Testimony opens in John Skelton murder hearing

John Russell Skelton’s apparent reference to a theme in his pastor’s sermons may have been the first inkling of what is alleged to have happened to his three boys at Thanksgiving in 2010.

“Come Home for Christmas” was the theme the Rev. Donna Galloway had chosen for Morenci United Methodist Church in the weeks leading up to the holiday. The Skelton family attended Morenci UMC.

“I talked about home, that if you feel uncomfortable in the world in which we live, if things bother you and you feel like you don't fit, it's because you don't,” Galloway said Monday while testifying in Skelton’s preliminary examination on murder and evidence-tampering charges. “The Scripture tells us we're all strangers and aliens in a strange land, and that's because we don't belong here. We belong in heaven, and heaven is our home. This is just the stopping-off place until we get to spend eternity with God. And that has always been a main theme. It's a main belief that I've always had and always expressed.”

On Nov. 27, 2010, three days after 9-year-old Andrew, 7-year-old Alexander and 5-year-old Tanner Skelton disappeared while with their father at Thanksgiving, Galloway took a phone call from Skelton, who was at a hospital in Ohio where he was being treated for an injured foot, which he hurt either in a fall from a ladder while doing remodeling work or in a suicide attempt. He had called the boys’ mother, his estranged wife, Tanya Zuvers, but she didn’t want to talk to him and gave the phone to Galloway. They were at the Morenci police station, which had been turned into the command center for the search for the boys.

Galloway was standing against a wall where she could look into the police station and the city hall offices, which share a building in downtown Morenci. An FBI agent was standing to her left as she took the phone.

“Why won't Tanya talk to me?” Galloway recalled Skelton asking.

“And I said, ‘She will talk to you if you're going to tell her where the boys are. If you tell her where the boys are, she will hear everything you have to say.’” Galloway said.

“He asked if she would come up there. And I said, ‘If you are going to tell her where the boys are, she will talk to you.’

“‘Is she mad at me? Is she thinking about us?’

“And I said, ‘She can't think about anything except her boys right now. She's a mom. She's not worried about you or me or anybody else. She wants to know where her boys are, and she wants them home, and they're not home.

“And he said to me, ‘Pastor Donna, you of all people should understand what I mean when I say that they're home.’

“I just kind of slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

“He hung up the phone. I didn't hang up. He hung up. …

“I knew at that point when he said, ‘You of all people should know what I mean when I say I sent them home.’ I knew that they were dead.

“I kept my hope alive. I kept encouraging everybody to keep on but in my heart of hearts I knew what he had done. I didn't know what he had done other than that he had taken the lives of the boys.”

Skelton, 54, is charged with three counts of open murder and three counts of tampering with evidence in the boys’ deaths and disappearance. The preliminary examination on the charges began Monday in Lenawee County District Court and is scheduled to run through Sept. 4.

A preliminary exam is a proceeding where the prosecution has to show that a crime was committed and the defendant is likely to have committed the crime. A judge, in this case District Judge Laura J. Schaedler, decides whether the prosecution has shown probable cause to have the case bound over to circuit court for further proceedings such as a trial or plea agreement.

The open murder charges would allow a jury to choose the degree of murder should the jurors decide to convict Skelton. First-degree murder involves premeditation and is punishable by life in prison without parole. Second-degree murder does not involve premeditation and is punishable by up to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Skelton has already served 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to three counts of unlawful imprisonment. The Lenawee County Prosecutor’s Office filed the murder and evidence-tampering charges last November, about two weeks before he was to be released from prison.

Despite intensive searches immediately after the boys disappeared and nationwide media coverage over the years, the boys have not been found. They were legally declared deceased in March 2025.

First witness

Before Galloway testified, Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie VanWoert called Zuvers as the first witness. She asked Zuvers about her previous marriage and her children from that relationship, how she met Skelton through a co-worker in 2000 and how she told him when they first met that she had been incarcerated for 10 months for an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old boy and at the time was on the Michigan Sex Offender Registry.

For most of their relationship, Skelton seemed to have no problems with Zuvers’ criminal history, Zuvers said, but later on he would try to use it against her.

They married in 2002. Zuvers sometimes had part-time jobs while Skelton worked mostly as a truck driver. He worked as an over-the-road driver for a time, then got truck-driving jobs with employers closer to Morenci.

Things seemed to be going well for them, Zuvers said, recounting how in 2006 or 2007 they bought a house on Congress Street in Morenci and worked on making it their own.

Eventually, their relationship deteriorated and reached a breaking point. On Sept. 8, 2010, Zuvers said, she had a phone conversation with Skelton where he indicated he wanted to move the fmaily to Florida because he thought there would be better job prospects there. Also, his parents lived in Jacksonville.

Zuvers didn’t want to move, she said. She doesn’t like hot weather, her family and friends are in the Morenci area, and, from a timing standpoint, the boys had just started the new school year. She also was concerned about moving while still being a registered sex offender and how people in a new community might treat her and the boys.

On Sept. 13, things came to a head. Zuvers dropped the boys off at school and went to Adrian with one of her daughters. She got home at about 10:30 a.m. and found a message on her answering machine from the school secretary saying Skelton had signed the boys out of school, didn’t ask for any homework for them and asked about transferring their records to Florida.

Zuvers said she called Morenci Police Chief Larry Weeks and explained the situation. Weeks called Skelton and got him to go to the police station so he could talk to the two of them.

At the same time, Zuvers had retained an attorney in Adrian who explained the only way to prevent Skelton from taking the boys was to file for divorce and get a custody order, so that’s what she did.

When Skelton found out — he had tried to hire the same attorney, Zuvers said — he became angry. Tanner was inside their house, but the two older boys were outside. Zuvers said Skelton put them in their minivan and “peeled out of the driveway, very erratically, almost hitting my dad and my sister in the process because they … were walking up to the house.”

The next day, Sept. 14, Andrew and Alexander called her to wish her a happy birthday and told her they were in Florida with Skelton and one of his high school friends. Zuvers said she contacted her attorney, who drew up paperwork to give her exclusive parenting rights. She picked up the paperwork the next day and headed to Florida with her mom, one of her daughters and her daughter’s friend, driving all night.

Their first stop was with the Jacksonville police, who directed her to an office where the Michigan parenting paperwork could be converted to Florida’s terminology. That took a day, and when she picked up the new paperwork, she learned the judge there wanted to meet with her and Skelton. This was on a Friday, so they had the hearing on Monday. Over the weekend, she hired an attorney there.

At the hearing, Skelton also had an attorney. The first question from Skelton’s attorney to Zuvers was about her sex offender status.

The judge there called the Lenawee County judge who had been assigned their divorce case. She then ordered them to drive back to Michigan, staying in sight of each other.

Zuvers said she moved out of their marital home, first staying with her parents and then moving into a house on Maple Drive. Her daughter and husband also were divorcing and had moved out of that house, so Zuvers moved in. From its kitchen window, she could see the driveway and front door of Skelton’s home on Congress Street.

She and Skelton eventually worked out a visitation schedule where the boys would spend each Wednesday afternoon after school and every other weekend with him. They later agreed to a schedule for Thanksgiving, where the boys would spend Thanksgiving Day with him and then the rest of the weekend with her. She said she wanted to take the boys to Ford Field in Detroit that Saturday to watch their cousin on the Hudson High School football team play in the state championship game.

Before the scheduled 3 p.m. exchange time on Nov. 25, Zuvers heard from Skelton, who told her he was in the emergency room in Wauseon with an injured foot. He said he hurt it when he fell off a ladder while doing some remodeling work. She asked where the boys were, and he told her they were with a Joanne Taylor who would drop them off at 3. She asked him for Taylor’s phone number, but he said he didn’t have it with him, it was written down at his house, which was locked.

Zuvers became alarmed at the idea of a woman she didn’t know watching her sons and not being able to contact her. She called the hospital and explained who she was and asked if the boys were with Skelton. They were not. She later called back and spoke to the nurse in charge of his care. She explained they were separated but legally married.

“He said, ‘OK, you're his wife.’ I can tell you John is being treated because he tried to hang himself earlier today,” Zuvers said.

Zuvers called the police shortly after 3 p.m. At Skelton’s home, they found “mass destruction.” Zuvers didn’t go into the house until Nov. 27. She said furniture had been smashed, cords to electrical appliances and lamps had been cut and the mattress in the master bedroom had been slashed multiple times. A rope was tied to the stairway banister and piled on the upstairs floor. Items such as cookbooks, photos and yearbooks with sentimental value to Zuvers were missing, but the boys snow boots were still there.

Investigators later found a letter in the house that Skelton had written to Zuvers. Replying to a question from VanWoert, she said she hadn’t seen the letter, which VanWoert asked her to read. In it, he expressed his love for her and apologized for hurting her “yet again.”

“This time it was on purpose and to kill my pain of losing you,” Skelton wrote. “…I guess my actions today will guarantee you won't have to see me again or in heaven. I pray God will forgive me, but I know it won't happen. I would ask your forgiveness, but maybe I can't have that either.”