Posted on 11/30/2025 3:52:30 PM PST by Red Badger
In a photo provided by the then Attorney General’s office, Brian Ognjan straightens the tie of David Tyll at Tyll’s wedding.The two went missing on a hunting trip in 1985 and were last seen at the former Linkers Lodge about 5 miles west of Mio. (Courtesy of Detroit Free Press)
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* Forty years ago, two metro Detroit friends vanished after heading Up North to hunt
* They never returned, launching a decadeslong mystery that focused on a ‘feral crew of hard-drinking brawlers’
* Two brothers were eventually convicted but bodies were never found. Police fear they were fed to pigs
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Forty years ago last weekend, two buddies tossed their guns and gear into a truck and headed north during Michigan’s storied firearm deer season. The plan: Hang with friends, drink heavily, have some fun and maybe, as an afterthought, bag a buck.
No one has seen David Tyll, Brian Ognjan, their truck, guns or gear since.
The Detroit-area men weren’t the type to skip town. Ognan was a mechanic saving to propose to his girlfriend; Tyll was a machinist, recently married. Both were punctual employees. Raise some hell in a bar? Drink too much? Do stupid guy stuff? Sure. But not show up for work Monday morning without any contact?
The families knew immediately something was very wrong.
The exhaustive years-long search focused on the Mio, area where the pair were last reliably seen, drunk and carousing at bars. It would grow to include dive teams, aerial overflights, ground-penetrating radar, law agencies from every level of government, thousands of tips from the plausible to the insane, the assistance of psychics, cadaver dogs, the resources of Interpol and thousands of hikers, hunters, trail riders, birdwatchers, anglers and others all keeping their eyes open as they walked through the woods of northern Michigan. Their photos on a reward poster were plastered in every storefront, behind every tavern bar and even in car windows and front yards.
Eventually, the story faded from the front pages, then from the headlines altogether. Yet for years afterward, law enforcement, the men’s families and journalists would publish appeals every November for Michigan’s 700,000 deer hunters to be on the lookout for anything suspicious as they fanned into the forests. The case was featured on the “Unsolved Mysteries” TV show and other sensational broadcasts. Every couple of years a new burst of publicity or an increase in the reward would generate a new flood of tips and increasingly bizarre theories.
Police begged the public for anything … any scrap of a clue … no matter how small. Something. Anything. Because they had nothing.
Urban legend grows The missing hunters, both 27, became the stuff of urban legend and endless speculation. Were they, and the Bronco they drove, at the bottom of a lake? Did they skip the country? Run off with women? Get involved in drugs? Aliens? Bigfoot?
The mystery tormented the families and frustrated law enforcement. What happened?
For years, investigators had heard that two brothers, Raymond (J.R.) and Donald (Coco) Duvall, bragged about the killings, implying they fed the bodies and bones to pigs. Once in a bar in Wixom. Once to an ex-wife. Once to a girlfriend. And several other such instances.
They were two of the seven well-known Duvall brothers, who had such a fearsome reputation in the Mio area that locals and even local police steered clear of them.
But the secondhand boasts weren’t enough to bring murder charges in a case with no eyewitness nor a shred of physical evidence.
The case had gone stone cold by the time Michigan State Police Detective Robert Lesneski inherited it more than 15 years after the disappearance of the men.
Known by his nickname, Bronco, Lesneski was obsessive, working hundreds of hours on his own time. Reinterviewing old witnesses, coding and organizing the colossal mess of paper files. Stopping by the side of the road to poke his shovel into a suspicious hunk of metal. He always carried a shovel in his trunk.
New tips occasionally trickled in, and he chased those too.
One tipster told Bronco that she knew of a woman who knew something about the hunters’ disappearance. The woman lived near a bar, Linkers Lost Creek Lodge in Luzerne, where the hunters were seen playing pool and harassing the waitresses. Her name was Barb Boudro. Lacking an address, Bronco began knocking on random doors near the bar after his shifts ended. For days.
“Are you Barb Boudro? No? Do you happen to know where she lives? No? Sorry for your trouble.” Rinse, repeat.
The tip seemed destined for the hundreds before it: A dead end. But Bronco wasn’t one to leave any loose end unknotted. One more door. Then one more after that. And another. And one more as light was fading…a woman cautiously cracked her door. “Hello, I’m Detective Lesneski from the Michigan State Police and I was wondering….”
“The woman flinched. She started shaking uncontrollably, so strongly it seemed as if she might be having an epileptic fit,” recounted Tom Henderson in his highly-readable book “Darker Than Night.”
“‘You’re going to get me killed,’ she said, pushing the door shut.”
Bronco’s adrenaline surged. “‘I just about fell over’” he told Henderson.
For the first time in his career, he literally stuck his foot in the doorway, blocking the door just before it closed.”
Boudro didn’t tell him much on that first visit. But over the course of months, he continued to stop by, befriending her, helping her with chores and beginning to get details of what she knew.
She told Bronco that her friend Ronnie Emery was with her at Linkers bar the night the hunters were there. The brothers had a verbal altercation with a couple of the Duvalls, who’d called in friends and other brothers who began arriving at the bar. The Duvalls bought a six-pack for the two and suggested they go home because there was going to be trouble.
Barb and Ronnie went back to Barb’s house just down the road and settled in to watch “Scarface” on video. Ronnie went outside to check out a commotion, Barb said.
When he returned, he told a terrifying story of the hunters, illuminated by truck headlights and begging for their lives, as the brothers broke their skulls with baseball bats, laughing.
Moments later there was a knock at the door.
“You didn’t see anything. Pigs gotta eat too,” one of the brothers warned them cryptically.
She’d been living in fear ever since.
Boudro was a recovering alcoholic who’d lived a hardscrabble life. But she was no dummy. Bronco knew Barb had witnessed the murder, and that she was protecting herself by telling the story through Ronnie’s eyes.
Ronnie had died years earlier, so Barb’s story was secondhand hearsay — not admissible in court.
As long as she continued to tell the story through Ronnie’s eyes, she couldn’t be compelled to testify. And she had good reason.
Like ‘Deliverance’ but worse The seven Duvall brothers were a feral crew of hard-drinking brawlers who split time between Monroe and the woods surrounding Mio.
They had a reputation, to say the least: Lore has it police sought backup to interact with them, locals knew to avoid even the slightest provocation and farmers even blamed deaths of cows on the brothers.
The most common comparisons made of the brothers was that they resembled the savage backwoods hillbillies depicted in the book and movie “Deliverance.” Times three.
Barb lived in constant fear. The brothers would stop by every year or so to remind her to keep her mouth shut, she told Bronco. They mentioned how pretty her granddaughter was, sneering. Over time, one of her dogs was shot. Another was run over in her front yard — the vehicle having intentionally left the road to strike the animal. The fear was palpable, and Bronco was careful to drive only unmarked cars to her home and even installed a camera for her protection.
By 2002, Bronco had a good idea what happened, but not enough to make an arrest. In concert with the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, they issued investigative subpoenas to Barb Boudro and several other witnesses who were compelled to come to Lansing and testify under oath. Attorney General Mike Cox at the time called it a “poor man’s jury.” It was their Hail Mary, hoping to shake something loose.
Barb Boudro was first to testify, and she continued telling the story through Ronnie’s eyes — the shouting, the beatings, the blood, the blows continuing to rain down on the crumpled hunters long after they were motionless. Still, none of it was admissible in court.
From Henderson’s “Darker Than Night” account: “All of them (investigators) were getting frustrated. It was clear she was holding something back.” Bronco shut off the tape recorder and leaned forward inches from Barb’s face. He begged her to tell what she knew.
“Something changed in her eyes and her face, something subliminal, some small hint of acceptance. ‘Bronco, you know I saw it, don’t you?’” she said …
“‘Yes, I know,’ Bronco said. ‘But I need to hear it from you.’”
“I’m a dead woman,” she said. And proceeded to tell the story. Through her own eyes.
They had their eyewitness.
No bodies. One terrified eyewitness Prosecutor Donna Pendergast was already legendary when she was assigned to the case. The daughter of a Detroit cop, tough-as-nails Pendergast had put dozens of murderers behind bars, including high-profile killers like Jonathan Schmitz, the “Jenny Jones Show” murderer and serial killer Coral Watts.
But this was different. No bodies. No truck. No confessions. And just one, shaky, eyewitness.
As the trial began in 2003, Pendergast weaved threads of circumstantial evidence — the brothers bragging of the murders at a bar, a relative recalling offhand remarks about “killing those hunters,” accounts of the brothers trying to have a black Ford Bronco chopped into parts.
But she knew without Barb Boudro’s testimony there would be no conviction. And Barb was terrified and flighty.
When it came time for her testimony, the courtroom went silent.
On the stand, she recounted the story:
Sensing trouble and seeing the Duvalls bringing friends and reinforcements to the bar, she’d left with Ronnie as the brothers had instructed her to do.
When they heard screaming in the woods, they knew it was the brothers jumping the hunters. They went to watch, but saw an unfamiliar truck parked in Barb’s drive. So, they sneaked out a bathroom window, through the woods to witness a horrifying sight. In a semi-circle of light from parked truck headlights, the brothers were beating Tyll with feet, fists and a metal baseball bat as he pleaded for his life. Ognjan ran, but was dragged back into the circle of light, where the brothers continued to kick and punch Tyll’s lifeless body long after it was limp.
“He (Tyll) was begging and they swung the bat, and it sounded like …. Like if you drop a pumpkin, and there was just blood,” she testified, as recounted in “Darker Than Night.”
As for Ognjan, “‘Two other people were holding him. He broke away and ran and they pulled him back … he kind of collapsed and they started laughing because he peed himself.’”
Then, they beat Ognjan to death.
Moments after Barb and Ronnie returned to the house, Coco and J.R. Duvall appeared on their doorstep, warning them not to say a word to anyone.
Defense attorneys tried but failed to crack Boudro on the witness stand, suggesting her alcohol consumption and the passage of time clouded her memory.
If there was doubt that she would hold up under questioning about her past, it faded as she jabbed back defiantly, throwing off the defense attorneys. The defense predictably hammered at the lack of a body or any shred of physical evidence, and called some bizarre defense witnesses including:
* A slow-talking, hard drinking man who had a metal plate in his skull from a crane accident who claimed the hunters told him they were leaving the country together.
* Ken Duvall, one of the brothers, who couldn’t recall anything because of a combination of cocaine use, a stroke, and Alzheimer’s.
* An amnesiac who recently regained his memory and claimed his friends killed the hunters with axes in downtown Grayling, then stripped them and held their mouths open while submerging them in the Au Sable River until their bodies sank.
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Pendergast took particular delight in cross examining the man about his self-proclaimed relationship with southeast Michigan serial killer Leslie Williams.
“Do you have any idea who prosecuted Leslie Williams?”
“No.”
“You’re looking at her.”
Lord knows why the defense put that nutcase on the stand.
In the end it was Boudro’s testimony that sealed the murderers’ fates. Her vivid descriptions of the “pinging” of the metal bat off the hunters’ skulls; the sound of Tyll’s skull splooshing open like a smashed pumpkin and the brothers laughing derisively when they saw that Ognjan had peed his jeans in fear were compelling details that bolstered her credibility.
The jury needed less than three hours of deliberation: Guilty.
Both Bronco and Pendergast have said that others were likely involved and they believe the hunters’ bodies were eaten by the Duvalls’ pigs after possibly being run through a woodchipper; and the truck and gear chopped up in junkyards owned or frequented by the brothers. There was likely a previous altercation between the hunters and the brothers that precipitated the events in and outside the Linkers Lodge bar.
Both Pendergast and Bronco Lesneski are retired. Barb Boudro died in 2007.
The verdict gave a partial measure of closure to the grieving families. But it can’t provide them with a motive for such wanton savagery. Pendergast said she’s at a loss for words when trying to understand the Duvalls and similar murderers she’s put behind bars.
“There is no understanding of the whys of Brian’s and David’s deaths because it’s pure evil.,” Pendergast said in closing arguments as she stared directly at the brothers. “And there is no understanding of pure evil. Only recognition for what it is.”
I don’t think MI had a monopoly on those badass roadhouse joints 50 years ago
I think them their truck and gear are sitting at the bottom of a body water.
That Demon Rum, that Demon Rum...
WOW! What a story of RELENTLESS Police Work. *APPLAUSE*
That poor woman (Barb?) that had to witness that and live in fear most of her life!
Which body of water?
A Wood Chipper and some Pigs...
I Knew the movie ‘Fargo’ was
Close to the answer of
Crummie Neighbors!
I love how “Up North” is capitalized. In Michigan, “Up North” is a location, not a direction. I remember as a young member of a college student funding board, we were petitioned by a Pakistani student group asking for funds so they could explore “the Up North.” Turned down, of course. Today I’d have been labeled a “racist” for turning down that request.
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