By Kirsten Buys
C & G Staff Writer

FARMINGTON HILLS — Almost 30 years later, Glendon Frank can still hear the “hillbillyish” voice of the masked man who tied up him and his coworkers in the back of a Farmington Hills supermarket and shot one of them point blank in the head.

While stocking shelves at Great Scott supermarket just after 4 a.m. Jan. 27, 1979, Frank turned when he heard what he thought was a playful co-worker approaching him.

“I thought they were playing a joke,” Frank said. “I looked at him and just started smiling and the guy grabbed me and said, ‘This is no f–ing joke.’ ”

Frank, now 56, and former coworkers Dennis Richards and Richard Dennis testified at the Aug. 20 preliminary trial in 47th District Court Judge James Brady’s courtroom about what happened the night William Hess, 50, and Darrell Kastel, 54, allegedly broke into the store through an open roof air duct and killed worker Julius Schnoll execution-style with a black .38 special revolver.

For the first time mentioned publicly, getaway driver Timothy Richman testified against Hess and Kastel in a deal with the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. Richman described the trio driving around town the night of Jan. 26 and into early Jan. 27, looking for a place to rob so they could buy cocaine. When Hess and Kastel couldn’t get into an adjoining drug store, they decided to rob Great Scott simply because they could get inside.

Night stocker Dennis was walking into the backroom with Schnoll just after 4 a.m. to get coffee when they saw Hess and Kastel dropping down from the air vent and were ordered to the floor at gunpoint. Hess, accused of being the gunman, was wearing a black ski mask and brown gloves, but Kastel, armed with some type of club, wasn’t.

Hess went into the main supermarket, approached Frank, then moved to the next aisle to gather up Richards, who is hard of hearing. When Richards didn’t hear Hess tell him to go to the back room, Richards testified that Hess pistol-whipped him on the left side of his face.

After the four were gathered into the back room, Schnoll, Dennis and Frank’s hands and feet were bound behind their backs with leather dog leashes, and Richards was bound with plastic wrap. They were ordered  to hand over their wallets, and Hess and Kastel got $1 in change from Frank, about $5 from Richards and $200 from Dennis. Hess soon began demanding that Schnoll, 62, open the combination safe, believing him to be the manager, according to testimony. For a time, Hess left the gun with Kastel to keep guard while he looked for a key in the front of the store. Schnoll kept telling the men he didn’t know how to get into the safe and pleaded with them, saying he was a sick man.

“He said he wouldn’t have to worry about being sick if he didn’t open the safe,” Dennis recalled. “Julius just kept protesting until he was shot.”

Dennis said Hess called Schnoll a “dead Jew” and shot him once in the head. The bullet passed through his head and is believed to have hit Dennis in the arm, leaving a bruise, though he didn’t notice it for hours because of the blood and brain matter covering him.

Though he didn’t conduct the autopsy himself, Oakland County Medical Examiner Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic read the report from 1979 and said Schnoll was shot once in his left temple and the gun couldn’t have been more than one to two inches from his head.

Dennis said he overheard the pair discussing whether they needed to kill all of them to eliminate witnesses, then left, telling the remaining three men to stay put and that they would be checked on. The men laid there for what is believed to be hours, before the store manager came to open up for the day at around 7 a.m. and got on the speaker system asking where they were and why the front door was open. At that point, Frank and Dennis untied themselves and helped Richards out of the plastic wrap.

Meanwhile, Richman said, the men had run back to the car and said they had to go. Despite some reports, Richman said he doesn’t recall seeing the men with cartons of cigarettes they are alleged to have stolen.

Once they were in the car, Richman recalls Kastel saying, “you didn’t have to kill the man,” and Hess told him to “shut up.” A few days later, the trio was at a house party when a news report came on regarding the robbery and murder and Hess allegedly said, “We did that.” Richman said that was the first he heard any details of the incident.

The following month, the men all were incarcerated for home invasions in West Virginia and for a time were in a cell together. Hess and Kastel allegedly threatened Richman — who said he never knew exactly what happened in the store — that if he told anyone about the incident they would blame him for the murder.

Farmington Detective Tom Daniels, now 70, testified at the hearing about questioning Hess in West Virginia in 1980. He said Hess told him much of what is alleged to have happened that night, including directing him to where he could find the boots that match a print investigators got from the store’s roof. When Daniels said that Hess told him he wears masks during robberies and home invasions to conceal his noticeable bushy eyebrows, Hess smirked and shook his head in court.

“He said it was like a bad dream,” Daniels said.

Despite questioning and witnesses, investigators didn’t have enough at the time to charge Hess with the crime. Farmington Public Safety Department Cmdr. Frank Demers decided to take another look at the case in 2006, believing new technologies could help solve the case. Instead, it was Richman’s testimony that seems to have made the difference.

Florida police arrested Richman, who has not been convicted of a crime for more than 20 years, earlier this year for not paying child support. It is then that the Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Barb Morrison and Sheriff’s Department investigators Sgt. Dave Wurtz and Sgt. Gary Miller approached him and he eventually started talking.

Richman said that after they served time in West Virginia together, he never saw Kastel again and only saw Hess once, when he ran into him at a Traverse City mall in 1995. Kastel was arrested at his Deerfield home in June. Hess was in a Jackson jail on auto theft charges.

Hess and Kastel each could spend the rest of their lives in prison if convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and felony murder. Kastel’s attorney, Mitch Ribitwer, tried to get the first-degree murder charge against his client dropped, stating that he couldn’t possibly have premeditated that Hess would kill Schnoll that day. Morrison cited various legal standings supporting the charge and stated that Kastel intentionally helped Hess during the events that led him to commit the crime — particularly when he held the gun for him with instructions to shoot anyone who moved.

Brady decided there was enough to support both charges against each of the men and ordered them both to be bound over for trial in Oakland County Circuit Court. Farmington Public Safety Director Chuck Nebus said the next step is their arraignment in circuit court and subsequent court dates leading to a trial.

You can reach Staff Writer Kirsten Buys at kbuys@candgnews.com or at (586) 498-1030.