Left: Garry Dean Artman; Inset right: Sharron Hammack. (Screengrab via WOOD; Kent County Sheriff’s Office)
A convicted rapist and murderer died in a Michigan state prison earlier this week, according to the state’s department of corrections.
The deceased convict died of natural causes, authorities said.
Content warning: graphic and misogynistic violence.
At the time of his death, he was serving a life sentence for the 1996 rape and murder of a mother of two. Last year, he was accused of killing another woman in Maryland, but had yet to be tried in that case, according to Grand Rapids-based ABC affiliate WZZM.
This September, Gary Dean Artman, 66, was found guilty on one count each of open murder, felony murder, and criminal sexual conduct in the first degree over the cold case of 29-year-old Sharron Hammack.
The convictions were secured, in part, based on Artman’s own macabre writings about jealousy, frustration, and sexual violence.
“All the girls I wanted to have and couldn’t when I was growing up in high school, I can now get,” Artman, a long-haul truck driver, wrote in a letter to one of his brothers that he sent from prison.
During closing arguments in his trial, prosecutors read aloud from many such macabre and vicious writings — exemplars of soullessness.
“You ask yourself who you are. Here is who you are: you are death itself to those who deserve it and life to those who live it,” one of Artman’s journal entries reads. Another entry reads: “The strange thing is I never felt guilty about raping them.”
The murderer was finally arrested in August 2022, nearly 26 years after Hammack was raped and brutally murdered near the tiny village of Caledonia, which is about 15 miles southeast of Grand Rapids.
The young mother’s killer left DNA at the crime scene, where a delivery driver discovered her body rolled up inside a blanket on Oct. 3, 1996. The sex worker who struggled with addiction had been raped, stabbed, hogtied, and left to die in a field of tall grass.
“[Sheriff’s deputies] are investigating the 1996 homicide of a local prostitute that took place on 76th St. between Patterson and Kraft,” an affidavit filed in the case reads. “The victim was strangled to death amongst other injuries. The assailant raped the victim leaving DNA vaginally and rectally as well as DNA on other items including the rope used to hogtie the victim. Further, the assailant stabbed the victim in the head twice with a knife.”
At the time of his arrest in Mississippi, Artman lived in Florida.
“We got him,” Hammack’s sister Tina DeYoung recalled a detective telling her. “It’s just a flood of emotions; I’m happy, but I’m sad too.”
The deceased woman’s parents, Jacob Gross and Lois Gross, have also passed on. Her sister addressed their mother in apostrophe.
“Mama, we got justice for her,” DeYoung reportedly told Grand Rapids-based NBC affiliate WOOD last year, as she looked towards the sky. “I’m sorry it didn’t happen before the good Lord took you, but justice will be served. You can celebrate with her up there.”
At the time of the killer’s arrest, police said he was also linked by familial DNA to a case in Maryland. One month later, he was charged with the 2006 murder of Dusty Myriah Shuck, 24.
“She was found without shoes or any identification and lying on the shoulder of eastbound I-70, east of New Market, Maryland,” police said. “The only clues to identify her were two dragon tattoos located on her back with the words ‘Gypsy Rose’ written beneath them. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in 2006 ruled her death as a homicide caused by stabbing and blunt force trauma.”
Prosecutors previously announced Artman had terminal cancer — which is presumably how he died, according to MLive.
Jerry Lambe and Alberto Luperon contributed to this report.
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