The Kill Jar Read online

  I watched the movie and felt anxious. Two people screwed onscreen, some other people screwed onscreen, and then at some point the movie was over and the lights in the room slowly ascended. We stood up in our towels and exited the makeshift theater.

  Naked and soapy in the shared showers while we rinsed off afterward, the man stepped too close to me and rubbed his hands over my back. “Let me get that for you,” he said, pretending that the two feet of spine moving down from my neck was something that needed procedural attention, his ringed, heavy-feeling fingers landing between my shoulder blades before I could turn away.

  The first touch, for a predator, must be exhilarating. For me, as his prey, the first touch was paralytic.

  I GOOGLE THE address for the Schvitz, then put it into my GPS and steer through side streets. When I get out of my SUV, I step around a massive pothole full of water and motor oil. There’s no traffic. I stand in the street and recognize nothing, but there’s a small handwritten sign on a stick in the ground that reads SCHVITZ PARKING and then an arrow pointing around back. Without that handwritten sign I wouldn’t know I was here, and I presume that’s exactly the point.

  The houses up the street are partially boarded, most of them written off as abandoned. Squatters have taken over. Adorning the nearby porches are half-fixed children’s bicycles, makeshift laundry lines of electrical wire, and the occasional gas station–issue hibachi. There’s a man sitting on a concrete stoop fifty yards away, staring at me.

  When I walk to the back of the building, I think about Timothy King and the route he’d taken in Birmingham to get home. He’d left a pharmacy through the back door at night, crossed a poorly lit parking lot, and never gotten to finish his five-minute walk home. Somebody stuffed him into an automobile, we can presume. The details of the precise moment of abduction are not known to the public or to me. What is known is that things happen to us within eyeshot of the rest of the world and nobody recognizes it as a “happening” until it’s done. Ellie’s ex-boyfriend, for instance, hung himself in a closet with his own belt, by lifting his legs off the ground. I believe his parents found him hanging like that, but in the dead space between the act and the discovery of the act there was no recognition from the world, no gesture of understanding that a man was looping a leather belt around his neck for impractical purposes. Outside my high school once, I saw a kid sitting by himself and thought he was a loser. Two days later there was an announcement over the PA that he’d shot himself. We had a moment of silence. When I was nine, a boy pushed me on the playground and I actively hated him for it. That year his whole family died of carbon monoxide poisoning while they slept.

  I want to believe that in the lead-up to death there are signs, but there usually are not.

  HERE’S THE MOST beautiful feeling I have ever had: It’s probably the same as yours, but I was drunk when it happened. I just want to be better than that now. I want to feel joy but the only way I know how to is to feel the darkness beforehand. I have to fuck myself up in order to call myself a survivor.

  In the back of my mind is always the memory of my father punching my brother so hard it left dots on his back from the meshing of his little Detroit Lions jersey—or the memory of weed smoke on my brother’s friends when they were eleven and I was six, and how my brother used to hide his pot in a hollowed-out Foreigner eight-track.

  Or the glass bullets of cocaine I’d found in a wicker basket my dad kept, or how my sister used to sit in her bedroom all the time and just cry for what seemed like no reason.

  Or the stacks of Hustler magazine in our garage and how I burned down our backyard looking at one of the centerfolds and playing with matches at the same time—how sex and fire mingled.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about my darkness that Ellie completely understood. No matter what I was doing, Ellie had already done worse, lived through worse, felt worse about herself. But our relationship was cosmic, too, if you believe in that shit. I always felt my skin vibrating in her presence, even when she’d done something hurtful.

  The best thing about being with Ellie was never having to hide, never needing a bar or a warehouse to conceal my sins. I could hold Ellie and cry to her and know she was there. I could fall to pieces and still get up feeling like a man.

  You don’t get that feeling walking out of the Schvitz.

  You want to smoke a cigarette, get robbed in the parking lot, stick a knife into somebody. You want to drive your car into the river and drown.

  But none of that happens.

  You walk out of the Schvitz and you go home, and that’s sometimes worse than anything violent. There’s a huge mega-freeway of ache inside you, and it’s empty, and you’re the only one on it.

  And nobody even knows it’s there besides you. And if you tell anybody, your whole life is over in a blink. And so you don’t.

  Whoever killed these kids had that feeling inside. I know it. The cops will argue differently, that psychotics don’t feel, but my hunch tells me to follow the loss.

  JILL ROBINSON

  Twelve-year-old Jill Robinson had left home on her bicycle three days before Christmas after an argument with her mother. She was wearing a small backpack and was thought to have been in transit to her father’s home in a nearby suburb. She was found four days later on the side of busy Interstate 75, which connects the Detroit area to wooded northern Michigan hundreds of miles away, still wearing her backpack but with part of her head broken away from a shotgun blast.

  Jill had been dropped in the snow at night, only a half mile from an on-ramp beside the Troy Police Department, twenty-five minutes from Detroit proper. A witness later described a blue Pontiac LeMans pulled to the shoulder at four thirty a.m. The LeMans will come up again at the Kristine Mihelich site, based on a rear bumper imprint in the snow, but nobody ever talked about the LeMans in the early dissections of the case. The only vehicle of interest anybody in the police ever talked about, and released information about to the press, was a blue AMC Gremlin, based on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony from the Timothy King abduction site.

  Regardless of physical evidence supporting the LeMans as a lead, it was buried, and throughout nearly all of my early research the blue Gremlin is still the only vehicle that shows up online, is talked about by friends or publicized in old radio shows and news video as the vehicle of interest. When asked about the Oakland County Child Killer of lore, nearly everybody who grew up in Oakland County at that time remembers the Gremlin—nobody speaks of a LeMans despite its appearance in the case files.

  Jill Robinson’s condition presented another mystery beyond the murder itself: the shotgun blast to her head. Since the other three victims were asphyxiated, it was speculated that she’d given her killer a hard time and that he’d panicked or gone into a rage, altering his MO. The pathologist listed Jill’s cause of death as hemorrhage and shock from the wound, which would certainly have killed her, but a theory iterated to me by Jack Kalbfleisch, a retired original task force member living in Florida, is that Jill Robinson was asphyxiated prior to a postmortem shotgun blast.

  “She was placed inside the LeMans,” the ex-cop Kalbfleisch tells me during our two-and-a-half-hour phone call. I’d been in my car out by the mall in Troy and pulled into a parking lot to talk to him. His voice sounds old now but he’d barely been out of cop school when the crimes went down. “Then she was taken to her drop site,” he says, and speculates that Jill was hoisted onto the shoulder of somebody who carried her into the snow. The guy held a shotgun in his free hand as a defense against any interruptions in the drop. When he plopped Jill onto her final resting spot, the backpack she’d been dressed in forced the remaining air out of her lungs, causing a moaning sound to expel through the vocal cords.

  Kalbfleisch adds, “Whoever carried her out there would have thought she was still alive, pointed the shotgun at her head, and squeezed off a round of buckshot.” He says that dead bodies often expel air, and noise. It would account for the killer changing his MO.

  O
ne set of footprints was left in the snow. What may also have been left in that moment was trace evidence on the torso section of Jill Robinson’s coat. Like the hair found on Kristine, hairs from the shooter’s head may have rubbed off while carrying Jill, although nothing in my research has, so far, shown that to be the case. What we might assume about the shotgun that blasted Jill Robinson in the face was that it was double-barreled, because twelve-year-old Mark Stebbins, victim #1, was found to have suffered a blow to the head that left two circular side-by-side imprints. There were two dead-together zeros stamped into his skull as if the barrel of the shotgun had jabbed his skin—somebody shoving the gun against his head to entice him to walk forward, maybe. When found on his corpse, the wound showed signs of healing, meaning it had been inflicted days before his murder, which, like the rest of the murders, was performed by suffocation.

  All I can know with certainty about the Jill Robinson drop site is the method of carrying her into the snowbank. Based on a single set of footprints and the positioning of her body, the carrier, who was also the presumed killer, held Jill Robinson over his right shoulder—the way he must have carried Kristine Mihelich, too, based on her positioning in the snow at the end of Bruce Lane.

  The killer was right-handed, using his stronger arm to lift and balance the bodies before delivering them. And he didn’t have to be particularly strong to do so. These were children the killer was toting. They weighed practically nothing. And here’s how a guy lifts you when you’re nothing: He just fucking lifts you.

  THE INTERNET SLEUTH AND HER SUSPECT

  Inside the American Legion Hall party that twelve-year-old Mark Stebbins had departed minutes before his abduction on February 15, 1976, a twenty-something man named John, dark-haired and thin, in attendance at his mother’s work party, had been mingling with guests before leaving hastily. Some say he left to go after the Stebbins boy.

  John and Christopher Busch, contemporaries in age, lived in the same upscale neighborhood in Bloomfield, just a few blocks away from one another, which I learn from checking their 1976 addresses on my phone. Although Busch appeared to have no hobbies outside of pornography, John, according to statements his relatives had given to the police, came to grips with the world around him through drawing, mostly in pencils and common ink. He was good at it and, in 1976, had recently returned from Europe, where he’d briefly studied art—now he was bumming around Detroit without direction.

  John’s father was an executive in the automotive industry. He provided well enough for his family that they were able to afford the price tag of a home in Bloomfield Hills, one of the five wealthiest suburbs in the United States at that time. It was a relatively close-knit community. Christopher Busch and John, being the same age, living within close proximity to one another, and each having well-off fathers with executive positions in the auto industry, would likely have crossed paths socially. Their fathers’ paths would likely have crossed professionally.

  In 1977, John was reported as a person of interest to the original OCCK Task Force by a tipster. He was questioned about the crimes but also about other suspects, including Christopher Busch. He claimed not to know who Busch was, even though you could fire a slingshot from John’s front porch and the ball bearing would land in the Busch family yard if you put the correct arc on it.

  John was crossed off as a suspect and investigators ignored him until 1992, when his name was again offered by yet another tipster, who claimed that John had confessed to the OCCK murders a year earlier. This new tipster, “Helen” Dagner—her real name, I’ve read online, is otherwise, but she goes by Helen in her correspondence—was a middle-aged woman who claimed that she’d met John in Alpena, a neighboring town to Ess Lake, where the Busch family had their cottage.

  Dagner’s husband, Wally, had been a cop in Rogers City, just north of Alpena, at the tip of the lower peninsula of Michigan and facing Lake Huron, a 23,000-square-mile freshwater body larger than the Caspian Sea. Since her husband’s suicide in 1983, Helen Dagner had nurtured an obsession with the underworld, police files indicate, and had eventually turned informant to minor crimes in the area. At some point, it seems from internal police emails and memos, Dagner had a personal relationship with a local detective but appears to have lost favor with the PD for what was characterized as her obstinate behavior.

  In Dagner’s 1991 statement to police, she said that she’d spent time with the mother of John’s young daughter, who was six then, and that Dagner had eventually developed a trusting friendship with John himself that teetered on romance but never went further. John, she said, like herself, seemed interested in discussing criminal activity, so they were drawn to one another and had lengthy intellectual conversations about darker, disquieting topics that most people shied away from.

  Dagner and John saw each other frequently. At some point, according to Dagner, John told her about being interviewed by the original OCCK Task Force as a suspect in the 1976–77 killings. Dagner was immediately titillated. She and John, after this disclosure, either went to coffee or met at his apartment nearly every evening for a year. John seemed to know an endless amount of information about the case, and Dagner never got enough of listening to him postulate about the killer’s motives and lifestyle.

  “The killer really took good care of them,” she claimed that John told her. He fed the kids their favorite foods, groomed them, and was generally “real nice,” probably only murdering them, he said, to save them from the misery of their coming lives. John speculated that the killer was inadequate socially, couldn’t get a girlfriend, and wound up doing odd jobs “like working in restaurants.” While the killer lived in a well-off community, John further speculated, his mother may have had to babysit for extra income, to make ends meet.

  At first Dagner was fascinated by John’s imagination, which seemed married to an intellect and single-minded ability to recall even the minutest details he’d read in the papers nearly fifteen years prior. After a while, however, Dagner began to suspect that John himself was the killer. He, too, was inadequate socially, had no current girlfriend, did odd jobs for a living, and complained that, although financially well-off, his father had sequestered their wealth and forced the family to live a meager existence.

  Dagner told police that she pressed him for more “theories,” feigning attraction, intuiting a potential confession from the man. Over time, she reported, John began to divulge even more about the OCCK crimes. He drew Dagner maps of the drop sites and routes the killer might have driven. He revealed details of the clothing the children wore and what items they’d had in their possession when abducted. Dagner would check what John had told her against old news articles and came to believe that some of the things he’d said had never been printed in the papers. John was either lying or had intimate knowledge of the case, it seemed. His storytelling was so specific and relentless that she felt it had to be the latter.

  By her account, John finally confessed to Helen Dagner over coffee at the Big Boy restaurant in Alpena sometime around Christmas of 1991. She called the Alpena police, the Birmingham police, and several family members of the victims within weeks of his confession, all in early 1992, reporting the details of their conversations. Much of what she reported they’d talked about, both intimate and unpublished, turned out to be factual.

  When she first went to the Birmingham police, they reminded her that the original task force had written off John because he’d had a passport showing he’d not yet returned from Europe at the time of the Stebbins murder, but Dagner claimed that John had laughed at their incompetence, stating that, in fact, he’d owned two passports, one a fake that he’d shown to the cops to avoid further scrutiny.

  She continued to tell the police more than they’d likely expected from her. She reminded the police that all four OCCK victims were abducted or dropped off on Sundays and Wednesdays and that John, employed as a cook, had these days off from work. She pointed out to the PD that John matched the original composite drawing, which was of
interest but just as circumstantial.

  She reported that John had told her that a different car was used for each abduction; although one of the automobiles had indeed been a Gremlin, it wasn’t blue.

  The children, John had said, were given manicures during captivity. Dagner told police that while in John’s home she’d discovered a professional-grade mani-pedi set purposefully concealed in a shoe box behind a drawer in a normally locked office. The children had all been abducted during snowfall in winter months, and Dagner reported that John would go into an eerie mental state while watching the snow and that he’d become completely unaware of others in his presence or of words being spoken to him.

  None of this was very important to the police. Lots of people became contemplative, even depressed and isolated mentally, during snowfall. How many people in the universe had Sundays and Wednesdays off? Things weren’t immediately adding up—until Dagner told them that, at some point in their discussions, she’d slyly asked John where he’d purchased the fried chicken that Timothy King was found to have eaten, and John had replied, “I cooked the chicken.”

  Realizing he’d confessed, Dagner said, John reportedly then let the floodgates open. He’d told Dagner that Jill Robinson’s backpack contained a compact, cosmetics, and a blanket, and that nothing was missing when he dropped her off. He’d said that his father owned two houses, the one the family lived in and the one next door, a rental that was often vacant, where John had held the children for brief periods. Dagner claimed that John alluded to the existence of Polaroid pictures of the crimes. She said that he’d drugged the kids with “a sleeping drug” before suffocating them.

  In addition to many hours of police testimony divulging their conversations, Dagner gave circumstantial evidence that might implicate John in pedophilia, other sexually illicit activity, or generalized sexual dysfunction, which did not prove John a killer but appeared, to the police, to add greater merit to a fuller investigation of the man. She said that John, in addition to the books he collected on fingerprinting analysis, forensics, and polygraphs, surreptitiously owned a tourism book called A Guide to Nude Beaches and the pages where children appeared naked were dog-eared.