BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) — Prosecutors have charged a Michigan man with killing and dismembering a janitor he met on the dating app Grindr.
Justie Stilwell, a 41-year-old janitor at T.L. Handy Middle School in Bay City, was reported missing on Sept. 18. A teenager spotted a foot in the Saginaw River that same day. Police subsequently found Stilwell’s arms and lower legs in the water.
According to court documents obtained by MLive.com, detectives obtained surveillance footage from Stilwell’s neighbors that showed Stilwell driving away from his home in Bay City on the evening of Sept. 14. Investigators used data from Grindr to determine that Stilwell had gone to meet a Grindr user with the handle “Bored.”
They tracked Bored’s location to 40-year-old Robert Tweedly’s home in Bay City. Tweedly told investigators that Stilwell came to his home and he shoved Stilwell down his basement stairs after Stilwell wanted to leave, according to the documents. He then strangled Stilwell to death, he told investigators, according to the documents.
The body was too heavy to move upstairs so he cut it apart, he told investigators. He dumped the legs and arms in the river and put the head and torso in a nature preserve. Police recovered those body parts there, according to the court documents.
Tweedly was arraigned Sept. 27 on charges of murder and mutilating a body. His attorney, James Piazza, told MLive.com that he had met with Tweedly but was still waiting for prosecutors to share evidence and had no comment on the case.
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