Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet’s sister and first cousin use the same words to describe their first impression of the husband-to-be she met working at the Ford plant outside Detroit.
“He seemed like a very nice man,” her sister, Louise Collier, and first cousin, Viola Hoston, independently told The Daily Beast.
His name was Roger Sweet and he shoveled coke at the plant while Lizzie Mae handled hot steel.
“He had just lost his wife,” Viola noted.
They saw no reason to doubt Roger when he said his first wife had died after falling in the bathroom and fracturing her skull on a door knob.
“At the time it seemed like it could have happened,” Viola said.
And they had no inkling of the real-life horror to come when Lizzie Mae phoned on Halloween in 1993 to say she had gotten married that very day.
“She called me and said, ‘I have something to tell you… I got married today,”’ Viola recalled. “I said, ‘Today’s Halloween. How did you get married on Halloween?’ I said, “Did you get married with a mask on?’ I wanted to know if they actually got married in a costume. She said no.”
Not until 2001 did the sister, Louise, get a sense of how disguised Roger had always been. The revelation came after her 12 year-old daughter, Misty, went to live with the Sweets for a time in Brownstown, Michigan.
Roger and Lizzie Mae worked different shifts, so he was often at home when she was at the plant. Roger frequently had a developmentally challenged 16-year-old who lived nearby come to the house, supposedly to play with Misty.
“She had the mind of a child,” Misty later said.
But the girl never actually played with Misty and instead spent the time with Roger.
“A couple times I walked in and I caught him with his hand in her pants,” Misty told The Daily Beast. “I didn’t know what molesting was but I knew it wasn’t right.”
Misty told her mother, who told Lizzie Mae, who told the girl’s parents, who do not seem to have told the police. But Lizzie Mae did not leave Roger, as Louise might have expected. And that contributed to a falling out between the sisters.
The extended family continued to share Louise and Viola’s initial impression of Roger.
“It just seemed so far-fetched. It sounds so crazy,” said Viola, who was living and working as a nurse 20 miles away in Detroit. “He has such a great facade. You wouldn’t even think of something for him like that. You would put him right up there with the pope if you asked anybody in my family. We thought so highly of him.”
Then came the Jan. 8, 2007, fire at the Sweets’ home. Roger’s evil would become apparent to everybody, though his benign exterior would persist and just last month would help persuade a federal judge to free him from prison a decade early on murder, child rape, and child pornography charges.
Firefighters who responded to the blaze became suspicious when they saw a gas can in the living room. Lizzie Mae had disappeared, and investigators came to suspect more than arson when they discovered a diary with a white cover in which she recounted harrowing physical abuse. She wrote that she had become so afraid of Roger that she slept on the sofa with a hammer and a butcher’s knife, and sometimes a shotgun.
And there was more.
In searching Roger’s computer for clues to Lizzie Mae’s disappearance, police came upon a huge stash of child pornography of kids as young as 4. Some of it was homemade; more than 1,600 videos and photos of Roger sexually assaulting the developmentally challenged underage girl whom Misty had seen him molesting.
As the computer material prompted the police to start building a sex assault and child pornography case against Roger, the diary led them to take a look at the 1990 death of Roger’s first wife. Melanie Sweet proved to have suffered abuse literally from head to toe and injuries too serious to be explained by a fall. The death was reclassified as a homicide.
Nobody in Lizzie Mae’s family was notified of her disappearance because Roger told the police that she had no relatives in Michigan. Viola learned of it only when she chanced to see a TV news report that showed her face.
“It said, ‘Missing and presumed dead,’” Viola would recall.
Roger’s son and daughter from his first marriage cooperated with the detectives, confirming that he had battered their mother. He was indicted for homicide, and Viola went to the arraignment figuring that if she met his gaze, she would get a clue to what happened to Lizzie Mae.
“When they brought him into that courtroom, that fool dropped his head and never looked up at me,” Viola recalled.
On April 7, 2008, Sweet pleaded guilty to killing his first wife and raping “a special needs child,” as well as producing and possessing child pornography. He was sentenced to 22 years.
In the meantime, Viola came to guess why Lizzie Mae had been a no-show at a family Thanksgiving dinner before she disappeared.
Viola figured why Lizzie Mae had behaved so strangely on a trip to Atlanta for a family funeral. Viola and Lizzie Mae and Roger had all driven down together. But Lizzie Mae had suddenly decided she was going to stay for a week and remained in her hotel room as Viola flew back home.
The explanation in both instances was the same Lizzie Mae’s friends gave for her taking to wear outsized sunglasses.
“She always had on these big sunglasses,” Viola recalled. “I didn’t know why. One of the girls that worked with her said she wore it to hide the black eyes she had.”
Viola decided that on Thanksgiving and in Atlanta, Lizzie Mae had not wanted anybody to see her after she had been beaten so badly the sunglasses could not hide it.
“She would have told me he was hurting her, I would have beat his ass myself,” Viola said.
The talk of abuse was confirmed when the police told Louise and Viola about the diary.
“A lot of abusive things that went on is part of her diary,” Louise told The Daily Beast.
That included feeling the need to sleep with weapons.
“She was that afraid of him,” Louise said.
Louise and Viola learned that at the time she went missing, Lizzie Mae had finally retained a lawyer as a step toward divorce. The police told her family they felt certain Roger had murdered her as well as his first wife.
“They said, ‘Miss Hoston, we know he killed her, and we know he disposed of that body, but we don’t have a body to prove it,”” Viola recalled.
Viola was chilled when she recalled a jest she had once made on seeing that Roger had installed a commercial meat grinder in the couple’s basement, cementing it to the floor. Viola remarked to Lizzie Mae that it was curious because Roger did not cook.
“[Lizzie Mae] said, ‘Roger’s just going to make some homemade sausage,’” Viola would recall. “I said, joking, ‘Don’t let him make you the homemade sausage.’”
Viola told the police about the meat grinder, but it had also disappeared.
“The detectives didn’t know about it,” Viola recalled. “They said, ‘There was no meat grinder in that house.’ They never did find that meat grinder.”
In January 2019, a man hunting for deer antlers found a skull in a swampy area about a mile from the Sweet home. Dental records proved that it was Lizzie Mae’s.
The lower half of her body was found some 200 yards away. The upper body was found in some nearby water where she and Viola had gone in better days.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I used to fish in that water,’” Viola remembered.
The police now had a body, but the medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. Police told the family they remained convinced Roger had killed her, but proving it was another matter.
Viola’s son is an FBI agent and she is not a sheltered soul. But she told the detectives she could not understand now someone who had seemed like such a nice guy had proven to be a monster.
“Miss Viola, this guy has a split personality,” a detective said by her recollection.
“What do you mean, split personality?” she said.
“Well, he’s a different person from what you saw,’” the detective said.
One person who did not make that mistake when it came to Roger was the warden of the prison where he was being held.
In January 2021, Roger applied for compassionate early release because as a 73-year-old with kidney disease, he was particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. One hitch for Roger was that he recovered from a bout of the virus last year and thereby acquired at least a measure of immunity.
“We will not be pursuing a request for compassionate release,” read the Jan. 13 denial issued by Warden Jonathan Hemingway of Milan Federal Correctional Institution in Michigan.
Two days later, Roger took advantage of the Moderna vaccine offered by the prison. He got this first shot and was on his way to the second and further immunity.
That did not stop him from taking his petition for early release to Federal Judge Victoria Roberts, who handled his case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan made its opposition clear.
“He cannot establish extraordinary and compelling reasons because he has received the vaccine for Covid-19 and already recovered from the virus once,” a prosecutor said in court papers. “The chances Sweet contracts the virus again are remote.”
In her decision, Roberts acknowledged the prosecutor’s argument beyond the COVID-19 issue.
“The government says the nature and circumstances of Sweet’s crimes—raping and sexually assaulting a special needs child—are shocking and counsel against his release,” she noted. “It says Sweet’s history and characteristics weigh in favor of continued confinement. Sweet pled guilty to murdering his first wife and police found his second wife’s body less than one mile from his residence—although he was never charged in her death.”
She herself allowed that Roger’s actions were “abhorrent” but went on to say that she is obliged to evaluate whether he “remains a danger to society.”
“Without a single disciplinary action in 14 years of incarceration, Sweet’s behavior demonstrates a respect for the law and indicates how he may perform on supervised release,” the judge then said.
She came abhorrently close to saying that Roger is a nice man.
“The Court GRANTS Sweet’s motion for compassionate release,” she ruled. “The Court REDUCES Sweet’s term of imprisonment to TIME SERVED.”
He will face various restrictions, but after 90 days at a halfway house, he will essentially be a free man after serving not even two-thirds of his sentence.
What makes it harder for Lizzie Mae’s family is that there is no reason to believe he will not begin to collect on her life insurance and her pension unless they succeed in persuading Ford to refuse.
“I really hope that he wouldn’t get anything,” Louise said. “I feel he shouldn’t be able to profit off my sister’s death.”
Louise recalled Lizzie Mae as a generous soul who would “give you the shirt off her back.” Lizzie Mae did have a failing that may also apply to the judge in the case.
“She was too trusting,” Louise said.
For their part, Louise and Viola were left wondering how they could ever trust the criminal justice system.
“They let him out,” Viola said. “What the hell is wrong with the system?”
The death of Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet remains an open case. The police tell Louise they still hope to put Roger back behind bars.
