GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Convicted killer Garry Artman made two requests before he confessed to murdering nearly a dozen women in Grand Rapids three decades ago, according to sources familiar with the case.
The long-haul trucker, 66 when he died from lung cancer Dec. 28, demanded his own prison cell and a ham sandwich from Subway with double meat.
Detectives are not publicly commenting on the case as they work to corroborate details of Artman’s confession.
The Kent County Sheriff’s Office has, however, confirmed that investigators met with Artman three times after he contacted prison administrators saying he wanted to talk about “bodies.”
He’d served three months of his life sentence for the murder of Sharon Hammack, who was 29, pregnant and a mother of two when Artman raped, strangled and bound her in October 1996.
In his confession from a bed in a prison hospital in Jackson, the long-haul trucker reportedly said he’d killed eleven women in total, including Hammack in ’96 and Dusty Shuck, 24, in 2006 in Maryland.
Based on details Artman provided in his confession, investigators are also confident he killed Cathleen Dennis, 28, in Grand Rapids in July 1995.
Hammack and Dennis were among 17 women who were murdered or went missing from the Grand Rapids area from late 1993 to late 1996.
“What struck me is… when he reached out to detectives and investigators, he described them as ‘the bodies,’ which I find very impersonal,” said retired FBI profiler Julia Cowley in a Zoom interview Tuesday with Target 8. “Just something I noted. I don’t want to read too much into it, but I find that very impersonal.”
Cowley was a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and worked on high profile cases, including that of Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo.
She also produces a true crime podcast, The Consult, in which she and several retired agents, all former BAU members, discuss cases and the practice of criminal profiling.
Cowley talked to Target 8 investigator Susan Samples about deathbed confessions, the potential motivations behind them and how serial killers select their victims, among other topics.