News Photo by Julie Riddle Retiring Michigan State Police Detective Steve Harshberger reminisces in his Alpena Post office about a career spent investigating crime.

ALPENA — After more than three decades wearing a Michigan State Police badge, Detective Steve Harshberger is hanging up his hat.

The end of the month will bring the end of a decorated career for Harshberger, who is retiring from the MSP-Alpena Post, where he has investigated murders, reopened cold cases, and dug into high-profile, high-stakes crimes.

Harshberger arrived in Alpena fresh from the widely publicized solving of the Dawn Magyar case in Owosso Township, a 30-year-old murder whose dramatic solving — later recorded in a documentary and fictionalized in a movie featuring a character named “Detective Hersh” — included a gun in a river, DNA evidence, and a dig through garbage to collect a cigarette butt.

After the excitement of detective work downstate — including a stint in a unit that investigated doctors who took advantage of their sedated patients or traded narcotics prescriptions for guns — Harshberger expected police work Up North, where he grew up snowmobiling and fishing on weekends, to be boring.

Instead, he’s been busy since the day he started, gathering evidence about crimes of every kind. A county treasurer sent to prison for stealing $1 from the county. Embezzlement from mom-and-pop shops. Drug crime. Sex assaults. Murder-suicides.

“I love finding the bad guy,” said Harshberger, from his office at the Alpena Post, where the inspirational quotes that used to hang on his walls have been taken down.

In the corner of the office, a stack of cardboard boxes holds files concerning the Lisa Knight disappearance, an Alpena abduction still unsolved after almost eight years.

It will be hard to walk away from those boxes, the detective said.

“One day, I’ll get that phone call,” he envisioned — a call telling him the Knight case has, at last, been solved.

In the meantime, as he leaves behind police work and the instinctive cringe when the phone rings at 2 a.m., Harshberger carries with him the crimes he solved but can’t prove in court. The victims who looked to him to provide closure. The children whose families still mourn their loss, the people he fought to help by wearing a badge and investigating crime.

“You don’t change the world,” Harshberger said. “But, if you can change a few pieces here and there, make them better, it’s worth it.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that the Dawn Magyar abduction took place in Owosso Township. That information was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.