The Murder That Inspired The Jeepers Creepers Franchise

Dennis and Marilynn DePue were a married couple from Coldwater, Michigan. Dennis worked as a property assessor for the town, while Marilynn was employed as a guidance counsellor at the local high school.

Married for nearly twenty years, the couple shared three children and appeared, to those on the outside, to lead a stable and happy life. Beneath the surface, however, their marriage was quietly unravelling.

Over the years, tension had steadily built within the family home, much of it stemming from Dennis’s increasingly erratic temperament. He was often withdrawn and sullen, and his behaviour took a toll not only on his marriage but also on his relationship with his children, who were growing increasingly distant from him.

In the company of close friends, Marilynn confided that she was deeply unhappy and no longer wished to remain in the marriage. After years of quiet consideration, she finally made her decision and, in 1989, filed for divorce from Dennis.

Marilynn laid out her reasons clearly to her attorney, explaining that Dennis had grown increasingly controlling. His volatile moods were affecting everyone in the household, and she believed that life would be healthier for herself and the children without him present.

Faced with the loss of his wife, his home, and daily access to his children, Dennis remained in deep denial. He refused to accept the collapse of both his marriage and the life he had built, repeatedly begging Marilynn to reconsider. Her decision, however, was final.

Although Dennis was granted visitation rights, each weekly pickup was marked by discomfort. The children were visibly reluctant to go with him, their distance only deepening over time. In the months that followed, Dennis also began appearing at the family home uninvited. Despite Marilynn changing the locks, she would return to find him inside—once sitting casually on the couch as if nothing had changed. These intrusions seemed to be Dennis’s way of asserting control, a final attempt to cling to the authority he felt slipping away.

On Easter Sunday in 1990, Dennis finally snapped, confronted with the reality that he could no longer force his way into his family’s lives.

He arrived that day to collect his two youngest children, but immediately became enraged when his youngest daughter, Julie, refused to go with him. Forcing his way into the house, his anger escalated further when his son, Scott, also declined to leave. Dennis seized Scott and attempted to drag him outside, prompting Marilynn to come downstairs in an effort to intervene and calm the situation.

Convinced that Marilynn was deliberately turning the children against him, Dennis began shouting at her as he followed her up the staircase. When he reached the top, he shoved her with force, sending her tumbling down the stairs. As she lay injured, Dennis continued to assault her, ignoring the desperate pleas of his children as they begged him to stop.

The eldest of the DePue children, Jennifer, managed to break free and sprint to a neighbouring house, where she called the police. Tragically, before officers could arrive, Dennis had already forced his injured ex-wife into his car and driven away.

Later that day, on the opposite side of town, a married couple named Ray and Marie were driving along a rural road when a green Chevrolet truck sped past them at an alarming pace. They were unable to see the driver clearly, but the vehicle’s license plate caught their attention—it began with the letters “GZ.”

The detail lingered in their minds because Ray and Marie often played a game during long drives, challenging each other to form words or phrases from passing license plates. It was a harmless habit—one that, on this day, would prove chillingly significant.The license plate stayed with them. As the truck tore past at high speed, Marie had remarked, “Geez, he must be in a hurry,” a comment sparked by the “GZ” on the plate. The vehicle quickly disappeared down the road—but it would not be the last time they saw it.

A few miles later, Ray and Marie passed an abandoned schoolhouse, an eerie, isolated structure where no one had any reason to be. There, Marie noticed the same green truck, now pulled over beside the building. Standing next to it was a lone figure.

As she looked closer, a chilling detail came into focus: the man was carrying a sheet, visibly stained with blood.

Horrified by what they had just witnessed, Ray and Marie drove off, intent on finding a phone to contact the police. As they wound their way along the narrow back roads, a wave of dread washed over them when they spotted the familiar green truck in their rear view mirror.

The vehicle was closing in fast, swerving erratically. It was obvious the driver had been startled mid-act, unprepared for the possibility that someone had seen him. For several harrowing miles, the truck pursued them, repeatedly attempting to force their car off the road.

Their escape came only when Ray, thinking quickly, made a sudden turn off the highway at the last possible moment, causing the truck to speed past. They did not see it again.

As the two vehicles split in opposite directions, Marie stole one final glance back. She saw the driver pull over and leap from the truck—a tall man wearing a hat—who immediately crouched down to change the license plates. For the first time, she also noticed blood smeared along the passenger-side door of the truck.

Still shaken, Ray and Marie debated what to do next. In the end, they made the difficult decision to turn back onto the isolated Michigan backroads, returning to the abandoned schoolhouse to see what the man had been trying so desperately to hide.

There, they discovered the blood-soaked sheet Dennis had attempted to discard, stuffed into a small animal burrow near the building. The following day, police searching the area made a far grimmer discovery: Marilynn’s lifeless body concealed in roadside brush along the quiet stretch of road. An autopsy later confirmed that she had died from a single gunshot wound to the head.

With the evidence mounting, a manhunt was launched for Dennis DePue.

As police worked to track down the man who had murdered his ex-wife, friends and family of the DePues began receiving a disturbing series of letters—written by the killer himself.

In total, seventeen letters were recovered. Each was filled with lengthy, rambling tirades in which Dennis blamed Marilynn for the collapse of his life, accusing her of failing as a wife and of taking everything from him. He repeatedly lamented that he was “too old to start over.”

The letters were both chilling and revealing, serving as Dennis’s warped attempt to rationalise and justify the murder of his ex-wife.

Investigators attempted to analyse the postmarks on the letters in hopes of tracing Dennis’s movements, but each one originated from a different state, deliberately obscuring his whereabouts.

Three months after Marilynn’s murder, Dennis sent one final letter. Spanning thirteen pages, it was filled with further rambling justifications interwoven with passages from the Bible. After that, the correspondence abruptly stopped.

With no new leads and no further contact, the investigation stalled, leaving authorities at a frustrating and chilling dead end.

For the next year, Dennis remained silent, leaving authorities with little to go on. Fearing the case might grow cold, it was featured as a segment on the popular U.S. television show Unsolved Mysteries, which aired on March 20th 1991.

This broadcast would mark the beginning of the end for Dennis DePue.

That very evening in Dallas, Texas—over a thousand miles from Coldwater, Michigan—a woman named Mary arrived home from work to the house she shared with her boyfriend, Hank Queen. Before she could even slip off her shoes, Hank approached her, visibly agitated, insisting he needed to visit his sick mother.

As he hurriedly packed a suitcase, Hank kept one eye fixed on the television, where the Unsolved Mysteries episode was already playing. To ensure Mary didn’t see it, he asked her to make him a sandwich for the trip—a seemingly innocuous request, but one designed to keep her from watching. The story unfolding on screen was that of Dennis DePue, a fugitive wanted for the brutal murder of his ex-wife.

Ten minutes later, Hank—still unaware of what was unfolding—drove off in his van, waving goodbye to Mary. But it was too late. A close friend of Mary’s, who had also been watching the Unsolved Mysteries episode, immediately recognised Hank as Dennis DePue and called the hotline to report his location.

Once informed of Dennis’s true identity, a shocked and terrified Mary worked closely with investigators to track where he might be headed. Four hours later, Louisiana state troopers spotted his vehicle and attempted to pull him over. What followed was a high-speed chase stretching fifteen miles. In his desperation to escape, Dennis even ploughed through two police barricades.

Recognizing the danger to his officers and the public, County Sheriff Paul Barrett ordered a tactical intervention: the pursuit team fired at Dennis’s tires. The shots were effective, and Dennis continued to drive for half a mile on nothing but the rims before his vehicle finally ground to a halt.

Just before 4am, as officers surrounded his disabled vehicle, Dennis fired at them before ultimately turning the gun on himself. His life—and his flight—came to a tragic and violent end. Dennis was later laid to rest at Eagle Cemetery in Indiana, far from the final resting place of Marilynn in Oakland County, Michigan.