A Never Ending Newspaper Article
Review by Kim Cantrell
On July 13, 1990, Barbara Kowynia George was busy at Comics World, the store owned by her and her husband, Michael George. Not only was she tending to regular business but Barbara was prepping for the surprise birthday party she had planned for Mike.
But the party would never happen. A couple of hours before the party’s scheduled start time, customers of Comics World in Clinton Township, Michigan, would discover Barbara dead in a back room of the store.
First, she was believed to have fallen. But the keen eye of a nurse who spotted a bullet wound on Barbara’s head would change the assumed cause of death and kick off an official homicide investigation.
As typical of any investigation, Mike was considered a suspect; even more so after police discovered his affair with Renee Kotula, despite Mike’s adamant denials.
Investigating every possible lead, police couldn’t shake that everything pointed to Mike. He had openly criticized his wife to customers, asked for a divorce that Barbara (a Catholic) had refused, offered the most flimsy of alibis, and had moved into (along with his two daughters) the home of his mistress just a few short weeks after Barbara’s death. And he was sole beneficiary to approximately $130,000 of life insurance benefits.
Yet there just wasn’t enough evidence to charge Mike with murder. At least not until almost two decades later when a newly formed cold case squad was formed.
Would new evidence paint Mike as a wife killer?
That’s what Detroit Free Press reporter Amber Hunt attempts to tell in her 2010 true crime Dead But Not Forgotten: The True Story of a Cheating Husband, His Stunning Mistress, and a Murder Case Gone Cold.
Notice the word “attempts.” Actually, I suppose you could say Hunt did lay out the new evidence (or lack thereof, mostly) but the writing style was so mundane, so excruciatingly boring that I’m not absolutely sure of what I did or didn’t read.
The first thing I noticed that the first five chapters all said the same thing, just using different words. But that’s not the worst aspect of the book. There was no – none, zip, nada – background information about Mike other than the mention of his numerous infidelities. Come on, we want to know about the people accused and what makes them tick!
The only interesting thing about Dead But Not Forgotten is that it is a true whodunit. While I personally believe Mike, or either Renee, is guilty of Barbara’s murder, I don’t think there is enough evidence to prove it. However, a jury of twelve disagree yet the Judge believed otherwise; enough so to overturn their verdict (a very rare event).
At the time of publication of this book, the case was still bouncing around in Appeals – truly hanging in limbo with the verdict being bounced back and forth more than a ping pong ball.
If you want to know about this case, I’d recommend you save your money and either (a) read the many, many newspaper articles available online or (b) catch a the Dateline episode titled The Comic Book Murder that frequently re-airs on MSNBC (check local listings for channel).
Want to read Dead But Not Forgotten by Amber Hunt anyway? Here’s where to buy it:
