The Kill Jar Read online

  Later, when I began to drink on my own, I sought out those places I’d visited as a kid with my grandfather and circled them in my own car, and watched, and remembered who I was supposed to be, the man my father had taught me to craft myself into, always in the margin between death and what’s before it, that space between the corners and the cars.

  Somehow I have lived a lie enough to get by in the world, concealing who I am inside. And I have to continue this lie. My children are worth it.

  But Ellie understands.

  Ellie is like the tinted blue glow of late-night movies across my skin. I would be alone without her, abandoned to the bodies, drifting in and out of the nameless pain that has haunted me since I was a kid.

  CATHY

  I’m in my rented car on a side trip from Detroit to a suburb outside Chicago, five hours from my hotel. I’m holding a photocopied fourth-grade science fair award that Timothy King’s older sister, Cathy Broad, had mailed to me a few months earlier. Cathy was seventeen when her brother Tim, victim #4 to the OCCK, was abducted. She’d loaned him thirty cents that evening to buy candy at a nearby store. It’d been dark out, but Tim was allowed to walk alone those few blocks through their neighborhood. The first three OCCK victims had been blue-collar, on the other side of Oakland County, whereas Birmingham, where the Kings lived with their relative wealth, still seemed untouchable, a safe place to live.

  Tim never came back.

  Tim’s parents, whose modest two-story house was less than a mile from Christopher Busch’s much larger family home, made public pleas to the abductor, on television and in the newspaper. They begged for their son, who was small for his age and mischievous. They promised Tim, if he was listening, that he’d be okay. His father told Tim not to worry about the baseball tryouts he’d missed. His mother said they’d have fried chicken, his favorite meal, when he eventually returned.

  Six days later Tim was found in a ditch. The papers would say he was laid out in the snow like the others had been. An autopsy report stated that his stomach contained evidence of a fried chicken dinner having been fed to him while in captivity, presumably due to his killer paying attention to Tim’s mom announcing what he liked to eat.

  Cathy left the Detroit area right after high school, partially to run away from the terror she’d felt in Tim’s absence. She became a lawyer. She rarely talked to the press and for the first twenty-five years after his abduction played it safe and respectful with the various police departments, hoping for information to arrive.

  It never did.

  Now Cathy lives in a beautiful home, in a neighborhood where the streets are named after all the good presidents. There’s artwork on her walls, custom cabinets, hardwood floors, signs of teenagers having trafficked through, and a spaciousness that feels helpful to getting your head right.

  Cathy’s smaller than I imagined her, and then I remember that Tim was small for his age, too. Like a lot of smaller, nicer people that you know, there’s a bit of a knife fighter under Cathy’s skin, and she’s got an office full of documents on her brother’s case to prove it. Over the next four hours she brings out many of those documents for review and lays them across the kitchen island. We lean in together and study her pencil markings along the margins.

  Cathy looks up at some point and asks me if I know the difference between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. I don’t, even though I’ve spent a month reading criminal forensics books by superstars like Henry Lee and Michael Baden, both of whom worked on the O.J. Simpson case and both of whom proved Simpson guilty, although that evidence never made it into either court or the public eye because of good lawyering on the Simpson team.

  “A mitochondrial DNA match,” Cathy says, “would mean that your family line was matched. A nuclear DNA match would mean that you, specifically, were matched.”

  She tells me something about needing the bulb of the hair for a nuclear match but only a fragment of the hair for a mitochondrial match. “So,” she says, “mitochondrial equals either you, one of your known relatives, or someone in your bloodline, although that could go back thousands of years. A nuclear match means, specifically, just you.”

  “They found a hair on Kristine fucking years ago, and they never let us know,” she tells me. And then she says, “They made a mitochondrial DNA match to one of Christopher Busch’s friends.”

  Other murder cases, lots of them, have been closed based on mitochondrial DNA. I ask Cathy how she found out about the hair, the match, about all of it, and she tells me that one of the cops let her in on it. She tells me his name, says he’s on TV a lot.

  A year after my visit to Cathy in 2010, the mitochondrial DNA finding is leaked and the press begins writing about it. The man on the scalp end of that hair, James Vincent Gunnels, will get a lot of attention thrown his way. At first, he’s in prison on other charges and can’t be publicly questioned. Later, local reporters try to ambush him outside of the halfway house he moves to. Nothing will immediately come of it. The press will appear exploitative, and the man will be struggling to keep a job under the scrutiny of public accusation and drug addiction.

  He’d been a teenager when hanging around with Christopher Busch, when the hair from his head was somehow transferred to Kristine’s coat. He’d been fifteen and gangly, just a boy.

  Now, decades later, he’d returned from prison as a man.

  VINCENT GUNNELS

  Mark Stebbins, victim #1, was killed in February of 1976. Kristine Mihelich, victim #3, was killed in January of 1977.

  In between those dates, on May 7, 1976, Christopher Busch—the suicide victim who mysteriously didn’t have any gunshot residue on his hands and, until his death, had been a prime suspect in the OCCK case—engaged in the sexual violation of the teenaged Vincent Gunnels, whom he’d been grooming for many months prior to any of the OCCK killings. Busch would later be charged with criminal sexual conduct for the Gunnels offense, while Gunnels himself would spend his adulthood in and out of incarceration.

  If the mitochondrial DNA evidence is to be believed, the hair found on Kristine Mihelich belonged to either Vincent Gunnels or somebody in his family line.

  When recently placed back into custody and questioned about the mitochondrial match to his hair, Gunnels told police that he was often in Christopher Busch’s vehicle. That’s all he would say, but in doing so he avoided directly implicating himself in the murder of Kristine Mihelich while simultaneously giving up Christopher Busch as a possibly guilty party.

  He didn’t say, “I don’t know how that hair got on the dead girl’s body.”

  Spending time in Busch’s vehicle would account for transference of Gunnels’s hair to Kristine’s shirt or coat, even without Gunnels’s presence during the crime itself. But it’s also possible that Vincent Gunnels carried Kristine Mihelich’s body and plunked her in the snow on Bruce Lane that day, transferring the evidentiary hair while doing so.

  What’s important is that the hair found on Kristine likely came either directly from Vincent Gunnels or from his relationship, in some fashion, to Christopher Busch’s vehicle, and therefore Christopher Busch.

  When I look at photos of Vincent Gunnels online—his hair cropped short, a thick mustache, his skin having whitened from spending more years under prison halogens than sunlight—I still see the boy he must have been decades prior. Cathy Broad and I talk on the phone about him throughout the next few months, speculating about his involvement with Busch, but I’m always imagining the wind in his hair and the sound of traffic as he runs across a suburban street, just being a kid, before Christopher Busch, before Kristine Mihelich, before whatever happened happened.

  WELCOME TO THE CASS

  Cass Corridor in the 1970s was one of the poorest areas in the country, teeming with prostitutes and junkies and welfare babies who either crawled around in the grass out front of scrap-lot homes or lined the arm’s-width interior hallways of tenement housing. The streets of the Cass were isolated and potholed, with steam that rose in wintertime fro
m iron manhole covers. Commercial buildings and homes alike were rapidly decomposing, made of brick or cinder block that peeled away in chunks and fell to the neglected streets.

  Liquor stores and makeshift bars rounded out the corners of every block. Pimps surveyed their periphery, sauntering back and forth beneath lottery signs in sore need of bulb replacement.

  Inside the decaying tenements, like in most ghettos, drugs were sold, weapons were exchanged, and young girls were prostituted behind bolted doors. It was the same inside the structurally unsound single-family homes that lined these short residential blocks. Most were rentals in great disrepair. Prostitutes of all ages, wearing homemade skirts that barely concealed the bruises on their legs, hustled the sidewalks outside of their homes.

  Looming over the Cass neighborhood was the two-hundred-foot-tall, Gothic-looking, stone-built Masonic Temple, constructed to last for centuries. The largest Masonic temple in the world, its interior was crafted for spectacle and austerity both. A fifteen-hundred-seat, fifty-foot-high cathedral as its centerpiece loomed as large here as the Sistine Chapel does in the Vatican.

  The Masonic, as it is called, contained—and still does—three different ballrooms, each of them over 17,000 square feet, as well as a 4,500-seat theater of red velvet, gold inlay, and artisan plaster to host the many symphonies, operas, and social balls underwritten by old, improbable, unthinkable money to the people of the Cass. The splendor of the Masonic amid the impoverished landscape of the Cass might seem an unlikely, even obnoxious contrast, but land in the hood is cheap, and the rich like cheap more than tact.

  The Masonic’s cornerstone was cemented in 1922, reportedly by the same trowel George Washington had used to mud the cornerstone on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. A lot happens over time, though. In the 1970s, prostitutes and their johns fucked against the building as a matter of course, the old grandeur of the Masonic encroached upon by gritty realism.

  Not far from the Masonic’s ballrooms and event spaces were the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, where Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson had grown up. The projects were five blocks long, squeezed with fourteen-story high-rises, and home to over 10,000 of Detroit’s most impoverished citizens. At the time of my visit in 2010, the half-mile-long ghetto was primarily vacant, the windows boarded up or broken out. There were no plans for demolition of the massive buildings: Whatever impoverished ghosts remained, they now crackled and dragged through the halls.

  In the 1970s, though, on weekend nights, suburbanites in their slicked-over sedans venturing into the Cass for an engagement at the Masonic would sometimes get lost and end up on the Eastside. I’d heard stories growing up of the terror one’s grandparents had felt pulling a U-turn near the Brewster buildings.

  The late ’70s in Detroit saw the first seeds of carjacking sprout. People who were “fucking high as shit,” as my dad would say, would skip out from the shadows with a handgun, crack it against the window to shatter it if the door was locked, and pull the vehicle’s goose-necked driver through the glass.

  But there were even more insidious elements than the addicts, dealers, and turf sharks at work. Running smooth as a mill in the heart of Cass Corridor was an industry of pedophilia. Hundreds of children over the course of the decade were either lured with cash offerings or “trunked,” the street term for being lifted from the curb outside one’s home and thrown into a car.

  Scores were held in captivity, often close to home, and sold off as either feed for a blossoming child porn industry making its way underground to the East Coast hubs, or as one-offs to johns who would venture in from the suburbs during daylight for a baggie of heroin and a quickie. There were independent operators—there will always be those—but there were more profitable kid runners as well whose proficiency at the trade, and power, allowed them a measure of immunity over time.

  The Detroit Police Department, presumably in order to get a grip on the Cass’s rampant problem, “turned” a known pedophile of the time named Richard Lawson and employed him as a confidential informant.

  Lawson, hovering at almost six and a half feet and well over two hundred pounds, occasionally gave up the odd john here and there. More often than not, though, Lawson used the police badge he had been granted by the PD—for “eventualities” related to being an informant—in much the same way the Pied Piper of lore lured children away from their village by the sound of his flute. He’d flip open his badge and the doe-eyed would follow.

  Later, Lawson would be tied to one Ted Lamborgine, a sort of rock star in the pederast scene in Pontiac thirty miles outside Detroit.

  Ted Lamborgine will begin to come up more in my research and will eventually be tied to Christopher Busch through the testimony of one of Busch’s molestation victims, a boy who survived his rape by Busch but who will claim to have crossed paths with victim #4, Timothy King, during King’s captivity.

  THE SCHVITZ

  The Schvitz is a steam house a few blocks from Cass Corridor central and the Masonic. A relic from the 1930s, the Schvitz is built like a warehouse: made of concrete, nondescript, twenty feet high and about fifty feet long, with no windows and a single unmarked door.

  Weeds growing up its side, the Schvitz is the type of place you could disappear inside of. Most buildings in Detroit are like this, vacant-seeming even if they’re not, the exteriors unpainted for decades, crumbling with decay. But to me the Schvitz exterior presents an intentional illusion; it’s supposed to look dumpy. Goings-on happened here, and, I am told, continue to happen here, that specifically require a lack of notice from passersby.

  Around its inception, members of the Purple Gang, known as the Jewish Mafia, took saunas at the Schvitz, ate steak dinners, and got smacked on the back with soaped-up mops of grape leaves. Years after that, the Schvitz became more illicit: In the1960s, homosexuals could mingle there in privacy, have furtive sexual encounters in the dimly lit rooms, and then go home to their wives and day jobs.

  By 1985, when I was fifteen, the same age Gunnels had been while riding in Christopher Busch’s car, I’d had my own dark suitor, a man in his mid-forties who’d been grooming me, only I was too young to know what that meant. The father of a friend, he’d taken me and a couple of other boys to the Schvitz for an afternoon steam.

  Like any father of any friend, I’d thought, only slightly sharper. He used to kiss me on the cheeks when he said hello, first one side of my face and then the other—like mobsters, or like the Europeans—and I’d smell the pomade in his slicked-back hair and the aftershave on his face when he leaned in.

  On weekends, he’d come into the bagel store where I worked my first job, and he’d bullshit with whatever boy was there but especially with me, it seemed, always leaning over the counter to touch faces, sometimes grabbing the back of my head to bring us closer. I just went along with it. He was nice, he wore expensive jewelry that impressed me, and I didn’t want to disappoint him by being cold. I didn’t find him threatening at all. Later, he invited me to the bathhouse with two of the other boys.

  Without asking permission from my parents, I went, and although those other boys went along with us, his attention seemed focused on me while we all undressed in a locker room and wrapped clean white towels around our waists for the short walk to an indoor hot tub. We soaked in silence for a while, the man leaning his head back against the rim of the tub and relaxing. When we got bored, we stepped out of the tub and dripped across ancient-seeming tiles to a steam room, the three of us boys wearing thin, inexpensive gold chains that glistened with sweat and heat against our undeveloped chests. The man wore his own gold chain, thick like a rope.

  We sat in the steam room for a while, the hot, mentholated air filling my lungs, then retired to a dining room, still wearing only our towels, which seemed odd to me.

  In the dining room were several cloth-covered tables but no other patrons, as if the room had been reserved just for us.

  We were served a steak-and-salad meal. It was long past lunchtime but not qui
te dinnertime yet. I had never eaten a meal practically naked before, but I liked it. I felt like I was in a Mafia movie.

  Done eating, we pushed our plates aside, and the man said, “We’ll see a movie now.”

  He stood up and we followed him to a small viewing room with a heavy door that he opened for us. I could see inside the room to a series of large leather recliners facing a sedan-sized movie screen. The man put his arm around my shoulder as I went in.

  “If you have to do anything in there,” he said, “just do it, you know?” I wasn’t sure of what he was talking about, but I figured it out soon enough.

  I sat in a recliner and the man sat in a recliner nearby. The door shut behind us and the room went fully dark. After a few awkward moments a porn film started rolling from a projector at the back of the room.