It has been 28 years to the day since Paige Marie Renkoski disappeared. Paige was a modelesque blonde from Okemos, Michigan. She stood at about 5'6" to 5'7" and weighed a svelte 125 pounds. The vibrant 30-year-old had no real reason to vanish, but she did. Hers is now one of Michigan's oldest cold cases. May 24, 1990 was a busy day for Paige Renkoski. At 11:30 am, she dropped her mother Ardis off at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. After that, she paid a visit to a friend in Canton Township, which is about a 20-minute drive northwest of the airport. After 3:30 that afternoon, Paige was gone, her '86 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais left idling on the shoulder of westbound I-96 about half a mile from the Fowlerville exit. Paige's shoes and purse were found inside the car, along with a beer she bought at a store in Canton just west of I-275. The store clerk there recalled seeing Paige dressed in "distinctive multi-colored, loose-fitting, flower-patterned pants and a distinctive necklace." Passing motorists saw Paige standing on the shoulder of westbound I-96 between 3 and 3:30 pm talking to several males posed next to a maroon minivan. Police did not respond to the report of the abandoned car until 6 pm. Paige's car was not initially processed as a crime scene because it was simply marked as an abandoned car. However, when investigators finally processed the vehicle for prints, they found several as-yet unidentified palm and fingerprints. Despite multiple eyewitness accounts of the suspects and maroon minivan and the prints in the Oldsmobile, no trace of Paige has ever been found. Several searches were conducted over the years. In May of 2011, police searched a pond in Handy Township using ground-penetrating radar. At this site, back around the time of Paige's disappearance, a woman had found boots covered in cement. However, seemingly nothing turned up in the search. In November of 2011, the FBI, along with state and local police, dug around in Conway Township using cadaver dogs after discovering a case file from 1999 that mentioned this was where Paige would be found. 28 years later, nothing has come from the reports or searches for Paige Marie Renkoski. In February of 2018, around the time when Paige would've celebrated her 58th birthday, a double memorial was held for her and her mother Ardis, who passed away in December of 2017, never knowing her daughter's fate.
Police had ruled out the possibility of a homicide back when the case was fresh, but after 28 years, this missing person case is, unfortunately, more than likely a homicide. Nobody has yet faced charges for Paige's disappearance. Will they ever?
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In my current work-in-progress, I have my main character, Jake Turunen, moving into an old, run-down former orphanage. While the story behind that building is fictional, it has some groundings in reality. Allow me to introduce you to the Old City Orphanage in Marquette, Michigan. In the past, it was known as the Holy Family or Holy Cross Orphanage. When it opened in 1915, it played home to 60 Native American orphans and eight nuns. In its heyday, the building housed about 200 children, and it stopped housing orphans in 1967. The building was left abandoned in 1982, but since then, stories have swirled about not just various forms of mistreatment during its operational years, but ghosts are said to linger here. One tale has it that a girl who played outside for too long in a harsh blizzard froze to death, and the nuns put her body on display as a lesson to the other children. Some say that the nuns even set the kids out in the cold to die when they didn't want to deal with them. While some of these stories are probably false, children did die and have funerals within this building. Of course, you will have to ask the residents of the new apartments that the building has been renovated into if the place is actually haunted. Before renovations began, neighbours reported hearing and even seeing children playing in the abandoned structure, screaming and laughing throughout the empty rooms and halls. Now, here's a little sneak-peek at my (very much unedited) depiction of the orphanage in House of Urchins.
4 Mugwort Lane was everything the real estate agent had cracked it up to be – “a steaming shithole of mud and weeds pretending to be a house.” Jake had seen the pictures. He knew it was part of the package deal; Jake got to work as the town’s notary-slash-historian with a higher-than-expected annual salary but had to live in the eerie old orphanage that hadn’t experienced human contact in probably several decades. Much like the children it must have once housed, 4 Mugwort Lane was unloved and unwanted. And Jake knew exactly how that felt. Pulling into the winding dirt driveway (if it could be called a driveway), Jake put the Honda in park near the front door. The house was not merely a house; it was a large manor that was enveloped by a sweeping veranda and capped off by a widow’s walk, which seemed out-of-place being so far inland. But it must’ve been part of the architectural trend in its day. Back then, every Midwesterner with a chunk of change wanted to pretend they were a wealthy New Englander dwelling along a romantic seascape. Must’ve been part of the original design, Jake thought to himself as he gazed up at the lonesome peak. And the original intended use was certainly not as an orphanage. As his eyes traveled across the front façade, a sudden chill swept over Jake’s body. Goosebumps laced the exposed skin of his brown arms and the back of his neck. Jake instinctively rubbed his hands along his arms to warm himself, but the chill, he realized, came from within. Something was not right with the house. Technically, aesthetically, there were many things obviously wrong with the white, sprawling mansion at 4 Mugwort Lane, but even the skeptic inside Jake could not easily fight off the turning of his gut. Sure, the sagging white-painted steps leading up to the wide veranda were sagging and weather-worn. Yes, multiple windows on the second story were busted-out and boarded. The bright red graffiti sprayed on the front door did not really help matters, either: Welcum 2 HELL How creative, Jake mused, attempting to negate the sense of foreboding growing in his belly. As long as I don’t find actual cum spritzed around the house, I think I’ll be okay. But maybe I should invest in a black light… |