Grandmother Sentenced for 1998 Murder
Lois Arlene Janish, widely known as the grandmother of missing-and-presumed-dead Coral Hall, was recently sentenced for murdering her granddaughter. The 75-year-old Flint resident, who has been under suspicion for almost two decades now, has finally had her day and court. And according to the court records, she chose to keep her silence.
Coral Hall went missing at the age of 14 in 1998 while she was living with her grandmother. She had been taken from her drug addicted mother as an infant, and placed into her grandmother’s care by the court, but it was not a match made in heaven, as they say.
Over the years there were at least five separate CPS investigations into Janish’s care of the girl. One witness testified that he had been offered “time alone with the girl” in exchange for drugs. On another occasion, Janish allegedly admitted to a CPS worker that she used crack cocaine. The day before her disappearance, Coral was taken to CPS offices by a friend, but the agency sent her back to her grandmother.
On September 22nd, 1998, Coral Hall disappeared. Her last known location was a pay phone, which she used to call a friend about a fight between her and Janish. Janish filed a missing person report two days later, and police searched for the girl, but never turned up any evidence of her whereabouts. Some time later, the report was closed, when police received word that Coral had returned home. Years later, however, investigators are saying that there is no evidence to support the fact that the girl was ever seen again.
Janish’s boyfriend, who is now deceased, was at one point accused of sexually abusing Coral. According to Janish, her boyfriend killed Coral when the girl refused to have sex with him. But that story was later changed. In 2011 and 2012, Janish submitted to polygraph tests conducted by the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office. She admitted to drug use, and to the fact that Coral was dead. However, after hiring an attorney, she recanted these admissions.
Police conducted several searches, but never found the girl’s body. In November of 2012, Janish was arrested for a couple of misdemeanors. According to witness testimony, she admitted to some of the other jail inmates that she had killed her granddaughter by hitting her on the head with a hammer and had then scattered her remains.
In 2013 Janish was arrested. She was accused of killing Coral and charged with open murder. But according to her defense attorney, the prosecutor was basing his evidence on Janish’s confessions. And since she had provided a total of 14 different versions of Coral’s disappearance over the years, this was unsound evidence at best.
It was not until January of 2015 that Judge Joseph Farah ruled that there was probable cause to bind Janish over for trial. In early September, Janish pled no contest to second degree murder, however she provided no details of the killing to authorities.
On Friday, November 13th, Janish was sentenced to spend 9 – 25 years in prison for the murder of Coral Hall. Judge Farah admitted that the sentence was below the state’s sentencing guidelines, but explained that the difficulty that prosecutors would have had proving the charges at trial, justified the shorter sentence. He also pointed out that, given her age, the parole board would probably end up deciding whether or not she died in prison.