The Kill Jar Read online

  John’s ex-girlfriend, who’d given birth to his daughter, was interviewed in 1992. She concurred with some of Dagner’s allusions, telling investigators she thought John “was a pervert.” While breastfeeding their baby once, she’d discovered John watching from behind a curtain, masturbating, she’d said. She’d once found women’s underwear and a vibrator wrapped tightly in plastic, she said, tucked into a bag he kept hidden. Again, although circumstantial, her statements corroborated the impression of John as someone whose sexual appetites were considered by police to be outside the norm of that time. She and John were only romantic for a short period, she’d said, between 1986 and 1987. John would stay for a couple of months, then disappear for a couple of months before eventually returning. She didn’t know where John stayed during those periods away from her.

  Another ex-girlfriend, from his days in Birmingham, was subsequently interviewed and told the police that John used to fold her arms across her chest and hold them tightly while they had sex. She’d thought he was privately into bondage but just wouldn’t talk about it. The crossing of her arms was of interest to the PD because of the way in which the OCCK’s victims had possibly been burked. Today it’s hard to imagine that any sexual fetish indulged by consenting adults would draw attention, but in an era predating wide exposure to Internet porn, John stood out to the cops.

  John’s mother was also questioned in 1992 and described her son as a loner but also as a natural-born artist. The rough dates she provided for his trip to Europe implied the possibility that John and Busch had crossed paths overseas, their two dates of travel overlapping. During her statement to the police, John’s mother veered from direct questioning, at first telling of circumstances where her son was beaten by black men at a temporary job he’d had with General Motors, then ranting about a plot by the Japanese to take over American economic policy. She stated that her son performed backbreaking work at GM while “black workers sat and watched.” From the perspective of the police, the statements she’d provided to them were of questionable merit and absent of leads.

  Sometime in 1992, not having been charged in any capacity, John moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where a little over a decade earlier the abduction-homicides known as the Atlanta Child Murders had occurred, from 1979 to 1981, relatively soon after the OCCK murders ended—a notation of coincidence, not consequence.

  Police records show Dagner corresponded with multiple law enforcement personnel about the case for over twenty years. She once ran a personal website containing thousands of posts about the OCCK murders but pulled it down. While a lot of Dagner’s claims about John have had fist-sized holes punched through them, certain early details about the case, which only insiders should have had knowledge of, appear accurate.

  Dagner’s husband, Wally, committed suicide on November 20, 1983. After Dagner told John about her husband’s death in one of their early conversations, John reportedly commented to her, “That’s odd. I knew somebody who committed suicide on that same day, five years prior.”

  Dagner mentioned this to detectives in 1992. She didn’t know that her husband’s suicide and the “suicide” that John mentioned had any more weight to it than the incidental. The detectives thought differently. They checked their records and confirmed that John had likely been talking about Christopher Busch’s suicide, not yet public in reference to the OCCK murders.

  On November 20, 1978, exactly five years earlier to the day that Helen Dagner’s husband, a Rogers City police officer, had reportedly killed himself with a gunshot wound to the chest, Christopher Busch was found shot in the head by a gun that left no residue on his hands.

  THE ALPENA WITNESS

  Over the years, OCCK investigators have apparently found enough merit in the John lead to repeatedly investigate him. In 2008, Michigan state detectives traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, questioned John, and took a DNA swab from inside his cheek to compare against evidence. No match was found.

  In August of 2009, police again went to Atlanta and met with John in a vehicle in an empty parking lot at the Church of the Apostles, on Northside Parkway. I’ve read their report, and the transcript of the interview, conducted by Detective Sergeant Garry Gray of the Michigan State Police and Detective Cory Williams of the Livonia PD.

  John had sat in the back of an unmarked police cruiser. Physically ailing and no longer in touch with his daughter, who was twenty-two by then, he appeared a bit jumpy to the police. He denied ever knowing Christopher Busch and claimed to have spoken with Helen Dagner on only one occasion about the OCCK killings—at the Alpena Big Boy, as she’d claimed—but John said they’d spoken only in a cursory way about the murders. He stated that he’d made no suggestion to Dagner that he had private information or that he’d been involved in the murders. He claimed that Dagner had a vendetta against him, due to her unrequited romantic urges.

  What John didn’t yet know is that, in 2006, someone claiming to be a witness to his conversation with Dagner at the Alpena Big Boy in 1991 had contacted the police and supported Helen Dagner’s story. The Alpena witness, a middle-of-the-road conservative employed as an engineer and with no police record, stated that he’d been browsing the Web for information about another infamous murder case, that of the much-studied BTK killings. He’d stumbled onto Helen Dagner’s website through a link devoted to serial killers.

  When he read Dagner’s blog entries about the Alpena Big Boy, he told police, his blood froze. He remembered the odd night he’d spent in the Big Boy restaurant listening to that strange man, now known to him as John, seemingly confess to a series of child murders. What he’d heard was so bizarre that he’d simply passed it off as a hoax. He’d even partially doubted his own ears, but when he read Dagner’s description of the John conversations on her website he knew he’d overheard what seemed to be a true confession fifteen years earlier.

  The witness had been sitting one booth behind Dagner and John on December 26, 1991. When he first sat down, he could tell the two intimates were deep in discussion. Place mats were spread around their table and Dagner and John leaned in toward one another. He heard John speak the words “drop off” and “murder.” He leaned over slightly and watched as John roughly penciled out street locations on a few place mats. The maps seemed to highlight different routes along Interstate 75 from Detroit to Flint and within northern Michigan.

  The witness thought that John must have been a cop but then he distinctly heard John say, “I wanted to live with the children before I killed them.” He said it sounded like John was trying to impress Dagner. At the same time, the way John talked was more urgent, “like a lid was blown off,” as he told police in his statement.

  When John started talking about giving the children baths, the witness got skeptical. They were in a public place, and John was speaking too freely for it not to have been a joke. Still, the witness was fascinated with the story. John seemed to tell it spontaneously, pulling a wealth of information from memory. His tone when speaking about the now-dead children was like that of someone speaking of a dear friend. The witness heard John say they’d watched television together and played games, and that John had prepared dinners for the kids.

  Darkly, John described sticking something up the rectum of one of the boys after killing him. One of the girls, he said, had enjoyed the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by the Beatles. John used hand gestures to imitate how he had “shot her in the head in the snow.”

  The witness was visiting Alpena on vacation with his wife and two children at the time of his eavesdropping. He left the Big Boy to meet up with his family, who had been waiting for him back at the Holiday Inn, he told the police. The cops checked the hotel records and verified his stay at the hotel. They found the Alpena witness to be credible, but once again there was no hard evidence to base an arrest on.

  When the police took a cheek swab from John in 2008, they didn’t tell him about the Alpena witness from two years earlier, but in 2009, in the church parking lot, they spoke to him at length
about it. Detective Williams stated that he had spoken to the Alpena witness once again in May of the current year, and affirmed, he told John, that the witness “is an independent person” who corroborated Dagner’s story of the alleged confession by John in the Alpena Big Boy. The detective told John, “He has a good job, is married, has kids, [and has] nothing to do with Helen Dagner.”

  John remained firm in his denial of the statements that Dagner, and now another, had attributed to him. And he appears to have satisfied the investigators that he was not involved.

  THE RABBIT HOLE

  I’m taking the John C. Lodge Freeway into central Detroit, back to Cass Corridor. It’s raining again, just after sunup, and there’s a stream of taillights in front of me as I dodge the car-sized potholes toward downtown.

  I’m thinking about the drugs that might have been used by the killer to keep his victims sedated. Tim’s sister, Cathy, had told me that Tim’s toxicology report negated the presence of ethanol, barbiturates, carbon monoxide, pain relievers, halocarbons (toxins used in fertilizer and dry-cleaning solution), Quaaludes, psychotic tranquilizers, opiates, Valium, and sleeping pills.

  I pick up my cell and call a doctor friend I’ve known since grade school. He tells me about a drug called suxamethonium chloride. It’s crystalline, white, and odorless. It enjoys the fastest onset and shortest duration of all known muscle relaxants. It doesn’t last long but does get into the bloodstream quickly. When absorbed, an animal or human is temporarily paralyzed but fully aware, conscious of events but unable to prevent them from happening.

  The drug is most often used in veterinary clinics to induce this short-term paralysis before euthanizing large animals. I learn later, through happenstance, that John worked at a veterinary clinic in the years prior to the OCCK killings.

  The information I gain working on the case sometimes doesn’t add clarity but, rather, when I run it down, muddles what otherwise might be a lucid-seeming narrative. There’s just too much to think about, the hundreds of newspaper articles spilling out of Bankers Boxes in my hotel room in Detroit, as well as back home in Idaho; the reels of microfilm swishing right to left in the many libraries I visit in the suburbs here; the sheaths of interview transcription stacked atop my bedsheets, their language betraying good and bad cops, good and bad suspects, truth and something murkier. When I add the information I get just talking to people, in person or online, I get even more lost.

  This feeling of getting lost has lately been masked by a newer, more false sensation, seemingly spontaneous with each fresh source, of getting close. When you receive new information, the eyes open wide, flooded with adrenaline. You move fast toward something but you don’t know what it is yet. Everyone on any hunt does, but it’s like frantically swimming toward a buoy to save yourself when you’d left dry land on purpose.

  There’s a guy, for instance, who people online say killed somebody in the 1960s. I spent hours one night reading about him, getting sidetracked. His name was Stephen Stanislaw, and his uncle was a state representative at the time. Stanislaw reportedly used an aviation rope in his killings. He was an avid flyer, as was his father, a former Michigan aeronautics commissioner. Coincidentally, Stanislaw’s old man knew JonBenét Ramsey’s old man through aeronautics circles, although they weren’t contemporaries. JonBenét is one of this country’s most famous murdered children, her case unsolved after more than two decades, just another of so many kids murdered without resolution to the mystery of how it happened.

  According to online reports, Stanislaw did no time on the suspected murder case from the 1960s. Already known to police, he was later questioned about the OCCK killings, but his family provided alibis. Later he murdered his father, one of the alibi providers. He went to a mental facility for fifteen years, I read, from 1981 to 1996. (In another notation of coincidence, not consequence, two weeks after Stanislaw’s release, JonBenét was killed.)

  The more you dig, the more you see danger around every corner. If I’m not careful, each new piece of information will indeed lead to another, so far forward that I will have surpassed the truth. Did Stanislaw have anything to do with the OCCK crimes? It’s highly doubtful, but if I’m not careful I will start to believe in a connection. It’s what happens to people who travel this road, who fall through the hole, this connecting of the darkest dots ad infinitum, until we’re tumbling and disoriented, while the rest of the world, living above us, remains deaf to the suction.

  THE ART DEALER

  In Detroit, it’s hard not to see a connection between poverty and politics. Reports of government corruption make the news every year like clockwork. The city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, served for twenty years, from 1974 to 1994, and, while initially applauded among the black community, spent his two decades instating cronies to fill a personal coffer rivaling old money. He ruled the city limits with a freshly minted fist; trolled for allies in the church, the police, and the courts; doled out bribes and gifted millions in no-bid contracts. He held on to his power in third-world fashion, strong-arming it from the people.

  During Young’s tenure, a drug cartel known as Young Boys Inc.—the name is only coincidental to the mayor’s name—seeing huge pockets of heroin use in the city, consolidated the independent drug dealers and eventually controlled all of the heroin traffic in Detroit. It was estimated that Young Boys pulled in $750,000 a day. They had a street reputation for creative vendetta tortures that included sharpened broomsticks and alligators in sealed basements. Where so much heroin saturated the city, there was an equal spike in prostitution and violent crimes.

  The mayor did little to curb the violence until the late 1980s, when soon-to-be police chief Ike McKinnon spearheaded a major raid on Young Boys, arresting sixty of its lieutenants. Prior to that, in the 1970s, Ike McKinnon headed the sex crimes unit in Detroit. Among his territories was the impoverished Cass Corridor and the unlit corners in the environs of the Masonic.

  According to McKinnon, the pedophile turned informant Richard Lawson was paid in cash by the Detroit PD for his particular knowledge of pedophilia within the city and its environs. In exchange for the badge they’d given him to get out of trouble with, Lawson steered the city’s sex crimes unit toward multiple arrests over the years, although they were of lesser consequence than the damage Lawson did himself, his exploits in the underground unknown to the public until 2006, when he went up for the 1989 murder of a cab company owner.

  During testimony in his murder trial, Lawson bragged about his ties with police in the 1970s. He gave up Ted Lamborgine as being connected to the OCCK and recounted stories about Cass Corridor and Cass Community United Methodist Church, whose pastor, Reverend Lewis Redmond, was of special interest.

  The Reverend Redmond inherited a church in Cass Methodist that had spent previous decades catering to the wealthy; now, with the flight of Detroit’s moneyed to its suburbs, Lewis Redmond’s church was the epicenter of a broken community that was financially and spiritually impoverished. Under the reverend’s vision, however, Cass Methodist began to focus almost entirely on the poorest children of the Cass. The homeless and drug-addicted, the developmentally disabled, and the homebound elderly were targeted for care.

  As a community volunteer with Cass Methodist, Richard Lawson had both God and the law on his side, the church and the police, with access to the vulnerable wherever he looked. The Cass became a fourteen-block-long, four-block-deep corridor of opportunity for those with insidious motives. Lawson led the pack, impervious to consequences.

  MUCH OF THE Cass’s population was white in the 1970s, although no more moneyed because of it. The whites back then were those without the accumulated wealth to flee after a 1967 riot that scared the hell out of most Caucasians with a savings account. The whites left behind were the most destitute, scavengers who roamed the vacated city for trifles. They mingled in jazz clubs with their black neighbors; overdosed in barren tenements with the same needles in their arms; “sold the same pussy,” as people said, on street
corners; and trusted in the same system of churches and government to recognize their need.

  The only time Cass Corridor saw money or power take notice, it came in the form of a “buy.” Like other suburbanites who came to the Cass for an easy score, the art dealer John McKinney used to roll in from the suburbs. Sporting his blazer, he’d slink up the stairwells toward any number of well-worn mattresses. Later, he’d drive back to his residence near 15 Mile, a few dots on the map from Timothy King’s family.

  ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION

  The art dealer John McKinney was murdered six months after Timothy King’s abduction, in 1977. McKinney sometimes spent nights at his gallery in Birmingham, Michigan. He had a disco-trim beard, a casual hairstyle, two girlfriends who would visit him at the gallery, and a wife and a home a few miles away. He was very involved in both his Christian-based church as well as in extracurricular cult activities: He was officially a reverend of a second, “hidden church,” as the papers called it after his death. A reported drug user (but who wasn’t, in the 1970s?), he was shot down in his art gallery one night, the case never to be officially solved. In the xeroxed photograph I have of him on my wall, McKinney’s eyes peer away from the camera, looking sidelong.

  According to a police source who worked his murder scene, John McKinney had shared a glass of wine with his murderer just prior to the time of death. He was beaten savagely afterward. He was then allowed to wash up and, shortly after that, killed with a .22-caliber weapon, assumed to be a pistol.