The Kill Jar

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  For Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, and Timothy King.

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  And for Dani, for turning on a light.

  Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

  —BOB SEGER

  FOREWORD

  Cathy Broad

  Forty years ago this past week, I gave my youngest brother, Tim, the thirty cents he’d asked to borrow so that he could walk four blocks to the store and buy candy. It had been a beautiful day, but I hesitated because it was now close to evening and Tim would have to cross a very busy road. He assured me that he would be careful, and I, seventeen years old, capitulated. Tim never returned. Six days later his body was found dumped on a roadside, one county over. Tim was the fourth victim of the entity that would become known as the “Oakland County Child Killer.”

  Over the decades, multiple law enforcement agencies allegedly revisited the case as leads straggled in, without resolution. I had long accepted my version of the truth: that the police had done everything they could, and that it was not uncommon for even heinous crimes to remain unsolved. Multiple writers have used the grisly and unbelievable facts of the Oakland County Child Killer case as a ready-made outline for fiction books. One nonfiction book, written back in the 1980s, was presented as a factual account, but it appears to have been written only as an effort to support the job done by the original task force investigating these crimes. The book did not dig deep.

  The Oakland County Child Killer case has also been the subject of recent television shows as well as the subject of many newspaper articles that should have outraged the communities where these kids were abducted and murdered. And yet, forty years after the crimes, there are still no official answers and no official explanations of how time and money were spent investigating. There is no official resolution.

  I support and applaud J. Reuben Appelman’s determination to climb the very high stone walls put up by law enforcement and others who do not appear to want these crimes solved, and to give a voice to the four kids who were abducted, held captive, tortured, and murdered in one of the richest counties in America. There is so much more horror in this case than anyone could have imagined back in 1976 and 1977, and a comprehensive book on the matter has been long overdue.

  Cathy Broad

  Sister of Timothy King, Victim #4

  March 24, 2017

  INTRODUCTION

  A murder scene is taped off to preserve evidence. Investigators will often return to it again and again, carefully walking through doorways, quietly standing in one corner and then another, maybe reflecting on bloodstains at the center of a room. A stain might be body-shaped and large, or it might be the size of a coin, cylindrical and small, leading to another coin-sized shape across the room, and then to another near a wall, and finally to another coin of blood that elongates now and seems to have pulled itself toward the front door, searching for exit.

  Evenings are the hardest times to sleep. An investigator’s bedroom is painted with the stain of cases being worked. There might also be photographs of loved ones or tastefully placed artwork on the bedroom walls, but an investigator’s mind is not calmed enough by this to fall tactfully into slumber. At night beneath the sheets, a question repeats itself in the investigator’s mind: How did one thing lead to another, which led to the end?

  Memoir, too, is a narrative that’s oftentimes best understood utilizing the techniques of a criminal investigation. To begin, a scene from one’s life is taped off on the written page, preserved, and thereafter investigated. Each relevant stain in the various rooms of a memoirist’s experience is revealed under lighting, sampled, and studied, until a pattern emerges. A true memoirist, restless in the evenings, snaps awake with anxiety, sometimes with dread, and eventually with awareness: How one thing led to another does, indeed, unfold in the darker hours, before illumination.

  When I set out to examine an unsolved murder case, I did not yet know that my personal narrative—violent at times in its own right, even if only with longing—would collide with the narrative of the horrible crimes I’d be investigating. This story, then, became a story of the living and the dead alike. The dead and the walking are twins, after all, each the other’s mirror.

  During my scrutiny of the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) case, I meticulously mined thousands of pages of local, state, and federal case documents, including witness statements, autopsy reports, catalogues of evidence, crime scene photos, interrogation transcripts, polygraph results, and personal correspondences and interviews to assist in forming a narrative of criminal activity leading to the dead. Naturally, I also collected and studied the hundreds of local news articles written about this case over the years: They plastered my walls and imprinted my dreams. Several surviving family members of the victims were overwhelmingly generous with their time, support, and openness to being interviewed, and on occasion their stories filled in the gaps for me where official documentation could not.

  But what of the gaps in the narratives of the living? Certainly, there are many private citizens, some in law enforcement, as well as my own family members, who count among the examined here. But internal lives and corresponding personal narratives are not often accounted for by documentation. One cannot simply walk into the Office of Debatable Family Matters, for instance, and file a request for the catalogue of events from Christmas morning, 1974. In time, then, I may ask myself, of the personal nuances, dialogue, and circumstances chronicled in this book, Under whose lens were they viewed? In what moments? Under whose authority? And did I get it right? Admittedly, I often ask myself those questions even now, for what claims to the dead or living do we truly own, be they our twins or not?

  In response to that line of questioning and others, it is important to state at the outset that the OCCK crimes remain, officially, unsolved. It is my hope that the information I’ve gathered will assist those entrusted with the duty of resolving the many questions about these crimes that still linger. Any assumptions and opinions on my part, where they occur within the text, reflect my attempts to synthesize vast amounts of sometimes conflicting and confusing raw material into a logical narrative and do not reflect the official policy or position of any agency known to me at the writing of this book. No parties mentioned have been proven guilty of the OCCK crimes, or of association with such, in a court of law.

  As the reader will find, there have been times throughout the years when both my written and internal narratives appeared to spiral uncontrollably, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, down the rabbit hole of speculation, derangement, and disorientation, although such was the condition of the hole that’d been left for me to fall through. Where I have ranged far afield, it was difficult to do otherwise and was, I hope, in service to this story, although in conflict with a more common tack.

  I worry that the official and unofficial position of my family narrative will be in conflict, too. Some will undoubtedly feel betrayed by my compulsion to give new language to what had been silenced for so many years. Regrettably, I offer no great antidote to that sense of betrayal, except in stating that I betrayed myself as much as any, devolved and obsessed, and became a ghost inside my living home during the examination of what my life had amounted to. It was only in the writing that I escaped and brought
to jury the evidence. It was the writing alone that allowed me to drag myself across the carpeted rooms, toward whatever we call the hoped-for light.

  PROLOGUE

  When I was a kid in the 1970s, a man tried to abduct me. He was about thirty-five or forty and I was seven years old, on the tail end of a stretch when multiple police departments surrounding Detroit were hunting for a kid killer.

  Two boys and two girls had been murdered, each of them white, each with brown hair like mine. There were posters everywhere, with a composite sketch of a suspect, a sketch of a car—a compact, blue Gremlin with a white hockey stripe up its side—and an area of operations favoring drugstores and run-down strip malls.

  They never found the guy. He’d seemingly taken kids at will, held them in his lair for many days, and then snuffed them at leisure. He was rumored to have washed their bodies with dry cleaning fluid and then set them back into the world like setting out a birthday cake full of lit candles: carefully, and with a look of accomplishment on his face.

  The cops said the murders weren’t about sex—they indicated to the press that none of the kids had been violated that way—but about power. There was a serial abductor out there, swiping kids from their footing like sweeping a few bugs into the kill jar in his garden, and there was nothing anybody could do but keep their doors locked and ride out the storm.

  The guy who tried to snatch me had been posing as a security guard in a drugstore. He wore a rust-colored blazer, a crisp shirt, and a dark-colored tie. He strolled along the endcaps and occasionally looked around noncommittally.

  He locked eyes with me in the candy aisle while I was stuffing a pack of bubblegum into my pants pocket. I put the gum back and rushed out of the store. He followed.

  I crossed a parking lot. The man got into his car.

  I crossed a major intersection on foot, then tacked into my neighborhood and strolled alongside a curb where our little blue-collar houses saluted an empty street.

  A minute later the man pulled up in his compact. It idled next to me, a few feet away. The passenger-side door opened and the man leaned across the center console and reached out.

  I remember the details of his tiny automobile, the rattle it made, and then the creak of its door opening on a faulty hinge.

  I remember the man’s eyes being a greasy brown, like motor oil.

  I remember the man’s brown hair across the top and I remember the sideburns he wore, each crawling to the sides of his jaw.

  Then my brain short-circuits, and what I begin to remember is a cigarette dangling from my father’s lip on the back porch of our house in full summer, his T-shirt hugging his chest, his Playboy magazine draped over a five-dollar lawn chair while he did biceps curls with a barbell, twenty-five pounds on each end.

  I remember my father taking my mother by her shirt and whipping her to the ground in my bedroom, and how, later that autumn, his shadow seemed long across our windows and kept my family sealed inside—nobody on the outside even knew we were there, but we did.

  Somehow, the two worlds seem linked to me—the one I lived in as a young boy, and the milieu of the Oakland County Child Killer. Like planets orbiting one another, the distance eventually tightens, until they appear to collide.

  MARK STEBBINS, 12 YEARS OLD

  Dates in captivity:

  Feb. 15–19, 1976

  JILL ROBINSON, 12 YEARS OLD

  Dates in captivity:

  Dec. 22–26, 1976

  KRISTINE MIHELICH, 10 YEARS OLD

  Dates in captivity:

  Jan. 2–21, 1977

  TIMOTHY KING, 11 YEARS OLD

  Dates in captivity:

  March 16–22, 1977

  KRISTINE

  It’s autumn of 2010, and I’m standing in the exact spot where ten-year-old Kristine Mihelich’s ice-burned body had been found in the dead of winter, 1977. Kristine was the third victim to the OCCK, and her face, slightly plum-colored from death, had been a beacon in the freshly fallen snow off the side of this wooded residential cul-de-sac. The more slushy detritus of inner-city Detroit was thirty minutes away, but here in Franklin Village a mailman discovered Kristine on his regular route, only fifteen minutes from my own childhood home, halfway between Detroit and this old-money enclave where the trees and the bank accounts stretch equally far back.

  The mailman, thirty-something Jerome Wozny, a tad homely, banked his mail truck and walked toward swaths of color off the side of the road. There’d been no blood at the drop scene, but he’d been drawn by Kristine’s coat, slightly frozen to the mannequin of her torso. He stood over Kristine’s body, then hurried back to his vehicle, leaving boot prints in the snow.

  At the time, Franklin Village was even more wooded than it is now, pocked here and there with chimneys that ran down into great rooms, where one would find fireplaces with dogs snoring next to them, balls rolling across the hardwood flooring, the smell of bread being baked, and, more or less, families still intact between these architecturally sound walls.

  Franklin Village, metaphorically, should have been hanging from a Christmas tree back then, encased in glass. When the snow fell, it seemed as if you could hear somebody moan from five houses down—it was that quiet inside the orb.

  Nobody died in Franklin Village until they were old, and Kristine didn’t die here, either. She’d been killed during captivity somewhere else, then driven around for a while and dumped here like a stack of newspapers hitting the curb.

  Bruce Lane, the street I’m standing in and where Kristine had been tossed, bears the given name of a well-known Detroit-area psychiatrist of the time, Bruce Danto. The street wasn’t named after Danto, but a lot of people immediately thought of him when Kristine’s body was found, as Danto had a track record of writing about serial killers in the early seventies and a drop site with his name attached to it, even just his first name, was titillating to the local press. Conjecture was that Kristine’s killer was directly challenging the psychiatrist, making a public statement with his placement of Kristine’s body. Other people thought Danto himself was Kristine’s murderer and that his academic fascination with serial killings was a translucent cover for the arrogant-seeming doctor with a receding hairline and bad glasses.

  For a while people even suspected the ungainly mailman with only lightly developed social skills and a house full of trinkets that seemed to indicate an obsessive personality type. He’d reportedly found the body, and yet there were no other footprints in the snow besides his. Police eventually explained away the lack of what’s called “impression evidence” to an overnight dithering of snowfall that would have fouled the area around Kristine’s deposit, covering any tracks previous to the mailman’s. A local news helicopter had further disturbed the scene, blowing snow almost immediately after Kristine was discovered, sweeping away evidence with its downdraft.

  Police had interviewed the mailman after finding Kristine’s body, and he’d indeed seemed “off.” He was nervous, avoided eye contact, and was generally silent throughout the interview process. None of that leads to being truly suspect, of course.

  He’d just found a body, was all.

  “THE BABYSITTER”

  Kristine had been missing for nineteen days. When the police found her and surveyed her drop-off scene, they were certain she’d been victim #3 to that entity labeled the “Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK),” also dubbed “The Babysitter” because of the way each victim had reportedly been tended to. According to investigators and the press alike, the killer had bathed his victims after death, combed their hair, clipped their nails, and even cleaned and pressed their clothes before giving them back to the world neater than when they’d gone missing: each body reportedly laid out like a new suit atop the snow, each of these suits found in various parts of the city during the thirteen months spanning from midwinter of 1976 to the end of winter in 1977.

  Mark Stebbins, a twelve-year-old boy with a clean side part in his hair, was the first to go missing, snatched in daylight while walki
ng home from his mother’s work party a few blocks away. Four days later he was found dead in a parking lot. Like the sexual violence notated by the medical examiner but left out of police statements to the press and public, evidence at the Mark Stebbins drop site was also quashed.

  Jill Robinson, a twelve-year-old like Mark Stebbins, went missing ten months later. A dark-haired girl with bangs and freckles, Jill had left home with a backpack and her bicycle after arguing with her mother. The bicycle was found one day after her disappearance, abandoned behind a hobby store. Four days after Jill had been snatched, the backpack, like the bicycle, was also found, although strapped to Jill’s body beside a busy freeway, a shotgun blast having disfigured Jill’s face.

  One week after the discovery of Jill’s body, Kristine Mihelich, a ten-year-old with long, wispy hair, went missing, as well. She was found by Wozny, the mailman, nineteen days later. The time period between kidnappings had quickened, and the duration of Kristine’s captivity—nineteen days versus the roughly four days of captivity for Mark and Jill—was nearly five times as long. The public obsession and hunt also quickened, and yet there’d been no reported witnesses to any of the abductions, and no reported leads.

  Victim #4, Timothy King, shaggy-haired and with a wide smile and carefree eyes, was taken roughly seven and a half weeks after Kristine’s body was discovered. King was found in a ditch approximately thirty minutes from home, six days after his abduction, re-dressed after having been anally assaulted and suffocated. The sexual violence associated with his killing, as with the Stebbins murder, had been left out of the official police blotter.

  After the discovery of Tim’s body, the story of the “Oakland County Child Killer” went into overdrive, as a witness had reportedly seen Timothy King being spoken to by an adult male standing beside a car in a parking lot just prior to King’s disappearance. A composite sketch of the man, white or possibly olive-skinned, with thick, dark hair brushed backward, began to circulate in the papers, with headlines such as “Man Sought” that would soon turn into the less inspiring “No New Leads.” For a period, however, with four kidnap-murders stated by police to be attributable to the OCCK, the area was swept by fear, and posters of the child killer’s suspected automobile and a sketch of his face were soon Scotch-taped to every storefront and stapled to every pillar.