The Clink

Mt. Pleasant Campus |Community Room

Come join us for an eventful night as Tobin gives a presentation based on his forthcoming book!

The Clink - Inside Michigan's Historic Jails

From the front, these buildings resembled fashionable estates with ornate facades and turrets. But looks can be deceiving. Behind the facades, these ornate, stately homes contained cells blocks that housed county prisoners. The occupants of these county jails ranged from chicken thieves to serial killers to the colorful cast of sheriff’s deputies tasked with watching over them. Using archival photographs and diagrams, author Tobin T. Buhk leads a guided tour of these mysterious, forbidden places and introduces the characters who did time there. Learn about the first female sheriffs in Michigan history; the Capone trigger-man who terrified his captors; the cook who refuses to leave her kitchen and on occasion makes her ghostly presence seen and felt; an inventive sheriff who turned road-kill into cuisine; the pair of chicken thieves who escaped from Kent County’s inescapable jail; and others.

Tobin T. Buhk is a freelance author specializing in historic true crime. To research his first book, Cause of Death, he volunteered in a county morgue. His subsequent true-crime publications include Skeletons in the Closet, True Crime in the Civil War, and Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids. Mr. Buhk lectures frequently on historic crime and provides a number of presentation options.