CASSOPOLIS – One of the area’s oldest cold cases is nearing a conclusion with a guilty plea last week by the man charged last year in the 1977 murder of his cousin near Edwardsburg.
Raymond Richmond pleaded guilty last week in the 1977 murder of his cousin, Robert Stasiak. Richmond had been scheduled to go to trial Aug. 8 in Cass Circuit Court.
Cass County Prosecutor Victor Fitz said Richmond agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and will receive a sentence of between 12 and 18 years in prison at his Sept. 15 sentencing before Cass Circuit Judge Mark Herman. Richmond has been in jail for over a year waiting trial.
Fitz said that a charge of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony was dismissed as part of the plea agreement. Richmond was originally charged with open murder and possession of a firearm, a long rifle, in the commission of a felony. The open murder charge carried a penalty of life in prison.
Fitz called Richmond’s guilty plea a good resolution to the case although he said it would have been interesting to present the case at trial. He credited the dedication of Stasiak’s daughter, Stephanie Stasiak, in pursuing the case over the years.
Richmond, now 58, of South Bend, was arraigned more than a year ago after the case was re-opened in 2015 by the Edwardsburg-Ontwa Township Police Department. Stasiak’s death on Nov. 2, 1977 at his parents’ Edwardsburg area home was originally ruled a suicide.
Fitz said last year that Richmond and Stasiak argued about Richmond’s drug use the day of the incident and that Richmond shot and killed Stasiak after Stasiak flushed marijuana down a toilet. Fitz said Richmond admitted to killing Stasiak five times in the intervening years.
As noted in the probable cause affidavit and the preliminary hearing last year, both Stephanie Stasiak and her mother, Kathy Hamburger, said that Richmond had admitted to them in a 1993 phone conversation that he killed Stasiak. Richmond also admitted his crime to the staff at Oaklawn Hospital in Goshen in verbal and written statements.
“We were on the phone and he identified himself as Raymond, I knew who he was,” Stasiak said during last year’s hearing. “He said that he had shot and killed my father. He was my dad’s cousin and he didn’t show any empathy and didn’t appear to have any remorse. He said they had gotten into a fight and my dad had gotten rid of some of his drugs.”
“I don’t remember much after that, it was just a lot to swallow,” Stasiak said as she wiped the tears from her eyes. “He said he shot him because my dad had gotten rid of his drugs.”
Forensic analysts found that the evidence left at the scene led them to conclude that Stasiak did not kill himself. They said the muzzle of the rifle was not in contact with Stasiak’s shirt and the angle of the shot made it unlikely that it was suicide.
Local police had investigated the case a number of times over the years although the death had originally been classified as a suicide. The latest investigation came about after Tim Kozal, a former Kalamazoo police detective who had worked on cold cases, became the Edwardsburg chief. Kozal took the public services director job in Manistee earlier this year.
Kozal said last year that his department was assisted by the Dowagiac police department, the Cass County Sheriff’s Department, the Kalamazoo police department, the Michigan State Police, the South Bend police department, the Cass County prosecutor’s office and the Elkhart County and St. Joseph County (Ind.) prosecutor’s offices.
Fitz noted last year that Southwestern Michigan College criminal justice students in the “Seeking Justice” organization also assisted in the investigation. The goal of the Seeking Justice initiative has been to investigate cold cases to bring murderers to justice and bring resolution to families.
In this case and others, students did everything from indexing information and materials to conducting interviews and developing witness lists.
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