A Sister’s Pain

The sister of a slain state police sergeant responds to the musings of her brother’s killer upon the woman’s release from prison.

By Patrick Sullivan | Feb. 3, 2018

Michigan State Police Sergeant Melvin “Paul” Holbrook was murdered by his wife in 2009; his sister recalls years before his death she believed his wife was capable of killing him.

Meleen Froman said she wants to speak about Joni Holbrook following a Jan. 15 Northern Express feature in which Holbrook talks about the challenges she’s faced following her release from prison in 2017. She served half of a 15-year sentence after pleading guilty in Benzie County to second-degree murder.

Froman believes her estranged former sister-in-law should have received a more severe sentence. She said that despite being able to convince a judge that she deserved a light sentence because she’d been a domestic abuse victim, she believes Joni Holbrook was adept at convincing people she was something she was not.

The Express reached out to Froman prior to the publication of the Joni Holbrook interview, but she declined to participate. Now she’s come forward to speak; Froman answered questions via phone from her home in Oklahoma.

Nothern Express: You said that you wanted to tell how it feels to be on the other side, to be the one who receives the call that your brother has been killed. How does that feel?

Meleen Froman: I can honestly tell you when I heard my husband say the words that she had shot him and that he was dead, I kind of, for lack of a better word, I blacked out. I just remember hearing somebody scream. You know, “Why would she do this? Why would she do this?” And it took a few seconds to realize it was actually my own voice I was hearing, because I just couldn’t believe that that had just happened. Just hearing my husband say those words to me.

I had just arrived at work. I’m a nurse. I worked at a cancer center at that point. One of my co-workers was the one who answered the phone and was told to take me somewhere private to take the phone call and she was with me when he told me. It was just, I don’t know that there are words to describe what that feels like. To actually hear those words, when you are that close to somebody, because my brother and I had a very, very close relationship, because we’d been through so much over the last five, six years, because my father had had Alzheimer’s. The two of us had definitely been the ones who took care of everything. He was my go-to guy. My confidante. Honestly one of my best friends that I’ve had in my lifetime.

Express: I know that the family never felt like justice was served in this case, that you all believe that Joni got away with pretending to be something that she wasn’t. Have you ever wavered in that conviction? And if not, what makes you so certain? 

Froman: No. What makes me so certain is that my husband and my children and I came to Michigan every summer. It was something that we just always did. It was our vacation. We always spent part of the week with Paul and his family and then we went to my other brother’s house. And I was thinking about this last night, and talking even with my other brother about this. I don’t know that I ever recall a time when we were up there when some kind of verbal altercation did not take place between the two of them, and she was the one that was always the aggressor in the conversations. My brother never wanted to argue. To say that she yelled profanities would be an understatement. Some of the stuff I wouldn’t repeat. I’ve watched him walk away from her, trying to just end it, and she would follow him into another room and it would continue. And it was not just some isolated incident. This is something we saw every time we were up there. To say that she was just this shell who never stood up for herself doesn’t sit well with me.

Express: How do you reconcile how a conservative, law enforcement-friendly judge heard the evidence that your brother abused his wife for years and found that the abuse mitigated the murder?

Froman: She was very good at manipulating people, and very, very good at playing sick and pitiful, because she would do that down here. She would come down here, she would lay in bed all day – she had a headache, she didn’t feel good. But then the minute it was time to go, one time we went to see Rascal Flats, one time we went to see a country performer named Darryl Worley, she just jumped out of bed and was ready to go. So I watched her manipulate for years. And also, she worked for the court system for a long time. I don’t think this was something that she just decided to do on the spur of the moment.

Express: The conversation I had with Joni was about how she is struggling to move on. I feel like you are also struggling.

Froman: That’s why I find it ironic that she reaches out to the press. If you want to move on, then put it behind you and move on. Why are we digging this up again now? Why are we doing this? We just want to let it be. I can’t go back and fix what she did. I can’t undo it. I can’t undo what happened in court. I can’t undo any of it. All I can do is move forward with my life and be left in peace. But then she reaches out to bring this back to the public all over again, and it’s just like somebody ripping open an old wound. And that’s the reason I reached out to you, because I am so tired of her being the only person that gets the opportunity to say, ‘Oh, poor pitiful me.’ It’s not that I am feeling sorry for myself, or for my family, because I will tell you, we are a family of great faith. Great faith. I also know that my brother was a man of faith. I don’t doubt that my brother was good. My brother is better now than he ever was. I know this. I know this for a fact.