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Nov. 10, 2002
By JOHN CHARLES ROBBINS
Staff writer
A double homicide.
The victims: Two little girls.
The accused: Their mother.
The place: Zeeland.
The sisters were poisoned and stabbed the day before Sept. 11, 2001.
The murders were overshadowed by the national tragedy, but never forgotten.
Fourteen months later, the case goes to trial this week.
Tracy Camburn, 39, faces two counts of open murder. She is accused of killing her daughters Candice, 10, and Kimberly,
5.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday in Ottawa County Circuit Court in Grand Haven, before Judge Calvin L.
Bosman.
It will be the first murder trial in the county in nearly two years. The case was investigated by Zeeland city police
and the Michigan State Police.
Contacted Friday, Prosecutor Ron Frantz said through his office that he does not wish to comment on the case.
Defense attorney John Moritz of Holland did not return telephone calls.
Camburn has remained jailed without bond since her arrest the day of the killings.
On Sept. 10, 2001, Camburn allegedly grabbed a knife and stabbed the girls after feeding them paint thinner for Sunday
dinner the night before.
The investigation revealed Candice and Kimberly were stabbed repeatedly in the neck and chest, as they tried to fend
off the attacks.
They were found dead inside a bedroom of the single-story house at 139 S. Wall Street.
It was the first homicide in Zeeland in 13 years.
Family, friends and neighbors said they knew Tracy Camburn as friendly and helpful, a loving mother who never raised
her voice let alone her hand to the girls.
So what happened?
A pivotal part of the case is expected to be Camburn's state of mind on the day of the killings.
Her lawyer, Moritz, says she was insane at the time.
In October 2001, Moritz filed a notice of intent to assert the defense of insanity in the case against Camburn.
This was required as part of his request to have Camburn undergo mental examinations.
The circuit court ordered the exams and the accused mother was tested by staff of the state's Center for Forensic
Psychiatry.
This summer, Moritz said he'd received a psychiatric report which concludes Camburn was legally insane on Sept. 10,
2001, and that she is not criminally responsible for the murders.
Upon her arrest, Camburn allegedly made incriminating statements, telling police she killed the girls to protect them
from voices which were threatening to torture her children. She also told her ex-husband, Thomas Camburn, their worlds were
about to end.
Cases like Camburn's are rare, according to longtime Holland attorney Don Hann, but there have been similar cases
in the area.
Hann, of the firm of Hann, Persinger P.C., has been a practicing attorney in West Michigan for nearly 40 years. The
bulk of his experience has been criminal defense work.
In the 1960s, Hann defended a woman who beat her 1 1/2 year old son to death. She said the devil told her to do it.
A mental exam determined the woman was insane, and the prosecutor's office chose not to pursue the matter, Hann said.
The woman was confined in an institution for the criminally insane for several years and treated for her illness.
Eventually it was determined she was no longer a threat and she was released.
About 20 years ago, Hann found himself representing a mother who had electrocuted her son by putting him in a bathtub
and throwing an electric radio in the water.
"She said she didn't want him to face the horrors of the world," Hann said.
She was also determined to be insane. She was committed to a treatment facility in Kalamazoo, and released after just
a few years.
In cases like these that reach trial, it's often a "battle of the experts," he said.
He said it could be a challenge to seat a jury in the Camburn case because of the emotions the crime evokes and finding
persons with no bias for or against psychiatric testimony.
But Hann expressed confidence that a jury will be seated, that enough people will have the attitude that, "I
don't know what happened. I'll listen to the experts and then make up my mind."
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