Jeffrey Gorton

As a true crime book reader I first learned of the case of Jeffrey Gorton through the author Tom Henderson. There are several authors that do cases in regional areas. Ann Rule was known to concentrate many of her cases in the upper northwest of the United States area. Kathryn Casey reports on a lot of cases in the Texas area. Tom Henderson does cases in the Michigan area. The interesting thing about the crimes that Gorton committed is that they show that criminals have no way of knowing just what advances can be made in forensics that can come back and bite them. It also shows that there are cases that investigators never give up on and there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Fifty-five year old Margarette Eby was murdered in her Flint Michigan home on November 9, 1986. She had been raped and left with her throat cut nearly to the point of decapitation. Investigators saved semen samples from the scene, as well as a latent fingerprint but until there were advances in science and computer data little could or would be found and done.

On February 17, 1991 Northwest Airlines flight attendant, Nancy Ludwig, who lived in Minneapolis, checked in the Hilton Airport Inn in Romulus, Michigan a suburb of Detroit. She would be found in her third floor room with her throat slit like Margarette Eby, over four years earlier, nearly to decapitation. Nancy too had been raped and semen fluid had been collected.

It would be eleven more years before either of these cases would be solved. But, just exactly how that happened seems to be unclear. Some reports say that the fingerprint gathered in the Eby case was found to be a match to Jeffrey Gorton from when he had served time in prison in the 1980's in Florida. Others say that it was first discovered that the two cases were linked through the DNA semen samples and later linked to Gorton. Regardless of what came first or how things were discovered, Jeffrey Gorton was arrested in February of 2002. He would eventually be charged with both murders.

Although Nancy Ludwig was at least Gorton's second victim I am going to start with her case first because this was the first case that went to trial in the fall of 2002. Prior to his arrest, investigators theorized that Nancy's killer had caught her off guard as she had attempted to enter her hotel room, coming out of the stairwell and forcing her into her room. Once inside it was believed that Nancy was gagged and her hands were tied behind her back with rope and that her assailant raped her. After being raped investigators believe that Nancy's throat was cut, her clothes removed, her body placed on the bed and was raped once more. They went on to say they believe that after the assault the assailant remained in the room for some time, first possibly watching television but also cleaning up not just himself but Nancy's body attempting to remove any trace of himself. When he left the room not only did he take luggage, jewelry and other personal items of Nancy's, he also went as far as taking the trash and anything that would have had blood on it. I found little when it came to the specifics at the trial but I can only assume that prosecutors continued and elaborated with this theory.

As far as the defense was concerned I was able to find some information from the trial in a 2006 appeal that was filed. Unlike many appeals that I have read this one did not give a lot of details as far as background into the case or the defendant. The sole issue on the appeal rested on the idea of “ineffective counsel” so they did discuss the defense strategy. It appears that the defense knew they were backed into a corner. There was DNA evidence linking Gorton to the semen sample obtained at the crime scene so first and foremost they basically had to address that first. From a defense standpoint in my opinion if they were going to plead innocence, which they obviously did they only had two choices. One would be to argue some sort of contamination by the labs or the crime scene investigators, which I saw no evidence of being mentioned. The second choice they had was to argue that yes, Jeff Gorton had in fact had sex with Nancy Ludwig, but the sex was consensual but that he was not guilty of murder. This is the strategy the defense used. In fact, they even claimed that another man (not mentioned by name in the appeal) that was apparently a friend of Jeff Gorton's was the actual killer. The man had allegedly been convicted sometime between the murder of Nancy and the trial at hand in a sex related murder. They attempted to argue that Gorton and the other man looked similar in nature and any witness who stated they saw Gorton could have easily been mistaken.

The jury apparently did not buy the story of the defense since they convicted him in Nancy's murder. And, in fairness, obviously the appeals court found no merit in the claim of ineffective counsel as they denied the appeal in 2006. But again, as I stated earlier if the defense was going to claim innocence their only other choice would have been to argue contamination with the DNA, which obviously there did not seem to be any evidence pointing in that direction or it is likely they would have chosen that argument. If there had been any inkling or evidence that there was even a possibility that contamination had occurred they would have surely used that line of defense as opposed to expecting a jury to believe he had consensual sex with the victim but did not kill her. In the end when it came to Nancy's murder Gorton was convicted of first degree premeditated murder, two counts of felony murder and two counts of first degree criminal sexual assault. In September of 2002 he was sentenced to 40-80 years which in essence apparently by state standards equated to three life sentences.

Gorton was expected to go on trial in the murder of Margarette Eby in February of 2003. It appears that on the day the trial was to begin Gorton decided to plead “no contest” to the charges. From a legal standpoint it is not a guilty plea or accepting responsibility but when it comes to sentencing that does not matter. He was then sentenced to life without parole for the charges associated with her death.

When Gorton was arrested for Margarette's murder her family filed a wrongful death suit not just against Jeff Gorton but also against his parents. As I stated earlier DNA had been preserved from the scene that had later been linked to Gorton. At the time of Margarette's death in 1986 Jeff was working at a sprinkler company that his parents owned. They maintained a significant estate near Margarette's home. Part of the argument in the lawsuit claimed that as employers his parents not only failed to do a background check on employees, including their own son, but that they knew he had a previous conviction and that the society at large could have been in danger.

In 1983, while at the Orlando Naval Training Center, Jeff Gorton had been arrested for charges of robbery and assaulting several women that resulted in the stealing of their undergarments. According to the laws at the time he could only be sentenced to four and a half years. He ended up serving just less than two years before being released in December 1985, less than a year before Margarette's murder. It was said that while he was incarcerated in Florida he had asked for psychiatric treatment but when approached years later the Department of Corrections would not confirm or deny if he had actually received the treatment he asked for and apparently no one else was talking either.

The case that the Eby family filed languished in the courts for a few years but in 2007 by a narrow margin the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the case be dismissed due to statue of limitations. The problem here, and what those judges who disagreed with the majority pointed out, was that while yes, the SOL was a three year window, there was no way that Margarette's family could have met that time considering it was nearly sixteen years before Jeffrey Gorton was identified and caught. The dissenting judges felt that the three year window should have started only after the identification of Gorton, of which the case was filed soon after.

In the end Jeffrey Gorton will spend the rest of his life in prison, keeping many woman safe in the future. The question lies with those who wonder if Nancy and Margarette were his only victims when it came to murder.