Does $5.25 Million Make up for 21 Years Behind Bars for a Double Murder You Didn’t Commit?

What is the value of a year of freedom, weighed against the alternative of withering away in a state prison, branded by the world as a murderer? Can such a thing be expressed by a dollar figure? And if it can, what does it work out to when multiplied by more than two decades? A 74-year-old Michigan man who was wrongfully convicted of the deaths of two hunters in 2022 reached a settlement this week with the accompanying dollar figure: $5.25 million. That’s what Jeff Titus will be given to support him in his remaining years, but if you asked the man, I have a feeling he’d still tell you he would have preferred to not be railroaded into a murder conviction by cold case detectives and prosecutors who failed to allow him a fair defense, withholding key evidence that would have flipped his trial on its head. The case of Jeff Titus is a living testament to both the misplaced zeal of the justice system to so often tie up loose ends despite gaps in the truth, and to the determination of selfless advocates for individual rights who worked to free him after two decades of wrongful incarceration, when it would have been so much easier to simply do nothing.

The murders in the Jeff Titus case took place in November of 1990, when hunters Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were found dead from shotgun wounds to the back in the Fulton State Game Area southeast of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Suspicion in the opening days of the subsequent investigation immediately fell on Jeff Titus, primarily due to circumstance: He owned and lived on a farm that was adjacent to the game area, and there were documented incidents of a “hotheaded” Titus confronting hunters who had strayed onto his property. The original police investigation of Titus, however, established a firm alibi: He was also hunting with a partner at the time, 27 miles away, a story that was corroborated both by the partner and the elderly couple who owned the land where he was hunting. They reportedly didn’t leave the area until hours after the murders had occurred, which led those original police investigators, Roy Ballett and Bruce Wiersema, to discard Titus as a suspect. He surely must have figured at the time that he was in the clear.

But it was not to be. The now cold case was reopened a decade later, now with Jeff Titus as the prime suspect. This time around, the new cold case detectives were focused on inconsistencies in newly recorded statements from those people who made up Titus’ original alibi, but there were glaring problems in this evidence collection: Most notably, the fact that the elderly man who owned the property where Titus was hunting was now suffering from dementia, and his former hunting partner also now possessed “serious memory lapses.” Their inconsistent accounts helped prosecutors to craft an implausible scenario for how Titus was alleged to have committed the murders, according to David Moran, clinical professor of law and co-founder of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, which eventually got involved in Titus’ case.

“When Jeff went on trial in 2002, the prosecution’s theory was—and I’m not making this up—that Jeff, while hunting 27 miles away from the game area, suddenly began to worry that some hunters in the game area might trespass on his land,” said Moran, speaking to University of Michigan Law School’s publication Law Quadrangle. “So he sneaked away from his blind, drove home, found two hunters too close to his land, killed them, and then drove back to pick up his hunting partner.” No actual, physical evidence tying Titus to the scene was ever presented, but he was still convicted anyway in 2002.

Suffice to say, the Michigan Innocence Clinic wasn’t buying this–and they were spurred to get involved in 2012, a decade later, after the original deputies who had cleared Titus of suspicion contacted the Innocence Clinic and told Moran they believe the wrong man was in prison for the crime. The nonprofit, in conjunction with podcasts such as Susan Simpson’s Undisclosed, would spend the next decade advocating for Titus’ case and gathering evidence before he was released in 2023, having served 21 years, with his murder convictions erased.

Jeff Titus will receive $5.25 million after he spent 21 years in prison for a wrongful conviction. Titus was accused of murdering two hunters and exonerated in 2023, after which he filed a $100 million lawsuit against two cold case detectives who targeted him.
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As it turns out, there was a little something that police originally investigating the case had failed to follow up on, and prosecutors had failed to share with Titus’ defense: The potential presence of a serial killer in this story. At the trial, multiple people testified that in the timeframe immediately after the hunters had been murdered, a man was seen in the area who drove his car into a ditch, who appeared “sweaty and nervous, and refused offers to help get his car out of the ditch.” Two of those witnesses, interviewed again a couple of years later, matched an Ohio man named Thomas Dillon as the “ditch guy,” with matching descriptions of the car owned by Dillon’s wife. That same year, Dillon was arrested for a series of murders of hunters and outdoorsmen around Ohio–he ultimately pleaded guilty to five murders in an effort to avoid the death penalty, but was suspected of others. Dillon passed away in prison in 2011.

There is no final nail in this coffin, such as DNA evidence conclusively proving that Thomas Dillon was in fact the killer, but the circumstantial evidence is voluminous. In fact, one of the murders that Dillon confessed to had occurred only a week before Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were shot in 1990, and another one of Dillon’s confirmed killings took place a week after. Notably, Dillon had borrowed two shotguns from coworkers only days earlier, and while incarcerated he reportedly bragged about having once killed two hunters at once. At this point, you’re likely wondering aloud how Dillon could possibly have been discarded as a suspect by Michigan police in 1993. According to the Michigan Innocence Clinic: “The office made a simple math error as to whether or not Dillon could have driven to Michigan in time to commit the murders. He could have.” Dillon was reportedly known to engage in long drives in the midst of his ongoing murder spree.

Any mention of Thomas Dillon, however, was discarded or actively withheld by the time Titus was on trial for the crime, a decade later. Nothing about the witness testimonies on “ditch guy” was disclosed to the defense in Titus’ trial, nor was the name of Dillon ever invoked. Titus ultimately took the fall, but his just-concluded settlement against Kalamazoo County cold case detectives stems from this information that was withheld from his own attorneys at the time.

“We are happy to bring the case to a successful conclusion,” said Titus’ lawyer Wolf Mueller. “While it cannot make up for two lost decades, Mr. Titus will be able to move forward and be comfortable for the rest of his life.”

Imagine, for a moment, the past 21 years of your life. Now imagine having spent all of them behind bars, because of the faulty memories of someone suffering dementia, a general lack of empathy, and police detectives who couldn’t follow up on witness testimony and obvious leads. Does $5.25 million make for an effective counterweight for a 74-year-old man who had to watch his last years of vigorous adulthood slip away while he sat in prison? Let’s hope, for his sake, it at least helps.