On a summer day in East Jordan, Michigan, 53-year-old William 'Bill' George Merriman was seen for the last time on June 16, 2006. He was at his parents' home on Phelps Road, where he had been staying for the summer, having traveled from his own apartment in Hudsonville to be with his family following the recent death of his mother in a car accident just five days prior.
Merriman was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing about 300 pounds, with gray hair and blue eyes. His disappearance would not be reported to the authorities for several weeks, when a concerned friend finally raised the alarm, setting in motion a troubling investigation.
The initial investigation by the Charlevoix County Sheriff's Office uncovered disturbing evidence at the family home. Merriman's car was found parked in the driveway, and his personal bank accounts showed no activity after his disappearance. Inside the residence, detectives discovered bloodstains that were later confirmed to be a match for William Merriman. The investigation revealed that after William was last seen, a sanitation company had been hired to remove furniture, carpeting, and other trash from the home in July. This led investigators on a grim search through the White Feather Landfill in Pinconning, Michigan, where they found a bloodstained cushion from the house. The evidence began to point not to a simple missing person case, but to a violent crime.
Suspicion soon fell on William’s older brother, Charles Curtis 'Chuck' Merriman, who also lived at their parents' home. Investigators learned that there was friction between the brothers; William had reportedly threatened to evict Charles, who had been unemployed for a long time, if he did not find a job. In August 2007, Charles Merriman was arrested and charged with the murder of his brother. In May 2008, following a 16-day trial that included testimony from 70 witnesses, Charles was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison. Despite the conviction, the full story of William's final moments remains incomplete, as his body has never been found. The overview of this case is one of a family tragedy that escalated to homicide, with the lack of a body leaving a painful void for relatives and a lasting mystery for the community.
William George Merriman was a 53-year-old man who was last seen in East Jordan, Michigan, on June 16, 2006, according to the date used in public missing-person records and later Michigan news coverage. William, often called Bill, was a white male with gray hair and blue eyes who stood about 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed approximately 300 pounds. He was a weightlifter and was described as having a muscular build. His last known location was his parents’ property in the 11300 block of Phelps Road, a roughly twenty-acre property near East Jordan in Charlevoix County. William normally had an apartment in Hudsonville, Michigan, where he worked as a self-employed graphic artist and operated a silk-screening business, but family circumstances had brought him back to East Jordan. His mother, Patricia Merriman, had died unexpectedly only days earlier, and his father, Charles Merriman Sr., was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had been placed in a nursing home. William had decided to remain in the East Jordan area so he could help oversee his father’s care and finances. Although most missing-person sources use June 16 as his last-seen date, the Michigan Court of Appeals later described his disappearance as occurring on June 15. Whatever the precise dividing line between those dates, William’s family, friends and acquaintances had no confirmed contact with him afterward.
The family situation surrounding William’s return to East Jordan soon became central to understanding his disappearance. William’s brother, Charles Curtis “Chuck” Merriman, had been living in their parents’ home for decades and relied heavily upon their parents for financial support and transportation. According to the Michigan Court of Appeals record, William believed Charles had not been properly caring for their parents and was taking advantage of them. William wanted his brother to find employment, contribute financially to the household or move out. Patricia’s sudden death, their father’s declining health and William’s intention to take a more active role in family affairs threatened to change Charles’s longstanding living arrangement. The brothers argued about Charles’s lack of employment and his dependence on the family. William made it clear that he expected his brother either to begin contributing to expenses or leave the house. Charles, according to testimony later described by the appellate court, reacted angrily and told a relative that if anyone was going to leave, it would be William. Those tensions occurred just as William disappeared, transforming what initially looked like a missing-person case into something far more troubling.
After William vanished, Charles offered an explanation for his absence. He told relatives and eventually investigators that William had left with a friend named “Ed” and traveled to Indiana to assist William’s former wife, who supposedly was experiencing marital problems. That story did not withstand later scrutiny. William’s ex-wife testified that she had never lived in Indiana and had not been in contact with William since their divorce in 1982. Investigators were also unable to establish the identity of the mysterious “Ed.” William’s own vehicle remained behind at the Merriman property, further undermining the suggestion that he had simply departed to begin a new life elsewhere. Meanwhile, the ordinary signs of William’s life stopped completely. He did not return to his Hudsonville apartment, did not access his email, did not use his bank account and did not contact friends, relatives or acquaintances. The absence was especially difficult to reconcile with his recently stated intention to remain in Charlevoix County and help care for his father. As weeks passed, relatives became increasingly alarmed. Charles resisted reporting William missing and ultimately failed to appear at an August guardianship hearing where he had said he would make a report. William’s sister-in-law, Colleen, then reported his disappearance, bringing law enforcement more directly into the case.
When Detective Michael Wheat of the Charlevoix County Sheriff’s Department began investigating, the condition of the Merriman home raised immediate concerns. By the time authorities examined the residence, much of its furniture had disappeared and large sections of carpeting had been removed. Investigators arriving for a planned search noticed an odor of cleaning products. They learned that in the weeks after William vanished, Charles had disposed of substantial amounts of furniture and more than twenty bags of garbage. Investigators followed that waste to a landfill and searched through material there. They eventually recovered a cushion that had come from the Merriman residence, and forensic testing determined that blood on the cushion belonged to William. Additional searches of the house during the following months revealed traces and larger areas of William’s blood in multiple locations. Some of the bloodstains measured more than a foot across. Investigators also recovered an ax bearing blood, although forensic testing could not determine whose blood was on that particular object. The discovery of William’s blood throughout the residence became one of the most important developments in the investigation, because there was still no sign that William himself had willingly gone anywhere after leaving the property.
Charles attempted to explain the blood by saying William had accidentally cut his hand while working on carpeting near a sliding glass door before disappearing. His description changed as investigators discovered more evidence. The appellate record recounts that he initially described only a relatively minor cut and a small amount of blood. As police uncovered larger bloodstains, his description of the injury and the amount of bleeding became progressively more serious. He eventually said that William had been bleeding heavily and that blood had fallen onto the floor, while still maintaining that the injury was essentially a hand wound. Charles also acknowledged cleaning areas where William had bled and removing carpeting and padding. Medical and forensic experts called by the prosecution testified that the quantity and pattern of blood found in the house were inconsistent with the comparatively minor hand injury Charles had described. Several experts concluded that the evidence reflected a potentially life-threatening amount of blood loss. The Michigan Court of Appeals later emphasized this evidence when finding that a jury could reasonably conclude that William had died inside or in connection with events at the family residence rather than simply leaving for an unexplained trip.
Investigators also examined what happened to material removed from the house after William vanished. Police searched the White Feather Landfill in Pinconning, Michigan, and recovered the bloodstained cushion, but William’s body was not found. At trial, prosecutors presented evidence that large quantities of household material and garbage had been discarded a few weeks after his disappearance. The appellate court later noted that the jury could reasonably consider the possibility that human remains could have been concealed among garbage sent to a landfill, although no recovered remains ever proved that this was how William’s body was disposed of. Prosecutors also introduced evidence that Charles had chartered short flights to Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York during the period after William disappeared and had carried luggage that he would not allow others to handle. The Court of Appeals described those circumstances as additional evidence from which jurors could infer that Charles had opportunities to dispose of evidence far from East Jordan. These were theories supported by circumstantial evidence rather than a recovered body or an eyewitness account of disposal, and the precise location of William’s remains has never been established publicly.
The investigation ultimately produced a murder prosecution even though William’s remains had never been found. Charles Curtis Merriman was charged with William’s murder in 2007. After a lengthy jury trial in 2008, during which dozens of witnesses testified, Charles was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to serve 20 to 40 years in prison. The conviction rested on the accumulated circumstantial and forensic evidence: William’s abrupt and complete disappearance; his intention to care for his father rather than abandon his life; his untouched bank account and abandoned vehicle; the conflict between the brothers; Charles’s changing explanations; the removal of furnishings and carpeting from the home; and, most importantly, the substantial amount of William’s blood found inside the residence and on the cushion recovered from the landfill. In 2009, the Michigan Court of Appeals reviewed the evidence and affirmed the conviction, concluding that the prosecution had presented enough evidence for a reasonable jury to determine both that William was dead and that Charles had caused his death. The court specifically recognized that a murder conviction can rest on compelling circumstantial evidence even when the victim’s body has never been recovered.
William’s remains have still never been publicly reported as recovered, leaving his family without the ability to bring him home and lay him to rest. ClickOnDetroit revisited the case years later and reported that his body remained missing despite the murder conviction and the extensive investigation. That unresolved aspect gives William’s story a particularly painful dual character: there was enough evidence for a jury to hold someone legally responsible for his death, but not enough physical evidence to determine exactly what happened to his body or where it was ultimately taken. William had returned to northern Michigan during a period of family grief, shortly after losing his mother and as his father’s health deteriorated. He was preparing to take responsibility for his father’s care and to change the way the family home was being managed when he disappeared. Instead, his plans ended abruptly, his possessions and vehicle were left behind, his communications stopped, and forensic evidence inside the family residence eventually exposed a far darker explanation than voluntary disappearance. In overview, William George Merriman was a 53-year-old man last seen in East Jordan around June 16, 2006, whose disappearance led investigators from an apparently abandoned life to extensive blood evidence, a landfill search and a murder case against his own brother. Charles Merriman was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 to 40 years, and that conviction was upheld on appeal, yet William himself has never been recovered. The criminal case provided a measure of accountability, but the absence of his remains has left one profound part of the story unfinished: after all the investigation, testimony and years that have passed, the place where William was taken after his death remains unknown.Last Seen: Jun 16, 2006
