For sixteen years, the people who loved Ashley Marie Parlier believed she had simply walked away. She had left her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, after an argument with her parents, and when she did not come back, those close to her assumed she needed time to cool off, that she would eventually call. Her parents did not report her missing immediately for that very reason. By the time they realized something was truly wrong, any trail had grown cold.
What no one knew, what no one would know for a decade and a half, was that the argument had given someone a chance. Ashley had walked out of her front door angry, distracted, and alone. He had been waiting for exactly that. Ashley was twenty-one years old.
She disappeared on June 12, 2005. Her sister, Nicole Campen, her only living family member, described her in a way that captured everything: she was just so kind and loving, and she wanted to see the good in people. At the time of her disappearance, Ashley was three months pregnant. Her life was still taking shape, a baby on the way, a future she was still mapping out, and a family who, despite the argument that night, loved her dearly.
She stepped out into that June Michigan night and vanished so completely that those who loved her were left with nothing for sixteen years. No suspect. No answers. Only that particular silence that follows someone who never calls, never writes, never comes home.
Investigators from Calhoun County worked the case for years. They interviewed dozens of people, traveled across the country, and traced Ashley’s male friends and dates, following an investigation that repeatedly ran into dead ends. The case produced no credible suspect. No physical evidence pointed definitively anywhere.
Ashley had simply disappeared the way people sometimes do in cases where no one saw what happened, where the only witness was the perpetrator, and that person had gone home, remained silent, and continued living in a way that left nothing to follow. Harold David Hullman III was twenty-one years old in June 2005. He was a resident of Pennsylvania who had previously lived in Battle Creek, which meant he knew the city, knew the neighborhoods, and knew how to move through them without standing out. He and Ashley knew each other.
He later confessed that during an argument, he knocked her unconscious, struck her on the head with a piece of wood, then drove her body to a wooded area in Newton Township and buried her there. He knew the exact location. He had placed her in the ground himself. After that, he left Michigan.
He returned to Pennsylvania. He built a life on the foundation of what he had done. Six years passed, then ten, then fifteen, and Hullman moved through the world as if Ashley Parlier had simply vanished into the night and never looked back. But he had killed before Ashley.
In 1999, at the age of nineteen, Hullman murdered a man named Joseph Whitehurst in Germany. Because he was under twenty-one, he was tried as a juvenile under German law and served his sentence. Then he came home, and he simply went on. On June 13, 2018, he picked up a woman named Tiana Phillips in Berwick, Pennsylvania.
The two had met online. He drove her around the area, took her into the woods, and beat her to death. Two years later, he met Erica Schultz on the dating app MeetMe. Schultz was reported to have an autism spectrum disorder.
Hullman struck her multiple times with a hammer and then stabbed her multiple times with a kitchen knife. When he was finished, he dumped her body in a wooded area in Butler Township. Shortly after the murder of Schultz, he was found. Railroad workers spotted him wandering along the tracks in Pennsylvania making suicidal statements.
He had cut his own wrists with a box cutter. He was taken into custody. Pennsylvania investigators sat across from him. He confessed to the murder of Phillips.
He confessed to the murder of Schultz, and he led them to Schultz’s body, which was quickly recovered in the wooded area he described. Then, unasked or nearly unasked, he said the name Ashley Parlier. He gave details about her disappearance. He gave investigators the possible location of her body in the northern part of Newton Township in Michigan.
Investigators from Calhoun County traveled to Pennsylvania to interrogate him. He was flown back to Michigan to assist with the search. He was taken to the wooded area he had described and walked through it. The investigators searched twice.
They could not find her. Ashley Parlier has still not been recovered. The man who buried her cannot or will not lead them to the exact spot. Her body remains somewhere in the ground in Michigan, while the man who left her there serves his sentences in Pennsylvania.
An assistant district attorney from Luzerne County named Danzola stated it plainly during one of the proceedings. If these situations do not meet the definition of what a serial killer is, then nothing does. Germany, Michigan, Pennsylvania. A man in his twenties, a man in his thirties, a man in his thirties.
Confirmed victims across three countries and two decades, each killed in a wooded area, each buried or hidden in the ground, places he specifically chose because he knew how long they could keep a secret. On February 1, 2023, Harold David Hullman III pleaded guilty in a Calhoun County courtroom to the murder of Ashley Marie Parlier. On April 10, 2023, he was sentenced to thirty-seven and a half to sixty years in prison. The sentence runs concurrently with the two life sentences he is already serving in Pennsylvania for the murders of Tiana Phillips and Erica Schultz.
He will never leave prison. He will almost certainly die in a state institution in Pennsylvania. He remains the only person who knows exactly where Ashley is. Her sister, Nicole Campen, stood in that Calhoun County courtroom and spoke directly to the man who had taken Ashley from her.
You killed my sister, she said. But you killed so much more. You have stolen a piece of us every day since she went missing until the day we all die. Ashley Parlier was twenty-one years old.
She was three months pregnant. She wanted to see the good in people. She walked out one June evening in Battle Creek believing she was going somewhere, believing she would come back.
And the man she trusted most had already decided that she would not.