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A Montcalm County Sheriff’s Office vehicle was parked outside Belvidere Township Hall in Six Lakes during a special meeting in August, after another special meeting the day before ended abruptly due to the former clerk causing a disruption. — DN file photo
One of the things I love most about my job is that I never know what the new year is going to feature in local news, and this year was no different.
From an international ice fishing contest in the village of Lakeview to a long-running game of musical chairs on the Belvidere Township Board to a random FOIA request leading to the possibility of a serial killer having lived in Crystal Township, here’s a look back at just a few of the most memorable stories I covered in 2025.
ICE FISHING FUN
The most fun I had covering a story this year was in February when Lakeview hosted the World Ice Fishing Championship. Teams from 10 counties, each carrying their respective national flag, paraded down Main Street which was lined by excited well-wishers in spite of the cold.
I’m not into fishing or cold weather, but I was completely caught up in the village’s colorful, international flavor throughout the weekend. I loved how residents went the extra mile to make the event a smashing success, from Lane and Laura Leppink organizing the parade, Jourdan Rasmussen instructing the audience on how to greet each team in their native language and Gary and Cathie Padden researching the different national anthems to play as each team arrived at the end of the parade route and assisting with a community meet and greet afterward.
Jeff Kelm of Wisconsin had the honor of carrying the flag for Team USA in Lakeview. He summarized his love of the sport as follows: “We get to go overseas and catch such different fish, that’s really the coolest part about it. There’s fish we’ve never seen over there and our fish are different from everybody else in the whole world.”
I really got caught up in the fun spirit of the festivities, as did seemingly everyone. Lakeview Community Church Youth Pastor Ben Stout came to the festival dressed like Daniel Boone complete with a fringed buckskin jacket and a raccoon hat, which caught the attention of ice fisherman Ivo Sööt of Estonia. The two men impulsively traded hats and posed for a photo, after which the pastor invited the Estonian team to a wild game dinner at his church “to hear some crazy hunting stories and enjoy some wild game meat.”
It really was pure Montcalm County.
And the event proved to be so popular, a similar version of it will return in the new year. The USA Ice Fishing National Championship will be held Feb. 26-March 1 on Tamarack Lake in Lakeview. Mark your calendar!
BEDLAM IN BELVIDERE
My pick for the most long-running difficult story of the year would have to be the colorful cast of characters who came and went from the Belvidere Township Board.
Let’s see … how to recap that township in 800 words or less?
The year began with the board telling Treasurer Forrest Herzog he had to start working from the township office again (instead of from his home). In response, Herzog resigned.
The board appointed Yolanda Lane (the former clerk) as treasurer in May and everyone said lots of nice things about working in collaboration with each other.
However, by summer, things had reached a boiling point. At the end of July’s meeting, Clerk Judy Spring and Trustee Tarin Minkel both announced they were resigning. Spring wrote in her letter in part, “I can no longer continue to work in the current environment,” while Minkel wrote in part, “I feel my time should be invested where it is appreciated, and I no longer feel that is the case.”
The board was set to appoint candidates to fill the two vacancies in early August; however Spring repeatedly interrupted the meeting to the point where Murray abruptly adjourned barely 15 minutes in.
A Montcalm County sheriff’s deputy was present at the next meeting the following night and his presence appeared to have a calming effect. The board voted to appoint Wayne Watts as a new trustee.
The board in September voted to appoint Jessie Mason as the new clerk, but only after deliberating in closed session, despite my warning that this would clearly violate the Open Meetings Act (I’m no legal expert, but after nearly 25 years of covering townships, I know my way around OMA).
Board members soon found out that Mason wasn’t a registered voter or even a township resident — the sole two qualifications needed to be a candidate for office (there’s a decent chance those two topics would have come up had deliberations been properly conducted in open session).
The board held another special meeting to appoint Tim Anstett as clerk and Watts publicly apologized for the OMA violation (at this point, Watts was chairing quite a few meetings in the absence of Murray). No one had a chance to get to know Anstett as clerk; despite announcing his intent to bring reform to township finances, he resigned after just a month and a half.
At a meeting in mid-November, it was announced that the township had been hit with an $8,700 federal fine from the IRS and had failed to file its annual financial report with Michigan, with state revenue sharing being withheld as a result.
At another meeting in late November, a motion to appoint former longtime clerk Sheila Smith as clerk failed in a 2-2 vote (Murray and Watts voted “yes” while Lane and her son, Trustee Brent Dietrich, voted “no”). Murray then resigned, saying he felt it was “in the township’s best interest.”
Murray’s resignation was soon followed by Lane’s abrupt resignation as treasurer. This left the township with only two board members: Dietrich and Watts, not enough for a quorum.
As a result, the Montcalm County Election Commission in mid-December appointed Smith and Nancy Snyder as temporary clerk and treasurer, respectively.
The board met on Dec. 16 (Dietrich was absent) and voted 3-0 to make Watts the new supervisor and to make Smith and Snyder the permanent clerk and treasurer (at least until the 2026 election). Watts is the township’s fifth supervisor in less than three years, while Smith is the eighth clerk and Snyder is the second treasurer in that same time frame (there’s also been some turnover in the trustee positions).
The Belvidere Township Board was scheduled to have one last special meeting of the year on Tuesday night to get caught up on paying some bills. Assuming no one resigned at that meeting (kind of joking, kind of not), I believe that with this current board (one trustee still needed) we now have every reason to be optimistic that the new year will be a calm and productive one for this long-turbulent branch of local government.
A SERIAL KILLER IN CRYSTAL?
Something new I learned this year while covering local news: Montcalm County may have once been home to a serial killer.
A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by Christian Leathers to the Montcalm County Sheriff’s Office in September led me to research the disturbing story of John Rodney McRae. I was able to do a deep dive into the life of McRae thanks in part to Michigan Department of Corrections records Leathers shared with me, as well as research I did using Detroit Free Press archives and Montcalm County records.
McRae committed his first known murder in 1950 when he was just 15 years old living in St. Clair Shores near Detroit. His victim was 8-year-old Joey Housey. A jury found McRae guilty and the teen was sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, about 20 years into McRae’s prison term, Michigan Gov. William Milliken commuted the life sentence at the recommendation of the state parole board. McRae was released on parole in February 1972, whereupon the now 37-year-old man moved to Crystal Township where his parents were living and proceeded to marry an 18-year-old woman less than eight months later. Thanks to the excellent record-keeping of the Montcalm County Clerk’s Office, I was able to find McRae’s marriage license via a FOIA request. The couple lived in the Crystal area from around 1972 to 1975 and had a son.
McRae and his new family left Michigan sometime around 1975. In the decades that followed, McRae was suspected by police of murdering 12-year-old Kip Hess in 1979 in Florida as well as 19-year-old Charles Collingwood in Florida (both males disappeared and have never been found).
After McRae and his family returned to Michigan, 15-year-old Randy Laufer went missing in 1987. The teen’s body was found a full decade later, buried on McRae’s former property. A jury convicted McRae in 1998 of murdering Laufer. McRae was once again sentenced to life in prison without parole. He died in 2005 in his prison cell.
Perhaps coincidentally to all this, a Montcalm County sheriff’s deputy shared details at a Crystal Township Board meeting this summer about a resident finding what appeared to be a small portion of a human skull by the shore of Crystal Lake. I asked Sheriff Mike Williams about this and he said the fragment has been sent to a forensic anthropologist to determine whether it is human or not. The sheriff told me this week that he has not yet received any results. Stay tuned …
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
If there’s one thing I hope our faithful Daily News readers have learned from our stories this year, it’s that all residents need to be active participants in their local government. We are fortunate in Michigan to have townships, the most local form of government. This is great because it makes it easy for residents to stay informed and have a say in the state of their community.
But most residents don’t care to bother. I’m old enough to remember the pandemic years when wind and solar energy were the hot topics of the day and drew dozens of people (sometimes 100 or more) to township board meetings. This, of course, caused some issues, but overall I was thrilled to see so many people taking an interest in their local government.
But the wind and solar debate has died down, and now I’m usually one of maybe half a dozen people (or less) at local meetings. I truly believe most of our township officials are good, well-meaning people trying to do right by their community, but without the participation of local residents, board members live in a bit of a bubble. Without local participation, township boards are bound to run into problems.
I can’t attend every township board meeting, but here are just a few of the observations I’ve made this year alone:
- Attorneys aren’t always right when it comes to state law: See the Day Township Board violating the Open Meetings Act in July as they followed the advice of their own attorney.
- Township board members aren’t necessarily experts in state law either: See Belvidere Township, above.
- Bids are optional, apparently: See the Reynolds Township Board which agreed without taking a vote to have their supervisor oversee the construction of a taxpayer-funded $1 million-plus township hall and didn’t go out for any bids for the project but simply voted to approve a handful of non-competitive bids after the fact (including nearly $130,000 to the supervisor’s own family business, which is doing electrical work for the project).
- Some township officials simply don’t like public matters to be in the newspaper: See the Maple Valley Township supervisor, who resigned in April.
As we head into 2026, I look forward to hopefully writing about more people participating in their local branches of government (and Belvidere Township, I really hope you can get it together … I’m rooting for you!).
