Page 38 - WilmU Spring Summer 2013

W hen domestic violence
was addressed in her
2008 Victimology course,
Melissa Kountz could
relate to the topic.
As a 13-year-old girl, a few days a er
Christmas in 1983, her mother’s estranged
boyfriendWilliam “Bosco” Lyles Jr. broke into
their home near Detroit, Mich., and stabbed her
cousin Andrew “Melvin” Weathers. Kountz had
been asleep during the break-in, andWeathers
had been staying with the family to help protect
her mother from Lyles.
Lyles escaped undetected that night. Police
investigated, and a er turning up no leads,
closed the case. A flood in 2001 le the Highland
Park Police Department badly damaged
and nearly broke, and the police suspended
operations until 2007, when it reopened in a
new building. The case was all but forgo en.
Although decades had passed and she was
now living in Delaware, Kountz’s memories
were vivid and her determination steely. She
commi ed, despite enormous obstacles, to
finding Lyles and bringing him to justice. But she
needed help.
“Divine intervention” is how Det. Paul Thomas
described his involvement in the case. A retired
Detroit homicide detective, Thomas said, “If I
hadn’t been the person to pick up the phone
the day that Melissa called [the Highland Park
police department], who knows what would
have happened.”
Kountz’s story, as well as the lack of evidence
from the long-ago crime, made for quite
a challenge. Locating the original warrant,
investigation file and physical evidence would
have been hard enough for such a case, but the
flood made it nearly impossible. It was “as if the
officers had just gone home for the night leaving
files on the desks and evidence in lockers,” said
Thomas. There was nothing to recover from the
vandalized, fetid police precinct.
To top it off, the judge who signed the warrant
and the original investigator were both dead.
Since the District A orney’s electronic database
only dated to 1985, Thomas found no warrant.
“If not for Melissa’s efforts, this case never
would have seen the light of day,” Thomas said.
Through old-fashioned legwork, Kountz began
to put the pieces together. She had copies of old
news articles about the crime and knew that the
offender’s family still lived in the area. Knowing
the offender’s age and legal name, Kountz
used “people search” websites, identifying a
possible address match for him. She convinced
a court clerk to search through paper files in the
basement of the courthouse for the original 1984
warrant. Another break in the case came when
the Medical Examiner’s office found records of
the case in storage.
In July of 2012, Thomas and his partner
drove to the address that Kountz had found
for “Bosco.” The man they encountered on the
porch gave the officers three different dates of
birth but agreed to have his picture taken by
Thomas’s partner. The photo was sent electroni-
cally to Kountz back in Delaware.
“Oh my God,” she recalls saying to the
detectives. “It was him!”
The arrest made the front page of the Detroit
Free Press. Kountz returned to Michigan to
testify at the preliminary hearing. In January,
William “Bosco” Lyles Jr. was convicted of
first-degree premeditated murder. He was
sentenced on February 26, 2013, to a mandatory
life sentence.
Kountz’s experience is proof that “a case is
never too old; it is never too late; it’s not over ’til
it’s over,” Thomas said.
For Kountz, who earned her master’s degree
in the Administration of Justice’s Criminal
Behavior concentration and is pursuing a
second master’s degree in Administration
and Leadership, working to solve the case not
only vindicated her cousin’s murder but also
provided healing from a long and violent cycle in
her family.
“I have broken the cycle of domestic violence
in my life,” she said. WU
col lege of social & behavioral sciences
Finding Bosco
How a grad student
helped solve her
cousin’s murder after
nearly 29 years
BY LORI SITLER
Melissa Kountz
Det. Paul Thomas
WILMINGTON UNIVERSIT Y MAGAZINE