Quarantine has me finally catching up on my hobbies, including going through my collection of clippings. How I missed this 2014 article on the murder of Wayne State English professor Philip “Phil” Traci is beyond me. It’s exactly the sort of case I take an interest in. Phil Traci was a popular professor of English and Shakespeare expert at Wayne State University. Openly gay and extraverted, he held many gourmet dinners and parties at his home and gave out his home phone number at lectures. It was apparent that he had a vital social life and was well-liked.
Deborah Laura, then a law student at Wayne State, described her first college Shakespeare class with Traci: “… he didn’t have students — he had a following. … He felt that discussion was the only vehicle by which he could both teach and learn. … Each of us was made to feel as though we had something important to add to the class, so each of us did.”
On the morning of March 13, 1984, his friend Lorne Hanley was to meet Traci for a coffee date along with Hanley’s landlord, Bill Johnson. Johnson had called Traci’s house, and there was no answer, so they headed to the professor’s house, worried. Johnson had keys to the house, and after pounding on the doors and windows, the two let themselves inside. On the kitchen floor was Traci, who had been stabbed to death multiple times.
Thirty-six years later, almost no information regarding the murder of this highly regarded professor is available. When Monica Mercer of Hour Detroit requested the police file of Traci’s case, she was told that the Detroit Police Department could not locate it. One of the investigators in a similar case in which a gay educator was stabbed could not remember the name of that victim, let alone the name of Philip Traci.
“The joke was, if you needed a list of suspects in a gay homicide, just look in the phone book,” said the former detective, who asked for his name not to be used because of his current position in Oakland County. “It wasn’t that we didn’t try. It’s just that some of these victims were with different men every day. In any homicide if I got one usable fingerprint out of a thousand, I was lucky. It was high stress, and the reality is, it was hard to solve these types of crimes.”
That other victim, Northern High School librarian Ronald Hamilton, was also a gay man in his forties who lived alone. But most remarkable is the fact that Ronald Hamilton was also found stabbed to death in his home on the exact same morning. Both men’s pockets had been turned out. Hamilton lived four miles from Traci, and the two men had mutual friends. However, Traci was not mentioned at all in Hamilton’s case file. Although numerous Free Press articles about the homicides link the two, I could find no indication that police thought there was a single suspect in the murders. The owner of a car with vanity plates that had been in Traci’s driveway the night before had been tracked down. However, police were apparently unable to link Traci’s alleged visitor to the crime. In any case, Traci’s friend’s felt that police had not taken Traci’s murder seriously enough, perhaps privately attributing his death to his “lifestyle”. Yet the very similar homicide of Ronald Hamilton would indicate that a serial predator might be responsible – an extremely vicious one.
A detailed search of local newspaper archives, however, turned up one possibility regarding the deaths of these two men. On April 2 of the same year, the body of Detroit area high school teacher Richard Bryant, who was 58 years old, was found in his bathtub, having been stabbed 64 times. His throat had also been slashed. Bryant was also gay. However, this case resulted in an arrest and conviction – two, in fact. Two men who had recently been released from the Riverside Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan were found guilty of that crime. Those men were Clarence Ray, 28, and James Shultz, 21. The two had become friends while locked up.
A key prosecution witness, Emmy Thompson, a friend of Ray, testified that he had described the slaying to her and a former roommate April 2 at a Melvindale motel.
She said Ray told her that he and Schulz had picked up Bryan at the R n R Saloon, a Michigan Avenue bar frequented by homosexuals, and had gone with him to his apartment to rob him.
Schultz hit Bryant over the head with a bottle, and when Bryant started screaming, Schulz held a pillow over his face as Ray stabbed him, Thompson said Ray told her. The men ransacked the home, put Bryant’s body in the tub and left in his car. (Detroit Free Press, 12/06/1984)
The witness also testified in court that one of the men had a watch that had belonged to Bryant. Here we have three gay men – all well-regarded educators, all stabbed to death an outrageous number of times. Could Ray and Schulz be guilty in the murders of Traci and Hamilton?
(to be continued…)
For further reading on life for LGBT people in Michigan, check out this timeline from the University of Michigan.
The Cold and Missing Persons Case Archivist 