The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  A Detroit News article about the ban quoted an anonymous investigator: “It’s a damn mess and until they straighten the thing out, I would just as soon not be part of it.… I’m not so sure secrecy is the answer. There’s a lot we don’t even learn from each other.”

  Reporters speculated: “Some people are wondering whether it’s an investigative ploy or an excuse for not knowing anything.”27

  On March 16, 1977, Timothy King, a straight A student in sixth grade at Adams Elementary School, left his home on Yorkshire Road in Birmingham with his skateboard.

  It was a Wednesday night and 11-year-old Tim had 30 cents in his pocket that his older sister, Cathy, had loaned him to buy candy. The Hunter Maple Pharmacy was located in a shopping plaza that borders Woodward Avenue and Adams Road, less than three blocks from the King home. Tim left around 7:45 p.m. Seventeen-year-old Cathy left the house about 8:00 p.m. She had tickets to a show at a new hotel/conference center in Dearborn; Jerry Lewis was doing a stand-up routine.

  The weather had been unseasonably warm that week. Temperatures reached 70 degrees, melting all the snow and creating the illusion of an early spring. Earlier that afternoon, after school, Tim had skateboarded at the Chatham Market and Hunter Maple Pharmacy parking lot with three friends. The lot had a decent incline and the kids would skateboard from the top to the bottom, sometimes hitting the brick wall of Chatham Market.

  Tim’s brother, Chris, who had turned 16 the day before, was babysitting in the neighborhood. His other brother, Mark, 13, was at play practice at Derby Middle School. Marion and Barry King were going to a client’s house for a will signing and then out to dinner at nearby Peabody’s Restaurant, less than 500 feet away from the site of their youngest son’s abduction.

  Before leaving the house, Marion had told Cathy they had talked to Tim and were allowing him to stay home alone. He’d been asking to do that for some time. Like every kid in the area, Tim had been duly warned about not going anywhere with anyone he didn’t know.

  Cathy had gotten dressed up for the show and was sitting on the couch, buckling the ankle strap of her shoe. Tim came into the room, stood in front of her, and said, “You look pretty.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Tim stood there smiling. “Ok, what do you want?”

  Tim asked to borrow some money so he could run up to Hunter Maple to buy some candy. He explained he was saving his money from his paper route for a blue track suit. Cathy had a big jar on her dresser in her bedroom with tip money from her waitressing job. She told him to get some change from there.

  When he came back downstairs, Cathy told Tim she would leave the front door open. She stressed that he be very careful crossing Adams Road. Never once did she consider the possibility that Tim would cross paths with a serial killer.

  Marion and Barry arrived home at about 9 p.m., followed by Mark and Chris. But Tim was nowhere to be found. Marion got in the car with Chris, while Mark and Barry stayed home in case Tim called. With Chris driving and Marion in the passenger seat, they drove slowly to search for Tim at his friends’ homes, all the while scanning backyards.

  Pulling in the driveway of a close friend’s house, Chris remembered, “The house was dark, pitch black. I said: ‘Mom. I’ll just go and knock on the door anyway.’ She said, ‘No, he’s not there.’ And then she started crying. I knew she was right.”

  From that moment on, Chris said: “It was horrible because you knew what was going on. The clock was ticking.”

  Later when he couldn’t sleep, Chris went out to the garage and grabbed a baseball bat and walked up to Hunter Maple pharmacy, furious and scared out of his mind in equal measure. The buzzing of the streetlights overhead was deafening.

  There were three or four cars parked in the lot. One of them was an AMC Gremlin. It was blue with a white hockey stripe. He would remember this car specifically because he was fond of the small hatchback. He dared himself to look inside. Nothing.

  Cathy arrived home close to 2 a.m. All of the lights were on in her house and she assumed she was in trouble. Instead, she was her parents’ last hope. As soon as she walked in, they pummeled her with questions about Tim. When she told them about Tim leaving the house to go buy candy hours before, their hearts sunk.

  On Thursday morning, less than 14 hours after Tim had gone missing, Birmingham Police Chief Rollin G. Tobin set up a mobile command post in Poppleton Park, a 10-acre field of grass and trees with a tennis court and baseball diamond, less than a mile away from the King home. The “post” was an RV—a trailer—borrowed from a local dealership. The park provided a landing and take-off area for teams using the Oakland County Sheriff’s helicopter to do air searches.

  That afternoon, at Chief Tobin’s request, Barry and Marion King reluctantly agreed to be part of a press conference. It was held in one of the marbled-floored, wood-trimmed conference rooms in the historic brick building which houses the Birmingham Police Department.

  “You couldn’t have a more ideal child,” Barry said, while camera shutters clicked in a frenzy. “He’s active and into all kinds of sports. He knows the dangers of talking with strangers. Just three weeks ago, in a talk with his mother, he told her he would run if a man ordered him into a car. We’ve been realistic about the problem [the possibility of abduction] since [the child murders] happened.”

  Pleading to his son’s abductors, he said: “I don’t know if you have children or want them. Please treat Tim the same way you would your own child. Talk to him. He’s a talkative kid. I don’t know if you have a brother, but Cathy, Chris and Mark, Tim’s brothers and sister, said to treat Tim just like you would a brother. We want him back. Please just send him home.”

  Prompted by reporters, King mustered his last comments: “I want to say ‘Hi’ to Tim. We love you. I spoke with Coach Righter and they had baseball tryouts yesterday, but don’t worry, they will have another one when you get home. Stay tough and say your prayers. We’re with you, buddy.”

  Timothy King’s parents, Marion and Barry King, pleaded for their son’s safe return at a press conference held at Birmingham Police headquarters two days after his disappearance (photograph by Ira Rosenberg, Detroit Free Press).

  By Friday, Cathy, Chris and Mark King were sent to school. Marion and Barry wanted them to be busy; it would help pass the time. Cathy’s friends tried to console her; maybe Tim had just run away for a couple nights. But they were all thinking the same thing: if only Tim was the kind of kid who would run away. After a few hours, Cathy had to leave. As she got close to home, she saw the low-flying helicopters and had to stop the car. She screamed out Tim’s name and broke down, sobbing.

  When neighbors and friends stopped by, Cathy knew from the looks on their faces: life as they knew it was over. Everyone bore the weight of the unspoken, Cathy remembered: “That Tim was being subjected to some very bad treatment all while we were hiding at home.”

  On one of those endless nights while Tim was missing, Cathy, Mark and Chris were down in the basement along with Cathy’s best friend, talking in hushed tones. Barry walked downstairs to use the basement phone. He looked at the kids, and then shook his head. “If you kids can live through this,” he said. “You can live through anything.” The kids looked at each other but said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Page from a police binder giving a physical description of four-foot, 63-pound Tim King, with a photograph of a bright red hockey team jacket like the one he was wearing when he was abducted (Michigan State Police).

  Marion called her family in Nova Scotia. She spoke with her sister, Liz, and told her Tim was missing. Marion asked Liz not to tell their mother who suffered from multiple sclerosis and was confined to her bed.

  But Liz thought differently. She told her sister, “I don’t think that’s your decision to make.” When Liz went ahead and told her mother her grandson was missing, her mother said through tears, “Thank you for telling me. I deserve to be able to p
ray for Tim.”

  From day one, police officers provided around the clock security detail. One officer was assigned the day shift; another had the night shift. They were gracious and deferential to the King family, defensive toward all outsiders.

  Each family member was required to be interviewed by the FBI. “When the FBI agent couldn’t even look me in the eye, I knew it was all over,” Cathy remembered. “He looked like he was about to cry himself.”

  During the first 36 hours of Tim’s disappearance, about 90 detectives from six nearby precincts—Ferndale, Southfield, Berkley, Royal Oak, Troy and Birmingham—performed house-to-house interviews in two-man teams, starting on the Kings’ street and fanning out toward all points of the compass.

  Tips began pouring in. A woman named Edith Raubacher said she had just finished grocery shopping Wednesday night at the shopping center where Tim had been. She said she had just left Chatham Supermarket and was loading groceries in her trunk when she saw a young boy in a red jacket with emblems on it (Tim was wearing his red nylon Birmingham Hockey Association jacket) talking to a man standing by a car. She described the man as having long dark hair, and sideburns and between 25 and 30 years old. She said he had “dark” skin, possibly Mediterranean features, and appeared “swarthy.” She was definite about identifying the car: it was a blue AMC Gremlin with a white hockey stripe. “I always notice those little Gremlins,” Raubacher said with a hint of pride.28

  Amy Walters, a clerk at Hunter Maple Pharmacy told reporters she recalled seeing Tim come into the store at about 8:30 p.m. “I remember him—a quiet kid, who just came in and bought candy and left,” she said. “He’s a real cute little kid—the kind you’d wish you’d have someday yourself. I feel so bad I can’t help out more. I saw him walk out the back door.”29

  Like so many aspects of this case, it would take decades for police to conclude that the Gremlin lead had been a red herring. The damage to the investigation would increase commensurately over time: the longer the myth that the killer drove a blue Gremlin persisted, the harder it was to dispel.

  From Raubacher’s description, police artists drew up a composite of the suspect’s face. Chief Tobin called a news conference to get the composite and photos of the Gremlin out to the public. Soon, word around town was: if you drove a Gremlin, you should probably carry a toothbrush because whenever that vehicle was spotted, cops appeared out of nowhere, sirens blaring.

  One driver of a blue Gremlin protested to police: “I’ve been stopped twenty-three times in the past four days. Any way you can give me some kind of pass?”30

  Police were determined to track down every one of the 8,000 blue Gremlins registered in Michigan. Birmingham police developed an information request form and sent it to departments all over the state. The response was tepid at best. Some forms trickled in months later. In the end, only 3,000 Gremlins were checked out. There were also numerous reports of false abductions related to the blue Gremlin. One was traced to a kid struggling to avoid being driven to the dentist’s office.

  On Friday, March 18, 1977, two days into the abduction, L. Brooks Patterson authorized all local law enforcement involved to stop and search every vehicle on the streets of Oakland County after midnight. It was a drastic measure. It was also blatantly unconstitutional. But they were driven by the urgency to find Tim King alive. Since the other three children had been dropped off within hours of being murdered and sometime after midnight, the hope, however slight, was that they could intercept the killer.

  The massive search occurred over that Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 2 and 6 a.m. One hundred patrol officers concentrated on three communities north of Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Township and Troy. More than 2,000 cars were pulled over. In the end, there was nothing to show for it. One officer said: “The amazing thing is that all the people whose cars we stopped cooperated one hundred percent in the search. Nobody complained.”31

  Officers take calls at the Oakland County Child Killer Task Force headquarters. The Task Force would receive 18,000 tips but none led to any charges being filed (Detroit News).

  Police enlisted the aid of nearly 1,100 Oakland County mail carriers for “Operation Observation,” in hopes they might discover some leads along their routes. The mail carriers were provided with the composite sketch along with a profile worked up by psychiatrists, psychologists and law enforcement personnel:

  As a result of the investigation and consultation with professionals in law enforcement, as well as the medical field, here are some of the characteristics that may be associated with the person responsible for the abduction of the local Oakland County youths.

  1. Male (possibly two)

  2. Age: 25–30 years

  3. Educated

  4. Intelligent

  5. Caucasian

  6. Has the capacity to store or keep victim for a number of days without being detected.

  7. Has a compulsion for cleanliness and very neat. His house and car are very clean. To the point of being a fanatic.

  8. Little or no substance abuse involved.

  9. His work schedule permits a certain amount of freedom of movement.

  10. He is a white-collar worker.

  11. He has abnormal sexual habits.

  12. He may be undergoing psychiatric treatment or desirous of same.

  13. He lives or works in Oakland County.32

  By Saturday, March 19, Birmingham police had received more than 600 tips. In one week’s time, that number would soar to 4,000. Persons named by tipsters included priests, teachers, doctors, a state legislator and a television newsman. Investigators from dozens of agencies were working 16-hour days, taking a few hours off to nap and then heading right back to work. “We’ve never had this type of volunteer response from law enforcement agencies that I know of,” said Chief Tobin. “We’re even more committed to solving this case than the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.”33

  Police in several other states checked their sex crime records. U.S. Customs Service said border points across the country between the U.S. and Canada would be monitored for suspicious persons and cars.

  Krease encouraged the public to come forward: “I feel there are people out there who may have seen something but don’t know what they’ve seen.” He stressed that the profile gleaned from police consultations with sociologists and psychiatrists suggested the killer is a man whose work permits freedom of movement and who lives in Oakland County. He may be undergoing psychiatric treatment for “abnormal sex habits.”34

  Chief Tobin echoed the same plea. “Look at your neighbor, your friends, your relatives,” he said. “See if there is any similarity with the profile. We may be talking about a very prominent or a very rich person, a person you see in a shopping center and you think he belongs there.”35

  Tobin said the King family was bearing up exceedingly well during the ordeal. Tim would be alive, held captive, for three more days.

  The last photograph taken of Tim King, at school, before he went missing (courtesy of the King family).

  At least one person was convicted of extortion after calling the Kings and demanding $25,000 in ransom. The 18-year-old man had phoned the Kings one late afternoon. As with all calls that came in during the time Tim was missing, it was monitored. After the first ring, Marion King waited for the go-ahead signal from Birmingham Police Officer Don Studt—a rookie assigned to security detail at the King house—before she picked up the kitchen wall phone. As soon as he gave the thumbs-up sign to Marion, Studt simultaneously picked up the special extension phone police had wired in the house. Within 24 hours, police staged a stake-out and watched as Michael A. Blue of Detroit snatched up the ransom—a cloth bag filled with shredded paper. He was handcuffed within minutes.36

  Police also got the name of every Hunter Maple Pharmacy customer that had a prescription filled that night and started knocking on doors. One, Lenore Marzolino, said sh
e was sitting in the back of the drug store waiting for a prescription when she saw a man walking on his way out the back door. She said she would not have given him a second thought, but when he got to the door, he stood and paused, turning his head to look at the candy aisle where a few kids were milling about. When Mrs. Marzolino saw the composite sketch on TV (based on Edith Raubacher’s description of the man she saw talking to Tim in the parking lot) Marzolino thought it resembled the man she saw in the drug store. At the police station, Marzolino told a sketch artist she felt the nose was a little bigger and that he had long sideburns. When they showed Marzolino’s drawing to Mrs. Raubacher, she agreed that the second drawing bore an even more striking resemblance to the man she saw talking to the boy in the parking lot than her own composite.37

  Police file of two composite drawings based on witnesses’ description of a suspect seen talking to Tim King in the parking lot of the pharmacy just before he disappeared. One witness reported seeing the man talking to a boy while standing next to a blue AMC Gremlin (Michigan State Police).

  By day four into Tim’s disappearance, the Detroit News published a letter written by Marion King to the kidnapper of her son. It was wrenching to read, like swallowing broken glass:

  I am expecting at any moment for the side door to bang open and hear Tim say “Have we ate yet? I mean, have we had dinner yet?” When that happens, I will run for his favorite Kentucky Fried Chicken and mix his glass of Ovaltine. Then, when he has had the usual eight Oreos and some plain milk to dunk them, Tim and I will go on our delayed shopping trip. We had planned to buy a much-wanted light blue warm up suit with the money he has saved from his newspaper route.