CONFESSED KILLER AND TROOPER ATTACKER TO APPEAR IN COURT THIS WEEK

NILES – Defendants in two high-profile cases are expected to be in court this week in Berrien County Trial Court in Niles.
James Parker Huffman walked into the Niles Law Enforcement Complex July 24 and told police that he had killed his girlfriend a few days earlier in an apparent suicide pact. He is now charged with open murder and was to be in court Wednesday for a pre-exam conference. He is being held in the Berrien County Jail in lieu of $1 million bond.
Huffman, 42, of South 14th Street in Niles, told police that he and the victim, Angela Cluver, also 52, had an agreement that he would kill her and then kill himself. He said he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself several times after he killed Cluver, his live-in girlfriend, in the master bedroom of the home on the evening of July 21.
Huffman told police that he strangled Cluver until she stopped breathing and he heard a pop in her neck.
Court files indicate that Huffman said he left a letter of confession at the residence describing what he had done. Niles Police Chief Jim Millin said his investigators are looking into Huffman’s suicide pact claim. “It is a statement we’re looking into, we don’t know how factual it is,” he said.  Millin said he wasn’t sure if officers found a suicide note or letter of confession in the South 14th Street home that would corroborate Huffman’s claim.
Police located Cluver’s body inside the home in the 900 block of South 14th Street last Monday, July 24. According to court records, they found her body wrapped in a blanket on the floor of the laundry room in the home with duck tape around her head, mouth, waist and legs.
She was identified originally from a tattoo, her height and weight and her fingerprints because of the decomposition of her body.
In the other case, Travis Tyler Wise was to be in court Wednesday for a case conference on six felony charges. Wise was found competent to stand trial in late June after a forensic examination.
 He and his half-brother, Michael Scott Barber, are accused in the March 20 attack on Michigan State Police Trooper Garry Guild during a traffic stop on the U.S. 31 freeway near Buchanan.
Barber has already been sentenced for his role in the incident. He was sentenced in late June to 14 years in prison for six counts including assault by strangulation and assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder as a habitual offender.
Wise is expected to go to trial on the charges he faces on Sept. 20. He faces charges of assault by strangulation, resisting and obstructing police causing injury, attempting to disarm a police officer, obstruction of justice, assault with intent to murder and assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder.
The Feb. 20 incident began when Guild attempted to pull Barber over on what turned out to be a stolen motorcycle. Barber ended up crashing the bike and then started attacking Guild. He was helped by Wise who got out of a car trailing them and started choking Guild.
Guild was assisted by two bystanders who helped him regain control of the situation before other police could come.