GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The deathbed confession of a man to a number of Grand Rapids murders offers some answers for families who have wondered for nearly three decades what happened to the women they loved.
But it doesn’t bring back Cathleen Dennis, who vanished in Grand Rapids in 1995 and whose body has never been found.
“I guess in this moment, I do feel a sense of closure, but it is far from satisfying,” her son Tommy Dennis told NewsNation affiliate WOOD.
In a prison hospital in Jackson just days before dying of lung cancer, Garry Artman confessed to 11 murders, sources told WOOD. That included the 1996 killing of 29-year-old Sharon Hammack, the only murder of which he was ever actually convicted, and the 2006 death of 24-year-old Dusty Shuck, for which he was awaiting trial when he died. He was not facing charges in the other nine killings — all of them in Grand Rapids — to which he admitted.
Some of the details Artman provided line up with the case of Cathleen Dennis, who vanished in July 1995 at the age of 28. He said he spotted one of this victims leaving a bar on Grand Rapids’ Division Avenue — the city’s red-light district — wearing a cast or sling.
Detectives called Dennis’ son Tommy Dennis this week to give him the news.
“Woo. It was a bit jarring, actually,” Tommy Dennis said of the call.
“I guess he admitted to them that he killed this young Black lady, which matches the description of my mom, and he disposed of her body in a dumpster,” he told WOOD.
His mother’s remains have never been found.
“You threw her away like she was trash. You literally treated her like she was trash,” he said.
He was 7 when his mother went missing.
“She could make the room laugh,” Dennis recalled. “That’s one of the biggest things I remember, is her sense of humor.”
Dennis and Hammack were among 17 women, many of them sex workers, who went missing or were found dead in metro Grand Rapids between 1993 and 1996.
Another one of those women: Sherry Stewart Brown. She was 32 when she vanished on Aug. 9, 1996. Two years later, in July 1998, a couple stumbled upon on a skeleton on a ditch in Walker. It was four more years after that before DNA identified the remains as Brown’s. Even then, no one could say what happened to her.
Brown’s sister, Debra Williams, said she lost her best friend. Williams’ daughter Shawnta Bush said the whenever she curls her hair, she things of her favorite aunt, who used to do it for her.
“She wanted a girl, so she would always curl my hair like Shirley Temple,” Bush remembered.
“I get a lot of my fight from her because I knew that she was a fighter. She would not back down. If you got in her face, she was getting in your face. So I get a lot of that fight from her,” she said. “There are so many good memories that I have of her. Even when it got bad, it was still good memories of her.”
On Wednesday, Williams was at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport near Grand Rapids to bid farewell to her son, who just enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
“I know my sister is looking out over him and will go with him,” Williams said.
Brown’s family hasn’t heard from deputies. They don’t know whether investigators believe she was among the women Artman killed — he identified only Hammack and Shuck by name. Regardless, Williams and her daughter believe he was probably responsible.
“We don’t have any hard proof. But the details line up,” Williams said.
“For me, I don’t need to hear him say her name,” Bush agreed. “I know he did it. I know that everything adds up. All the timelines. All the information, it just adds up. So for me, my heart can close in that area.”
Artman was near death when he talked to detectives, struggling to breathe. He offered few details. Detectives may never be able to clearly link his confession to Brown’s case or other cases. And there’s no way to confirm the number he gave — 11 murders — is accurate. He was a long-haul trucker, so it’s likely agencies nationwide are looking at whether he could be responsible for any of their unsolved murders.
Still, the confession and Artman’s death is enough for Williams.
“…That brings myself, my family and I pray the other families, some closure so that we can heal and move on,” Williams said.
“To my parents, it’s going to mean everything,” she said. “It’s going to catch my mom like it caught me. My dad can know that his daughter’s at rest. My best friend, my buddy that didn’t get a chance to see my son or my daughter get married, her kids, it’s going to mean the world to for that healing process as well.”