Have you ever been to prison?
Temujin Kensu has. In fact, he’s been in prison for nearly twice my lifetime: 37 years. Kensu is currently serving a life sentence he received after being convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Scott Macklem in 1987. This is usually how things go in the American justice system: If you murder somebody, and it’s proven in court that you really did it, you go to prison for a while. Sometimes for your whole life. This is what has happened to Temujin Kensu.
There’s just one small problem: Kensu was more than 400 miles away from the scene of the crime when Scott Macklem was murdered in 1986. For 37 years, he has maintained his innocence. An amalgamation of politicians, police officers, judges, record producers, journalists and private investigators — all of various political affiliations — have publicly called for his freedom.
That freedom is yet to come.
No matter how many people stand for Kensu, as I pulled into the Macomb Correctional Facility parking lot, I felt alone. I stood in the parking lot and emptied my pockets down to the bare essentials: drivers license, notepad, pen and a handful of quarters for the vending machine. In a few minutes I would be getting a pat down before sitting down with Kensu. I was nervous. I tucked my shirt in and shuffled my hair in the reflection of the driver’s side window. I took a deep breath and walked in.
But this is not a story solely about me or Kensu’s crimes and conviction. This is a story about a man who has been battered and wronged continually by the American justice system, a man whose hopes have been tested and laid bare by every strand of red tape imaginable. This is a story of a man who wakes up each day with hope in a world where hope is hard to come by.
But to know about Temujin Kensu, inmate number 189355, you should know how he got here.
The Case
Despite the messy and ugly aftershock of Scott Macklem’s murder, the actual murder itself was relatively simple. At about 9 a.m. on Nov. 5, 1986, Macklem was shot once with a shotgun in a parking lot outside of St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Mich. While investigators have revealed that Macklem was struggling with his grades and possibly involved with drug dealers, any motive for his murder was unclear. There was very little evidence left at the scene, other than a shotgun shell and an empty carton of ammunition, which carried a fingerprint. A matching print was never found.
In 1986, DNA forensics as a method of obtaining evidence was in its adolescence, and the St. Clair County police were left with very little information to discern who could have committed the murder. It didn’t help that there were no witnesses to the crime. The police interviewed Macklem’s family in the days following. They spoke with Crystal Merrill, his fiancée, and her teenage sister, Tracey.
Tracey suggested that a man named John Lamar could be responsible for Macklem’s death; he was an unpopular and intimidating character Crystal had been seeing. He wore a leather jacket and listened to loud music. Tracey would later testify that when Crystal was around him, she felt like she lost her sister.
The police were intrigued. They followed the lead and discovered Lamar, the rambunctious martial artist who Tracey Merrill spoke of, was actually a man named Fred Freeman who used aliases to dodge warrants for bouncing checks. This, of course, was before Freeman converted to Buddhism and changed his name to Temujin Kensu. From then on, Port Huron police pursued Freeman (now Kensu) as suspect number one for the murder of Scott Macklem, and they bent over backward for a conviction.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Imran Syed, clinical assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and co-director of Michigan Innocence Clinic, said, “From the very beginning, (the police) were getting evidence only that said Kensu was the wrong man, but they never let that stop them.” Syed has been the lead attorney on Kensu’s case for the majority of the last decade. “Every time they would see something that showed it wasn’t Kensu, they would see that as evidence that he was some mastermind that was covering his tracks.”
And that is how Robert Cleland, the St. Clair County Prosecutor at the time, portrayed Kensu to the jury: a cunning mastermind — a “ninja killer.”
How the prosecution landed a conviction
Bill Proctor, a Michigan Journalism Hall of Famer, first brought Kensu’s claims of innocence to mainstream media in the spring of 1995 with a five-part series of stories on Channel 7, evaluating the conviction of the “Ninja Killer.”
Proctor was the lead story reporter for WXYZ-TV Channel 7, the ABC affiliate in the Detroit Metro area. He built a nearly 33-year-long career as a smooth-talking truth seeker on the screens of southeastern Michigan televisions. Ten years ago, he retired from news to pursue a career as a private investigator and founded Seeking Justice, a private investigative firm for those who have been wrongfully convicted. For years, Proctor was an investigator for Kensu.
I met Proctor in Ann Arbor to discuss the case. He spoke with a steely, measured tone and an air of earned confidence. In his reporterly timbre, he called Kensu’s conviction “the most ludicrous thing ever in the history of the world.”
I agree.
When Kensu was arrested and charged with murder, Cleland, the county prosecutor, had a tough case to make without strong eyewitnesses or a matching fingerprint. Lacking hard evidence, he painted Kensu as an elusive member of an American sect of the Yakuza (hilariously misspelled as “Akusar” throughout the 2,200-page trial transcript) who carried poison darts in his shoes and was capable of controlling people with the “Ninja mind control” he had honed from practicing martial arts.
Kensu’s defense presented a strong alibi, though. At the time of the trial, nine witnesses placed him in Escanaba, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, before and after the murder. The gap in witness testimony left him with 10 and a half hours to make the 16-hour round-trip drive from Escanaba to Port Huron to shoot Macklem and drive back. According to court documents, witness Paul DeMars testified that he helped Kensu jumpstart his broken-down car until 1:30 a.m. on the day of the murder. Another witness places Kensu back in Escanaba by noon.
So Cleland lofted the theory that Kensu — who was so broke he was on welfare and jump starting his car 400 miles away in a Big Boy parking lot at 1:30 a.m. — could have chartered a private plane from Escanaba to Port Huron, ambushed Macklem outside of his college, shot him in the parking lot, and flown back to Escanaba, doing all of this under the radar of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Crazy, right?
The narrative gets even harder to believe when you consider that pilot Robert Evans, the expert witness Cleland put on the stand to bolster his charter plane theory, was Cleland’s own private pilot who flew him around while he campaigned to be Michigan’s attorney general in 1986, according to findings revealed by private investigators. The jury was not made aware of this conflict of interest.
Cleland’s masterful demonstration of prosecutorial misconduct continued with the testimony of Philip Joplin, an inmate who met Kensu when he was first arrested.
Initially, Joplin’s testimony was damning.
He said Kensu admitted to murdering Scott Macklem in the St. Clair County Jail when they were held there together in 1986.
“He said that when he shot this guy, he screamed,” Joplin told the jury in response to Cleland’s questioning. He paints Kensu as a sick killer, bragging proudly about his slaying of Macklem, smiling while recounting the story.
The problem: Joplin was lying.
In 1995, Proctor interviewed Joplin on camera. He fully recants his testimony, admits to lying and later signed an affidavit swearing that Kensu never admitted to the murder.
“Why did you write in your letter (that Kensu) was a confessed murderer?” Proctor asks him.
“To see if it would get me out,” Joplin said.
Even with damning testimony from a jailhouse snitch, Cleland’s theory wasn’t bulletproof. Kensu’s court-appointed lawyer, David Dean, had a solid alibi — a nail in Cleland’s coffin. Unfortunately, Dean — who would later be disbarred in the state of Michigan for alcohol and cocaine abuse that took place while representing Kensu — failed to call that alibi: Kensu’s girlfriend at the time of the murder, Michelle Woodworth.
Woodworth was never called to testify at trial, despite being able to place Kensu in their home in Rock, Mich., at the exact time of the murder. She closes the 10 and a half hour gap in which Kensu was supposedly flying across the state. In 2019, Proctor and Herb Welser, former Port Huron police officer-turned-private investigator, prepared a nearly 400-page collection of evidence not considered by the jury. In their findings, they detail how Woodworth has submitted affidavits and passed two polygraph examinations in which she insists on Kensu’s innocence.
She never spoke at trial. The nail in the prosecution’s coffin was kept in the carpenter’s tool belt and never hammered home before the jury.
And so, without Kensu’s most important witness, Cleland’s hail-mary plane theory landed, supported by Joplin’s testimony and legitimate concerns regarding Kensu’s character.
Syed, Kensu’s attorney, told me Cleland’s team had carefully crafted witness testimony to convince the jury that Kensu was a manipulative, womanizing master of ninja-like mind control. Though his Yakuza ties and mind control skills were likely exaggerated, Kensu’s portrayal as an abusive, uncouth womanizer, was, in many ways, accurate to who he was.
Crystal Merrill, Macklem’s fiancée, testified that in 1986, she met a man named John Lamar (Kensu’s alias at the time) in the video rental shop she worked in. Merrill described Kensu as suave, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, sporting a mullet she asserted was “stylish.”
“He didn’t seem like a bad guy,” she said to the jury, adding that Kensu successfully courted her with a slick message written on the back of the receipt and a bouquet of flowers. She agreed to go on a date with him.
According to Merrill’s testimony, when they went out, he dragged her from Port Huron across the state to a variety of “ninja karate shops,” before dining at a Pizza Hut in Flint. She alleges that before the end of the night, he raped her.
I was deeply troubled by this when I first read it. I still am.
From a legal standpoint, though, Syed thinks this testimony should have never been admitted.
“A lot of the trial became about what kind of a person Kensu is, as opposed to evidence of him committing this crime,” Syed said. “None of (the testimony) got to: ‘Does he have a gun? Does he shoot people?’ It’s all about mind control, ninja practices and his army of ninjas in Canada.”
Regardless of who Kensu was, Syed thinks he should have never been convicted of the murder of Macklem.
I struggled to reconcile my emotions here: Even if it is true that Kensu was rambunctious — consumed with vice and poor intentions — was that the crime he was charged with? But also, even if the alleged rape was never elevated to criminal charges, is it worth my breath to tell the story of a possible abuser?
I asked Proctor if he ever struggled to reason with Merrill’s testimony. He reminded me that most of her testimony was absolutely unreliable, even if Kensu was a problematic figure.
“The boy was an uncouth thug. He used women as play toys,” Proctor said. “But the law is absolute. You get punished for what you are convicted of, not your reputation.”
He’s right, but it wasn’t a totally satisfying answer.
“(His conviction) is a horrific miscarriage of justice, and everybody who ever hears his name, Temujin Kensu, should come to the conclusion he is an innocent man, serving time for a murder he did not commit.”
Regardless, in the eyes of the law, his conviction raises important, troubling questions about the American legal system. Syed asked me one of those questions, and it’s been stuck in my mind since the moment he said it: “If getting it right is not the whole point of the law, then what is?”
To this I have no answer, because after about five hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously convicted Temujin Kensu of the murder of Scott Macklem. He was sentenced to life in prison.
The prosecution reacted to the conviction with excitement. Elwood Brown, an assistant prosecuting attorney at the time, celebrated the conviction, calling Kensu the “most dangerous person” he had encountered, “a Charles Manson type.”
Cleland, too, was boosted by the conviction. Three years later, in 1990, he earned a lifetime appointment to the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan from President George H.W. Bush. He served 23 years as a federal judge.
Cleland, now retired, declined to speak to me.
Instead, his clerk at the Eastern District Court directed me to the St. Clair County Prosecutor’s office. I emailed the current prosecutor, Mike Wendling. He, too, declined the opportunity to comment, sharing a 2022 press release from his office, standing by the conviction.
Merrill did not respond to email requests for comment either. Macklem’s brother, Jeff, did not respond to requests for comment via Facebook.
But anyone who would talk to me rejected the conviction vehemently. Proctor, the first time I met him, explained Kensu’s trial simply. Through a series of punctual, thunderous slams of his fist on the table between us, he told me this:
“(His conviction) is a horrific miscarriage of justice, and everybody who ever hears his name, Temujin Kensu, should come to the conclusion he is an innocent man, serving time for a murder he did not commit.”
Going in and getting out
Before I went to meet Kensu, I met with Proctor again. This time, we spoke at his home in Metro Detroit. He took me up to his office, which was neatly organized with files upon files regarding falsely incarcerated people. An Emmy award sat above his desk. To the right, a framed poster for “Just Mercy,” a movie about a man who is incorrectly sentenced to life in prison, ironically, in 1987.
From his desk, with a voice that was at times booming, and otherwise jovial, Proctor expressed how frustrated this case has made him, specifically regarding the political barriers standing in Kensu’s way.
“It’s ridiculous how many times you come up against politics when it comes to government misconduct and what they will and will not fix,” he said. “It’s that kind of madness that drives me fucking crazy.”
In 2020, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel conducted a review of Kensu’s conviction via the Conviction Integrity Unit. The unit’s mission, according to its website, is “to determine whether new evidence shows that an innocent person has been convicted of a crime, and to recommend steps to rectify such situations.”
The Conviction Integrity Unit closed Kensu’s case in 2022, determining that there was not enough new evidence to warrant a new trial or commutation. The unit did not speak to Kensu’s innocence or guilt, but rather said that the new evidence provided by his attorneys was simply not enough, or “cumulative.”
Proctor, along with many of Kensu’s other advocates, wonder why Nessel’s team didn’t articulate why they refused to hear Kensu’s case further.
“I would like to have a great deal of faith in the existence of a government entity which essentially is charged with evaluating wrongful conviction claims,” Proctor said. “But I am extremely concerned about the amount of political bullshit that stands in the way of them doing their job.”
When Nessel published her disappointing and confusing findings, it wasn’t the first time Kensu had been tempted by freedom. In 2010, educated by paralegal degrees he earned while incarcerated, he filed a writ of habeas corpus. Writs of habeas corpus are rarely granted, only 3.2% of the time.
Kensu’s was granted.
Just the red tape one must cross in order to be granted freedom. If I ever find myself falsely incarcerated, perhaps then I will find that email useful.
Federal Judge Denise Page Hood issued an order — from the same courthouse that Cleland worked in at the time — that Kensu be freed or given a new trial. She says Kensu was denied a fair trial on the basis of a few claims, chief among them being ineffective assistance of counsel.
Hood agreed that Dean, Kensu’s lawyer, failed to adequately represent Kensu by not calling Woodworth and prohibiting Kensu from testifying on his own behalf.
Two years later, Hood’s decision was overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals because Kensu filed the writ too late. He was hung up and left to dry on a technicality.
Syed and the Michigan Innocence Clinic have spent the last decade litigating on Kensu’s behalf, bringing a variety of new arguments before judges. The Conviction Integrity Unit was one of their final hopes. With all possible appeals exhausted, clemency from Governor Whitmer is “his last realistic shot,” Syed said.
I emailed Whitmer’s press secretary Stacey LaRouche about Kensu’s potential innocence, asking for a comment about Whitmer’s attitude toward false incarcerations in general. She declined to comment regarding Kensu’s case, saying she was unable to do so, but responded with an email outlining the steps for an individual to receive a pardon or commutation — just the red tape one must cross in order to be granted freedom. If I ever find myself falsely incarcerated, perhaps then I will find that email useful.
Days before that email, though, I did find myself in prison. I was visiting Temujin Kensu— 37 years to the day after he was first arrested in 1986.
I walked into the visitation room and quickly scanned for the face I had come to recognize through photographs and mugshots for the last six months. I didn’t see him first. He saw me.
I’m not sure how he recognized me, but he shouted my name and I went to greet him, slightly struck by how surreal it was to see him in the flesh. It was like seeing a celebrity, except the celebrity had been convicted of murder and living in prison for the last 37 years. It seemed like he wasn’t real.
I shook his hand and quickly learned that Kensu is, in fact, very real. He wasn’t intimidating, and as far as I know, he didn’t command my attention with the power of an international mind-controlling ninja organization. He greeted me with a smile and a firm handshake, even asking permission to hug me. Then we sat down in the sterile, plastic chairs in Macomb Correctional Facility visiting room.
Kensu immediately cracked open his encyclopedic knowledge of his own misfortune. He started firing off stories and facts about his trial in 1987.
The first note I wrote down, before I could ask him how he was doing, was “882 DHH,” a license plate number that was used as evidence against him.
Kensu explained how Cleland used this license plate to push a theory that Kensu convinced a woman to participate in his yearlong scheme of lifting a license plate from a car in Washington and placing it on the car he drove to the murder scene, before scrambling off in some murder induced frenzy. He made it very clear how absurd this was.
I was captivated by him. We had quickly established a genuine rapport, and for the first 20 minutes, he spoke at a furious pace, explaining in waterproof detail how ludicrous his trial was.
Kensu told me he saw himself as a sort of political prisoner. “This was never about the crime. This was about what they did to me,” he said.
Semi-seriously, I wondered if he truly could’ve been manipulating me. Then we started talking about puppies. He started crying.
He told me about a dog he bought for a recently-exonerated man he spent time with in prison: Larry Smith Jr.
“I’m probably going to get sniffy about this,” he said. Through welled-up eyes, he spoke of Smith’s dog. “It’s just a little thing to love, dude,” he said.
Suddenly, I forgot I was speaking to a convicted murderer. And look, I’m not blind to the fact that this reads like a sitcom: Convicted murderer cries about puppies while meeting with a journalist. But it wasn’t disingenuous. They weren’t crocodile tears, and it wasn’t the only time he cried.
He cried again while telling me about Carl Levin. Levin served as U.S. Senator for 36 years. He was one of Kensu’s most fervent — and powerful — advocates. He died from lung cancer in 2021. Again, Kensu began to cry.
“He went to war for me,” he said, pausing for a moment. “By the time I found out he was dying, I couldn’t even call him to thank him.” His voice shook. “I would do anything to give back to the people who advocated for me.”
Kensu’s wife and fierce advocate, Paula, told me that he uses his paralegal degrees to help advocate for others in the criminal justice system, too. “I’ve had people tell me, ‘Temujin helped write my appeal and I couldn’t sleep at night, but I could go to sleep because I could hear him clicking away on the typewriter, working on my appeal,’ ” she said. “He’s always helping people.”
As I sat across from Kensu, I realized he was not the abusive hellion I had read about. What happened?
Kensu told me that much of what has been said about his character was true. In the last 37 years, he’s changed.
“Before this happened to me, I had nobody,” he said. “My life was really pretty empty, full of vacuous relationships.”
He told me about his childhood. He was an orphan, abused, spending time in and out of foster homes and Christian ministry organizations. “I’d come home from school and get beat into a coma. I wasn’t living my life well, either. I wanted to be cool. I was in with the wrong crowd.”
Kensu spent his childhood “trying to be good at everything,” rolling around with the wrong people, lifting weights and practicing martial arts. And, as a skilled martial artist, he wasn’t afraid to fight. For some time, he really was the rough-and-tumble guy I read about.
As we reached the end of our conversation and corrections officers began to escort me towards the door, I asked him the question that had been weighing on me. I asked about Merrill’s troubling testimony of abuse, manipulation and rape.
He said it was untrue, but it was a testament to the fact that he was “A jerk. Arrogant. And awful. I cared about all the wrong things. I hate who I was,” he said. Kensu looked me in my eyes. “A lot of this is my fault. If I was living a better life, they wouldn’t be able to do this to me,” he said. “There was a lot of good and a lot of stupid. Unfortunately, the stupid outweighed the good.”
I stood in the parking lot and looked at the sky — the sun was setting — a beautiful swirl of purple and pink. For a moment, the sky was all I saw.
Hours prior, I stood at the end of Bill Proctor’s driveway. I asked him flatout: Do you think Temujin Kensu will ever be free?
Proctor paused for five seconds. Leaves fell from the trees and were whipped around by the mid-day breeze.
He refused to answer my question.
And as I sat there, inside those walls with Kensu, I realized that it was a question I didn’t really have an answer to, either. No matter how clown-like and comically evil his conviction was, there is a slim path to freedom for Temujin Kensu. At 60 years old, it’s a path he may not be able to walk down.
I know the prisoner who sings of innocence is usually to be treated with a degree of skepticism, but Kensu earned my trust; not just because he could detail precisely how Cleland’s forensic theory was incorrect, or how absurd certain witness testimony really was, but because he held himself accountable and demonstrated an impressive level of self reflection — finding peace in becoming a better man. This was a man who was confident of his innocence. His dedication — tangible and intagible — is difficult to argue with.
As I walked out of the Macomb Correctional Facility that day, after faking nice with the officer at the front desk, I began crying. I stood in the parking lot and looked at the sky — the sun was setting — a beautiful swirl of purple and pink. For a moment, the sky was all I saw.
I focused my eyes. When I realized how easily I could filter out the razor wire that framed the sky, the same razor wire Kensu might never escape, I lost it.
It wasn’t the obviously broken justice system or the haphazard smattering of questionable facts that convinced me of his innocence. It wasn’t the fact that Kensu was 400 miles away at the time of the murder nor the double-wide, California king-size mattress of strange bedfellows who have rallied in his corner through the decades that made me decide with confidence that he was innocent.
It was his earnest dedication to himself and his own story. It was his ability to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It was the way he teared up when talking about puppies and Carl Levin. It was his demeanor and the legitimate connection we made that day that told me all I needed to know about Temujin Kensu.
Either that, or it was mind control. I’ve heard that he can do that.
Statement Correspondent Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu.