Old Mission Mysteries

Transplanted Author Explores Peninsula of a Century Ago

By Patrick Sullivan | Feb. 18, 2017

Brooklyn-born writer Stephen Lewis still carries the East Coast in his gruff voice, but for the last 15 years, he’s made Old Mission his home. The iconic peninsula is the setting for his most recent novel, a follow-up to a murder mystery he published a decade ago.

Lewis, a 75-year-old English professor emeritus who spent his career at a college on Long Island, NY, has published numerous novels and textbooks in a writing career that spanned decades and won him national attention for his debut novel The Monkey Rope, published in 1990.

Since he retired with his wife, Old Mission native Carol Johnson Lewis, to northern Michigan, Lewis has turned his literary eye to his adopted home. He just published Murder Undone, his second novel based on the life of Woodruff Parmelee, a peninsula resident who was convicted in 1895 for the murder of 22-year-old Julia Curtis.

Northern Express sat down with Lewis on a rainy February afternoon not far from the scene of the crime to talk about his connection to Old Mission, Parmelee and the limits of historical fiction.

Northern Express: You spent your career on the East Coast, but you’ve been in northern Michigan for a while now. How connected do you feel to the Old Mission Peninsula?

Stephen Lewis: I tell people that I am incompletely and imperfectly acculturated to northern Michigan. There is such a profound difference in culture. When I was teaching at Suffolk Community College, my students, as I came into class, would be kind of sprawled on their chairs – this was before constant cell phones – very comfortably sprawled on their chairs, with no great enthusiasm. This was a required English course. I [also] taught for a period of time at NMC. I would come to class, the students would be sitting at a wall opposite the door, waiting for me to open the door so they could come in. The manner and attitude were so different.

Express: How did you end up in northern Michigan?

Lewis: My wife wanted to come home after I retired from teaching. We had been coming out here every summer while I was still working, and we saw a house we liked and bought it.

Express: How did you become interested in the Parmelee story?

Lewis: On one of our visits in the summer, my father-in-law took us to this little cemetery off Eastern Avenue in Old Mission Village. In that private cemetery are the Parmelee family plots. There’s a major monument to George Parmelee, who was Woodruff Parmelee’s father. Walter Johnson, my wife Carol’s father, said, “There’s a story here about this fellow’s son.” He told me briefly about the case. That was in August. Between August and the holidays, he sent me voluminous newspaper clippings of the trial, pretty much insisting there was a story to tell. His point was, he thought Woodruff had been railroaded. Or at least there was serious doubt about the evidence that convicted him. He pointed specifically to the fact that one of the prosecution’s [arguments] was that Woodruff’s footprints were found where the body was located. My father-in-law said, “Well, yea, that’s true, but there were also the footprints of 20 or 30 men who were tromping around looking for this young woman who had been missing for days. How did they pick out his footprints from all those others?”

Express: And you thought he had a point, so you wrote Murder on Old Mission.

Lewis: Walter Johnson was an engineer and interested in factual accuracy, and he thought that Woodruff hadn’t gotten a good deal. I’m a novelist, so I’m looking for something else rather than absolute truth. I’m looking for the story. I had written some murder mysteries prior to that, which is probably why Walter thought I might take a shot at this one. When I read through the newspaper reports, the thing that jumped out at me as a possible way into the story was that Woodruff Parmelee’s son was called as a defense witness to support his father’s alibi. Woodruff said, “The body was found on East Bay, in a place they called the hemlock swamp. I was clearing a road going to West Bay at the same time. I can’t be in both places. And my son will verify that.” I thought, “What if the son had a reason to believe that maybe his father was guilty? Now what do you do? You’re the son, you have pretty good reason to believe your father might be guilty, but he’s your father.” To make it more believable, I made the son older. The kid was only 14 at the time. I made him old enough to have a romantic interest in the young woman, so that he was kind of competing with his father for the attentions of this young woman, though his father had already won that battle.

Express: Do you think Woodruff Parmalee committed the murder?

Lewis: That’s an interesting question. No. I do think the way I represented it in the book is maybe a fair guess as to what happened. I don’t see him, insofar as I got to know him, as a violently disposed man. I saw him as a careless man, one who responded to his impulses. I don’t see him as one who would kill a young woman. I think it was probably more accidental. There was reason to think she might have overdosed on laudanum, because they did find a laudanum bottle nearby, by the body.

Express: The sequel, Murder Undone, picks up after Parmelee is convicted and punished. What can you tell me about the real-life story that’s based on? Was there more or less material to research for the second book?

Lewis: Less. I did do some research on Jackson [State] Prison, and, as you can imagine, it was not a very nice place. They had punishments for prisoners that bordered on torture…At about that time, prisoners like Woodruff would have been in solitary. At a certain point, they stopped the solitary, but the solitary cells were really nasty. They were very, very uncomfortable. No light. Dank.

Express: So what historical record inspired the sequel?

Lewis: The circumstances that jumped out at me. Again, I’m a novelist. The most puzzling part of the premise for the second book is that Parmelee was convicted of the heinous crime of killing his pregnant girlfriend. The community was staunchly opposed to him because he had a checkered past…Twice divorced, an older man in his 40s having a relationship with a young woman of about 20. This is in the 1890s, when morals were more strict, by far, than they are now. Sentenced to life in prison at Jackson. Had there been a death penalty, I’m sure he would have gotten it. Twenty years later, in 1915, he’s out. Governor [Woodbridge] Ferris directly intervened. My wife and I went down to the archives in Lansing to see what we could find, and the clerk there gave me a copy of two index cards – they literally had [the records] on index cards – that said Parmelee had been denied parole two times in a row. And then, in 1915, Governor Ferris interviewed him. [The governor] went to Jackson 20 years after the fact, and of all those thousands of prisoners at Jackson, he interviewed him. Several months later, Parmelee was out.

Express: So it sounds like the mystery of the second book is why he got released from prison.

Lewis: It’s what drives the book. I’m not quite sure I’d call that a mystery, in the sense of murder mysteries, but it is a puzzle, why he got out. So I made stuff up. I did play on the fact that his conviction was questionable.

Express: When Parmelee was convicted, contemporary accounts indicate he was a pariah around Old Mission and Traverse City, a hated man. People couldn’t have been happy to see him return home.

Lewis: But they seem to have been. The only notices I found, by doing a newspaper search, are a couple of very brief notices downstate – Woodruff Parmelee, bup-bup-bup, was released. One or two sentences, that’s it. The local papers from that time aren’t available. But he came back. He lived another, let’s see, he came back in ‘15, he died, I think, in ‘43. He lived on the peninsula. He lived for a while with the son who had inherited his house from Parmelee’s first wife, the kid’s mother. I found places where Parmelee lived in town. He listed himself at times as a carpenter, which he had been. He died in the state hospital. He seems to have been absorbed back into the community.

Express: I know it’s common in historical fiction to embellish what’s known, but isn’t there a distinction between historical fiction that sticks to the known facts and embellishes upon that framework versus historical fiction that changes known facts like you’ve done, changing the ages of characters, bringing to life Woodruff’s father, a character who in real life had died? How do you defend that?

Lewis: It’s an interesting question; I think about it all the time. The short, quick answer to your question is, “Well, Shakespeare did it.” Shakespeare took history and changed stuff for the purpose of his plays. I’m not pretending to tell what actually happened, so I think the key word is “suggested” or “based on.” I understand your question about what liberties can and should be taken – if you’re dealing with really minor historical people like Parmelee, it seems to me you’re pretty well free to do what you want.

Express: Have you heard from any of Parmelee’s descendants?

Lewis: Yes. I don’t know exactly what this guy’s connection is, but he’s written to me a couple of times. He wrote to me just a couple of days ago saying he’d just finished reading Murder Undone, having already read the first one. He was happy that I used so much of the Parmelee family history, and he wanted to know if I had plans to continue because, he said, there’s more Parmelee history that could be covered. So I wrote back to him, thanked him for his interest, but said, “I think I’m pretty well done with the Parmelees because there’s no more dead bodies. I don’t know what else you want me to do.”

Murder Undone is available through Mission Point Press, which has also just published a second edition of Murder on Old Mission.