Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
In May 2015, a team of firefighters from Sand Lake, Michigan, had just finished putting out a house fire when a neighbor came running up to them, frantic, asking for help.
Two doors down from the fire, inside a house on the same street, the neighbor had found Martin Duram.
The firefighters went in. Marty, as everyone called him, was lying on his bedroom floor, next to the bed. He had been shot five times. One of the shots had hit him in the head.
On the floor nearby lay his wife, Glenna. She had been shot in the head too.
At first it looked like a double homicide. About an hour later, police realized Glenna was still breathing.
The house in Sand Lake
Sand Lake is a small village in Newaygo County, in western Michigan.
Marty and Glenna Duram were both in their forties. Marty had been seriously hurt in an accident years before, and Glenna had been his caregiver for a long time. The two families had once been close. They used to go camping together, Marty’s mother later said.
But things inside the house were not good. Police records described money problems and gambling. About a month before he died, Marty had learned that their house was in foreclosure.
The notes
Glenna survived her head wound. Investigators looked hard at what had happened in that bedroom, and it did not look like an intruder.
In the house they found suicide notes. There were three of them, according to police records. One, left for one of her children, apologized for being “a disappointment to you these last 12 yrs or so.” It asked the reader: “Please forgive me.”
Handwriting analysis matched the notes to Glenna.
She told detectives she had not written them. “I know for a fact I didn’t kill my husband,” she said, according to police.
To investigators, the picture was a murder-suicide that had failed. Glenna had shot Marty, they believed, and then turned the gun on herself, and lived.
But a belief is not proof. Nobody had been in that room except the two of them. One was dead. The other said she did not do it.
Or so everyone thought.
Bud
Marty had a parrot.
His name was Bud, and he was an African grey, a species known for copying human speech with eerie accuracy. Bud had belonged to Marty and his ex-wife, Christina Keller, back when they were married. When they split up, Marty kept him. Bud had lived with Marty for the 15 years since.
After Marty’s death, Bud went back to Christina Keller.
Then, about two weeks after the shooting, he started doing something nobody could explain.
“Bud started going into rants I couldn’t explain,” Keller said. “Screaming, yelling.”
He argued with himself. Marty’s family listened, and they knew both voices. One sounded like Marty. The other sounded like Glenna.
And every rant ended the same way, with the same few words.
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