Convicted Rapist Found Guilty In Girlfriend's Gruesome 2013 Murder
DETROIT (WWJ) - A Detroit man charged with killing his girlfriend and then setting her body on fire has been found guilty.
It took a jury less than an hour to convict 38-year-old Walter Bass in the shooting death of 47-year-old Evelyn Gunter, whose charred remains were found wrapped in barbed wire inside a garage on the city's west side.
Gunter's sister Opal says there's a sense of relief with the verdict.
"I feel a sense of peace and I feel a sense of justice for my sister and family," she said. "I just wish that Michigan had the death penalty. It is still my hope that Walter Bass, that he doesn't do down to his grave a young man because of how he murdered my sister and made her suffer."
Family members have always suspected that Bass was responsible for Gunter's grisly murder.
Gunter went missing on March 10, 2013. Relatives say she had just come home from running errands and was dressed to go out when she was last seen around 6 p.m. by her grandson. She left the house and never returned.
When Gunter failed to show up for work the next day, her family knew something bad had happened. Her daughter told investigators that she received a text message from Gunter's phone, saying she was going out-of-town to visit a friend. But relatives said the text message was suspicious, and they couldn't help but wonder if Gunter might have been targeted because she had access to a large amount of cash, after receiving a 401K deposit and paycheck from General Motors.
Days later, Gunter's new Chevy Impala was found parked outside of Club Celebrity on Detroit's west side. Bass was driving the vehicle. He told police that Gunter loaned the car to him while she was out-of-town. Police impounded the vehicle and sent Bass on his way.
As it turns out, two days after Gunter disappeared, charred remains wrapped in barbed wire were found in a garage on the city's west side — but no one knew it was the missing mother.
"It was a hard case to identify because it appeared that somebody had gone to great lengths to get her to be unidentifiable," Detective-Trooper Sarah Krebs with the Michigan State Police told WWJ's Vickie Thomas. The remains would sit in the county morgue for another six months before DNA would confirm Gunter's identity.
Finally, in April 2014, police announced that Bass had been arrested and charged with Gunter's death.
Bass is also the lead suspect in the murder of April Black -- a Redford mother of six who was killed in 2012. Black's body was found floating in the Rouge River about a week after she had been reported missing.