I was a fairly terrible student in high school. I got good grades, but I could rarely be bothered to do my homework or pay attention in class. Whenever we were assigned a book to read, there was maybe a one in four chance I would actually read any of it, because the assignment was never to just read the book.
We couldn’t just enjoy a good story. We were intended to overanalyze every single word on the page, likely in ways the author never intended, until any passion we could possibly have for the written word was drained from our souls. The selections for our assigned reading barely helped either.
Dickens bored me into a coma. The Bronte sisters made me pray for death. Shakespeare is amazing, but we only got to read one of his plays each year. But of the few books in high school I actually read, my favourite was The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. Published in 1974, it was much more modern than most of our reading material. Because it was modern, the story felt like it could happen at pretty much any school. Most importantly, evil won the day.
The book ends with the entire student body watching and cheering as the story’s protagonist gets the shit kicked out of him by the school bully, and there is absolutely no comeuppance for anyone. The school’s headmaster even chooses to protect the student that orchestrated all the events that led to that happening due to his massive success in increasing the students’ fundraising efforts.
I’ve always preferred stories with darker endings. Happy endings tend to be boring and unrealistic, and they rarely feel like the natural progression of events. Admittedly, most of our required reading in school wasn’t fraught with happy endings, but The Chocolate War was the one book we were just allowed to read and enjoy as a story. However, the more episodes of the Casual Criminalist that I write, the more I find myself wishing for happy endings.
This channel tends to be about murder, so they’re not going to be happy stories, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t entitled to a happy ending now and again. It doesn’t have to be something as dramatic as a would-be victim overpowering and murdering a serial killer, but there are plenty of happy endings available in true crime. Electric chair, lethal injection, murdered in prison by other inmates for the depravity of their crimes, these would all be happy conclusions to most of our episodes.
I’ll have to keep that in mind when I pitch my next topic to Simon, because this story does not have a happy ending. It doesn’t have a happy anything. The only things that will be left for you are disgust, disappointment, and rage. Such is to be expected whenever we cover Simon’s favourite topic: serial rapist child murderers.
Mark Stebbins
Mark Stebbins was a 12 year old boy living in Ferndale, Michigan. As always, to help Simon out Michigan is considered a Midwestern state; it’s the one that borders Canada and has the Great Lakes. Mark was a quiet kid and a loner, but a good student.
On the afternoon of February 15, 1976, he was at the American Legion Hall where his mother worked as a bartender. Unsurprisingly, early afternoon at a bar is not a very exciting place for a 12 year old to hang out, so at 1:30 pm he got bored and told his mother he was going to walk home.
When Mark’s mother returned home that night, she asked his brother Michael if he had come home. He had not, so she called her ex-husband to see if Mark had gone there instead, which he had not. At 11 pm that night, she called the police department to report her son missing.
Four days later, a man was walking his dog through the parking lot of an office building at around 9:30 am. The dog was on a 20 foot leash, so it had plenty of room to run around and investigate anything interesting it happened to see or smell. This didn’t happen, and the man and the dog continued on their walk. Very exciting stuff, I know.
At 11:45, that same morning, Mark Boetigheimer emerged from the office to walk to a nearby drug store on his lunch break. As he was crossing through the same part of the parking lot the man had been walking his dog, something in the corner of the lot caught his eye. It looked like a discarded mannequin, so he walked over to investigate. As he got closer, he could see what it really was.
Lying in the parking lot, in plain view, was the body of Mark Stebbins. There was only a window of a little over two hours in which he could have been placed there, but sadly these were the days before CCTV cameras were everywhere.
Mark was wearing the same clothes as when he disappeared, but freshly washed. The cause of death was suffocation, but there were also rope burns on his wrists, ankles, and neck. Wherever he had been kept for the past four days, he had been bound tightly. The autopsy also revealed that he had been sodomized with a foreign object.
Jill Robinson
Like Mark, twelve year old Jill Robinson was described as a loner and a good student. Quiet? Not so much. Jill would frequently get into arguments with her mother, Karol, and the day of December 22, 1976, was no different.
Karol had asked Jill to help her make biscuits for dinner. When she refused, Karol told her to get out of the house until she was ready to be part of the family. Regrettable last words to say to your child, but they had had similar arguments to this in the past and Karol figured she would leave for an hour or so and come home. Jill went upstairs, got dressed for the cold weather, and packed her bag with some clothes and a blanket so she could do as she was told and run away.
She went out the door and rode her bike away.
Jill’s parents were also divorced, so when we say she was running away she was most likely just planning to make the 5 or 6 mile bike ride to her father’s house. The average bike speed for a 12 year old is about 9 mph, so that’s really not that far, assuming she knew the way there.
Shortly after she left her house, Jill was seen at a local hobby shop just four and a half blocks from her home. Her bike would be found behind that store the next day.
As we said, Karol expected her daughter to return home in an hour or two, so when several hours passed she finally called Jill’s father, Thomas. She had never made it to his house, so at 11:30 pm he called the police to report her missing.
Christmas came and went. Jill had been particularly excited for Christmas because she had been able to buy presents for her family on her own, but all of the family’s presents sat under the tree, still wrapped. Her mother and two sisters did not want to have Christmas without her.
The next day, her body was found on I-75 in Troy, Michigan. She was also left out in the open, this time in view of the Troy police station. She was wearing the same clothes and backpack as when she ran away. She had been taken to this location where she was then shot in the face at close range with a shotgun.
At first, police were not sure these crimes were related. One was a male victim who was bound, sexually assaulted, and asphyxiated. The other was a female victim who showed no signs of being restrained, was not sexually assaulted, and was shot. On the surface, the only similarity was that they were young kids who disappeared and were found four days later in plain view. That’s something to take note of for sure, but not a clear link.
However, the public felt differently. While police insisted there was not a serial killer on the loose, the population of Oakland County wasn’t convinced. People were scared, but it was only after the next victim that full blown panic would ensue.
Kristine Mihelich
Kristine Mihelich was a 10 year old girl from Berkley, Michigan. On January 2, 1977 she complained to her mother, Deborah, that she was bored and wanted to go to 7-Eleven to buy a magazine. Normally Deborah would never let her cross 12 Mile road on her own, but because Kristine had helped out with some chores earlier her mother relented. She instructed Kristine on how to cross the street and told her to hurry.
When Kristine failed to return within 30 minutes, her mother called the police. She had disappeared in broad daylight without a trace. As she continued to remain missing for days, tensions quickly began rising. Deborah’s friends and neighbours raised $17,000 in the hopes that a ransom request would come in, with many offering to mortgage their houses as well.
The only way Deborah could cope with her child being missing and not having any answers was to stress eat to the point of gaining 30 pounds during her disappearance. And the whole time, she had to try to ignore her two younger sons who kept asking when Kristine was coming home.
After an excruciating 19 days, they would finally get the answer: never. A postman in Franklin Village, Michigan was driving the same route he had for eight years when he saw something on the side of the road on Bruce Lane and decided to take a look. He frequently would pick up things people had thrown out as junk, and perhaps whatever had caught his eye might be something he could make use of or pawn off at a flea market. Instead what he saw was the body of Kristine.
Her legs were tucked up towards her chest, indicating she was carried from the car the same way a parent would carry their child. The killer had then crossed her arms, laid her in the snow, and packed snow on top of her as evident by fairly obvious handprints. Like Mark, Kristine had died of suffocation, and like both others she was wearing the same clothes she had on when she disappeared. Despite being missing for 19 days, the autopsy showed she had been dead for less than 24 hours by the time she was found.
All three missing children had been bathed, fed, and their clothes had been washed. News outlets at the time described them as having been “well cared for”, which if you ignore the sexual abuse to one of them and the shotgun to the face of another, then sure I guess. But it was because the children were fed, washed, and given clean clothing that the media started referring to the culprit as the “Babysitter Killer”. Now was the time for panic to ensue.
Parents were terrified. Even those that only lived a block away from their child’s school would drop them off and pick them up at the doors to the school. Children weren’t let out of their parents’ sight. A total of 35 police officers from 9 different departments made up a task force that the county prosecutor called “the strongest effort I’ve ever seen in this county.” Once the FBI got involved, it would become the largest task force the entire country had ever seen until that point.
Police staked out Kristine’s funeral, running the license plate of every single person who showed up, though nothing would come of this. Another possible lead was the fact that her body was found on Bruce Lane. At the time, a local psychiatrist, Dr. Bruce Leonard Danto, was doing a lot of interviews to talk about the case and his opinions on the killer. It is believed that Bruce Lane was chosen as Bruce L. represents the doctor’s first and middle name.
Assuming the 7-Eleven currently on 12 Mile Road hasn’t changed location, it’s only six miles from where Kristine’s body was found, so there’s always the chance it’s a coincidence. But given that Jill’s body was placed in view of a police station, it was probably meant as a message. Whether this was an attempt to open a line of communication or simply taunt the doctor is unknown.
Timothy King
Timothy King was the final confirmed victim of the Oakland County Child Killer. If it seemed like a demographic was forming beyond just the age of the victims, Tim broke that mold. The other three victims were all introverted children of divorce, but Tim was a popular, athletic kid whose parents were still married. It was the night of March 16, 1977, and Tim was about to be home alone for the first time ever.
Tim’s parents had gone out to dinner at a nearby restaurant, leaving Tim with his older sister Catherine. He had two older brothers as well, one of whom was babysitting a neighbour’s kid and the other who was rehearsing a school play. Catherine was about to go out for the night as well, but first she lent Tim 30 cents because he wanted to go buy some candy.
It wasn’t unusual for Tim to go to the store by himself; it was a trip he had made many times before. He asked Catherine to leave the door ajar so it would be easier for him to get back inside, then grabbed his skateboard and football and went to the store while Catherine went on her way.
Tim made the trip to the store three blocks away, and at around 8:30 pm, after purchasing his candy, he left out the back door into the dark parking lot. Thirty minutes later, his parents returned home from dinner to find the door ajar and the house empty. The family called everyone and searched everywhere, but there was no sign of Tim.
Barry King, Tim’s father, made several public pleas to the kidnapper in the hopes that maybe they would let his son go. He also commented on something that seems obvious, but is still important to potentially identifying the killer. Barry stated that the week before his disappearance, Tim had told his mother that he wouldn’t talk to strangers, he’d run away from them.
These children who were disappearing were doing so in public, sometimes in daylight. There was a very good chance that whoever was responsible was someone that would not be seen as a stranger. Even if it wasn’t a person they personally knew, the killer could either be or be dressed like a trusted authority figure such as a police officer. It could have even been another kid, as everything we were taught about “stranger danger” only applied to adults, not to our peers.
Another seemingly obvious but important statement came from a neighbour of the King family. “When it happens to other people, you feel sympathy. When it strikes your neighborhood, you’re scared.” Michigan isn’t quite in the top 10 for states with the most violent crime, but it’s pretty close.
However, that crime is very disproportionate. About 30% of all violent crime in Michigan takes place in Detroit, whereas Oakland County is the most affluent county in the state. There’s speculation that these crimes were committed as part of some sort of vendetta against the wealthy.
Barry made one final televised plea to the killer from the police station. “I don’t know if you have children, or if you want them. Please treat Tim the same way you would your own child. Talk to him, he’s a talkative kid. I don’t know if you have a brother or want one, but Cathy, Chris, and Mark, said to treat him just like you would a brother. But we want him back. Please send him.”
Sadly, that didn’t happen. Six days after he had been kidnapped, a passing motorist spotted an arm poking out of the snow in a shallow ditch by a busy intersection. Like the others, Tim had been fed and cleaned, and was wearing the newly washed clothing he had on the day he vanished. His skateboard was found 15 feet away from his body. The autopsy revealed he had died of suffocation just six hours before being found, and that the killer had fed Tim both his and Simon’s favourite meal: Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Fuck Your Bill of Rights
In everything that has happened so far, there was very little evidence. There was however a clear modus operandi. All of the children were killed and dropped off on days that it snowed. All of them were placed publicly where they would be found. During their time in captivity, all appeared to be mostly cared for, except for obviously the sexual assault and rope burns on the two boys. They were also all abducted within one mile of Woodward Ave between 9 Mile and 15 Mile roads.
From this, the Oakland County Task Force released a suspect profile on the day that Tim went missing. Some of this seems like a bit of a stretch, but I’m not a detective. The profile said that the suspect was a white male, 20-30 years old, above average intelligence and education, homosexual, compulsively/fanatically clean, mental problems (yeah, no shit), works a white collar 9-5 job, has December-January off from work for vacation, has a one family home with an attached garage, has had prior contact with the police, and is seeing a psychiatrist.
The thing with all that is, as much as criminal profilers are portrayed in television and movies as sorcerers with psychic powers, there’s a reasonable chance that profiling is going to go the way of the polygraph test. It’s still thoroughly used and many swear by it, but evidence suggests that profilers are only slightly better than a coin flip or a random person off the street at guessing traits of criminals.
Despite the extensive profile, there were only two bits of evidence the police had. One was dog hairs that were found on all four bodies. Those hairs were from the same dog. Even though it was pretty clear already, this gave a conclusive link to the four slain children. The most important part of this was tying Jill to the other three despite her suffering a gunshot wound rather than suffocating like the rest.
The other piece of evidence was everyone’s favourite and most reliable evidence of all: eyewitness testimony. First, while we’re on the topic of unreliable evidence, there’s quite a bit of discussion about polygraph tests in this case. Who took them and who didn’t, who passed or failed, and what supposed expert misread the results. We’re going to ignore all of that because this is 2022 not 1977 so we know polygraphs are total bullshit, but if anyone really cares I figured I’d let you know that information is out there if you’re so inclined.
Back to the eyewitness testimony, a woman came forward saying she saw a child talking to a man in the parking lot where Tim disappeared, and that she believed the child she saw was Tim. She gave a description of the man from which a police sketch was drawn, and she claimed the car he was in was a blue AMC Gremlin with a white stripe and whitewall tires. All of the sudden, the Gremlin was the entire story. Pictures of the crude police sketch and the car were circulated everywhere in thousands upon thousands of flyers.
So what were the police to do with this information? According to Prosecutor of Oakland County L. Brooks Patterson, they should stop any and every car that looked suspicious and he would take the heat for it. He said that normally to pull over a car you had to have “probable cause”, a phrase he stated in air quotes, but he didn’t care. Oakland County was suspending the fourth amendment.
Over the next few days, countless cars were pulled over, and every blue Gremlin was probably pulled over several times. Brooks noted that while the police had little, if any, probable cause for all of these stops, there wasn’t a single civilian complaint. They all just wanted to help catch the killer. Maybe that’s true, or maybe it was just a world without body cam footage to tell us how people really responded.
Either way, this is America; you can’t just selectively suspend parts of the Constitution because it’s convenient. If Governor Charlie Baker knocked on my door and said “Hi, we need to fumigate the barracks at Hanscom Airforce Base so Staff Sergeant Sully is going to be sleeping here for the next three nights,” it is my Constitutional right to tell them to go fuck themselves, and no one can take that away from me.
Ultimately, for all of the Constitutional violations, nothing came of these searches. Years later, the blue Gremlin had been largely dismissed as a hoax, false lead, or as part of a police cover up. There’s also the chance it was nothing nefarious and the woman who reported it was just mistaken, or that the car was immediately disposed of following the thousands of flyers letting the killer know their car had been marked.
Without the car, all that was left was a few dog hairs to link the crimes, as well as one hair found on each of the male victims, though this was still about a decade before DNA evidence would first be used in any case. Still, the police were able to come up with some persons of interest, because wealthy communities are apparently the breeding ground for pedophile sex rings.
Christopher Busch
In an interview decades later, Barry stated that he never blamed Tim’s abduction on himself for taking his wife out to dinner that night, and good on him. It’s gotta be really hard as a parent in a situation like this not to second guess every decision you’ve ever made and constantly wonder if things would be different if you had acted differently. Tim had skateboarded to that store to buy candy plenty of times without incident, and even if the parents were home he probably still would have been allowed to do the same.
Barry may not have blamed himself, but he never gave up on trying to identify the killer, either. Over the decades, he spent thousands of dollars on Freedom of Information Act requests. The information itself is free, but you have to pay the hourly wage of whoever spends their time finding the files for you, typically ranging from $23-85 per hour depending on how important the person searching is. The result was over 3,400 pages of files related to the case being released to Barry, much of which he proceeded to release to the public.
This is how the public found out about Christopher Busch.
Chris had been in police custody shortly before Tim’s disappearance on suspicion of being involved with child pornography. The police had been tipped off to Chris by Gregory Greene when he was arrested on child sexual assault charges. Chris and Greg, ages 26 and 27 respectively, were both charged with sexually assaulting young boys. For the identical charges, Greg was sentenced to life in prison. Chris received probation.
How could such wildly different sentences for the same crimes possibly make sense, you ask? Easy, Michigan is home to Detroit, the motor city, and Chris’s father was an executive financial director and one of the vice presidents of General Motors. In late 1978, about 20 months after the Oakland County Child Killer had gone dormant, Christopher Busch committed suicide. I mean, he committed suicide about as much as Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, but that’s how it was officially ruled by the police.
Chris was found dead in his apartment from a gunshot wound to the head. There were four shell casings on the floor, he had been shot right between the eyes, there was absolutely no gunpowder residue on his hands, and he was in bed tightly wrapped under his blankets, including his arms. Just your run of the mill, in no way physically impossible suicide.
In 2012, the crime scene photos were obtained by Barry King’s FOIA requests and released to the public. By this time, Chris had been ruled out as the killer by DNA evidence we’ll discuss later. However, these photos resulted in a lot of talk about a police cover up, or at the very least police incompetence. In Chris’s room were several ropes that some claimed to be bloody ropes.
Allegedly they were tested and there was no blood on them, and they didn’t look bloody in the images I saw. But there was one indisputably important item in the room.
On the wall was a hand drawn picture of a boy screaming. Here is the picture he drew, side by side with the photo of the first victim, Mark Stebbins. Mark was wearing a parka when was abducted, exactly like the child in the pencil drawing is wearing.
People immediately picked up on how alike they looked, especially the rather unique and identifiable nose. When Michael Stebbins saw the sketch, there was zero doubt in his mind. His response was “that looks exactly like Mark being sodomized.” That seems overly specific and saying it looked like Mark screaming would have sufficed, but either way he was 1000% sure this was a picture of his brother.
Oh, did I mention that at the time of the abductions Chris was driving a blue Chevy Vega with white stripes? The AMC Gremlin’s advertising campaign was basically “It’s the exact same fucking car as the Vega, but cheaper.” Considering that Chris was a convicted child sex criminal who was clearly known to the police since they had him in custody shortly before Tim’s disappearance, you think they might they’d have taken him back into custody. They were already suspending people’s Constitutional rights, so what’s the harm in keeping a sex criminal off the street for a few days just to be sure?
There seems to be strong circumstantial evidence that Chris was involved, but the DNA evidence says he was not the killer. Then there’s the subjective element. Chris’s brother in a later interview would describe him as a fun and gregarious man who loved food, skiing, and riding his motorcycle. Others would describe him as a fat fucking slob who could barely take care of himself, let alone care for a child for 19 days.
Because of how long the kids were held captive, the theory that there was at least two people involved went all the way back to 1977 when the crimes first started happening. This information definitely lends credence to that theory, but if Chris wasn’t the killer then who else could have been involved? It looks like we’ll have to investigate Michigan’s wealthiest county’s thriving pedophile community.
North Fox Island
They say that there are no original ideas left in the world, and it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Island” was just another cheap Hollywood remake.
Jerry Richards was the gym teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Port Huron, Michigan, and he was a real piece of shit. He was the sort of gym teacher that was big on patting boys on the ass and being in the locker room while they showered. You know, the sort of gym teacher that none of these boys had ever experienced before or ever would again, because that shit’s not normal.
Jerry introduced his students to a man that he referred to as his Uncle Frank. “Uncle Frank” was millionaire Francis Sheldon, a geologist and heir to a lumber fortune. Frank had outbid the state of Michigan to purchase nearby North Fox Island. The first thing he did after buying the island was to build an airstrip for his private plane. That plane would be used to ferry both Michigan’s wealthy pedophiles and young boys to and from the island.
Students would be taken from the gym class to the private island, with the consent of their parents, as a special reward for being the top performers in class. Frank also opened a camp for young boys named Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, aka Brother Paul’s Nature Camp. The island was completely covered in cameras, and everyone had to be naked at all times, because “that’s what people on islands do.”
I’ll spare you the rest of the graphic details about what happened on that island, I only wish I could’ve spared myself. Suffice to say a lot of boys were treated to what they were told was the privilege of visiting the island where their trust and innocence was preyed on by depraved millionaires, all masterminded by a wealthy, connected, and very well known philanthropist. And of course, the children were supplied both by that philanthropy and a fake boy’s camp as well as by at least one school teacher; the sort of person a child on the street would not consider a stranger.
A few weeks after Tim’s murder, a psychiatrist received an anonymous letter signed only with the name “Allen”. Allen claimed to be a BDSM slave of the killer who he called “Frank”. He wrote that he and Frank had served in the Vietnam War together, where Frank was traumatized by having to kill children. He had decided to take out his anger on the children of the affluent members of society who had sent people like him to war.
As always, this letter could just be a hoax. The author arranged a meeting with the psychiatrist through the newspaper classified ads, but he never showed to the agreed upon destination and no more communication occurred. Frank Sheldon also was not the killer, or at least not the sole killer. First of all, that description of a war vet taking vengeance on the wealthy elite doesn’t really sound something a guy with his own private island would do.
These murders also took place in 1976 and 1977, but Frank fled the country in 1976 after being tipped off that the FBI was coming for him.
If the letter was genuine, there is the possibility that the name Frank was chosen because the killer was an associate of Frank’s, and they wanted to guide authorities towards Frank’s known associates, of which there were many. There is also the theory that the killer may have been a victim of Frank’s. Abuse has the tendency to create abusers, and the island was in operation for ten years. It’s absolutely possible that the killer was either a previous associate or previous victim of Frank’s, but again there was no physical evidence other than two matching but unidentified hairs that could pinpoint a suspect.
Lawson and Lamborgine
When these serial murders were taking place, they had the largest task force in American history trying to solve them. By 1979, there was only one state detective left on the case. And for a long time, nothing happened. By a long time, I mean 20 years. In 1999, they exhumed the body of one of the suspects in the case to test his DNA against the hairs that were found. DNA testing had improved dramatically, and they figured it was worth a shot. The exhumed body was not a match.
The next possible break in the case would not come until 2006 when Richard Lawson of Detroit was arrested for murder. Interestingly, while he was in custody he didn’t want to talk about his murder case at all. He wanted to talk about the Oakland County Child Killer. Richard didn’t want to go to jail, so he started telling everything.
He had been part of a child sex ring of five people out of Detroit. Richard divulged a lot of information. Much of what he said was known to the police but had never been released publicly, but he had a lot of good new information as well. While leaving the courthouse one day he told reporters that he knew who the murderer was, but he wouldn’t tell them because he wanted to make a deal.
No deal was made, and he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder with an additional 28 counts of child sexual assault being added for later prosecution.
In Richard’s naming of names, he implicated the only other living member of their five person sex ring, a man he called Ted Orr. When police failed to find anyone with that name, he told them that he believed the guy’s real last name was “Lam…something.” Not long after, police picked up Theodore Lamborgine.
Police didn’t believe that either of these men was the killer, particularly as they were based out of Detroit. It’s only a half hour drive from Detroit to Oakland County, but these pedophile rings probably have turf cut out the same way gangs do, or something like that. They may not have been the killer, but because they were reasonably close to Oakland County and because Richard had so much good information, authorities thought it was likely that these men could know who the real killer was.
Ted was taken into custody and charged with 19 counts of sexually assaulting children. The police hoped they’d be able to lean on him and get information out of him. They offered him a deal in exchange for his cooperation. In a remarkable turn of events that the police had never before seen, Ted didn’t consider the deal for a moment. He immediately pled guilty to all 19 counts, including three life sentences, without saying a word.
It’s still not evidence, but the police felt this was extremely telling. These Detroit pedophiles weren’t rich and connected like the Oakland County types. They almost definitely had the information the police needed, but they had been able to live their disgusting criminal lives for 40 years without any repercussions. It seemed almost certain that they had known to remain silent in exchange for decades of operating without scrutiny, and now that they were in custody, they had to pay back those years of protection.
Sure, Richard had been quite talkative, but aside from ratting out his partner, he didn’t give any actionable information. All of the intel he gave was solid, but it was also all about people who were dead, or about Frank who had fled the country (and at this point was presumed to be dead, most likely dying around 1996 in Amsterdam). They were the most promising suspects the case had seen in 30 years, but it still amounted to nothing.
The last reports I could find are that both men are serving their life sentences, but that’s from a few years ago so with any luck they’ve died by now.
The Third Hair
Archibald Edward Sloan was, surprise surprise, a child molester. Seven years after Timothy King’s death, Archibald was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. In January of 1985, he was sentenced to life in prison where he remains to this day. With him already in jail for life, it kind of makes sense then Archibald would no longer be pursued as a lead.
For whatever reason, in 2009, a 1966 Pontiac Bonneville that belonged to Archibald was searched. Inside the car, they found a hair. That hair was a DNA match for the hairs found on Mark and Tim’s bodies. Finally, there was a new suspect. A new suspect whose DNA did not match the hairs found. God fucking damnit.
There are frequent references to the Michigan pedophile community throughout this investigation, and it would seem they really were a community. Not only did they have their own private island and use power and influence to protect one another, but Archibald would also loan out his car to people for whatever they wanted.
Fortunately, a match did turn up for the hair. Investigators pointed to James Vincent Gunnels, the DNA match, as the best lead there had ever been in the decades long search for the killer. When he was approached by news reporters who asked to interview him outside his home, he shocked them by actually agreeing to talk.
In James’s own words, “My heart goes out to those families. It really, really, really does. I don’t feel that they were served justice through any of this.” They were definitely not served justice, but why would he even talk to the press? Not only that, when he was brought in by the police why did he ask to be allowed to speak to Barry King who was still very publicly pursuing the case?
Barry was hesitant, but law enforcement said that sometimes criminals feel remorse and will confess things to the victim’s families. It was a long shot, but they felt it was worth it. Barry and his son Chris met with James, but James did not confess. Barry felt that the story James told him was believable.
It wasn’t some absurd, off the wall fantasy, but it did contradict statements he had made over 30 years earlier. The meeting did little to clear anything up, and it is believed that James knows a lot more about what happened than he wanted to say.
If you’re wondering why on Earth James wasn’t charged with the crimes if he was a DNA match for all three hairs found, there’s some bad news on that front. Except for at the very root of the hair, hair only contains mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is much shorter, and therefore it cannot be used to pinpoint a specific person with a huge degree of accuracy.
It is also only passed down only by the mother, not by both parents, meaning the mitochondrial DNA of a woman and all of her offspring will be the same; there is only a slight chance of any variation. Think about extending that by 10, 20, or 50 generations, and you’ve probably figured out the problem.
The odds of having a random person matching a sample of nuclear DNA, assuming no contamination or anything, are about one in 70 trillion. That’s pretty conclusive. The odds of a random person matching a sample of mitochondrial DNA are about one in 150. Not 150 million or something, just one in 150. James’s mother and brother would have both matched, as would hundreds of thousands of other residents of Michigan. This by itself would not be nearly enough to charge him with a crime.
Even using it as part of a larger picture, it unfortunately doesn’t do much. James has a long history of property crime, but he has never been charged with any crimes of a sexual nature. He was also 15-16 years old during the course of these murders. This would make it unlikely that he was the killer as there’s seemingly no way he could have kept someone kidnapped and taken care of for 19 days.
It could, however, make him an accomplice, especially as it is known that he had interacted with Christopher Busch before Chris definitely committed suicide. As a teenager, James would have been another sort of person that would likely not be seen by children as a stranger.
As for the nature of the interactions between James and Chris, police have stated that James was sexually abused by Chris, as was James’s younger brother. So the best piece of evidence that has ever existed in this case is borderline useless DNA that connects to a man that was 16 years old at the time of the crimes and is a known victim of abuse by one of the people who is suspected to be involved in the case. Fantastic.
There is only one other piece of vaguely incriminating evidence against James that I could find reference to. I cannot find the actual recording, but according to a memo prepared by Barry King, one of his FOIA requests included a recorded conversation between James and his sister while he was in prison. She asked him about one the hair found on one of the victims and his answer was, “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
That’s potentially incriminating, but hardly proof of anything. As I can’t find the recording or transcript anywhere, we also have to take Barry’s word for it. It’s easy to be skeptical of information and theories from the family as they are often too close to the case, but personally I believe Barry remained remarkably level headed throughout over 40 years of investigation into the murders, so I’ll take him at his word.
Wrap Up
There is nothing even close to a happy ending here. Barry King died in 2020 at the age of 89 without ever knowing who killed his son, despite tirelessly dedicating himself to the case for 43 years. When all is said and done, all we have is a loose theory.
It is believed that James Gunnels may have been used as a lure. Either he could have been groomed by Chris Busch or he simply went along with it to avoid personally suffering more abuse. From there, Chris brought the kidnapped children to…someone. We don’t really know.
There were a lot of sex criminals in this story, and they all seemed to either have been involved or know the people that were, but they aren’t talking and there’s no physical evidence. Then there’s Chris’s suicide. He may have killed himself because he was seen as a liability, someone who would crack under pressure. Maybe he thought someone would realize that the Gremlin they had spent years searching for was actually his Vega and he wanted to tie up that loose end.
And what of Jill and Kristine? All of the child abusers in today’s story targeted boys, and the girls seemed to be well taken care of until their deaths. There were no rope burns or other signs of being restrained like with the boys, and they had not been sexually assaulted. There seemed to be a clear motive for kidnapping the boys that wasn’t present with the girls. It also isn’t clear why one of the girls was shot when the other three were all suffocated.
We may never be able to answer any of these questions. Barring a surprise deathbed confession by one of the people involved, it doesn’t seem that there’s anywhere the answers can come from.
I’m sorry, Simon. I promise the two episodes I pitched last night are going to be a lot more fun.
Key Takeaways
- Four children aged 10-12 were abducted and murdered in Oakland County, Michigan between 1976-1977, with bodies found cleaned, fed, and publicly displayed.
- The killer’s care for victims during captivity earned them the ‘Babysitter Killer’ moniker, despite sexual assault on two male victims and one girl shot with a shotgun.
- Police suspended Fourth Amendment rights to stop cars matching a witness’s blue Gremlin description, but the lead was later dismissed as a hoax or false lead.
- Wealthy pedophile networks including North Fox Island and Detroit sex rings surrounded the case, with suspects like Christopher Busch receiving probation due to family connections.
- Barry King, father of victim Timothy King, spent 43 years and thousands on FOIA requests pursuing answers but died in 2020 without knowing his son’s killer.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who were the four confirmed victims of the Oakland County Child Killer?
The four confirmed victims were Mark Stebbins (12, abducted February 15, 1976), Jill Robinson (12, abducted December 22, 1976), Kristine Mihelich (10, abducted January 2, 1977), and Timothy King (11, abducted March 16, 1977).
What was the common modus operandi of the Oakland County Child Killer?
All four children were abducted within one mile of Woodward Ave between 9 Mile and 15 Mile roads, killed and dropped off on days that it snowed, placed publicly where they would be found, and appeared to be mostly cared for during captivity (bathed, fed, and given clean clothes). Three died of suffocation while Jill Robinson was shot in the face with a shotgun.
Why was the killer nicknamed the ‘Babysitter Killer’?
News outlets at the time described the children as having been ‘well cared for’ because they were fed, washed, and given clean clothing during their captivity, leading the media to refer to the culprit as the ‘Babysitter Killer’.
What was the significance of the blue AMC Gremlin in the investigation?
A woman claimed she saw Timothy King talking to a man in a blue AMC Gremlin with a white stripe and whitewall tires in the parking lot where he disappeared. Police circulated thousands of flyers with a sketch of the man and car, and pulled over countless vehicles. Years later, the blue Gremlin was largely dismissed as a hoax, false lead, or part of a police cover up.
Who was Christopher Busch and why was he suspected?
Christopher Busch was a convicted child sex criminal whose father was a General Motors executive. He was in police custody shortly before Tim King’s disappearance on child pornography suspicion, received probation while his accomplice got life in prison, drove a blue Chevy Vega with white stripes (similar to the Gremlin description), and had a hand-drawn picture of a boy in a parka resembling Mark Stebbins on his wall when he was found dead from an apparent suicide in 1978. He was later ruled out as the killer by DNA evidence.
What was North Fox Island and how was it connected to the case?
North Fox Island was purchased by millionaire Francis Sheldon, who used it as a location for a child sex operation involving wealthy pedophiles. Boys were ferried there via private plane from a fake camp called Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission. An anonymous letter signed ‘Allen’ claimed the killer was a BDSM slave of someone named ‘Frank’ and had served in Vietnam with him, possibly referring to Sheldon or an associate.
What was the significance of the dog hairs found on the victims?
Dog hairs from the same dog were found on all four bodies, providing a conclusive link between the four slain children. This was particularly important for tying Jill Robinson to the other three victims despite her different cause of death (shotgun versus suffocation).
Who was James Vincent Gunnels and what was his connection to the case?
James Vincent Gunnels was identified as a mitochondrial DNA match for hairs found on Mark Stebbins and Timothy King. He was 15-16 years old during the murders, had a history of property crime but no sexual offenses, and was a known victim of sexual abuse by Christopher Busch. Police believed he may have been used as a lure or accomplice, but the mitochondrial DNA match alone (odds of one in 150) was insufficient to charge him.
What happened to Barry King, Timothy King’s father?
Barry King tirelessly dedicated himself to investigating his son’s murder for 43 years, spending thousands of dollars on Freedom of Information Act requests that resulted in over 3,400 pages of case files. He made public pleas to the kidnapper during the abduction and met with James Gunnels in hopes of getting a confession. He died in 2020 at age 89 without ever knowing who killed his son.
Why was the case never solved?
Despite the largest task force in American history at the time, the case lacked conclusive physical evidence. Key suspects were ruled out by DNA, died, or refused to talk. The mitochondrial DNA match to James Gunnels was not specific enough for charges. Multiple pedophile rings operated in the area with apparent protection from wealthy and powerful individuals.
Christopher Busch’s suspicious death cut off a promising lead, and surviving suspects like Theodore Lamborgine immediately pled guilty to other charges without cooperating. Barring a deathbed confession, there appears to be no source for answers remaining.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: UNSOLVED: The Oakland County Child Killer
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
