Wayne Bizzard had been on the Jackson police force for only four months when he walked into his first homicide. The house belonged to an older couple who had stopped showing up at church. Their worried children called 911, suspecting a gas leak. Inside, Wayne found the husband slumped near his recliner, kitchen knives still stuck in the back of his neck.
The wife had tried to barricade herself in the bathroom. She hadn’t made it. The knives were still there too. That scene stayed with Wayne for years.
He never forgot the smell, the silence, or the weight of knowing he was too late. Four years later, he would walk into something far worse. Kevin “Kip” Arts ran a popular pizza and taco restaurant in Jackson, Michigan, with his wife, Patty. The place was attached to their home, and the two ran it together—Kip in the kitchen, Patty running the front of the house.
They had been married for twelve years. Friends said they had never seen a couple so happy. Patty’s family thought so too. After her first marriage ended in abuse, they were just relieved to see her smiling again.
Everything seemed fine. It wasn’t. The couple decided to host a big barbecue for everyone they loved. With access to their commercial kitchen, they were perfectly set up to feed a crowd.
The roast was a success. But right after the barbecue, Kip started getting terrible headaches. Patty begged him to see a doctor. He resisted, mostly because they had no health insurance.
She kept pushing, and he finally went. The news was devastating. Kip had a large blood clot on the right side of his brain and needed emergency surgery immediately. On June 29th, 1999, Kip went into the hospital.
The restaurant shut down. No one knew when it would reopen, and the bills were already stacking up. Out of money and desperate, Patty sold their Lincoln to get some quick cash. The surgery went well.
The clot was removed. But when Kip came home, he wasn’t the same man. His father noticed it right away. His son seemed dazed and childlike.
Kip couldn’t even describe the color of his own clothes. And on top of everything, the doctors had ordered him to stop taking his antidepressants cold turkey before the surgery. Patty became his full-time caretaker. She was exhausted, alone, and worried about money.
She held on, hoping her husband would come back. Then they both disappeared. Patty’s family talked to her every day. When two days passed with no word, her sister Cynthia drove over to check on them.
Kip answered the door. He looked odd, dazed. He told Cynthia that he and Patty had gotten into a fight. She took the Lincoln and drove off to visit someone.
Cynthia knew that was a lie. Patty had already sold that car. She called the police. Officer Wayne Bizzard was one of the officers who responded.
When he arrived, Kip was sitting in his car outside the restaurant. He agreed to unlock the door, but his hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold the key. “I can’t do this,” Kip said. He turned around and walked back to the car.
Wayne followed him. “Let’s just look inside. If she’s not here, we’ll leave you alone. ”
Kip reluctantly went back to the door.
He let Wayne inside but didn’t turn on the lights. They walked through the dark restaurant toward the kitchen. Wayne noticed something on the floor—paper towels stained with what looked like dried blood. A large garbage can nearby had the same stains.
The restaurant had been closed for weeks, so he found it strange. Wayne saw no sign of Patty and left. Kip’s family took him in. Patty’s family kept talking to Wayne, sharing dark details about the marriage they had once kept private.
“Kip and Patty have had problems,” they told him. “Serious ones. ”
Something didn’t sit right with Wayne. He talked to Detective Tom Fierro.
“I think we need to go back in there,” Wayne said. They arranged to meet Kip at the restaurant later that day for a closer look. But Wayne and Tom decided to arrive early, hoping to get a look around before Kip showed up. When they pulled up, Kip was already there.
He was carrying a cardboard box to the neighbor’s front porch. Kip didn’t know they were watching him. He had come back early to clean up. The kitchen had never been properly cleaned after the pig roast.
Kip’s demeanor had completely changed. He was friendlier, more relaxed, and he happily agreed to let Wayne take another look inside. Wayne moved through the kitchen. He saw a large stainless steel pan covered in baked-on meat.
Then he saw foam littering the floor in front of the washer and dryer. Inside the dryer, there were chunks of foam, like someone had thrown a pillow in there and it had disintegrated. He found a purse. It looked like Patty’s.
Patty’s sister Cynthia had arrived outside. Wayne brought her in to confirm the purse belonged to Patty. She said it was hers. Wayne realized what that meant.
Patty hadn’t left on her own. She wouldn’t have left her purse behind. He walked back outside and found the cardboard box Kip had carried to the neighbor’s porch. He opened it.
Inside was a clear plastic bag. Inside that bag, Wayne could clearly see a human head. It appeared to be cooked. “I found her,” Wayne told his detective, pulling him away from Kip.
“Are you sure? They had a pig roast here. Are you sure it’s not that? ”
“I’m positive.
It’s a human face. You can still see her eyes. ”
Crime scene investigators used luminol on the restaurant. Garbage cans, counters, and floors lit up with the unmistakable evidence of human blood.
Investigators determined that while Patty lay on her couch, Kip had raised a hammer and beaten her to death. He had then dragged her into the kitchen, dismembered her body with axes, and cooked the pieces for an estimated forty hours. He put her head in a box to dispose of it, along with bones and remains he tried to clean, grind, and wash away. Rumors spread that Kip had served his wife to unsuspecting restaurant customers.
There was no evidence of that, but the rumor never died in a small town. Then the case got stranger. Two weeks before Patty’s murder, a man named Thomas Craft had murdered and dismembered his own wife, Lynette, in nearby Ann Arbor. Her body parts were found scattered in dumpsters and landfills.
People wondered if Kip was some kind of copycat. Investigators found no direct connection between the two men, but the details of Craft’s crime were all over the news. Kip would have heard them. Still, Kip’s past was coming to light.
It turned out the happy marriage was a long-running fiction. Years earlier, in a rage, Kip had tried to smother Patty. She stayed with him. They went to therapy.
He took medication. They stayed together, but the problems never stopped. Kip was paranoid and jealous. He was constantly suspicious of Patty’s phone use.
He drank and smoked marijuana heavily, and any attempt to talk about it turned into a fight. Shortly before the blood clot was discovered, Kip had been furious about the cost of the pig roast. The corn they bought was infested with bugs. They argued.
Patty used bug spray to fumigate the kitchen. Kip blamed her for everything. He was convinced that the bug spray had caused his blood clot. He told her it was her fault.
After the surgery, Kip stopped taking his antidepressants. His behavior became erratic. He called his nephew, asking if he ever felt like killing his own wife. He asked a friend if he knew anyone who could make Patty disappear.
He speculated about how much it would cost to hire someone. Years before, he had told another friend that a perfect murder would involve cutting up the body, boiling it so it wouldn’t stink, and throwing it in a dumpster. Exactly what he did to Patty. On the night of the murder, Kip later claimed, he saw the devil staring back at him when he looked at his wife lying on the couch.
He didn’t kill Patty, he insisted. He killed the devil. The defense argued that Kip was insane. His brain surgery, the sudden stop of his medication, and the belief that his wife was a demon were cited as proof he didn’t understand what he was doing.
The prosecution argued that none of that mattered. Kip’s method of disposing of the body showed planning. He covered his tracks for days. He cleaned the crime scene.
He lied about the car. A man truly insane, they said, doesn’t scrub a restaurant for two days to hide a murder. The jury agreed. On March 15th, 2001, Kevin “Kip” Arts was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Kip’s appeal on the grounds of marijuana psychosis was rejected. Kip’s family always believed he wasn’t responsible, that the surgery and the cold-turkey medication withdrawal turned him into someone he wasn’t. Patty’s family mourned the lovely woman they had lost and found relief in knowing Kip would never walk free. Wayne Bizzard served twenty-six years on the force and eventually retired to run his own private investigation business.
He still carries the memory of that box, that bag, and that face. But he never stopped telling young officers the same thing: trust your gut. Those feelings are there for a reason.
