An Ingham County judge sentenced Marcus Lee Hayes to life in prison for the killing and dismemberment of Zaccari Taylor.

Tuesday's hearing is the punishment on a verdict that was already in. WLNS reported first-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence without parole, and that a separate 46-month-to-life term was imposed for mutilation of a corpse. The strangling and the cutting of the body are what investigators, and then a jury, spent two years on. They are not a new accusation filed this week.

An Ingham County judge sentenced Marcus Lee Hayes, 37, of Lansing, to life in prison on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, for the murder and dismemberment of 25-year-old Zaccari Taylor, WLNS reported. WILX News 10 reported the same day that Hayes was sentenced Tuesday to life behind bars, citing court documents. A jury found him guilty in September of first-degree murder and mutilation of a dead body, both stations reported. WLNS reported that first-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and that the judge also handed Hayes 46 months to life for mutilation of a corpse. WILX's account of Tuesday's order described the punishment as life and did not break out the second term. The life sentence on the murder count is the judgment. WLNS attributed it to an Ingham County judge and did not give the judge's name in the account of the term.

WILX reported that the Ingham County Prosecutor's Office announced the verdict on Friday, Sept. 11, 2026, a day after the conviction. The station's September story spelled the victim's name Zacarri Taylor. Its Oct. 20 story spells it Zaccari Taylor. WLNS's sentencing story uses Zacarri Taylor. A WLNS story from August 2025 gives the name as Zaccari Marquise Taylor, 25, of Battle Creek, and WILX's May 2024 account of the court file uses Zacarri Marquise Taylor, 25. The outlets do not agree on the spelling. They agree he was 25 and that he died May 12, 2024. WILX reported the first-degree murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence, which is the term imposed Tuesday.

Authorities say the killing started as a fight. WILX reported that Hayes and his brother, Leonard Hayes, got into a fight with Taylor at a home on Georgetown Boulevard, that Taylor was strangled, and that the brothers and a third defendant then took him to a home on Malcolm X Street and dismembered his body. WLNS reported that Lansing police were notified around 7 a.m. of a fight at a residence in the 2100 block of Georgetown Boulevard, and that investigators later determined a seriously injured person, identified as Taylor, had been taken from that home. Officers found two of the three men, and Taylor's body, in the 1400 block of Malcolm X Street, a little under five miles away, WLNS reported. Then-Police Chief Ellery Sosebee said the body had been dismembered in an attempt to destroy evidence, the station reported.

What the video showed, and what the defendants told investigators, is a separate record from the verdict. WILX reported in May 2024 that court documents described a witness who saw both brothers fighting with Taylor, and a video in which Leonard Hayes fought Taylor after being hit, then strangled him on the living-room floor of the Georgetown Boulevard apartment after Taylor signaled he was giving up and stopped responding. In those documents, WILX reported, Marcus Hayes said he strangled Taylor after his brother did, helped move him out of the camera's view into the kitchen, rode in the back seat with the body, and that they picked up Terrence James Jones, who directed them to a house on Malcolm X Street. The documents said the men discussed burning the body, that Leonard Hayes said it would be dismembered, and that Marcus Hayes dismembered it, WILX reported. Those are statements in the 2024 court file. They are not the words of Tuesday's sentence. The Lansing State Journal, reporting Leonard Hayes's sentencing on May 6, 2026, described security video from the apartment that showed Leonard holding Taylor in a stranglehold for nearly four minutes, long after Taylor stopped moving, and showed Marcus wrapping an arm around Taylor's neck and dragging him out of view. The Journal reported the brothers could be heard talking about cutting up the body, that a forensic pathologist testified Taylor died of asphyxia, and that the head, the legs, and both hands had been removed by the time of the autopsy.

Leonard Hayes was sentenced first. The Lansing State Journal reported that Ingham County Circuit Judge Wanda Stokes, on May 6, 2026, imposed the mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole on Leonard Felton Hayes III, then 44, after a jury convicted him in late March of first-degree premeditated murder and mutilating a body. Stokes told him, "I cannot tell you that I have seen a more heinous crime," and said it went beyond the pale to watch the life go out of a body without responding with empathy, the Journal reported. Assistant Ingham County Prosecutor Nattalie Macomber told the judge that Taylor was killed because he had disrespected Leonard Hayes, and that Leonard was the kind of defendant the Legislature had in mind for a mandatory life-without-parole term, the Journal reported. Leonard did not address the court. His attorney, Kareem Johnson, said he maintains he was acting in defense of himself and his brother, the Journal reported. A lawyer's account of a defense is not a finding that the killing was justified. The jury convicted him.

The third defendant pleaded earlier. WLNS reported on Aug. 19, 2025, that Terrance James Jones, 38, pleaded guilty to acting as an accessory to a felony after the fact, and that prosecutors then dismissed a body-mutilation count and a fourth-time habitual-offender notice. WILX has spelled him Terrence Jones and has described the plea as accessory after the fact to open murder and/or dead body disinterment. The stations do not use the same name or the same charge language. Both describe a guilty plea to an accessory count, which is a conviction, and both say it is a lesser outcome than the murder counts the brothers faced. Jones was one of three men WLNS said were originally charged in the killing. WILX reported in 2024 that court documents listed prior convictions for Marcus Hayes that included fraud and controlled-substance cases. Those priors are history in the file. They are not the counts he was sentenced on Tuesday.

Ingham County Prosecutor John Dewane told WILX in May 2024, while the case was still at the start, that trying to make a body disappear did not surprise him in a person able to kill someone, and that the facts he had heard were graphic. He said his aim was that victims have their day in court and that serious violence in the community be answered by his office. That day came for Marcus Hayes with the September verdict and Tuesday's life term. WLNS and WILX did not report whether he plans to appeal. Hayes and his brother have been convicted and sentenced, and Jones's plea is a conviction on the accessory count. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.