GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Norma Abbott knows the clock is ticking.
"His life is ending soon," Abbott said, referring to alleged serial killer Garry Artman, charged last August in the 1996 rape and murder of Sharon Hammack.
Artman, whose trial is set for September 18, was recently diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. It's not clear how much time he has left.
That's why Abbott is preparing to write Artman a letter.
"Let us have some peace after 30 years. Tell me where my sister is. Where is her body? Please don't take that to your grave," Abbott said, speaking directly to Artman.
She plans to include a picture of her big sister, Linda McHugh, who vanished from Grand Rapids in December 1993.
"I want my sister Linda's bones," Abbott declared. "I want her back. Just to have her where the rest of the family is. My mom. My dad. To have her put to rest in a proper manner. Not lying off in the woods somewhere."
Artman has not been officially tied to McHugh's disappearance, but she may have been the earliest victim in a string of killings that likely ended with Hammack's murder on Oct. 3, 1996.
A delivery driver spotted Hammack's body on the side of 76th Street near Kraft SE in Kent County. She'd been raped, strangled, stabbed, hogtied and wrapped in an electric blanket.
Hammack, 29, was pregnant and had two young children at the time of her murder. McHugh, also 29, had one young daughter when she vanished.
From December 1993 through October 1996, 13 women were found murdered in and around Grand Rapids. Four more vanished, including McHugh. Nearly all of the women worked in Grand Rapids' commercial sex industry and were last seen along a 3-mile stretch of Division Avenue, the center of the city's red-light district.
"These are women who have families that care about them," Abbott said Monday morning from the living room of her apartment in Kentwood. "They have kids. They're not just nobodies out on the street."
Abbott said her sister had long fought to overcome trauma she suffered as a child.
"She was struggling with addiction, which started with alcoholism when she was younger," Abbott recalled.
By her 20s, McHugh had been introduced to the crack cocaine that ravaged America's urban core. The epidemic did not spare Grand Rapids, and those it claimed sometimes turned to sex work to fund their drug use.
Twenty-six years after the murder of Sharon Hammack, a forensic genetic genealogist tracked DNA left at the crime scene to Garry Dean Artman, a Florida-based long-haul trucker who listed Grand Rapids as home from 1992 to 2018.
His DNA also tied him to a second murder, separated by 10 years and 500 miles. Artman is charged with the 2006 killing of Dusty Shuck, 25, whose body was found on the shoulder of eastbound I-70 east of New Market, Maryland. She'd been stabbed and beaten.
Shuck was fully clothed, though she had no shoes. Hammack was found wearing only a bra.
Records show Artman moved to Grand Rapids in June 1992 upon his release from an Ionia prison. He'd served eleven years for raping three women in two vicious assaults in 1979 and 1980 in Port Huron, his hometown.
Corrections officers told state police that Artman was threatening and violent towards women.
According to a search warrant filed in connection with the Hammack murder case, a task force investigating the murders of sex workers in Grand Rapids received a tip about Artman on Oct. 23, 1996.
When Artman was interviewed in March 1997, he admitted he had used prostitutes in Grand Rapids from June 1992 to November 1996.