Florence Unger: The Last Resort

A Storm-Tossed Marriage Ends at a Lakeside Vacation Spot
(‘Drowning Sorrows,’ Forensic Files)

For a long time, the Ungers looked like an enviably high-functioning family.

Florence stayed home with the kids and enjoyed photography and decorating. Mark was a banker who served as the base coach for their sons’ ball teams.

Every year, the family enjoyed a vacation at a charming resort town in Western Michigan.

Boiling point. But on the first night of their 2003 trip, something went horribly awry between dinner and bedtime, and Florence didn’t make it home alive.

According to Forensic Files, the tragedy was the culmination of Mark Unger’s downward spiral into gambling and substance abuse.

For this week, I looked for clues as to why Mark sank to such depths. I also searched for more background on Florence. So let’s get going on the recap of “Drowning Sorrows” along with extra information drawn from internet research:

Style sense. Born in Detroit on March 16, 1966, little Florence Gabrielle was adopted by Claire Stern and her husband, Harold, a successful lawyer

Florence, known as “Flo” to friends, enjoyed hiking, horseback riding, and interior design, according to the Detroit Jewish News. She had an eye for beauty and “was the person you’d want to be with at a flea market,” her older cousin Elizabeth Stern told the DJN.

Mark Steven Unger came into the world on Nov. 29, 1960. He enjoyed an affluent upbringing in Huntington Woods, Michigan, thanks to his mother, Bette Rosenthal, who owned successful restaurants in the Florida Keys, according to the book Afraid of the Dark by Tom Henderson.

Radio days. As a student at the private Detroit Country Day School, Mark belonged to the swim and football teams and advanced to the state tennis championships in his junior and senior years, according to Afraid of the Dark.

In his young adulthood, Mark had gigs as an ad-copy writer, a restaurant manager, and a bartender before winning a spot as a WJZZ radio sportscaster, a job he loved.

Mark met Florence at the University of Michigan, where she majored in fine arts. After two years of dating, he proposed by hiding an engagement ring in her brownie sundae, according to Tom Henderson’s book. They married on Feb. 24, 1990.

Glamour gal. Once the couple started a family, Florence wanted to stay home, so Mark — who already had to supplement his income with a job at the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame — traded his sportscaster gig for a better-paying career as a mortgage banker.

Friends described the Ungers as a happy couple. With her delicate good looks, charm, and elegance, Flo was “like a movie star,” according to “Lady in the Lake,” an episode of Dark Waters: Murder in the Deep. And the athletic-looking 6-foot-tall Mark was crazy about her and their little sons, Max and Tyler.

Trouble in paradise reportedly began in 1998. Mark became dependent on Vicodin and Norco after back surgery for an old sports injury. A drinking problem soon followed. After an MGM Grand casino opened in Detroit, he took up gambling.

Emotional instability. The couple was already a bit house-poor. They had bought a 3,355-square-foot home in Huntington Woods, Michigan. The fact that Mark lost $7,000 at a betting parlor didn’t exactly help.

According to Dark Waters, he was letting his family down in other ways, too. On one occasion, he blew off their sons’ swim meet. Mark hated his job — which involved extending loans to low-income customers in a way that he felt exploited them — and it showed. He could be angry and hostile at home.

To his credit, Mark recognized he needed help. His father was a heavy drinker who went off on benders, and Mark wanted to break the cycle, according to his older sister, Connie Wolberg, who appeared on Dark Waters.

Sudden hardship. He spent months at a residential rehab facility in late 2002, according to Dark Waters. But he didn’t go back to work when he completed treatment, according to 2008 court papers. Sources vary as to whether he was fired or just refused to return to the bank.

Florence struggled without Mark’s income.

“Her normal was pulled out right before her eyes,” a friend told Dark Waters. Florence took a job as a loan officer at Flagstar Bank to support the family

Show us the money. By this time, the marriage had nearly collapsed under the weight of Mark’s disgruntlement and weaknesses. The once-fit outdoorsman had acquired a double chin and a paunch.

Florence, 37, began an affair with family friend Glenn Stark.

She filed for divorce in August 2003. Mark, 42, wanted to stay together and refused to sign the papers. She and her lawyer reportedly roiled Mark by demanding a full accounting of his gambling losses and the amount spent on his long stretch in rehab.

Where is she? Although angered, Mark still loved Florence desperately and insisted they take Max, 10, and Tyler, 7, on their annual family vacation to the Watervale Inn resort in the lakeside town of Arcadia, Michigan.

Mark would later tell police that on Oct. 24, 2003 – the first night of the trip – he and Florence spent some time together on a boathouse roofdeck.

The next morning, Mark told resort owners Maggie and Linn Duncan that he had awakened to find Florence gone.

Suspicious precision. When the Duncans went to the cottage to break the news to Mark that they found Florence’s lifeless body in Lower Herring Lake, Mark “went ballistic,” started “crying and screaming and hollering,” and “went diagonally down to the water and jumped right in, right next to [Florence],” according to 2008 court papers. 

But Linn hadn’t told Mark where Florence’s body lay in the water, and it wasn’t visible from the cottage.

According to Mark, that night on the roofdeck, Florence asked him to check on the kids, so he went back to the cottage, read them a story, and put them to bed.

What a heel. When he didn’t find Florence back on the roofdeck, he figured she was visiting the Duncans or other friends. He watched a movie and went to bed, only to wake up alone in the morning.

The police found it interesting that, by the time they first arrived at the scene, Mark had already packed up the family’s 1999 Ford Expedition and was getting ready to head home with his sons.

Police saw some broken railing on the roofdeck and noted a large bloodstain on the cement 12 feet below. A search of Mark’s car yielded a pair of his shoes smeared with white paint similar to that on the deck railing.

Perfect storm. Mark hired a team of his own forensic investigators who made a case that the wooden slats cracked after Florence sat on them and she fell to the cement, then rolled into the water.

Investigators didn’t buy it. “Bodies don’t bounce,” the medical examiner said.

They believed Florence and Mark fought that night over her refusal to reconcile with him. Perhaps the rejection awoke his anger over having to sacrifice his sportscaster job as well as his self-loathing over his weight gain and his frustration that he could no longer use substances as a crutch.

Placement off. Mark’s emotions exploded and he threw his wife over the railing, then kicked in some wooden slats to make it look like an accident, the authorities theorized. After 90 minutes — long enough for the pool of blood to form on the concrete — Mike checked on Florence and discovered she was still breathing, so he pushed her body the three feet from its resting place into the water, the forensics suggest.

Testing revealed the fence would remain intact under Florence’s weight of 110 pounds. (I’m a little suspicious of experiments like that — it could be that the particular section she sat on was already damaged or otherwise weakened.)

More telling was the finding that she had no drugs or alcohol in her system that night, making it unlikely she’d carelessly sit atop a fence 12 feet in the air. Plus, the spot where she landed didn’t align with the broken slats.

Her policy. And numerous friends noted that Florence was profoundly afraid of the dark, and wouldn’t have stayed on the roofdeck alone at night. Fred Oeflein, a boater who stopped by the roofdeck that night and offered the couple a ride, said that Florence declined because she feared the dark.

There was also the matter of Mark’s having $750,000 in insurance payouts to gain from Florence’s demise.

In May 2004, seven months after Florence’s death, Mark was charged with murder. Max and Tyler went to live with their maternal grandparents.

Toon time. In the run-up to the trial, Oakland County Circuit Judge Linda Hallmark declined Mark’s request to have the boys returned to him. Claire Stern declared the prosecution “my heroes” and “my daughter’s heroes.”

But Judge Hallmark also admonished both sides for trashing each other publicly.

At the 2006 trial in Benzie County Circuit Court, Mark’s defense trotted out a theory that Florence may have had a seizure that propelled her from the cement into the water. They also showed an animated rendering of how she could have fallen and then tumbled.

Boyfriend spills story. The prosecution accused the defense of trying to paint the dead woman as a “shopping-crazed adulteress” after Glenn Stark, who had moved to Montana by the time of the trial, testified.

Glenn acknowledged that he and Florence exchanged romantic emails for two years and had sex on four occasions — one of them a week before her death, the Detroit Free Press reported. (Still, he seemed to validate Mark’s claim that he didn’t know about the affair until after Florence died. Glenn called it the “best-kept secret in Huntington Woods.”)

Jurors deliberated for 26 hours over a period of four days before finding Mark guilty of first-degree murder.

Dueling matriarchs. Although defense lawyer Robert S. Harrison said the decision stunned him and his client, Mark Unger showed little emotion as he was handcuffed and taken away, according to a Detroit Free Press account.

“Thank you, God,” Claire Stern said after the verdict.

Mark’s mother expressed disbelief. “My son is innocent,” Bette Rosenthal said, according to an AP account. “He would never hurt anyone. I think the world knows that except those people.”

None-too-‘appealing.‘ In 2006, Max and Tyler won a $10 million suit against their father for Florence’s “projected lifetime earnings as a bank loan officer and the personal loss to her survivors.” It’s not clear whether Mark had enough money to pay off on any part of the award, but the boys’ lawyers also pursued claims on property and insurance.

In 2019, their father lost a bid for a new trial on the basis of ineffective counsel. Mark complained that his lawyer didn’t object to “provocative comments in the courtroom,” according to Michigan Live.

Mark is presently offender No. 611081 in the Chippewa Correctional Facility in Kincheloe on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Children successful. Florence is buried at Clover Hill Park Cemetery, which according to the Detroit Jewish News, is known as the “final resting place of Metro Detroit’s most prominent Jewish figures.”

Although she never got to fulfill all of her own promise, it looks as though her sons are on track to realize their potential.

Max Unger earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and has a management job with Spurs Sports and Entertainment. Tyler Unger followed in his mother’s footsteps to a career in design.

You can watch the “Lady in the Lake” episode of Dark Waters: Murder in the Deep on Amazon, but it costs $1.99 even if you have Prime.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube