Who Killed Erik Cross?

Vicksburg Michigan is a small, quiet town, about 130 miles west of Detroit in Kalamazoo county. The town of about 3,000 people is where the Cross family called home. The Cross family loved Christmas, fishing and the simple things in life. 

Erik Cross and his younger sister Jackie were extremely close growing up. It was the two of them in the adventures in childhood.

Erik was good-natured, outgoing and made a wonderful older brother. He loved playing outside. Erik and Jackie loved exploring the outdoors. 

When Erik about 16 years old, he started chasing girls and hanging out with his buddies. His father was concerned that Erik was hanging out with a bad crowd.

It was June 25th, 1983 and 16 year-old Erik Sterling Cross was getting ready to leave his home to attend a graduation party at a lake house about a mile down the road from his home.  Jackie remembers "The Look Of Love By Dusty Springfield" playing as Erik fixed his hair in the mirror. It was the last time Erik's sister would see him alive.

Erik's parents had no idea he was going to this party, which was a drinking party, a"kegger" and being thrown by one of his buddies. The price for all the beer you could drink was $2.00. All of Erik's friends were going and there were supposed to be a lot of pretty girls in attendance.

Erik was highly intoxicated when he left the party and was seen stumbling down the road towards home at around 1 a.m. A witness said he saw Erik walking past a general store on his way home. Also seen at the general store at that time was two parked cars, one yellow and the other a dark color.

Investigators believe that Erik made it home. Sometime after 1 a.m., his father heard the front door but went back to sleep, assuming Erik made it in safely.

It was theorized that since the front door was locked, Erik made his way to the rear of the house and as he did so he was approached by those who decided to do him harm. Between 1:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. Erik was beaten, tied to a car and dragged, then run over by the car to conceal the beating he'd received.

Around 5 a.m., Erik's parents said that they heard a car with a loud muffler turning around in their driveway. After 5:30 a.m., Erik's dad went out to retrieve the newspaper and that is when this inconsolable father discovered Erik's shoe in the road and his partially clad remains at the foot of the driveway. The dad ran back inside to get Erik's mother. She brought out a blanket to cover him up with and called a neighbor who had worked at a hospital.  The neighbor preformed CPR, but Eric could not be revived.

Detective Sargent Madison was one of the first cops on the scene. He was young patrolmen at the time. He says that evidence of Eric's demise was found strewn for hundreds of yards along the road.

At first, investigators thought that Erik's death was due to a simple hit and run, but Erik's family believed something more sinister was a foot. His family pressured police to look deeper at the case and Erik's case became not so simple.

Police began to believe that the dark colored car, that was parked at the general store when Erik walk past, drove past Erik's house and saw him. That they might have tied him to the hood of the car and took him hood surfing. Then he had fallen off and was run over.

Within weeks of Erik's death, police dropped that theory as well and look at his death as a deliberate act of murder. 

Erik's autopsy showed that contusions, deep abrasions, rope burns, striations on his skin. He had leg fractures and a large, gaping laceration on his back.

Many leads came in, a very few credible and the rest a waste of time. Some of them down right bizarre. The police interviewed more than a hundred people and they confirmed the theory that Erik was tied to a car by a bunch of teenagers, dragged him along the road for hundreds of yards, ran him over and then dumped his body outside his home. 

There was a core group of persons of interest in Erik's murder. The main suspect and the one that many people pointed a finger at, was the town bully named Brent Spaulding. He allegedly was the ringleader of the group and the driver of that dark colored car. 

Brent's girlfriend at the time, and another person of interest from that core group, was Amber Thomas. It is said she had first hand knowledge of what exactly happened to Erik and might have even been in the car when Erik was run over. Police also believe that she was the woman that a neighbor had heard yelling " Oh my god, he's seen us!" from that car that Erik's parents had seen pull from their driveway just before Erik's body was discovered. 

Amber was also at the party at the lake house and was seen flirting with Erik. This made police wonder if this made Brent jealous and motivated him to seek vengeance against Erik. A witness told police that there was a rumor going around that Brent was seen pushing Erik at that party. Another witness said that after Erik's death, Brent called himself the Lucifer and was sent to a mental institution. 

Many people said that Brent acted crazy after Erik's death and police wondered if it was all an act, if he was trying to build up an insanity defense for the day that he might have thought was coming.

Also after Erik's death, Brent's car mysteriously vanished.

During the investigation, another witness came forward and stated that Brent actually confessed to them about his role in Erik's murder. However, police had no concrete evidence of Brent being involved in Erik's murder and Brent, along with the other people that were said to have been with him in his car that night, all denied any of them had anything to do with Erik's demise. 

Police are sure that the group knows something that they won't divulge to authorities. The group adopted "a conspiracy of silence" and would no longer cooperate with the police.

In 2016 police named persons of interest in the case. Brenton Spaulding, Amber Thomas and Bill Cook, people Erik knew from Vicksburg High School who were in attendance at the party. Also Tim Martin and Brenton Spaulding's father, Brian Spaulding.

No one has ever been arrested or charged in Erik's death.

Erik's younger sister, Jackie, went to the same high school as Spaulding, Thomas and Cook while the rumor mill churned that these three were responsible for her brother's horrific murder.

It is 2019 and 36 years later and Jackie, who started a Facebook page for her brother, has never given up on Erik's case. And even after all these years, the town hasn't forgotten Erik either and they still yearn for justice.

Erik would have been 52 this year and there was a vigil held in his honor that attracted a lot of media attention. This caused a break in the case investigators had been waiting for and solidified their suspicions about their core group of suspects. So much so that investigators submitted their evidence to the attorney general's office and are awaiting search warrants and official charges.