Cold Case of Aundria Brown

Lt. Mike Brown joined the Allegan County Sheriff's office in 1999, ten years after Aundria Brown was reported missing by her father. In 2009, a cold case team was formed to look into the Brown case. When the original case detectives started to retire in 2019, the team felt a sense of urgency to resolve the case. WMU has a service to review case files for law enforcement. This review led to questions about leads not followed.

Dennis Brown served in the US Navy and then the Naval Reserve after moving to Michigan. In 1974, he and his wife adopted the infant they named Aundria. On March 11, 1989, Dennis reported Aundra missing. A truancy officer visited the home, and Dennis reported that he and Aundria had a fight and she ran away. She had done this before and no major investigation of the home was performed. There were reported sightings of Aundra through October of 1989. The sheriff continued to treat this as a missing persons case.

The cold case team uncovered that Brown had a 1980 Criminal Sexual Conduct case, a 1989 abduction, and a 1998 break-in of a co-worker's home. Aundra's birth mother started helping the team and worked on generating publicity. Nationwide databases were starting to be available, and Aundra's DNA and dental records were recorded. Dennis was interviewed by the team in 2013 without them learning much new or getting him to admit anything. The team kept a cup from which Dennis drank and extracted his DNA. This evidence was inadmissible in court, but proved invaluable.

The Big Break

A Michigan State Police (MSP) detective was in Virginia for training and started a conversation with a Norfolk detective. The Norfolk police officer said that they were working on a murder case of the wife of a Navy pilot, and they had DNA of the murderer. The DNA showed familial matches to a number of people in West Michigan. He asked the MSP officer to look at a list of possible names to see if he recognized anyone. Dennis Brown was on the list. Dennis' DNA was a match for the Virginia murder. This brought Norfolk PD and NCIS into the team, working within Allegan County. They searched the Brown home with ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs, but found nothing.

Interrogation attempts didn't get information from Dennis. The team had learned that in 1998, Aundra had confided in a school counselor that her father had sexually assaulted her. The team knew that they needed to get Dennis to talk.

They let him overhear some comments about having evidence and left him by himself. He started wondering out loud about what evidence they might have. He admitted to murders in San Diego, Holland, and more crimes that the Sheriff didn't know about. Nothing about Aundra, however.

They put Dennis and his wife in a “soft” interrogation room, one with couches and comfortable chairs. His wife started to interview him, and he eventually admitted that he had killed Aundra, buried her body in a drum, and had a cement patio poured on top. The body was found, and Dennis was convicted of the murder. He was already serving a life sentence for the murder in Virginia.