Richard Clarey

On January 3, 1984, Clarey was paroled from the Kalamazoo Correctional Center, where he had served on charges of breaking and entering. On April 15, he accepted a ride from acquaintance, 36-year-old Robert Baranski. When they were alone, Clarey shot Robert and later dumped his body at a pier in South Haven.

After Clarey was ruled competent to stand trial, his trial was scheduled for December 1984. During the trial, more than 50 people testified: among them was psychologist Leonard Donk, who said that the defendant suffered from an array of disorders, most prominently periodic schizophrenia; another was Raymond Matthews, who revealed that on the night before Holmes' and Bultema's killings, Clary had approached his truck, tried to break in, and shot a gun at him.

A videotaped confession further proved Clarey's guilt. When he took the stand, he claimed to have realized that he needed help. On December 21, 1984, he was found guilty of the Holmes-Butelma murders, and received mandatory life imprisonment sentences.

Clarey first came onto police radar at age 19, when he and 28-year-old Flavio Lengs robbed a Kalamazoo man who picked the two up in his car on December 18, 1979. They stole his wallet and stabbed him in the back, pushing him out of the vehicle before speeding off. The man's injuries proved to be non-fatal and he called the police, telling them that his assailants were breaking through roadblocks on the I-94, just outside Benton Harbor. Clarey and Lengs were shot at and chased by several patrol cars, driving at about 110 mph for about 15 miles. Clarey crashed the car into a utility pole in Benton Harbor's central business district. The two criminals were apprehended by police officers and sent to nearby Bronson Methodist Hospital, where the former had to be treated for head injuries and an LSD overdose. Both were imprisoned for a few years, before they were let out on the streets again.

Richard Norbert Clarey, Jr. (born July 18, 1960) is a German-American murderer and self-confessed serial killer. A Neo-Nazi sympathiser, he was convicted for the murders of three men in Michigan in 1984, but later confessed to being responsible for over 100 unsubstantiated murders, starting at the age of 15 in his native West Germany.

Clarey was born on July 18, 1960 in Wiesbaden, West Germany, the elder son of an American officer from Kalamazoo, Michigan stationed in the city and his German wife, Hilde. His younger brother, Paul, was born in 1963. Richard Sr. was rarely at home to care for the children, and so, the two brothers were doted upon by their mother, who allowed them to do whatever they wanted. Richard Jr. became a delinquent who detested going to school, spending his time drinking alcohol and abusing drugs, in particular LSD. In his dreams, he began to hear voices of prominent Nazi figures who told him that he had a "mission to kill all Americans", after he had read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. As a teenager, he moved in with an aunt in Oregon, before settling in his father's native city of Kalamazoo.