Stepson shares new details on Troy cold case victim Wynona MIchel

by Randy Pierce • Describing himself as a genealogist, a man who says he has a doctorate from Duke University in North Carolina has publicly shared information about a woman whose body was found in a farm field near Troy 35 years ago and was, as announced early last month, officially identified during a press conference hosted by the Madison County Sheriff’s Department.

Michael Black, posting his blog on a website called BlackenedRoots.com which is dedicated to family history and research, after explaining that his fascination with genealogy began when he was very young, said that he learned about the aforementioned deceased person after being contacted by e-mail by a woman who claimed it was her aunt who was discovered dead in July of 1990 near the intersection of Lebanon and Troy-O’Fallon roads.

Wynona Nadine Michel, the female who was positively identified after a lengthy investigation involving the sheriff’s department and numerous professionals in the field of forensic science, was the second wife of Black’s father.

In referring to Michel as “Wyndi” rather than “Wendy,” which is how her name has been spelled since the sheriff’s department press conference, Black said he met her a few times during the 1980s after his father and his first wife divorced.

Black’s father apparently had developed a relationship with “Wyndi” that led to their marriage. It was during the time those two had been together that Black said he knew the least about his father’s life, so he sought more details as connected with his genealogical research.

“At the time,” Black said in his blog, “I was mad at him for breaking up our family and I distanced myself from him for a couple of years by which time he had moved hundreds of miles away.”

The dad and son had later reconciled and grew closer again, Black’s accounting of the situation went on, “but we never spoke much of the details of those years” until the older man reached a state of terminal illness.

“While he was in the hospital, I discovered a wedding certificate for his marriage to Wyndi,” Black said. “Until then, I hadn’t even known they had gotten married.”

When Black asked his father about it, the response was that the latter considered the matrimony “probably one of the biggest mistakes of his life without further elaboration.”

Soon thereafter, Black’s father passed away so there was no additional discussion about Wyndi. Black explained he tried to track her down, including an effort to find her parents, but was unsuccessful, discovering that all the records he could locate stopped in the late 1980s after Wyndi and his dad were no longer together.

This led to Black’s posting everything he knew about Wyndi on a genealogical group site called WikiTree which in turn resulted in the woman he would only identify as the aunt of the mystery deceased female reaching out to let him know something interesting.

That “aunt” explained to Black she had been contacted by a detective who said, in relation to a “Jane Doe” case he was working on, her DNA had been a close match to that of Wyndi Michel’s.

The investigator told the woman who had informed Black about this that a genetic analysis showed Michel appeared to be a half-sister of the “aunt’s” father. The aunt “was trying to come to grips with this new revelation,” Black wrote, and was also trying to learn more about the female whose body was found in rural Troy. Black and the lady who communicated with him about all of this got connected through WikiTree when the latter saw the profile about Wyndi created by the former.

Feeling concern about what appears to have been a murder taking Michel’s life, Black, who had been unaware previously that a crime like this could have occurred, inquired with the aunt about her awareness of a possible daughter named Tasha who would have been about 10 years old when the victim died.

Black further revealed that he discovered Michel had a half-brother named Frank who “is currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, aggravated robbery and aggravated sexual battery.”

“The more we learn about Wyndi’s background, the more tragic and heartbreaking her story becomes,” Black stated.