An attorney for Jeff Titus said Monday that the man who spent nearly 21 years in prison for the 1990 deaths of two hunters in Michigan agreed to a $5.25 million settlement, after accusing law enforcement of failing to provide information he says could have changed his trial. Titus was released in 2023 and his murder convictions were erased at the request of prosecutors, according to the attorney’s account.
The lawyer, Wolf Mueller, said the legal challenge focused on what he described as a failure by police to share evidence that might have cast doubt on trial testimony involving a key witness. An email seeking comment from the lawyer who represented a retired homicide detective was not immediately answered, the report said.
Mueller also addressed the personal stakes of the settlement, telling reporters that “It’s been a long road for Jeff.” Mueller said Titus is 74 and “lost two decades of his life,” adding that “The money doesn’t make up for the loss of decades, but it allows him to put this part of his life behind him.”
The underlying case dates to 1990, when Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were fatally shot near Titus’ property in Kalamazoo County. Prosecutors later filed murder charges against Titus about 12 years after the killings, and they portrayed him as a hothead who didn’t like trespassers, according to the report.
The push for a new trial, the report said, gained momentum after students and staff at the University of Michigan law school helped find a 30-page file from the original investigation in the county sheriff’s office. That file, described as a “blockbuster,” pointed to an alternate suspect: Thomas Dillon of Magnolia, Ohio.
The report said the conviction questions were later supported by investigative work from Jacinda Davis at Investigation Discovery and Susan Simpson through the podcast “Undisclosed,” which raised doubts about Titus’ guilt and aired concerns about Dillon’s possible role. Dillon was arrested in 1993 and ultimately pleaded guilty in Ohio to killing five people who had been hunting, fishing or jogging, and he died in prison in 2011, the report said.
While the Innocence Clinic and investigators helped authorities acknowledge that an Ohio serial killer might have been responsible for the hunters’ deaths, Mueller said the lawsuit settled Monday did not center on Dillon as the alternate suspect. Instead, he said, the case alleged that police violated Titus’ rights by not sharing information that could have undermined testimony presented at trial.