Secret Witness: The Untold Story of the 1967 Bombing in Marshall, Michigan by Blaine L. Pardoe (review)

Book Reviews 125 faced by other tribes as a result of the removal and assimilation policies of the government in the nineteenth century, there were elements of that story that were unique and instructive. The Anishinaabeg were able to fend off forced removal beyond the Mississippi and seemed not to be subject to the policies of forced assimilation such as Indian boarding schools. However, Karamanski’s account would be more effective and valuable if it had been placed in the larger historical and historiographical context of forced removal and assimilation. For example, it might have benefitted from a comparison with the Indians of New York, who were also able to stave off removal. Nevertheless, the story of Andrew Blackbird and the Indians of northern Michigan offers a different perspective on the experience of Indian tribes in the nineteenth century. Keith R. Burich, Professor of History and Director of the American Indian Center Canisius College Blaine L. Pardoe. Secret Witness: The Untold Story of the 1967 Bombing in Marshall, Michigan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 211. Illustrations. Notes. Paper, $22.95. Secret Witness, a true-crime account of an unusual homicide-bybombing in Marshall, Michigan, in 1967, employs all the classic devices of the genre. Blaine Pardoe, sometimes writing like a novelist, works hard to build suspense, telling us that he has a “secret witness” who will cast new light on the case. For added resonance he sets the crime into two different contexts: one the town itself, the other the turbulent decade in which the bombing occurred. Some of the facts tend to undercut these narrative strategies, but there is enough inherent interest to hold a reader’s attention until the kicker at the end. Pardoe opens his story as postman Donald Damon makes his rounds on the hot Friday morning of August 18, 1967, nodding to folks along the way. One stop was the Tasty Café, on Michigan Avenue, where he delivered a small package addressed to 52-year-old café coowner Nola Puyear. She opened it at precisely 9:03, and the resulting explosion tore her and much of the establishment apart. According to Pardoe, there was another victim as well. At several points he suggests that Marshall, in real life a small industrial city of 70,000, resembled television’s fictional town of Mayberry, NC. The 126 The Michigan Historical Review comparison runs through descriptions of the Calhoun County Fair, Friday-night football games, local gossip, and short-haired teenagers cruising the main drag. All this contrasted with the previous year’s “Summer of Love” in faraway San Francisco, as well as with the 1967 race riots in Detroit, which were a bit closer in space if not in spirit. But at the moment of the explosion, in the first of several similar phrases, Pardoe observes that “Marshall’s innocence was torn away” (p. 11). The fact that churchgoing Nola Puyear had no known enemies puzzled local, county, state, and federal investigators. With nothing else to go on they followed the obligatory “cherchez l’epouse” rule by investigating her husband Paul. He was a highly unlikely suspect, if only because it was sheer luck that had kept him from also being shredded by the bomb. But the investigators took some time—and Pardoe has a good time—looking into Paul’s remarkably busy sex life. Nola had long since given up the act, but on weekends Paul went to a trailer, deep in the woods, with a number of local women, sometimes staging small orgies. Apparently much of Marshall knew about this—the town begins to resemble Peyton Place more than Mayberry—but none of this information proved relevant. The actual murderer was interviewed and released only days after the killing. He was a brutal local arsonist and criminal, but he was undone by a “secret witness,” a gimmick created by the Detroit News, which had begun to offer a reward to anyone who provided a hot tip on a cold case. A local secretary recognized a published handwriting sample, and further physical evidence quickly turned up. Pardoe tries valiantly to stretch out the suspense through the trial. It was impossible to establish a...