Right from the start, Peters says she harbored few doubts that Lindberg jumped that night. After all, her great-uncle made the jump 77 years ago, and came from a family that loved the island, which puts her in a position to know that suicides seek out familiar places they've loved. And Belle Isle was a joyful refrain in her conversations with Lindberg.
"I know she liked to go on drives on Belle Isle," she says. "We both loved Belle Isle, so we would talk about it. To my family, and to my grandfather's family, Belle Isle is really important. My grandpa had family picnics there regularly. He loved the conservatory and the aquarium. And Kathyrne loved Detroit and loved Belle Isle. And I mean, I love that bridge. I've crossed the Ambassador Bridge many, many times, but I don't really feel any kind of connection to it. I think that people have a really profound love for Belle Isle, and I think that bridge is so lovely. ... Belle Isle is like a place people really feel spiritually connected to, because it's like nature that you can access almost instantly from the city. I think that people maybe like to do that near something they feel connected to."
Peters also offers an unusual insight: that by jumping in the river, Lindberg may have hoped to spare her friends any unpleasantness.
"Maybe bridge jumpers think that no one will really have to face what they're doing to themselves much," she says. "Like, shoot yourself in your home and someone's going to have to ... I think you distance yourself a bit from the idea that someone will discover you if you jump into the water."
For Lindberg's friends, no discoveries came, while several months of uneasy uncertainty passed. It wasn't until late in the spring when Lindberg's body was found. According to the Downriver News-Herald, fishermen found her body at about 6 a.m. on June 12, just off the northeast tip of Grosse Ile. By August, dental records had been used to identify Lindberg's remains after her nephew heard about the body and contacted authorities. It brought a measure of closure, just a week or two before what would have been her 60th birthday.
"I guess it was sort of a double-edged sword when they found her body. I thought that, in some ways, OK, now there's a definite answer for what happened," Peters says. "Because before all that, all you have is a car with a door open. And it's just missing person. You want to know. But then ... you know. As irrational as it seems, when someone is missing, there's always hope."
The current is a continual refrain in discussions of the river, often ill-understood and misrepresented. Ask a dozen Detroiters and you'll hear all sorts of stories about it, about sudden undertows, tricky subsurface currents that can overpower seasoned divers, and that steady, powerful flow that will flush you straight down the river.
According to expert divers, the flow itself isn't deadly — but fighting against it is.
No public safety officer knows the river better than Sgt. Mike Carpenter. He's head of Detroit Dive Team, operating from the headquarters of the Detroit Harbor Master, a squat boathouse that's been just downriver from the bridge since the 1950s. The 50-year-old has spent literally thousands of hours diving in the Detroit River since joining the dive team in 1988. He describes a place where the flow is normally four to six knots, driving over an eerie underwater junkyard.
"There's a pretty quick current. There's a lot of debris on the bottom," he says. "You know, the old bridge is still under there, the one that burned. Years ago, the river was where they dumped stuff, so there's a lot of stuff from the tire factory, the Uniroyal plant that was there. Fences, tires, steel, and wood.
"It is too strong to swim against," he continues. "There is no undertow. If you swim with the current and float toward shore, you will eventually reach it. The reason people drown, that we've found, is that they get fixated on where they fell in at and they will try to swim back to that point. If they were to go with the flow and swim toward shore they would eventually make it. I imagine an Olympic swimmer may be able to swim against it briefly, but you're not gonna swim five to six knots for very long."
By his count, Sgt. Carpenter has rescued 50 or 60 jumpers during his career, all while 10 or fewer have died. (There has not been a suicide off the bridge since 2013, according to Lt. Arthur Green of the Law Enforcement Division of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over the island.) It's not quite the official "suicide squad" of the Great Depression, but Carpenter's dive team is on patrol and has even been able to coax several would-be jumpers back to safety before they made the plunge.
"It's really not high enough for the impact to kill you," he says. "I imagine it's possible. Most everybody who has jumped off has been on the surface for a while. And they all change their mind, too. They're all yelling for help after they hit the water. If they jump off, we're right here."
But should the search and rescue mission become a search and recovery mission, the dive team's job gets simpler in a grisly way.
"The way our river works, especially because of the speed of the current, where you see them go into the water for the last time," he says, "they will go down right to the bottom."
The way the dive team captain describes it, it's eerie work done in a twilight where visibility usually ranges from four feet down to zero. Search teams don't use lights; Carpenter compares it to flipping on your brights in a snowstorm:
"It's the same thing down there," he says. "If there's sediment in the water or algae or whatever, if you turn on a light it's just worse." Visibility can be as far as 12 feet just before the ice breaks up, before waves and wakes stir up the bottom, but such exceptions are rare.
Carpenter says, "Basically, if it's zero visibility, you're doing it by feel."
If the body isn't recovered, it will stay where it is until it floats.
"Floaters can make quite a journey once they're buoyant," says Carpenter. These are the bodies you hear about being recovered in places like Ecorse, Wyandotte, Grosse Ile, or other communities on the Canadian side of the water.
Over the last few years, thanks in part to the efforts of the Detroit Dive Team, the bridge has seen fewer suicides.
In truth, many other factors likely contribute to that decline. Detroit has changed a great deal since the bridge was built in 1923. Instead of a dense city of 1 million bound closely to the river, it's a sprawled-out metropolitan area of 3.7 million encompassing more than 1,000 square miles.
And as the city's parks and policies change, the river's relationship with the city was bound to change as well. A host of recent regulations, such as requiring recreation passports of visitors and closing the park at night, have had a chilling effect on the kind of casual visitation Belle Isle once attracted. And the opening of Detroit's riverfront to pleasure seekers over the last several decades has had an effect as well. Much like the planners of the 1923 Belle Isle Bridge, the architects of Detroit's riverfront attractions, such as Hart Plaza and the RiverWalk, likely had no intentions of smoothing the way for those seeking to end their troubles. For most of the day, these urban parks lack a certain amount of solitude and silence, an atmosphere that so often prevailed on the bridge.
But they've seen their share of jumpers, most notably on one October day last year.
That's when 17-year-old Renaissance High School student William Derrick Watts Jr. went over the railing at Stroh Place and swam out into the water to drown.
The young student, better known as "Bill" or "Billy" — or his alter ego DJKillBill313 — was no stranger to hardship. He lived in Hamtramck with his mother, who suffered from chronic health problems. He developed a strong relationship with his uncle, Marvin Pillow, a part-time DJ and carpenter, and Watts went to live with Pillow's family at his west side Detroit home from time to time, attending Renaissance with Pillow's daughter.
Pillow, 46, says, "Me and him were probably closer than anyone else in his life. Even closer than his friends. Pretty much, he spent 90 percent of his time with me. He was a very creative young man. Very articulate. Pretty good in math and just pretty good in school. Very creative and kind of one of those people who could just pick up things pretty quickly. If he tried to do something he could pick it up by just doing it a few times. He was great at graphic design and wanted to go to state college for it."
Watts was also something of a quiet iconoclast, given, for instance, to wearing button-down shirts printed with lively patterns.
"He did not want to be a middle-of-the-road person," says Pillow. "He didn't want to be like anybody else, ever. So he always did things a little different from what other people would do."
As for Watts' DJ work, Pillow explains: "He was kind of following in his uncle's footsteps, so to speak. We would sit in my basement for hour and hours, listening to music, and when he started making his own music, I would critique it, and we would do changes together."
Pillow's voice trembles with emotion for a moment as he says, "In retrospect, there's times when me and Bill were in the basement, because we had the music on, there were times when I went down and he just didn't look like himself. And I would ask him what was wrong. 'You look like you're so depressed. What's wrong with you?' And he would say, 'Aw, no.' And I would say, 'You just had this look on your face. I don't like the way you look. I don't like when you look like that because it looks like something is wrong.' So I would tell him come on outside and get some fresh air and sunshine because it's beautiful. He seemed to be always smiling and pretty much always happy. It was quite a shock. I was really devastated by this."
In many ways, Watts was a normal Detroit kid, working part-time at a Checkers fast food restaurant, trying to save money for a car, considering what courses to take at college, riding his bike from Hamtramck down to the RiverWalk on weekends. But in retrospect, Pillow now sees how the young man was deeply disturbed about adulthood and what it entailed.
"A lot of our conversations would be about him getting older and being able to do the things that older people can do," says Pillow. "And he kinda had a thing about – I can't even say this – he had a thing about getting old and being worried about bills and worried about paying for everything because he knows. I would go through my bills with him and say, 'Well, I gotta pay this and pay that. That leaves me only a couple of bucks to do what I need to do, but we gotta pay bills.' And he didn't really like that, if I could say it that way.
"And throughout his life, Bill has come to live with me on two, three, maybe four occasions. But before he came to live with me, he had a lot of pressure of being the parent in the house, if you can understand that, because of his mother's health challenges. He kept having to take on the role of kind of an older person."
Pillow adds that Watts was an excellent swimmer, and that they'd actually discussed a jump from the MacArthur Bridge in one of what must have been many wide-ranging conversations.
"Bill and I had a conversation about jumping off of the Belle Isle Bridge," he says. "We discussed how difficult it would be for anyone to swim in the Detroit River. I've been boating on that river quite a bit in my lifetime and the current is really strong. I've had that discussion with him and I'm just really shocked that he did this."
The emotional wallop experienced by Pillow was only intensified by what he discovered later: Watts had been foreshadowing his intentions on social networking.
