Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 132

For more than three years, questions about their mother's abrupt disappearance gnawed at Kelly and Kim. Then, in an awful instant, they had all the answers. ByJoelThurtell Illustration by David A. Johnson KELLY TYBURSKI WAS IN THE BASEMENT OF HER parents' Canton Township home, dumping wet clothes into the dryer, when she found herself spellbound again by the small orange safety light on the base of the old Sears Coldspot chest freezer. It was not the first time 20-year-old Kelly had been mesmerized by this glowing rectangle of light, no bigger than a paper clip.

There had been days when she couldn't even remember why she went down to the basement; now here she was again, gazing at the light Kim, Kelly's 16-year-old sister, was upstairs in her bedroom this afternoon. Their father, Leonard Tyburski, had gone to an appliance store to buy speakers for their stereo. And now that orange glow drew into Kelly's consciousness all the questions that had plagued her since her mother, Dorothy Tyburski, disappeared on Sept 28, 1985. Why did her mind so often dredge up the image of a freezer rack? Her mother had used such a rack in the top portion of the freezer to store her homemade jellies. Why was there a pile of carpet padding spread over the top of the freezer? When Kelly's mother had lived there, she had polished the freezer once a week with car wax to appease Leonard's obsession with cleanliness.

Back then, the Tyburski girls would get into trouble if they so much as leaned on the freezer top. Now, it was dirty. Sometimes, Kim banged her drumsticks on the freezer lid as she headed toward her $1,500 drum set a gift from Dad since Mom disappeared in a dark comer of the basement Nobody complained now. Kelly continued to stare at the orange light thinking about her nightmares. In one, her father attacked her in the darkened hallway of their home.

In another, Kelly would find her mother in a chair, angry, hunched over, unable to move. This freezer had not been opened in more than three years. The key was gone, their dad said; the girls' mother had taken it with her when she abruptly walked out on her family. But why hadn't their dad frugal man that he was broken into the freezer to salvage die food? And why, whenever their mom called, was Leonard the only one home to talk with her? "Your mother called," he would say. "She's mad at you." According to Leonard, Dorothy was always mad at Kelly, but always from afar from Toledo or Monroe or somewhere Leonard said she was living.

Dorothy didn't even show up for Kelly's high school graduation. Unbelievable. Too many questions. Now Kelly stepped over to the freezer, moved the padding and saw rust on the lid rust on a freezer that once was kept immaculate. Again the image of a freezer rack.

What was it with this freezer? She became angry with herself. Spontaneously, she grabbed a screwdriver and a paint lid remover from a nearby shelf and jabbed at the lock. She was amazed at how easily it popped open. Slowly, she lifted the lid-Just a few inches. That was enough.

ONCE IN CANTON TOWNSHIP, A YOUNG WESTERN suburb of Detroit, a man shot his wife to death with a rifle. Then he drove to a bar, ordered a beer and called police. The incident merited brief stories in both Detroit newspapers. Wayne County had 769 homicides in 1985, the year Leonard Tyburski battered his wife to death. Many of those killings were reported most very briefly by news media.

It is safe to say that none attracted the worldwide notoriety Leonard Tyburski received when his horrible secret was revealed more than three years after he killed his wife. The Tyburski slaying made the New York Tunes and the supermarket tabloid National Examiner. Two British tabloids followed the case. Why such intense interest in this suburban Detroit homicide? Leonard Tyburski did more than kill his wife. According to his confession the day of his arrest, he slammed her head against a concrete pole in the basement after she came after him with a steak knife, while taunting him with news that she had had sex with Kelly's 18-year-old boyfriend.

Once she was dead, he twisted her bloodied 5-foot-4, 135-pound body and stuffed it into the family freezer, atop frozen hamburger and loelbasa. Dorothy Tyburski's neatly made-up face, now gashed, was pressed against the side of the freezer; she was barefoot, and wore jeans and a gray Hall Oates T-shirt Kelly had bought her. Within minutes after his wife's death, Tyburski began a complex psychological game, telling his wife's relatives elaborate lies, convincing his oldest daughter, Kelly, the inquisitive one, that her mother had left because she hated Kelly. Tyburski's lies and his good fortune that no long electrical outage struck Canton protected his secret for 3 Vi years, during which he drank beer and entertained a pal just 10 feet from his wife's frozen body. During that time, be shared the house with his two bewildered daughters, who could never figure out why their mother had left so suddenly, or why she never called them.

If Leonard Tyburski, now charged with second-degree murder, had buried his wife in a field or sunk her in a lake 12 Detroit frttPruMafiine April 2 i.