The Kill Jar Read online

  Multiple known or newly discovered pedophiles residing in Michigan were questioned in relationship to the Fox Island scandal, including an elementary school principal, a child social services employee, and several directors and board members of other child welfare organizations. Eventually the investigation grazed a local police officer, a man referred to in confidential documents only as “Lindsay,” who was in possession of multiple reels of child pornography as well as print photographs depicting several Fox Island boys.

  Lindsay claimed not to know Frank Shelden or Gerald Richards, but, along with the pornography found in his home, there was print material from the camps and receipts from donations he’d made to the Boys Farm in Tennessee. The pornography was confiscated and eventually destroyed instead of held as evidence.

  GERALD RICHARDS HAD a short stay in a psychiatric hospital while awaiting trial. During that stay, he provided statements revealing his secret ownership in a two-room naturology clinic in Port Huron, where he had previously taken two boys to meet with Frank Shelden, each on different occasions.

  The location seemed inconsequential until years later when a young girl would testify to the FBI about having observed her father and other members of a pornography syndicate, one of them “someone powerful from Ann Arbor,” raping and, on a few occasions, killing young children in what she called “a doctor’s office.”

  She also testified to police officer involvement in the activities.

  A case report dated June 10, 1976, many months before the final two OCCK victims would be killed, outlines information received from the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification detailing a link between Boys Farm and four major sponsors noted as living in the Detroit area. Their names, ages, and places of residence have been whited out from all official documents.

  Richards eventually pled as accused on multiple criminal sexual conduct charges. Several of the victimized boys, a small percentage of them, testified. Richards was sentenced to two to twenty years in prison, served ten, and by the late 1980s was a free citizen living with his mother in Michigan.

  AGAINST THE WIND

  Ellie and I have dinner at another diner and then go for a drive, old-school Detroit classic rock on the radio. We say nothing while I turn corners and take curves on Hines Drive along a river banked by trees. She’s recently dyed her black hair even blacker and looks like Joan Jett.

  We’re both thinking of the same thing, I think, how years ago we used to take her baby for a cruise down Hines Drive in her Oldsmobile when we were bored that first summer we met. We’d swerve along the Rouge River and we’d have the windows down and Ellie’s hair would flip in the wind all the time. We’d listen to Nirvana on the cassette player and then we’d get out and walk along the river. Ellie would hold her baby on her hip and toss chunks of balled-up Wonder Bread to the ducks. When Ellie wanted to smoke, I’d hold her baby and try to remember being held like that but couldn’t. It hurt to think I could give my love to a baby that wasn’t mine while being cheated out of that same love from a father who’d had the opportunity but didn’t take it.

  I never wanted to let Ellie’s baby go. I used to smell her hair all the time, pressed beneath my chin while I carried her, and it made me weak.

  In the wintertime, Ellie and I started listening to Courtney Love’s band, Hole.

  A lot later, after we’d split, I used to drive down Hines by myself and feel the hurt all over again, pushing that cassette into my player.

  It’s been so many years, and all of this time I’ve been holding on to Ellie like I might have held on to the memory of my father or of Hines Drive or anywhere else that promised me sanctuary.

  When I drive back to her place to drop her off, we sit in my SUV and I turn the radio down and we talk.

  The light from the radio tints her hand electric blue when it crosses to my knee. We still haven’t slept together, and I want to, but also I won’t. I don’t know what Ellie wants. I can feel us moving in a current together, and that frightens me, but I say nothing and neither does she.

  We just sit like that outside her home for a while, and then when I’m on the freeway going back to my hotel, I decide to take a different exit and drive the twenty minutes to Troy.

  I measure out the distance along I-75 with my odometer and then pull onto the shoulder in the dark where, based on newspaper clippings, I can assume Jill Robinson, the second victim, had been dumped.

  I put my blinkers on and get out.

  There’s a huge wind that rattles my SUV when a semitruck passes, and then the air is still and silent and no cars pass for a while. In the distance I can see the lights of commercial businesses, the Troy PD, and the massive Somerset Collection mall complex; but when I turn my back to the city, everything ahead is dark.

  I stand in a ditch beyond the shoulder. A few cars pass. Somebody slows and then speeds up again. I can see the ditch willows in his taillights, and it feels like summer suddenly, how when you were a teenager you used to find yourself outside in the middle of the night the way adults don’t do.

  Or the way, when I was a little older, I used to make out with Ellie on the hood of my car, how I’d press my body against her jeans and hear her breathing become shallow, then quicken suddenly, and how everything was so humid all the time when we were together.

  Like in that Bob Seger song, “Against the Wind,” nothing mattered to us but each other. That time in our lives lasted only a blink, but we were young and strong, or at least wanted to be, and the whole fucking thing was before us, waiting for us to inhabit it, whatever that thing was.

  But then the moment ended, like everything else. We dated maybe eighteen months, but it felt like five minutes and it felt like my entire life at the same time.

  Ellie had been what I’d planned for, right before she was gone.

  I can’t know specifically what Jill Robinson had planned for in her own life, but standing there in the high grass and the north-leaning willows on the side of the road with nothing but darkness and taillights and the damp smell of ditch weeds and gasoline in the air, I know that Jill Robinson would have been planning for a lot, for the million little moments that make up a world, and that we never expect to be taken from us before they are.

  HIT MEN

  Christopher Busch, the suspect who reportedly shot himself without leaving gunshot residue, was the son of a prominent Detroit family. A food service worker in his mid-twenties, he primarily lived off his parents, enjoying their automobiles, their homes, and the small restaurant his father invested in so that Christopher could have a job.

  At five feet eight inches and 250 pounds, Christopher was fantastically barrel-shaped and his beard went down to his neckline. The hair on his head was greasy. His skin was pale.

  His father, H. Lee Busch, was the chief financial officer for General Motors’ entire North Atlantic division. Before the car company bailouts of our recent recession, many of us were beginning to think of General Motors as a doomed enterprise, overwhelmed by inefficiencies and improbable debt, but in its heyday of the 1970s, General Motors had a greater revenue stream than most small countries.

  Even the lowliest of GM employees, of the hundreds of thousands of them in the auto industry at large, would clock $40,000 in a calendar year working regular hours on the assembly line. That was great money in the 1970s. There were guys everywhere with only a GED putting in overtime and buying up second homes, mostly wilderness cabins an hour or two north of the blue-collar concrete grids that kept them employed.

  As an executive in that world, H. Lee Busch had more than just money. He had access and power, and it trickled down to his kids.

  We didn’t have any of that when I was growing up. We lived in the low-mortgage Oak Park area at first during my early childhood. A couple years later, somebody on our block bought a used, beat-to-hell limousine for their daily driver and parked it on the lawn. My father saw that as a sign that the neighborhood was “turning ghetto,” and we eventually moved to another small house a
few miles away, in Southfield, when I was five.

  My brother, in turn, was smoking weed, listening to acid rock on the eight-track player in the basement-level bedroom he’d eventually moved his quarters to, escaping the original bunk bed he’d first shared with me, and nursing the wounds my father would inflict. I think my brother probably sees it differently all these years later, time having softened some of the blows, the soldier in him having thickened his body and hardened his jaw and mind to the blows that could not be softened.

  I don’t remember spending much quality time with my dad during those years, but on Thursday nights he occasionally sat on the bottom bunk with me and we watched the boxing competitions on a small television atop my bureau. I remember wanting to hold on to those moments with him. My dad knew a lot about boxing. He’d grown up in Detroit proper, was a “greaser” who had gravitated vicariously to the roughness of the streets. He was lean with muscle, his knuckled fists cutting and jabbing through the glow of my bedroom while he taught me the trade, telling me to put up my hands while he punched at them during commercial breaks.

  I felt the sting of his fists against my palms, and I liked it because it seemed to be the only time my dad ever touched me.

  THOMAS “THE HITMAN” Hearns was a widely popular boxer back then. He was tall like my dad and decisive with a strike. He had trained at the Kronk Gym in Detroit and eventually become a world champion. My dad was obsessed with him. There was something in the way Hearns hit that spoke to my dad with a force that family couldn’t. I understand this now. It’s a glorious thing to watch a boxer in his prime.

  Hearns must have been what my dad seemed to feel he had missed out on: a stab at greatness, maybe. Shortly after Hearns won the national Golden Gloves light welterweight championship in ’77, my dad moved out. He took my little television with him, and my mom put a fish tank on the bureau instead.

  I’d lie in the bottom bunk, snapping my switchblade open and staring at the backlit fish tank. The blue and red neon of it flatlined above imitation pebbles. The Plexiglas box glowed like my old television.

  Years later, I would recognize this same distance between myself and neon, alone at bars, still confused about my life, still wanting to hurt somebody just to get out of my head for a minute.

  DURING WINTER BREAK when I was seven, my mom drove us through the suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield to look at the Christmas lights.

  I guess she thought it would make us feel better, seeing the big homes lit up. Our own little brick house was the size of some of those garages and half as tall.

  Christopher Busch had grown up in one of those “spreads,” as my mother called them.

  While I was staring through the window of our station wagon, my breath fogging across the glassy December tinsel that streamed by, my forefinger etching downward through the moisture as though marking out time, a suitcase full of 8mm film showcasing children was somewhere in Christopher Busch’s possession. And just under a year later, Christopher Busch and two accomplices would plead guilty to multiple counts of criminal sexual conduct related to dozens of child molestations in areas north of Detroit.

  The accomplices, less moneyed than Christopher Busch, received multiple years in prison for the crimes. One of them got life, but Christopher Busch, under the tutelage of his politically entrenched father and an expensive attorney, received only probation and a $1,000 fine.

  Kristine Mihelich and Timothy King, victims #3 and #4, had not yet been killed.

  Christopher Busch, out on probation at the time of their murders, was questioned several times about the OCCK murders. The suitcase full of pornography previously confiscated as evidence in the sexual misconduct charges he had faced had somehow disappeared from police custody and was no longer evidence to anything but the fact that more than just children in the OCCK case could turn up missing.

  Within weeks of being polygraphed about the case, Christopher Busch was dead of the reported suicide. His father, H. Lee, incinerated Christopher Busch’s body. He would do the same to the family’s birth certificates shortly afterward, for unspecified reasons.

  LIAR LIAR

  During the initial weeks of the OCCK investigation, two different tips were called in on Christopher Busch. Of the roughly 20,000 original tips, the Christopher Busch tips were numbers 369 and 1,035. They had come early.

  Tip #369 reportedly went missing—although I would later find it—but tip #1,035 had a note attached to it stating that Busch was currently under indictment for the sexual misconduct charges mentioned, stemming from incidents with young boys at various locations. Among them was the family-owned cabin on Ess Lake, a few hours north of Detroit.

  Of the hundreds of official polygraphs given during the OCCK case, Christopher Busch’s was the only one attended by a prosecutor and the only time in memory that the Oakland County deputy prosecutor himself had ever made an appearance at a polygraph. Something about this particular examination demanded the presence of a higher authority.

  Busch would also be polygraphed by Lawrence “Larry” Wasser, but the examination would be paid for and administered privately by his own attorneys, who, according to the King family, buried the results. Busch’s official polygraph was now administered by Ralph Cabot and concerned only the murder of victim #1, Mark Stebbins. He was not questioned about victim #2, Jill Robinson. Due to her taking a shotgun wound postmortem, police allegedly weren’t immediately convinced that Jill’s murder was a related killing.

  What was passed down the chain of command from polygraphist to the police to the press, and eventually to the families of the victims, was that Christopher Busch had passed the Stebbins polygraph. In reality, he had failed it, although nobody on the outside would know this until three decades later.

  Busch couldn’t be touched. He was released from questioning until future court dates on pending charges against him related to the Ess Lake molestations. His evasion of custody early on is noteworthy, as, later, police would be searching for that blue compact car, a Gremlin with a white hockey stripe—the car from the fliers plastered everywhere. The Gremlin would be seen at the abduction site of Timothy King, the OCCK’s final known victim. Christopher Busch, out on his own recognizance after the Stebbins polygraph, was driving around in a 1977 two-door blue Chevy Vega, a near duplicate to the AMC Gremlin, with white stripes down its sides.

  He’d purchased the car just weeks prior to the first OCCK abduction.

  THIRTY YEARS LATER, one of Christopher Busch’s molestation victims was living in a halfway house in Detroit. In 2008 he gave statements to police about Busch and Gregory Greene, one of Busch’s associates in the sexual misconduct charges. Greene’s name had been OCCK tip #370, alongside Busch’s. Tip #370 had been “lost,” too, just like the first tip on Busch.

  Greene, in his twenties in 1976–77, was clean-shaven and had a strong jawline and piercing eyes that were sometimes augmented by thick black-framed glasses. Greene’s hair was slick and dark. He was often transient in the years prior, flitting back and forth from Michigan to California, before colluding with Busch.

  The molestation victim divulged in his 2008 statements that Busch and Greene often used him as bait, like Shelden and Richards used Michael F., to lure other children to Busch’s vehicle. He stated that Christopher Busch, in the winter of 1977, had once driven him and another young boy down to Detroit from the Ess Lake cottage and made the two of them perform sex acts with each other in a wooded area while Busch watched.

  Busch then drove them both toward Pontiac, forty minutes from Detroit, where he dropped off the boy from the cottage at the house of another man, the pedophile named Ted Lamborgine, who, by the time of the victim’s statements to police in 2008, was serving prison time for reportedly unrelated molestation charges.

  The victim stated that he believed, back in 1977, that the boy who had been handed over to Lamborgine was Timothy King. He’d believed that since the time of the molestations themselves, when he was still a child and providing his o
riginal testimony about Busch’s molestation of him. The police had shown him pictures of two boys lying on tables, dead. He had recognized one of them as the King boy but kept this to himself over the years out of fear.

  He also said that Busch kept handcuffs and a pistol in his blue Vega. At some point Busch himself had shown him a Polaroid of the boy who he later understood was also Timothy King. The photo had shown King tied up in the Vega’s trunk.

  At the time of the victim’s statements in 2008, he was a grown man in his forties and was not being investigated for any crimes. Both Busch and Greene, his previously convicted molesters, were long dead. No unscrupulous motivating factors could be found for his testimony. The narrative report, written by the cop who took his statement in 2008, was not released to the press, and no further case summary or documentation appears to exist that would indicate further scrutiny or investigation based on his narrative.

  I scan the narrative into an email and send it to a friend of mine in D.C. so there’s backup in case my life gets muddied—in case what happens to me on the outside is what happens to me on the inside almost every day, even before studying this case: the little moments when you disappear from the world, are snatched into corners.

  When I flatten my hand to the nightstand in the hotel after hitting send, I am wondering which will hurt more: the pocketknife in my gym bag or the darkness of the room when I turn down for the night.

  WAYNO

  Mark Wayno was twelve years old in 1977, the year after victim #1, Mark Stebbins, was murdered. Wayno, like Stebbins, went missing from the Ferndale area. He disappeared on a Monday night and police went frantically from door to door in their hunt for the boy, fearing the worst.