GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The man found guilty of a 27-year-old cold case will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Thursday, Garry Artman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Sharron Hammock.
Artman was arrested in 2022 and charged in what was one of West Michigan's coldest cases.
Hammack was pregnant with a son at the time of her murder, and already a mother of two young children.
Her body was discovered on October 3, 1996, on 76th St SE, between Patterson Ave. and Kraft Ave. in Caledonia Township.
At his trial last month, it took the jury less than an hour of deliberating before returning a guilty verdict, convicting Artman on all three counts: felony murder, and first degree criminal sexual conduct.
When Hammack was murdered back in 1996, there was talk in the media that the person responsible for her death could be involved in other similar killings.
Reports from 1996 say a task force was put together, made up of 6 police agencies, to investigate the murders of 9 women.
"All nine were white women, most had dark hair and many of them had been strangled," an Associated Press article from 1996 reads.
"In each case, police are facing difficulties in finding a killer. Three bodies were so decomposed, investigators didn't know how they died."
Rudimentary DNA testing was done on several items found at the scene of Hammack’s body, but nothing concrete came from the results.
“In 1996, the MSP would have been at the very early stages of doing DNA in the state police system,” Katherine Meredith with the Michigan State Police (MSP) explained during the trial. “We are (now) able to detect DNA profiles from less quantity of DNA in a sample than what would have been required in the 1990s,” she said.
It wouldn’t be until 2019 when a detective with the Kent County Sheriff’s Office submitted some DNA samples to Identifinders, a genetic genealogy company, that a true break in the case would emerge.
Identifinders was able to trace the DNA samples from the crime scene to Artman’s family tree. They were able to identify that the suspect's DNA came from one of the four sons of the Artman family.
Detectives were then able to determine that Artman was living in the same area as Hammack was at the time of her murder. Artman has previously been convicted of criminal sexual conduct, serving an 11-year sentence in the Michigan prison system.
"For all the resources and everything we could do at that point in time, we couldn't solve it then," Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker explained at an August 2022 press conference announcing their arrest of Artman.
"It had to take, you know, progression of the technology that we have in terms of DNA to be able to bring a solution to this case."
During the trial, prosecutors said Artman and Hammack had met up prior to her death, as she was doing sex work at the time. They met in person at least one time for a specific sexual act, but Hammack was left disturbed afterward.
“She said he was a creep, and he would get rough, and force girls to do things they didn’t want to do,” a friend of Hammack said on the stand last month.
Despite this, Artman was allegedly trying to persuade Hammack to come meet up with him again. Her friend described on the stand a time in which Artman had been calling Hammack about a “gift” he wanted to give her.
Hammack brought this friend with her to a hotel room, where Hammack became quickly uneasy. The pair were quick to leave the room, but her friend said it left a bad taste in his mouth.
Artman was accused of tracking the young mother down, kidnapping her, sexually assaulting her, and then killing her.
