GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A long-haul trucker charged with murdering two women in two states has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, according to the Kent County Prosecutor's Office.
It’s not clear how long Garry Artman, 65, has to live, but those seeking justice fear the accused serial killer will take his secrets to the grave.
The Florida-based trucker, who called West Michigan home from summer 1992 to 2018, is charged with killing two women 10 years and 500 miles apart.
In the Kent County case, Artman is charged with the 1996 rape and murder of Sharon Hammack, a 29-year-old mother of two whose body was found rolled up in a blanket on the side of 76th Street near Kraft Avenue SE, between Kentwood and Caledonia.
On Tuesday, shortly before Artman was scheduled to appear in court for a status conference, the senior assistant prosecutor on the case, Blair Lachman, met with Hammack’s sisters to inform them of Artman’s deteriorating health. He also told them his office is forging ahead with the case and a trial date has been set for Sept. 18.
Lachman noted that no matter what happens with Artman's health, prosecutors will complete additional DNA testing that is currently under way.
Lachman said prosecutors learned Friday that Artman had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He was in a Grand Rapids hospital last week, but he's now back in the Kent County jail under medical care. He did not appear in court Tuesday.
Kent County sheriff's detectives say Hammack was raped, strangled, stabbed in the head, hogtied with cord and wrapped in an electric blanket.
She was likely the last victim in a series of mid-1990s murders that targeted women working in Grand Rapids’ commercial sex industry. From December 1993 to October 1996, 13 women were found dead in and around Grand Rapids and four more vanished. According to police reports obtained by Target 8, nearly all of the victims were last seen on or near a 3-mile stretch of Division Avenue South, the center of the city’s red-light district.
While investigators developed suspects, no one was charged in any of the murders until Artman was identified through genetic genealogy in 2022. The Kent County Sheriff’s Department submitted DNA allegedly left behind by Hammack’s killer to Identifinders International for analysis. A genetic genealogist with the firm compared the suspect DNA against more than a million samples uploaded to public ancestry websites. By building the killer’s family tree in reverse, the genealogist narrowed down the origin of the suspect DNA to one of four sons of Wilfred and Donna Artman.
Detectives say Garry Artman was the only son who had ties to Grand Rapids. Records show he lived just 5 miles from where Hammack was last seen in the area of Division Avenue and Burton Street.
Artman was arrested for the murder in August of last year.
He is already a convicted rapist, having served 11 years in Michigan prison for sexually assaulting three women in two separate attacks in 1979 and 1980. When the Port Huron native was released from prison in summer 1992, he landed in Grand Rapids, moving into a room at the Herkimer Hotel on Division Avenue.
In 2008, CODIS, the criminal justice DNA database, produced a hit that tied Hammack’s 1996 murder and that of a woman who was killed in Maryland in 2006. Detectives say DNA allegedly found in Hammack and on the blanket and cords that bound her matched DNA left at the scene of Dusty Shuck’s murder.
Shuck, 25, was stabbed, beaten, and dumped on the shoulder of I-70 near a rest stop in Maryland. She was found wearing a tank top, hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, though she had no shoes and no identification. Maryland State Police said the only clues to Shuck’s identity were two dragon tattoos on her back with the words “Gypsy Rose” written beneath them.
Hammack, and at least one other Grand Rapids victim, was found wearing only a bra.
Maryland State Police, upon announcing murder charges against Artman in the Shuck case, reported that investigators found several pairs of women’s underwear in a Florida storage unit rented by Artman.