A woman's bizarre email to police ended up getting her and her mother jailed for decades for a crime they would have likely otherwise gotten away with.
It was a case which rocked Michigan in 2002 after a blueberry farmer found the charred remains of a man in an old footlocker.
Unable to know who the man was, and with no evidence on the scene of any third-party involvement, his case went cold for years.
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Even asking a communications professor to create a documentary on the case in 2004 failed to provide fresh tips.
But a decade later a strange series of emails would land of the desk of Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office detective Robert Donker.
He recalled to PEOPLE the moment he received the misspelled email: “The first one said, ‘I’m scarred’ — I believe she meant ‘scared’ — and the one after was, ‘I’ve got information about a case.’”
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The emails were from Dineane Ducharme, who had actually seen the documentary made years prior and told the detective that she thought the sketch of the victim was the likeness of 37-year-old Robert Caraballo, who was her mother Beverly McCallum’s boyfriend.
She even boldly accused her mother of being his killer.
Well, it was a little more complicated than that, as after the police matched dental records to Caraballo’s and formally identified him as the victim, they soon realised Ducharme was also a culprit.
Caraballo was a handyman who had recently been released from prison and lived with McCallum.
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Ducharme, who at the time was 21, was close to a man named Chris McMillan - who was also in on the killing.
Throughout the investigation, they soon discovered that Caraballo was attacked at the home on May 7, 2002, and speculated that McCallum pushed her boyfriend down a flight of stairs to the basement, where she enlisted the help of her daughter to beat him with a hammer and wrap his head in a plastic bag, before driving 90 miles to set him on fire.
Eaton County prosecutors formerly charged McCallum, her daughter, and McMillan with homicide, conspiracy and disinterment and mutilation of a body.
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The kicker? If Ducharme hadn’t sent the email, they would have gotten away with it.
Agreeing to the sentiment, Eaton County prosecuting attorney Doug Lloyd said: “That email was the start of the downfall for all of them. If [Ducharme] hadn’t sent that email, he’d still be an unknown body in a cemetery.”
McMillan ended up taking a 15 to 40-year plea deal in 2019 and agreed to testify against the others.
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Ducharme was convicted of first-degree murder in 2021 and sentenced to life without parole.
During the six-day trial, McCallum was theorised to have murdered Caraballo as he was ‘cramping her lifestyle’ and hindering her efforts to be with other men.
Following his murder, she moved to Jamaica to live with another man and during the investigation, she moved to Pakistan to be with a different man - taking two years of legal proceedings to extradite her for the killing.
She was eventually sentenced to 40 to 60 years in prison for second-degree murder.
Topics: Crime, True Crime, US News
Britt Jones