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2002–2022 · THE COLD CASE REOPENED
Stacy Maria DeGrandchamp was seventeen, a student at Wayne High School, when she was stabbed during a fight in the backyard of a Fort Wayne home on 15 August 2002, at a party at her ex-boyfriend's house. The other girl in the fight was Holly Boisvert, also seventeen. Boisvert was questioned at the time — she said she had had no knife — and she was not charged. The killing joined the city's cold cases, where it stayed for seventeen years, with a distinction the record preserves: at Wayne High School, a former assistant principal later said, it was common knowledge among the students who was responsible. There was simply no case that could be taken to court.
What changed the case was Stacy's family. In 2019 the family brought new evidence forward, and Fort Wayne homicide detective Brian Martin reopened the investigation, re-interviewing witnesses across several states. In April 2019, interviewed at her home in Wisconsin, Boisvert admitted to investigators that she had carried a knife to the fight — and she handed over a knife, which an Allen County pathologist found to be of the size that inflicted the fatal wounds. On 25 March 2020 she was arrested in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and charged with murder. On 17 December 2021, in Allen Superior Court before Judge David Zent, she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter; the court put the plea to Stacy's family in the courtroom, and the family accepted it. The plea's terms, which the court imposed at sentencing on 14 January 2022, were twenty-five years with five years suspended, to be followed by three years of probation — a sentence whose executed portion, twenty years, is the figure the sentencing coverage headlined. Boisvert apologized in court; the family used the hearing to thank the detective who had reopened the case. The case's afterlife has been national: People magazine covered the arrest and plea, and in 2023 Investigation Discovery opened its series Mean Girl Murders with the case, in an episode titled “Battle of the Besties.” It stands in this record as the city's defining cold-case prosecution of the television era — a schoolyard killing, an open secret, and a family that refused to let the file close.
Sources:
- WANE 15, plea coverage, 17 December 2021, and sentencing coverage, 14 January 2022
- Allen Superior Court record as reported — charge, plea and sentence
- People magazine case coverage; Investigation Discovery, Mean Girl Murders, “Battle of the Besties” (2023)