“Don’t f—ing shoot”
In Marty’s voice, Bud screamed: “Don’t f—ing shoot.”
“I believe with all my heart those are pretty close to the last words of Marty,” Keller said.
The family filmed the bird. A video shot several weeks after the killing shows Bud on his cage, ranting in two voices, and ending on those words.
Marty’s parents believed it.
“I personally think he was there, and he remembers it and he was saying it,” his father, Charles Duram, told WOOD-TV.
His mother, Lillian, said the bird repeated everything. “That bird picks up everything and anything, and it’s got the filthiest mouth around,” she said.
The video spread around the world. Newspapers from London to Ghana ran the story of the parrot who saw his owner die.
A witness with feathers
On a Thursday in June 2016, more than a year after the shooting, Newaygo County prosecutors charged Glenna Duram, then 48, with first-degree murder.
Reporters asked the obvious question. Could a parrot be a witness?
The prosecutor said at first he had not ruled it out. But a bird cannot take an oath and cannot be cross-examined, and what Bud said, if anything, could not be tested. In the end, Bud did not appear in the trial. The case was built on what the investigators had found instead.
At a preliminary hearing in December 2016, a judge sent the case to trial. As she was led out of the courtroom, Glenna shouted angrily at the family members who had gathered there.
The trial
The trial opened in White Cloud, the county seat, in July 2017. Prosecutors had lined up around 60 witnesses.
First responders described the bedroom. One firefighter told the jury about finding Marty next to the bed. “We seen the shell casing on the bed and decided it was time to leave,” he said.
The jury saw photographs of Marty dead on his bedroom floor. For his family, his mother said, that was the hardest part. “To sit there and watch her be emotionless when she sees the pictures, kind of hurt too,” Lillian Duram said.
There was phone evidence too. According to court records, data pulled from a cellphone in the case showed its internet browser had been used to visit pages about Ruger guns, with titles like “Ruger Safety Bluebook” and “Ruger New Model Single-Six, Single Action Revolvers.”
The defense said the firefighters might have contaminated the scene and attacked how the suicide notes had been handled. Glenna’s lawyers did not call a single witness.
The jury deliberated for about eight hours, across a day and a half. On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, it found Glenna Duram guilty of first-degree murder and a felony firearm charge.
“Two years is a long time to wait for justice,” Lillian Duram said outside.
Life
On August 28, 2017, Glenna Duram, 49, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Her lawyers appealed. They argued, among other things, that the web pages from the phone should never have been shown to the jury. In May 2019, the Michigan Court of Appeals rejected every claim and denied her a new trial.
Marty’s father had already said what the end of the case meant to him. “No matter what happens I lose. I lost a son and I’m gonna lose a daughter-in-law,” Charles Duram said. “But when I wake up in the morning my wife ain’t crying and asking for justice, I can live with that.”
The bird who remembered
Bud never testified. He did not have to. The case against Glenna Duram rested on a bedroom, a gun, a phone and three notes in her own handwriting.
But for the people who loved Marty Duram, the most chilling evidence was never in the courtroom. It was in a cage in Christina Keller’s house, where a gray parrot kept replaying, in a dead man’s voice, the last thing he may ever have said.
“Don’t f—ing shoot.”
