GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The trial against Garry Dean Artman, the man accused of killing and sexually assaulting a young woman in West Michigan back in 1996, continued on Tuesday with a number of witnesses taking the stand.
Prosecutors continued presenting the case against Artman Tuesday, high up on the eleventh floor of the downtown Kent County courthouse.
The 65-year-old was arrested last year for the once cold 1996 murder of Sharon Hammack, who was 30 at the time of her death.
On Tuesday, prosecutors called two detectives to the stand to continue explaining how investigators ended up linking Artman to the Hammack case.
Detective Gerald McCarthy, a forensic computer analyst for Michigan State Police, talked about examining three external hard drives and five thumb drives seized from Artman’s property.
McCarthy described videos he located in a “recycling bin” on one of the hard drives.
“So, they were recoverable,” he described Tuesday.
“The file titles of these videos started with the two words ‘the kidnapping,' so, obviously, that brought those to my attention.”
McCarthy said he recovered four pornographic videos from one of the drives.
“The videos showed a female; she was continuously brutally beaten, tortured, bound. She was tied up; she was raped by a male individual. These were very graphic videos,” he explained.
Prosecutors also led the jury through some information about Hammack’s life right before her tragic death in the mid-’90s.
A witness was walked into the courtroom during the early afternoon, the media asked not to identify him.
The man spoke about being friends with Hammack in 1996, even accompanying her one time to meet Artman.
Prosecutors have previously explained that Artman had met up with Hammack prior to her murder under the notion of paying for specific sexual acts, but not intercourse.
They say Hammack became frightened of him afterwards, unwilling to meet up with him again.
“She said he was a creep and he would get rough and force girls to do things they didn’t want to do,” her friend said on the stand Tuesday.
Artman is accused of later finding, kidnapping and killing the young mother of two.
