This medical technician insured his wife for a significant sum, after which she had a near-fatal accident followed by a fatal one…
Bruce was born on 29th March 1955 to Huldah and Wiljo Moilanen in a small outpost called Mass City in Michigan. Huldah would later attest that her husband was an alcoholic, but others said that her viewpoint was tainted by bitterness at the couple’s late divorce. Bruce was their fourth child and there was a fifteen-year gap between himself and his oldest brother. One of his brothers would later go to jail for sexually assaulting a child.
The family had very little money and were regarded by many of the locals as slightly odd but Bruce had a talent for fixing cars and, after he left school, he took a course in auto-mechanics and worked in various car repair shops.
Unsure which career path he wanted to take, Bruce went to Northern Michigan University in Marquette and trained as an emergency medical technician, but afterwards returned to car repair work, setting up his own business. He would often switch between one career and another, or even run two or three businesses at once.
Whilst skiing at a local resort, he met an excellent skier called Judy and they began dating. On 24th June 1978, they married. Judy was working at Marquette General Hospital as an administrative assistant and, by 1980, Bruce was working there too. He operated a mobile scanning machine, which he often took to a nearby hospital. Staff there assumed that he was single as he flirted outrageously and asked several of the nurses out.
Later, Bruce also set up a kennels, but he was seen to kick one dog and was very strict with the others. As a result, many of the locals were unwilling to board their animals with him.
In autumn 1991, Judy and Bruce were doing some repairs on their home. Judy was standing on the patio and Bruce went up to the roof to do some work near the chimney. Seconds later, an 85 lb chimney block fell from the roof and hit Judy a glancing blow, the incident being witnessed by the couple’s three-year-old daughter, Elise. Judy was concussed and had to be taken to the Emergency Room to have her head stitched, after which she spent four days in hospital. On her release, she had to wear a neck collar for several weeks. Medics agreed that, if she’d been standing slightly closer to the house, the blow would have proved fatal – the block had gone on to make a large hole in the patio.
Later that autumn, Judy and her daughter were asleep in the house when Bruce left to go hunting. She woke up to find smoke filling the rooms and found that he had carelessly dumped the smouldering ashes from the woodstove so that they set the woodpile on fire. Fortunately, she was able to extinguish the small fire before the basement caught alight.
Shortly afterwards, she confided in friends that she and Bruce were having marital problems and were going for counselling. He was in debt and they had to sell their vehicles in order to pay their bills.
On 29th November 1992, Judy, by now aged 35, took her dogs for a walk in the Michigan woods. One of the animals returned home without her and friends mounted a search; they found her body, shot through the chest. It seemed like a tragic hunting accident, but police were sceptical as Bruce showed no emotion when they broke the news to him and he remained emotionless when viewing the body of his dead wife. He explained this to them by saying that, as he worked in the operating room at the hospital, he saw dead bodies all the time. When asked where he had been on the afternoon when Judy was shot, he immediately listed lots of places and times.
Detectives became even more suspicious when they found out that Bruce would benefit to the tune of $330,000 under an ‘accidental death’ insurance clause. He had been taking out policies on his wife for some time.
They talked to his colleagues and supervisors at the hospital and found out that he repeatedly showed up late for work and that he often absconded to a different part of the building to chat up various women. He claimed to be having an affair with one married woman but she wanted nothing to do with him.
Detectives also found out that Bruce Moilanen regularly filed insurance claims. Indeed, he had done so after Judy was hit by the chimney block as the block had damaged their patio. They examined his finances and found that neither his car repair business nor the kennels were in profit, and that he had several overdrafts.
They asked him to take a lie detector test but he said that he had to look after his little daughter and didn’t have the time. Determined detectives arranged for him to have a polygraph at a later date but he cancelled again. He also cancelled further lie detector tests, explaining that he was on medication to help him sleep so his responses would be poor. In the same time frame, he wrote an inappropriate love letter to a married woman and suggested that he take her husband on a hunting trip: frightened for her own safety and that of her spouse, she contacted the police. Bruce had written that he was ready to get married again, yet Judy had only been dead for ten weeks…
In March, he handed in his notice at work. The hospital was relieved as he had been such a poor employee – one of the reasons that they’d kept him on was because his wife Judy had been such a wonderful worker. They told him not to work out his notice, that his resignation was effective immediately. At a loose end, Bruce began to declare his affection for various local women, all of whom regarded him as a somewhat frightening pest.
On 23rd April, Bruce finally took a polygraph test. Detectives also showed him one of the inappropriate letters he’d written to a married woman. To their surprise, his eyes filled with tears. They told him that they believed he’d shot his wife and asked if it was an accident or deliberate. ‘I probably shouldn’t say without an attorney,’ Bruce replied. A few minutes later he confessed to shooting Judy, saying that she was going to leave him and take half of everything. He complained that she’d worked long hours and wasn’t a good cook, that he’d had to take care of the house. His tone was self-pitying and he showed no remorse.
Bruce added that he’d bought the gun from a stranger, crept into the woods and shot his wife, then torched the firearm. He was taken to the local jail, where he attempted to hang himself with a sheet.
His daughter was handed over to relatives and, to their concern, she told them that Daddy had pushed a big brick onto Mummy. Court officials decided she was too young to testify, so she didn’t have to take the stand.
A few days later, Bruce cleaned his cell and his door was unlocked for him to hand the jail’s duty officer his bag of rubbish, but when the officer unlocked the door, Bruce threw pepper into his eyes and fled. He ran to a local park and was recaptured there twenty-five minutes later and returned to jail.
Meanwhile, detectives continued to look into the Moilanens’ finances and found that Bruce had let his insurance policy lapse but had continued to pay for his wife’s policy. He had also lied to them when he said that their daughter, Elise, was the beneficiary.
They put a chimney block on the edge of the roof and did the kind of roof repairs Bruce had done, watching to see if the block would dislodge. It didn’t. Even when they jumped up and down, the block remained in place.
Bruce’s trial, which lasted for eight days in December 1993, was virtually a foregone conclusion and, after slightly less than seven hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of first-degree premeditated murder. He showed no emotion. On 21st January 1994 he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.