William Dhondt

This is one of those cases in which you have to wonder what William Dhondt was thinking when he decided to call the police himself and report his live in girlfriend, Kaitlin Hehir, missing.

On February 23, 2013 at around ten at night William Dhondt called the Farmington Michigan police to report his girlfriend missing. He claimed she had been missing since the early morning hours. He had not seen her since about 12:30 in the morning when she had left to go to a party. As protocol the responding officers searched the home the couple shared. They found only what I found described as “bloody plastic” somewhere within the home which appeared to be suspicious. This gave them reason to ask a judge for a search warrant. While they were waiting to get the warrant and search some more investigators were interviewing some of Kaitlin's friends. They stated she had been at a party on Friday night but she had left to pick William up from work and had never returned. They also discovered that Kaitlin had expressed to family members that she was not happy in the relationship and they knew that William had been made aware of significant problems they were having.

It did not take long to solve this crime. When officers returned to the home with the new search warrant and began looking through the home they found human remains tucked away in various locations throughout the home. William quickly confessed that he had hit her, slammed her head into the floor and then strangled her to death during an argument that had obviously turned violent. He then took her body into the basement where he dismembered her body and places body parts at different places around the home.

Despite his confession and the fact that it seemed quite obvious that he was guilty the case was still taken to trial. There does not seem to be much information on what actually occurred so I can only guess that the defense attempted to argue that he was mentally ill in some fashion.

On March 28, 2014, after two hours of deliberation the jury found William Dhondt guilty of first degree premeditated murder, and a charge related to the mutilation and defacement “of a human body.” On April 18, 2014 he was sentenced to life without parole for the murder charge plus a sentence of seventeen months to ten years on the remaining charge.