Jeff Titus

Wrongfully convicted: July 19, 2002
Exonerated: June 1, 2023
Kalamazoo County

Jeff Titus was convicted of murdering two men who were killed by shotgun blasts in November 1990 at a state game area near Titus’s farm in Kalamazoo County. Titus was cleared as a suspect at the time because he was himself hunting that afternoon with a friend on a private farm some 27 miles away. Several witnesses said they saw another man who had driven into a ditch near the game area shortly after the killings, and who they deemed suspicious.

Ten years later, a cold case team reopened the case and charged Titus. Titus was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002 on the theory that he sneaked away from his own hunting trip, drove 27 miles back home, killed the victims, stole their deer, and then drove 27 miles again to meet back up with his hunting friend.

In 2020, a podcaster and a documentary filmmaker discovered new evidence showing that Titus was innocent and that another man, Thomas Dillon, was the true perpetrator. Dillon was convicted in Ohio in 1993 of multiple killings of hunters, and he had in fact been identified by scene witnesses in 1990 as the man seen in the ditch near Titus’s farm. The Innocence Clinic then discovered police files showing that Ohio authorities had also established that Dillon drove a car matching the one in the ditch. Faced with this new information that had not been turned over to Titus before his trial, the Michigan Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit jointly moved with the Innocence Clinic to overturn Titus’s conviction. The Kalamazoo County Prosecutor’s Office subsequently dismissed all charges on June 1, 2023.

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