Who Was Renee Pagel?
Those who knew Renee said she went above and beyond to show kindness and grace. A deeply religious person, Renee devoted her life to helping others as a nurse and nursing instructor.
That’s why she stepped in to help after noticing one of her nursing students, Caitlin Salliotte, had shown a particular interest in learning more about kidney disease. When Renee learned Caitlin’s father was in kidney failure and waiting on a list for a new kidney, she offered up her own — even though she’d never met Phil Salliotte before.
“I was just dumbfounded someone would want to do that,” Phil told MLive in 2010 of the selfless gesture. “It really shocked me because here it was, a total stranger, asking if she could help me.”
Despite going through her own heated custody battle at the time with her estranged husband Michael Pagel, Renee put her own problems aside in July 2006 and donated one of her kidneys to Phil. Just five days later, she’d be dead.
Renee Pagel Found Dead
Renee — whose death was the subject of an episode of Oxygen’s An Unexpected Killer — was found dead by her father in her home on Aug. 5, 2006 after she failed to show up at a craft fair she planned to attend with friends.
“Uh, my daughter,” the distraught father told a 911 dispatcher. “We just found her in bed and she’s got a lash on her arm, and, uh, she’s all bloody.”
E.J. Johnson, a detective from the Kent County Sheriff’s Department, rushed to the scene and quickly discovered that Renee’s death was a brutal homicide.
“When I walk into the bedroom, I see Renee laying sideways on the bed and I was seeing blood all over the bedding, then I started looking at her arms and around her head and face and [there were] just a lot of lacerations and cuts,” he said.
A coroner would later determine that Renee, a devoted mother of three, had been stabbed more than 50 times and suffered defensive wounds including one stab wound that went straight through her hand as she tried to fight for her life.
“There was blood on the walls, blood on the lamps, blood on the ceiling,” Johnson said.
At the time of the murder, Renee’s three young children had been staying with their father while she recuperated from surgery.
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Michael Pagel Becomes a Suspect
At the time, Renee and Michael were going through a bitter divorce and had been separated for a year.
Renee’s friends say part of the contention between the couple had been that while Renee often worked two to three jobs to support the family, Michael worked part-time or not at all. He spent more time as the caregiver for their three children, Sarah, Joel, and Hannah.
“She was the worker, she was the breadwinner and he had backed off a little bit on his full-time work and he stayed home and was able to play with the kids and I know there was a little bit of tension there,” her childhood friend Laura Beach recalled.
Renee’s friend Chris Crandle said Michael had been a “master” gaslighter, finding unique and cruel ways to humiliate his wife like suggesting they meet for lunch and then never showing up, only to later claim she had misunderstood the plan. “He would make her feel like she was the crazy one,” she said.
As the couple neared their 10-year anniversary, Michael blindsided Renee with divorce papers, which he had served while she was in the middle of teaching a nursing class.
But whatever issues there may have been in the marriage, by all accounts, Michael had been a loving and devoted father to his children.
“We all lived on a farm together and I would wake up at six in the morning with my dad and we’d go ride the horses and take care of everything on the farm,” Sarah remembered, before adding “He was a good dad.”
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The Case Goes Cold
Investigators believed Renee may have been killed by someone she knew after they noticed some telling clues at the scene.
They were able to quickly rule out a burglary gone wrong after noting that Renee’s jewelry box was untouched and cash still lay on a dresser, clearly visible. They also found an orange flashlight in the backyard they believe may have been dropped by the killer.
“The flashlight, it was clean, it wasn’t dirty, there were no signs it had been outside for a long period of time, so we were pretty convinced that whoever had it had recently left it there,” Detective Bill Marks said.
Authorities took a close look at a male tenant living in an apartment above the horse barn on the property, but the man insisted he had nothing to do with the slaying and passed a polygraph test.
Suspicion quickly fell to Michael. Renee’s friends said just weeks earlier, Michael had lost an important battle in court. While they believed he had hoped to win the house and keep caring for the children while Renee paid alimony and worked, the judge ordered him to find full-time employment.
“The judge told Mike in no uncertain terms you’re going to go get a job and you’re going to work full time and you are going to pay child support and Renee is going to stay in the home and he was incensed,” friend Joyce Schaner recalled. “I mean, he was livid. That day Renee came home from her court hearing, she told me she had never seen him so angry in her whole life.”
On the night Renee was killed, Michael’s mom told police that she, Michael, and the children had a bonfire and then all three children and Michael slept in the front room of his house having a “fort night,” while she slept in a back bedroom.
Although she initially told police she heard the sliding door open and close at some point in the night, and assumed it was Michael letting out the dog, she later recanted her statement after prosecutors served her with an investigative subpoena that forced her to answer questions under oath in court.
Michael also quickly asked for an attorney and refused to answer investigators’ questions.
During a search of his house, however, investigators discovered a hard drive with scanned copies of journal entries detailing his hatred of his wife, hidden in a hollowed out beam in the house.
“The b-tch is such a drain. I am not appreciated for anything, not respected for anything I’ve done or I am doing or I will do. I must terminate with extreme prejudice,” he wrote in one damaging entry.
But without any hard evidence to link him to the murder, the case went cold for years.
