Tia Skinner Case: Murder Plot, Trial, and Resentencing Ruling

The Tia Skinner case is the Michigan prosecution of a 17-year-old girl who, in November 2010, paid her boyfriend and his friend to stab her adoptive parents in their beds in Yale, Michigan. Her father died; her mother survived roughly 26 stab wounds. Skinner was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Two resentencings, a landmark Michigan Supreme Court ruling that bears her name, and a denied U.S. Supreme Court petition later, she is still serving that sentence at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.

The Night of the Attack

Around midnight on November 12, 2010, two young men wearing Halloween masks climbed through an open bedroom window at the Skinner family home in Yale, a small town in St. Clair County. Paul Skinner, 47, and his wife Mara, 44, were asleep. The intruders stabbed both of them repeatedly. Mara suffered approximately 26 stab wounds. Paul fought back, forced the attackers out of the house, then collapsed and died.¹

The couple’s adult son, Jeffrey, had been watching a movie in the basement with his sister Tia when the attack began. He testified that he heard loud, repetitive thumps and found blood covering the walls and staircase. He saw his father come back inside “blood-covered and disoriented” and tried, without success, to revive him.²

Mara survived. She did not see her attackers’ faces and later described the assault as “continuous strikes without pause.”³

The Plot Behind the Attack

Michigan State Police quickly concluded the break-in was staged. Investigators called it “a planned event which involved several days” of preparation.¹ Three people were charged with open murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder: Tia Skinner, 17; her boyfriend of about two weeks, Jonathan Kurtz, 18; and Kurtz’s associate James Preston, 18.⁴

Prosecutors alleged that Tia was furious with her parents for confiscating her phone and forbidding her from seeing Kurtz. She allegedly offered Kurtz and Preston $1,000 each, promising to pay from leftover college scholarship funds.⁵ A Michigan appellate court later described her as the “architect of the plan.”⁶

The preparation was documented in detail at trial. Tia drew a map of the neighborhood and a diagram of the house with notes on how to avoid detection. She left a bedroom window open, cut the screen, and placed a stepladder outside. She set kitchen knives on her bed for the attackers to use. During the night she stayed in continuous text contact with Kurtz and Preston, telling them “the later, the better” and instructing them to “try to make it look like a break-in gone bad.”⁷⁵

While the attack was happening upstairs, Tia stayed in the basement. When Jeffrey tried to go help their mother, she told him, “I can’t come up there, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The trial court found that she had “actively prevented her brother from helping the victims.”²⁵

Tia was not the Skinners’ biological daughter. She was Mara’s biological niece, adopted after an unstable early childhood, and had lived with Paul and Mara since roughly age two and a half. In a 2012 interview she attributed the killing to her temper: “I just had a bad temper and I took it out on somebody who didn’t deserve it, somebody who looked after me and took care of me.” She said she had only had “second thoughts” on the night of the attack itself.⁷

Conviction and Original Sentence

On August 16, 2011, a jury in St. Clair County Circuit Court convicted Tia Skinner of first-degree premeditated murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder.⁸ The prosecution’s case relied on the map, the house diagram, the text records, the knives, the propped-open window, and Tia’s own admission during a police interview that she had discussed killing her parents with Kurtz.⁵

On September 16, 2011, Judge Daniel Kelly sentenced her to mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder count, plus life sentences for the attempted murder and conspiracy counts. Michigan law at the time required life without parole for first-degree murder regardless of the defendant’s age.⁸ Kurtz and Preston were also convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.⁹

Why Skinner Was Resentenced Twice

In June 2012, less than a year after Tia’s sentencing, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Miller v. Alabama, holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment. Because her case was still on direct appeal, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed her convictions in February 2013 but sent the case back for a new sentencing hearing.¹⁰

On July 11, 2013, Judge Kelly reimposed life without parole, telling Skinner, “Justice demands that you serve not one day less.”¹¹

The Michigan legislature then enacted MCL 769.25, setting a framework for sentencing juveniles convicted of first-degree murder. If prosecutors move for life without parole, the court must hold a hearing weighing mitigating factors tied to the defendant’s youth: age, maturity, family environment, the circumstances of the offense, and the possibility of rehabilitation. If prosecutors do not seek life without parole, the court must impose a term of years with a minimum between 25 and 40 years and a maximum of at least 60 years.¹²

The St. Clair County Prosecutor’s Office filed a motion under the new statute seeking life without parole. Skinner’s defense asked to have the determination made by a jury; the trial court denied that request. At the resentencing, the prosecution presented four witnesses and a video, and the defense presented expert testimony, family and prison-official statements, and hundreds of pages of records from Children’s Protective Services, probate court, juvenile court, and federal court. Judge Kelly again imposed life without parole.⁸

The Michigan Supreme Court Ruling That Bears Her Name

Skinner’s appeal set up a Sixth Amendment question the Michigan Court of Appeals had split on: does a jury, rather than a judge, have to decide whether a juvenile receives life without parole? The Michigan Supreme Court took the case up alongside People v. Hyatt, which raised the same question.⁸

On June 20, 2018, the court issued People v. Skinner, 502 Mich. 89; 917 N.W.2d 292. It made three holdings that still govern juvenile life-without-parole cases in Michigan:

MCL 769.25 does not violate the Sixth Amendment. Life without parole is authorized by the jury’s guilty verdict alone, so no additional jury fact-finding is required.
Neither the statute nor the Eighth Amendment requires the trial court to make a specific finding that the juvenile is “irreparably corrupt” or “incorrigible.” Whether a juvenile falls into that category is a moral judgment, not a constitutional fact-finding.
Appellate courts review juvenile life-without-parole sentences under the traditional abuse-of-discretion standard, not a heightened one.

The court sent both cases back to the Court of Appeals for review under that framework.¹³ On November 13, 2018, the Court of Appeals affirmed Skinner’s sentence, finding that the trial court had properly weighed the Miller factors and had not abused its discretion.⁵

Skinner then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Michigan’s scheme violated both the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment by not requiring a finding of permanent incorrigibility before imposing life without parole on a juvenile. The Court denied the petition on April 15, 2019.⁸¹⁴

Where the Case Stands Now

As of mid-2025, Tia Skinner is incarcerated at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility near Ypsilanti, Michigan, serving life without parole. She has been resentenced twice and lost every appeal.¹⁵

In a prison interview, Skinner said she works as a plumber and believes she “can be a productive member of society again if released.” She told the reporter she expects to become eligible for further resentencing at some point given the “regular flux of court opinions” surrounding juvenile lifers in Michigan, though no proceeding is currently pending on her behalf.¹⁵

Her co-defendants’ status has shifted. Because Kurtz and Preston were 18 at the time of the killing, Miller did not originally reach them. That changed after the Michigan Supreme Court barred mandatory life without parole for 18-year-olds in 2022 and then, on April 10, 2025, in People v. Taylor and People v. Czarnecki, extended the same rule to defendants who were 19 or 20 at the time of their crimes, applying the ruling retroactively.¹⁶¹⁷ Kurtz and Preston became eligible for resentencing as a result. As of May 2026, the St. Clair County Prosecutor’s Office was seeking to keep their life sentences in place.¹⁸

Mara, who later remarried and goes by Mara McCalmon, has spoken publicly about the repeated hearings, calling the process “re-victimization.” She told the Times Herald in 2015: “Whenever I have to go back to that courtroom, it brings us right back to the core of what happened.”¹⁹

1
ABC News. Suspects Arraigned in Michigan Parent Stabbing
2
CBS News Detroit. Mother, Son Testify in Yale Stabbing
3
ABC7. Mother, Son Testify in Yale Stabbing
4
Columbus Dispatch. Daughter, 2 Other Teens Held
5
Michigan Court of Appeals. People v. Skinner, No. 317892
6
MLive. Tia Skinner Again Sentenced to Life
7
CBS News Detroit. No-Parole Sentence Thrown Out in Deadly Knife Attack on Parents
8
U.S. Supreme Court Docket. Petition for Writ of Certiorari, Skinner v. Michigan
9
Legal News. Tia Skinner Eligible for Re-sentencing Hearing
10
Detroit Free Press. Michigan Supreme Court: Youth Lifers Must Be Resentenced
11
CBS News Detroit. Michigan Woman Again Sentenced to Life in Dad’s Death
12
FindLaw. People v. Skinner
13
U.S. Supreme Court Docket. People v. Skinner, 502 Mich. 89 – Appendix
14
GetCaseLaw. Skinner v. Michigan, 139 S. Ct. 1544
15
Detroit News. Michigan Juvenile Lifer Convicted Murderers Life Without Parole
16
The Sentencing Project. Michigan Supreme Court Finds Mandatory LWOP Sentences for People Under 21 Unconstitutional
17
Michigan Advance. Michigan Supreme Court Eliminates Automatic Life Sentences for 19- and 20-Year-Old Murderers
18
Times Herald. Prosecutors Fight to Keep Life Sentences for 2010 Murder of Paul Skinner
19
Times Herald. It Never Goes Away for Us