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Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Memphis Head in the Bag Case

     On Saturday September 13, 2014, in Memphis, Tennessee, Lacedric Ruffin and his truck were in Michael Wilson's backyard to haul away some scrap metal Wilson had offered him. The men were neighbors and acquainted. As Ruffin loaded his truck he saw Wilson pull a trash bag out of a garbage can. Wilson was about to drop the black bag into a metal bucket when it ripped open. The severed head of a black man fell out. A stunned Ruffin said, "Man, what the hell is going on?"

     Wilson muttered something to the effect that he had not meant to kill the man whose head lay on the ground before them.

     "Kill who, brother?" Ruffin asked. Before his 36-year-old neighbor responded to that question, Ruffin added, "You don't got to tell me that."

     As Ruffin climbed into his truck Wilson begged him not to alert the authorities. Ruffin, who was on parole, couldn't afford not to notify the police about what he had just witnessed. When he got a few blocks from Wilson's Dunn Avenue house he called 911.

     In the bedroom of Michael Wilson's dwelling, officers with the Memphis Police Department discovered a headless corpse lying near a pair of severed hands and an unattached leg. Inside the house officers also found bloody knives and other instruments that had been used to dismember the body.

     Police identified the dead man as 48-year-old Andre Cole, a schizophrenic who had been off his medication for months. A few days earlier Cole had moved into Wilson's house.

     A local prosecutor charged Michael Wilson with second-degree murder and abuse of corpse. The judge set his bail at $2 million.

     Lacedric Ruffin, in speaking to a local television reporter, said he believed Wilson had intended to place the head into the bucket then put the bucket in Ruffin's truck with the scrap metal. Had the head not tumbled out of the bag it would have ended up in a junk yard. 

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