Bio

Carol Ege was born on October 9, 1956.

She lived in Michigan and was formerly of Birmingham, Michigan.

For about a decade before 1984 she had been living with a man named Mark Davis.

By 1993 she was living in Florida. In 2007 she was reported to be 51 years old.

Murder Story

On the night of February 21, 1984, Cindy Thompson, 26 and seven months pregnant, was last seen between about 8:45 and 9:15 p.m. The next morning Mark Davis found her dead in her Pontiac, Michigan home. The body showed both blunt force and sharp force injuries. The phone lines were cut and there was no sign of forced entry.

The initial police investigation in 1984 made little progress. The case was listed as open and unsolved in April 1984. In 1992 the cold case squad reopened the file after tipsters came forward. Evidence from the scene was sent to the Michigan State Police Crime Lab. The lab found fingerprints of Thompson and Davis and hairs from Thompson and others, but no physical evidence tied to Carol Ege.

Investigators learned that Ege and Thompson had both dated the same man, Mark Davis. Some acquaintances said Ege had expressed hatred for Thompson, had assaulted her months earlier, and had offered to pay men to kill Thompson. Two men said Ege offered money to have Thompson killed. The witnesses who gave these statements were later shown to have problems with credibility.

Autopsy photographs showed a mark on Thompson’s cheek. In 1993 the body was exhumed so experts could examine that mark. Forensic odontologist Dr. Alan Warnick compared the autopsy photographs to dental impressions and testified that the cheek mark was a human bite mark. Warnick told jurors the match to Ege’s teeth was highly unlikely to be random, giving a probability he described as about 3.5 million to one. He based his opinion on the autopsy photos because the tissues were too decomposed for direct examination.

Ege’s defense called experts who said the mark was likely livor mortis, a post-mortem discoloration, and not a bite mark. They also said the pattern did not match Ege’s dentition. No other physical evidence placed Ege at the scene. A ball peen hammer found in a box in Ege’s possession was consistent with some blunt force injuries, but it was not forensically linked to the crime scene.

Carol Ege was arrested in 1993 and tried. A jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. On January 28, 1994, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In 2005 a federal district court granted a conditional writ of habeas corpus, finding that the bite-mark evidence was unreliable. The case went through appeals and review of expert testimony.

Ege was retried in October 2007 without Dr. Warnick’s bite-mark testimony. The jury again convicted her of first-degree murder. The jury reached its verdict in less than five hours. On November 28, 2007, an Oakland County judge resentenced Carol Ege to life in prison with no possibility of parole. After receiving the sentence, she said, “I did not commit this crime.”