David Widlak hoped he had found an angel to help save his struggling bank.

First thing that Tuesday morning, a New Jersey mortgage executive was set to pitch a deal to the
board of Community Central Bank in Mt. Clemens that just might help pull Widlak's deeply
troubled institution into the black.

Then the following day, Widlak had time set aside with a retired FBI agent to discuss his
concerns about some guys he had encountered as he searched metro Detroit and the country for
investors.

Part 2: Murder or suicide? David Widlak's death a mystery clouded by botched autopsy,
puzzling clues

He also was thinking about a community-focused advisory panel with a possible role for Edsel
Ford II, who had dropped by the office a couple of days earlier.

It appeared that Widlak had the solution to his business problem all mapped out with time left
over on a Sunday afternoon a year ago to work on arrangements for his family's annual
Caribbean getaway -- just the planning you'd expect from a savvy guy who went from Detroit's
bungalow belt to banking board rooms and blue-book Grosse Pointe society.

But there was another plan in place for Widlak on Sept. 19, 2010, as the 62-year-old walked
from the bank on Main Street into the late summer night.

That plan called for a bullet to the back of his head and left the banker floating faceup along the
weed-choked shore of Lake St. Clair, rattling metro Detroit with a mystery that remains
unsolved.

Did Widlak choose his own escape from looming financial failure and personal shame, as some
speculate, or were darker forces at play?

In reviewing the case, the Free Press conducted hours of interviews and examined court files
and business records, discovering previously unknown details of Widlak's final days, events
leading up to his disappearance and still-vexing questions surrounding his death.

It's been a year of multiple investigations, clashing autopsy findings and whispers of shaming
secrets and self-serving deals.

"This is not just a mystery, this is the terrible loss of a husband, brother and father," said the
Widlaks' family attorney, Todd Flood, who added that the family had to endure a month of
uncertainty before the missing man's body was found. "This is a family that is heartbroken at the
loss of someone they dearly loved."

The bank's collapse and Widlak's death have drawn in a collection of powerful political and
social figures -- names including Ford, Stroh, Dingell, Hackel, Patterson, French and Booth.
Some say Widlak's family won't accept the painful notion that he could have killed himself over
personal and professional problems.

But a team of lawyers, criminal investigators, doctors and other experts working on behalf of his
widow, Anne Widlak, says the trail of forensic clues, e-mails, financial records, a nightstand
memo and a washed-out note clutched in the dead man's hand point to murder. The lakeside
scene alone stymies a suicide scenario, they say.

Wake-up call didn't come, nightmare began

It all started for Anne Widlak that Monday morning, Sept. 20, 2010, when her phone didn't ring
on her business trip to Traverse City. Anne expected a 4 a.m. wake-up call and was troubled by
her telephone's silence.

Dave should have called her; he had promised. She'd requested a backup call from the Park
Place Hotel's front desk, besides Dave's call, just to be on the safe side.

As the new attorney on an employment case, she wanted to be prepped and ready for a 7:30 a.m.
conference and 8 a.m. hearing. Her mobile phone was still silent as she left room 411 and walked
the couple of blocks to the old red brick courthouse. She tried Dave's cell and bank office, but the
calls went to voice mail.

She reassured herself, assuming Dave turned off his phone at the gym or on a run, or maybe it
was a business emergency as he continued trying to raise money for the bank.

With the judge taking the bench at 8 a.m., Anne ducked into an anteroom to shut off her phone.
Just then, it flashed with a call from Mt. Clemens' 586 area code. She answered.

Anne Widlak? This is the Macomb County Sheriff's Office. Do you know where your husband is?
His car's at the bank, but he's not.

Stifling panic, Anne said she would drive right back, but friends scotched that notion. Lynn Ford
Alandt, a friend and member of the Ford family, sent a jet to bring her home.

That anxious flight would carry her into a fearful puzzle as the plane roared toward an Oakland
County airport.

With Community Central Bank on a watch list of shaky institutions, David Widlak had
crisscrossed the country for months scouting for investors. By late summer, according to some
accounts, he had found a match in New Jersey-based Mortgage Now.

The mortgage company's CEO, Jim Marchese, was flying in Monday night. Widlak was
apparently so pleased with the prospect that he and Anne took Marchese to a champagne dinner
that August at the understated, exclusive Little Club, tucked behind the Grosse Pointe Memorial
Church on Lake St. Clair.

But investors were hard to find, and some who wanted to put up money made Widlak so uneasy
that he was going to have a former FBI agent see what he could find. Widlak had not yet given
the worrisome names to the ex-agent.

He hadn't shared the names with his wife, either, but had mentioned his concerns. He also told
her that some of the bank's significant borrowers had balked about terms of repaying loans.

With the pending meetings, Dave went to the office on Sunday while Anne drove to Traverse
City after she read lessons for the 11 a.m. mass at Sts. Peter and Paul Jesuit Church in downtown
Detroit. All seemed well as they spoke at 6:30 p.m. and set the 4 a.m. wake-up call.

But he didn't call, and now she was flying home.

Upon landing that afternoon, she was hustled into lifelong friend Hadley French's Volvo wagon
and sped to the Macomb County sheriff's headquarters.

Reporters and camera crews were waiting. Mystery mixed with money and trouble in tony
Grosse Pointe was like catnip for the news media.

Lives of success and accomplishments

It hadn't always been hushed suburban streets, high hedges and private jets for Dave.

He was one of three boys raised in an East Montana Avenue bungalow between John R and
Brush. His dad was an engineer and his mom a school counselor and principal. He loved sports
and mastered magic tricks to fool his younger brother, Paul. By high school, the family moved to
be closer to University of Detroit Jesuit High School.

Four years younger than Dave and several miles to the east, Anne was the oldest of eight kids in
a big brick manor on Lakeland Avenue in Grosse Pointe. Her dad was a labor lawyer on the
management side and her mom, a Mayflower descendant and member of the Colonial Dames,
was a homemaker. Anne and the rest of the rough-and-tumble troop were reminded that the
living room was not a gymnasium.

He passed through U-D Jesuit on to Wayne State University and then the University of
Michigan Law School.

She was a Sacred Heart Academy girl until the school overlooking Lake St. Clair closed. After her
senior year at the Liggett School, she went to Georgetown University, receiving bachelor's and
master's degrees in English. There was a pleasant but unfulfilling stint in public relations for the
Red Cross before she got her law degree at Wayne State.

Dave rarely wore one hat. He was a lawyer in Macomb County, but got into the savings and loan
business and then branched into real estate. He also found time to raise money to reopen and
refurbish the Macomb Theater for an arts center.

In 1982, he became vice chairman of the Central State Savings & Loan in Macomb County and
was the subject of a glowing Free Press profile. The next year, the S&L bought the Keim real
estate network.

With other investors, he bought a shaky S&L in Taylor in 1984 that struggled until it was sold in
1989.

Along the way, he had divorced his first wife and left their tidy little Mt. Clemens colonial.
Remarried, he relocated to a horsey spread called the Skyline Ranch in extreme northern
Macomb County, where Dequindre is a barely paved country lane.

His Macomb County thrift, by then the Colonial Central Savings Bank, held on until 1994, when
it was bought out by Standard Federal Bank. He and his wife moved to Las Vegas. Through all
the moves, he remained close with his three daughters from his first marriage.

The move to Las Vegas was not a flight from the failures of the two thrifts, his brother Paul
Widlak said.

"Don't think of him as a banker," his brother said. "He was an entrepreneur." For Dave, an early
investor in cable television, wind power and other ventures, Nevada was a change of scenery
with tax advantages, his brother said.

But in 1999, Widlak returned to the familiar territory of Macomb County banking just in time
for the boom that saw mini-mansions supplant farm fields. New malls and trendy shops
sprouted along Hall Road. Community Central Bank shared the good times.

The bank board included Macomb County heavyweights such as businessman Gabe Anton, as
well as members of old-line Detroit families, like John Stroh. Dave Widlak brought the firm that
managed the Stroh family investments into the bank.

There were personal rocky patches, however, and Widlak and his second wife divorced.

When he began dating again, he would enter the world of comfy clubs, society and old-school
ties.

Past heartbreaks healed by their new romance

Anne's first marriage ended in divorce, and she later met and married Bob Bagno.

Bagno was an advertising executive for national publications in the 1970s and a pal of Edsel
Ford II and radio personality J.P. McCarthy. His life took a turn in 1990, and he spent three
years in Rome. Once back home, Bagno started an Italian food company in addition to his work
with recovery programs.

Anne and Bagno were walking hand-in-hand on Mackinac Island in 1998 when he dropped dead
of a massive heart attack.

A young widow with responsibilities, Anne focused on her two children from her first marriage
and her law career.

She became a partner in Nemeth Burwell, with riverfront offices in the old Parke-Davis drug
company headquarters in Detroit. She also sat on panels for the Attorney Discipline
Commission, serving as chairwoman when lawyer Michael Stefani faced professional
misconduct charges over his representation of three cops in the whistle-blower case that
eventually chased Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick from office.

She had little interest in dating.

But old friend and Liggett schoolmate Chuck Shreve thought she might like getting together
with a guy from work, Dave Widlak, who was recently divorced. They were both smart and
successful, Shreve said. What could it hurt?

She was wary, but agreed to a date at an autism benefit at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club. "It was
close to home in case he was a dud," she explained.

Instead of a dud, Anne said she found herself falling for the "funny, affable and bright" banker.
Two years later, they bought a house on Oldbrook Lane in a discreet collection of homes on the
grounds of the Woodhouse estate, just off Grosse Pointe Boulevard in Grosse Pointe Farms.
They married in 2004.

Their careers were engaging and challenging. And they traveled to Italy, the Caribbean, the
Netherlands and Paris.

The two families meshed, sharing extended gatherings at resorts in Puerto Rico, complete with
custom-ordered polo shirts.

At home, Anne and Dave worked New York Times crossword puzzles.

It was serendipity.

"I was deeply grateful," Anne said. "I was not looking or expecting anyone."

Charming investors and Detroit illuminati alike

Anne's friends, including those in the "Social Secretary" -- the book of who's who among metro
Detroit, tracing bloodlines though schools, clubs and marriages -- took to Dave. Anne's
classmates and friends Becky Booth, Debbie Dingell and Hadley French thought he was a good
match.

The three spanned the power spectrum: Booths in publishing and communications, the Frenchs
in banking, and the Dingells staking Detroit's flag in Congress since 1933.

But the economic implosion of 2008 shook Community Central Bank. By 2010, Widlak was
spending more and more time searching for new investors, looking for healthy wallets, from
Western states all the way to Wall Street. It could be a grind, but associates said Widlak stayed
enthusiastic.

Bradley Lott, a retired U.S. Marine major general, took to Widlak right away when a mutual
friend put them together.

"He was a go-getter and obviously a man of ethics," said Lott, owner of True North Logistics, a
Port Huron defense and security consulting firm.

With 34 years of active duty and seven combat tours to go with his two general's stars, Lott said
he sized up Widlak as smart, focused, active and positive. In short, he was "everything I
respected."

Even as pressure mounted on the bank last year, Lott said that Widlak would grin and
announce, "I'm shaking the cup, shaking the cup for money."

"He was like a team runner," Lott said. "He didn't wear down."

Not everyone was sold on Widlak. Some in the bank thought he was smart -- damn smart at
sizing up situations and making deals -- but not a real day-to-day, hands-on business guy,
especially not in troubled times.

Finally, the deal to save the day -- and the bank

Finance can be a fang-and-claw culture, and Jim Machese laughed that he and Dave Widlak
were among "the last of the warriors."

"We pitched Wall Street together," Marchese said. "We'd pick up our briefcases and go out and
do it."

Marchese and Widlak were put together by investment bankers in April 2010, and Marchese
said they had struck a deal within weeks.

Marchese said his New Jersey-based company Mortgage Now would come in with Community
Central and transform the hometown bank to part of a multistate mortgage company. It would
stanch the red ink and start turning a profit within weeks, Marchese said.

In court records and interviews, Marchese said he expected a board meeting on Tuesday, Sept.
21, to seal the deal.

If Detroit has a sketchy image across the country, New Jersey can run a close second. Some folks
wondered what Widlak was doing looking for money there, gave a knowing smile and suggested
doing an Internet search on Marchese.

What pops up are New York Times articles and other accounts of $15.8 million in improper
insurance billings for a cancer drug's off-label use. Marchese, a drug company sales
representative, blew the whistle to the feds only to have them turn on him, alleging he
masterminded the scheme and shouldn't collect the usual reward.

A federal judge in 2007 sided with Marchese, awarding him $1.6 million, the low end of the 15%-
25% reward authorized by whistle-blower laws. He "did not plan or initiate the scheme," Judge
Marsha Pechman wrote, but neither did Marchese "swiftly and efficiently" expose it.

Marchese said he never hides from the history: "It comes up all the time, and I disclose it. I
disclosed it" to Community Central.

In interviews and court filings, Marchese said the bank and mortgage deal was struck in late
August, a milestone celebrated with the champagne dinner with Anne and Dave at the Little
Club.

Marchese said there was supposed to be an exchange of faxed documents before the bank board
meeting Sept. 21. In the meantime, he said, he had access to the bank computer systems, records
and customer lists and an office in the bank building.

He said $4.4 million in loans had already been lined up under the proposed venture, and $34
million in loans were being processed.

The Thursday before he went missing, Widlak left a voice mail with another bank official saying
he wanted all directors at the meeting for Marchese's presentation. It promised to be a rugged
day, Widlak said in the message, with a "long, painful ... interminable meeting" with a
representative from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, after the board
session.

Marchese put together a 40-minute PowerPoint presentation showing how the new setup would
lift the bank into the black. In interviews with the Free Press, he said the deal could mean power
and personnel shuffling, but "nobody was going to go on welfare because of this."

On Friday, Edsel Ford II came by the bank and Dave introduced him around. Edsel and his wife,
Cynthia, had dinner with Dave and Anne a week or so earlier.

Some took the visit as a sign that Edsel Ford might invest with the bank. He declined to speak
with the Free Press, and others said it would be wrong to see Ford as a potential investor; he was
considering a role on an advisory board.

But no matter how you cut it, having Edsel Ford stop by is good office juju.

His final hours only add to the mystery

If lethal forces were gathering around Dave Widlak, there were no obvious clues on Saturday,
Sept. 18. He watched the University of Michigan struggle to beat the University of
Massachusetts, 42-37, while Anne went to Costco. He asked her to get him some disposable
razors.

On Sunday morning, Anne loaded her bags and legal files into her Volvo for the trip to Traverse
City after church. She was stepping into a case representing Michigan cherry producers in an
employment dispute.

Dave went to the bank, but it wasn't all business that afternoon.

He took some time to plan the family's Thanksgiving Caribbean getaway. He e-mailed his
brothers Ron and Paul between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. about their share of the holiday tab. Dave
also wanted to get everyone's shirt size.

He wasn't the only one at the bank. Anne MacIntyre of the wealth management department also
showed up. She told investigators that she stayed in her office on the first floor, and Dave, as far
as she knew, was in his second-floor office.

Their only encounter, she said, was when she looked into his office and gave him a wave as she
left about 5 p.m.

A little after 8 p.m., Dave, in a ball cap and carrying some sort of package or thick folder that has
never been found, came down the rear stairs and seemed to be waiting for someone before
disappearing into the deepening twilight.

It was a fearful tour for Anne Widlak as she led detectives down a secluded lane and through her
Grosse Pointe Farms home in search of her husband.

A sweep of the house didn't find him. So where was David Widlak?

Part 1: One year later, banker David Widlak's death still a mystery

The 62-year-old CEO of the Community Central Bank in Mt. Clemens hadn't been seen since he
left his office the night before. His car was in the parking lot, and his office furniture was in
disarray.

There were three options: He ran away, suicide or foul play.

In New Jersey, Jim Marchese, CEO of Mortgage Now, heard that Widlak was missing before he
flew in for a Tuesday meeting about partnering with the bank.

"I hoped Dave had run off to see some other investors" or lost his phone, Marchese said.

But when he saw police at the bank, "I realized how serious this was," he said.

The board met at 7:30 a.m., and Marchese made his pitch: a partnership he said Widlak had
agreed to. The board thanked him and said the deal wasn't going forward.

"I couldn't believe it," Marchese said. "I told them it was a done deal. Even if Dave is missing,
you can't stop the world."

Papers were signed, he said, computer programs integrated and loans already written.

The board was unmoved. The bank limped along until April, when the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp. stepped in. Talmer Bank and Trust of Troy took over.

Suits and countersuits between the former Community Central and Mortgage Now are in federal
court. Former bank officials did not return calls, and their attorneys referred calls to the FDIC,
whose spokesman said it could not discuss pending litigation.

Family and friends search for answers
With Dave missing, his family and friends set up a command post at home with a flip chart
tracking the what-ifs. To Anne, an experienced attorney, "It felt like we were preparing for a
trial, especially if it led to a charge for his murder."

Everything they knew, suspected or heard was charted. Information that didn't make any sense
went into "our 'WTF' list," Anne said.

Part of her lifeline were Becky Booth, Hadley French and Debbie Dingell, schoolmates from
powerful families.

The Booths made a fortune in publishing and communications; the Frenchs founded the City
National Bank of Detroit, and the Dingell family has long been a dominant force in politics.

"Annie's one of the toughest people I know," French said. "This just blew her out of the water."

Rumors of gambling or that he had deserted Anne or killed himself infuriated Dingell: "It was a
total distraction."

"Everyone knew Dave was working hard at getting his bank over the hump," Booth said. "He
never thought he'd fail."

Dave's character was pummeled with news of a lawsuit by relatives of the late Elizabeth Cerget
of Windsor. Her family alleged that Widlak took advantage of a mentally ill woman by taking
$150,000 from her to invest in one of his companies.

In another case, filed in spring 2011, a Grosse Pointe Woods woman said Widlak talked her into
lending $210,000 from a trust to buy a Ford dealership in the Netherlands. But the money was
not used for a dealership, the suit alleges.

Meanwhile, investigators checked out Dave's ownership of firearms: A new handgun with the
original packaging and a full box of new ammo was at the bank; an older .38-caliber revolver
could not be found.

A grisly discovery but no closer to the truth

After a month, the continuing questions became a numbing routine for Anne, overlaid by the
constant fear that Dave would never be found. Finally, her phone rang late on Sunday night, Oct.
17.

This is Sheriff Hackel. Can we come over? We're five minutes away.

A few hours earlier, Donald Vogan and a hunting buddy were guiding their canoe to the boat
ramp near Jefferson and Ballard on Lake St. Clair when Gauge, a yellow Labrador that was with
them, set up a ruckus.

Pushing toward tangled growth where the shore curves out in a long arm, they caught the odor.

"He was floating right there," Vogan said. "There was all kinds of weeds and vegetation and a
dead branch. ... The water was real shallow, but it's terrible. Real mucky."

Sheriff Mark Hackel and his team gently shared the news.

Dave was found in the water, his body badly decomposed. An autopsy was set, Anne recalled.
"They were very compassionate."

It was difficult to reach where Widlak's body was found by land. Chain-link fences isolate the
site, which is partially covered by thick undergrowth. The shore is a rocky jumble in some places
and marshy in others.

Dr. Daniel Spitz, the Macomb County medical examiner, started on the autopsy the next
morning. That Tuesday, he said he had found no signs of traumatic injury.

Spitz is the son of the legendary Dr. Werner Spitz, the former medical examiner for Wayne and
Macomb counties who co-wrote the standard autopsy textbook.

The elder Spitz, who reviewed the slayings of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., remains in demand, serving last summer as a defense expert in the Casey Anthony
murder trial in Florida.

The younger Spitz said that the cause of death was undetermined, but Widlak likely drowned.

Anne was ready to move on to cremation and the funeral. Her friends French, Dingell and Booth
weren't.

He might have drowned? No trauma?

"It made no sense," French said.

The friends urged Anne to get another autopsy.

"He's been through enough," Anne said, but the three were undeterred.

"We were the three bossy friends," French said.

Dingell, not wanting a political misstep, asked Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson.

"I told her it wasn't out of line at all," said Patterson, a former county prosecutor.

Booth stepped in. She knew Oakland County Medical Examiner L.J. Dragovic and called him.

Again, Anne hesitated. Cremation was imminent.

French clinched it: "He'd do it for us. We should do it for him."

Horrifying news brings them closer to the truth
Widlak's body was at Dragovic's office the next morning. X-rays picked up small fragments at
the base of the skull and something larger in the chest.

A detailed investigation would have to wait until the body -- frozen to preserve it -- thawed.

The next day, Dragovic examined the body faceup, then turned it over.

What he found stopped him. He called Hackel and Daniel Spitz.

Soon, Dave's younger brother Paul Widlak and Anne were called to Hackel's office, where they
were joined by an uneasy Spitz.

There was new information: A bullet wound was found in the back of Dave's head.

"I was truly in shock," Anne recalled. "I immediately thought he'd been murdered.

"It was horrifying news, but it brought us closer to the truth."

Dragovic had found a 3/8-inch wound at the base of the skull. There was soot inside the edges.
He traced the wound path through the spinal column and neck. A slug was recovered from the
top of the right lung.

It was homicide, he said, adding he believed Widlak "was shot execution style."

Suicide was possible, he told the Free Press, but that would have taken a contortionist.

Sheriff's divers returned to the lakeshore and found Widlak's pistol in the reedy muck, about 6
feet from where the body was.

Spitz said decomposition, matted hair and debris led to "a one-in-a-million" mistake.

The funeral was held at Sts. Peter and Paul Jesuit Church in Detroit, where a month earlier,
Anne had read lessons on the last day she saw Dave alive.

"It closed a chapter, but there was no closure," she said.

About then, whispers and gossip emerged. Anne MacIntyre, Community Central Bank's wealth
manager, who was at the bank and saw Dave on the day he disappeared, moved to squelch the
talk, hiring a polygraph examiner.

One test said she was truthful when she said she had no role in his disappearance or death. A
second said she truthfully denied intimacy with Widlak or anyone else at the bank. The results
were turned over to the Sheriff's Office.

"There was no relationship of any romantic nature," said MacIntyre, who now owns a financial
services firm. Any other suggestion is "very offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Others familiar with the case said that Widlak had pestered MacIntyre with plaintive song lyrics
and excerpts from the children's classic "The Velveteen Rabbit."

"Obviously, it's a very painful issue," Anne Widlak said of the rumors, adding that her husband's
side can never be heard.

But she said she's sure: "David loved me, and I loved him."

In early December, another crime expert, David Balash, issued a report. A go-to gun guy after a
career with the State Police, Balash said "a homicide or a suicide ... is equally possible."

In mid-December, Hackel and Daniel Spitz said that the sum of the evidence pointed toward
suicide. The Sheriff's Office has not released its files, and current Sheriff Tony Wickersham has
declined to discuss their contents because the case is an open investigation.

Former Sheriff Hackel said one influential factor was that Widlak erased his computers and his
car's GPS memory.

Spitz said that "foul play cannot be excluded. Thus, the manner of death is best certified as
indeterminate."

It just doesn't add up, one way or the other

This month, Spitz reiterated that the medical evidence, coupled with the police work, "points in
one direction: that this was a self-inflicted act."

Hackel, now the Macomb County executive, said there were "troubling issues that Dave may
have been dealing with at that time."

Patterson, like others, said he didn't see a man wading into a lake to shoot himself in the back of
the head: "There are so many better ways to kill yourself."

The reports of the electronic erasures did not align with Widlak's skills, said Jason Sherill, an
information technology expert who worked at the bank.

He said Widlak needed help in syncing his personal devices and that the average user can't fully
erase electronic records.

Hackel said the experts agree that suicide was in the picture. Even Dragovic "showed
investigators how he could have" done it, Hackel said.

Anne and Paul Widlak hired the Royal Oak law firm of Flood, Lanctot, Connor, Stablein --
headed by former Wayne County homicide prosecutor Todd Flood -- to investigate the death on
behalf of the estate.

Flood brought in William Kowalski, director of corporate investigations for Rehmann Corporate
Investigative Services and the former No. 2 agent in the Detroit FBI office.

"We believe the facts and the science are persuasive, that this is not a suicide," Kowalski said.
"What was so bad that he had to kill himself that Sunday night?"

He was not unfaithful and had weathered other professional storms, Kowalski said.

"Widlak's battle-tested," he said.

Flood added that there was no sign of a planned suicide and Sunday's events don't match an
impulsive act.

The pending partnership with Mortgage Now could help the bank, Flood said.

He was actively planning a family vacation to Puerto Rico, sending e-mails about it within hours
of his disappearance, Flood said.

Widlak's personal lawsuits were being handled. The Cerget case settled out of court, and
attorney William Gilbride Jr. said that the Grosse Pointe Woods case is in settlement talks.
Gilbride agreed with Paul Widlak that Dave was financially solid, even if the bank failed.

Still, other circumstances make suicide plausible.

The body was found about 4 miles from the bank, a distance that a runner like Widlak could
easily cover in the 75 minutes between the time he left the bank and when his phone shut off.

He was killed with his own gun, and there's no indication that someone else ever had it.

Flood and the investigators counter that after Widlak left the bank Sunday night, with his car
still in the parking lot, he was not seen by anyone or caught on any cameras around Mt.
Clemens, which would be likely had he run or walked 4 miles.

Flood said that it makes little sense that Widlak would walk to an unfamiliar site in the dark,
clamber over fences, wade into mucky, waist-deep water and then awkwardly shoot himself in
the back of the head.

He said a likelier scenario is that Widlak met someone, was shot with his own pistol and then
dumped in the lake.

There are loose ends, such as what was Widlak seen on security cameras carrying out of the
bank? Was it a bag? Was it files? Was it a fanny pack? It is still missing.

Also intriguing is a faded piece of paper found clutched in Widlak's hand.

A possible suicide note?

Flood said it seems unlikely someone would take a suicide note into the water where they
planned to die.

Kowalski found another clue, one he said was a bedside note about an unnamed person playing
outside the rules.

Like the clutched paper, it may be a lost key to Widlak's death.

The search for what happened continues
Anne, Paul Widlak and Flood met this month with Sheriff Wickersham. After the session, Flood
praised the sheriff as "a cop's cop. And his investigators have been nothing but professional."

Wickersham declined to discuss details, but said the case is "always considered open."

Anne Widlak said the answer goes beyond her peace of mind.

"If it is a homicide, then there is a killer out there uncaught and unpunished," she said. "That
should be a moral issue, too."