I Found Mom!

Leonard Tyburski was a dean at Mackenzie High School in Detroit. He lived in suburban Canton Township, Michigan, with his wife, Dorothy, and their daughters. By 1985 the marriage was in serious trouble, and Dorothy had begun an affair with one daughter’s 18-year-old boyfriend.

In late September 1985, the couple argued in the basement, and Dorothy taunted Leonard about the affair. He drove her head into a steel basement pole again and again, 11 blows in all, and she died. He put her body in the basement chest freezer and told his daughters their mother had left after a fight. For more than three years the family lived with that freezer in the house. On January 2, 1989, his daughter Kelly pried it open and found Dorothy inside, then ran to tell her sister, Kim.

Tyburski admitted the killing but said he had been provoked. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder in June 1989, and in July he was sentenced to 20 to 40 years. In 1992 the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the conviction, ruling that jurors had not been properly questioned about news coverage, and the Michigan Supreme Court agreed in July 1994. That November, after his daughters asked for leniency, a Detroit judge gave him a new sentence of 9 to 25 years.