LAPD conducted a massive manhunt, employing helicopters and tracking dogs. Finally, they found Mudica hiding out in a garage. He would later confess to Williams: “I was trying to get to Leticia. We were going to run away together.”3
When Mudica was finally in Williams’ custody, the detective got him ready for trial. Part of Williams took pity on Mudica. His mother was a prostitute. He was a runaway who had been abused and molested by Lawson and was probably coerced into being his accomplice in the Giller murder. Williams also knew that after testifying in Detroit, Mudica would be sent back to California to face attempted murder charges on the driver of the van. So, he got Mudica a haircut and a shave, fed him burgers and pizza. Then they went to buy new clothes, specifically a shirt with a collar high enough to cover up the swastika tattoo on his neck.
After one of Lawson’s appearances in court, a television news reporter asked Lawson directly: “Do you know who the Oakland County Child Killer is?”
Lawson answered with all the bravado he could muster: “Yes I believe I do, but I’ll tell you what, if you gentlemen want to meet with me privately, we’ll cut a little deal.”4
All three local news stations led their broadcast that night with the story of a murder suspect on trial being a possible informant for the notorious child killing case. Lawson ate it up.
As his defense in the Giller murder, Lawson claimed he had suffered a stroke that caused amnesia and the murder had been erased from his brain. The prosecution relied heavily on a heated exchange between Williams and Lawson during an interrogation.
“Did you or did you not shoot Exavor Giller?” Williams pressed him.
“I don’t know,” Lawson said.
“So, you’re not denying it?”
“What?”
“You’re not denying it?”
“I’m not denying it,” Lawson said. “I just don’t know, all right? I just don’t know!”5
After a week-long jury trial, Richard Lawson was convicted of first-degree felony murder on March 6, 2006. Sentencing was set for two weeks later.
In the interim, the prosecutor’s office and Lawson’s attorney went back and forth trying to come to a consensus on the conditions of a “cooperation agreement.” In exchange for information leading to the identity of the Oakland County Child Killer, the conditions ranged from a reduced sentence to sending Lawson to a prison with varying degrees of security.
Detroit’s Fox 2 News sent their reporter Scott Lewis to interview Lawson while he awaited sentencing in the Wayne County jail. Lawson insisted he knew who the killer was, but he refused to reveal the name. Why not, the reporter asked. Lawson answered: “Because the information I have is worth more than what the prosecutor is offering me.”6
The problem was that Williams could never be sure how much of Lawson’s story was true and how much he was reconstructing to fit the narrative of what was already publicly known about the case. Lawson’s premise was that the killers were two adult male pedophiles that used a young boy to lure kids to the car. One of the men—“the brains” behind the crimes—was into young boys. The other pedophile was into young girls and was “the violent one.” Once they abducted the first child (Mark Stebbins) from Oakland County, Lawson said, they knew they could not release him, so they had to kill him. With the second child (Jill Robinson), the violent man forced his partner to kill her. “That way,” Lawson said. “They couldn’t point a finger at each other.”
Sometimes, Lawson would nail certain facts that were not widely known. For example, in a 2005 interview, Lawson said that Jill was not molested because she was menstruating and that Kristine had not yet started her period.
Sgt. Williams: Okay. So, three were suffocated, one was shot with a shotgun. Only the boys were … sexually molested. Not the girls.
R. Lawson: She wasn’t sexually molested because she was having her period, like I say.
Sgt. Williams: How about the other one, though?
R. Lawson: She wasn’t havin’ her period. She was younger.
Sgt. Williams: I know. But why wasn’t she sexually molested?”
R. Lawson: There are men out there that are sexually turned on with the boys but at the same time they get a big kick out of watchin’ young boys and young girls together but they’re fantasizing due to what the girl is doing to the boy. They have no interest in the girl. … They just like watchin’ the boy perform. … Or the girl perform on him. The focus is on what she’s doin’ to him.7
Sometimes Lawson would inadvertently switch from “they,” the third person, to the first person “I,” and back to the third again. Just to be sure, Williams had a forensic psychiatrist read the lengthy transcripts to determine the significance of Lawson’s slips. But the psychiatrist was little help; Williams could not get him to commit either way on Lawson’s involvement in the crimes.
Williams convinced Lawson to take a polygraph. He had refused all along. But now that he was facing a life sentence for murder, he was out of options. Strapped to a polygraph machine, Lawson was asked if he knew who killed the four children in Oakland County. He answered “no,” and he passed. On March 21, 2006, Lawson, then 58, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing Exavor Giller 17 years earlier.
Nine months later, Lawson was back in court, answering to five counts of criminal sexual conduct (CSC). Williams had tracked down Lawson’s Cass Corridor victims and convinced them that testifying in open court about being coerced into sex acts as children, against a perpetrator already serving a life sentence for murder, was worth the resurrected pain it would cause them.
Lawson chose to act as his own attorney. It was an absurd performance. “Evidence will show I molested these people,” Lawson told the jury in a rambling open statement. “Which I did. But I will prove to you I was under the direction of the Detroit Police Department…. The reason why I did it was to prevent another hundred children from being molested.”8
Lawson maintained he needed to molest the boys to gain the trust of other pedophiles so they would talk to him. He insisted he had a signed document granting him immunity from prosecution, but he couldn’t find it. It had been “misplaced.”
One victim, now 38, testified: “(Lawson) used to take us skating, give us money.” He said he didn’t report the abuse because he was scared of what could happen to him. He was then shown a photo taken of him when he was 11. He was wearing a suit Lawson had bought him.9
A second victim said he was “very embarrassed” when Williams came to him and asked if Lawson had sexually abused him. A third said Lawson molested him in the basement of Cass United Methodist Church. A fourth witness said Lawson struck up a conversation while he was playing video games. “Then, he gave me quarters to play more.”
On the stand and under questioning by Lawson, former Police Chief Isaiah “Ike” McKinnon conceded: “You were good at what you did. There’s no doubt that you helped us arrest a number of people involved in child prostitution and child pornography.” But, when asked if Lawson was given immunity to molest children, McKinnon said: “Absolutely not.”10
After deliberating for less than an hour, the jury convicted Lawson on all five counts and Lawson was led away in handcuffs. While everyone in the courtroom seemed relieved to be rid of Lawson, no one was happier than Williams. Now he could focus solely on Lawson’s pedophile pals: Bob Moore and Ted Orr.
* * *
1. All named in Det. Cory Williams’ notes and interviews.
2. Faye Goley, Interview with Det. Cory Williams, February 11, 2005.
3. Mudica, Phone interview from jail cell with Det. Cory Williams, February 2006.
4. Marisol Bello, “Suspect Says He Can ID Oakland Co. Child Killer” Detroit Free Press, December 13, 2006, 5B.
5. Lawson in interviews with Det. Cory Williams, February 22, 2005.
6. Lawson to news re
porter Scott Lewis, Fox2News Detroit, “Ten O‘Clock News,” March 24, 2006.
7. Lawson in interview with Det. Cory Williams, May 27, 2005.
8. Zlati Meyer, “4 Men Testify in Molestation Trial; They Recall Abuse in the Early 1980s,” Detroit Free Press, February 5, 2008, 1B.
9. Meyer, “4 Men.”
10. Zlati Meyer, “Wayne County Man Found Guilty of Molesting Boy in 80s: Ex-Chief Confirms He Was Informer,” Detroit Free Press, February 7, 2008.
6
Offered Ten Years, He Chose Three Life Sentences
The search for Bob Moore was relatively easy. A check with the Michigan State Intelligence Unit in Lansing showed that Robert “Bob” Moore died in Detroit, March 2, 1996. At 55, the man with a ghoulish wandering left eye, who forced children into sex acts with his camera rolling, went into cardiac arrest in his home. By the time his body was discovered days later on the floor of his kitchen, three vicious pit bulls he had kept in his house for protection had chewed his carcass to bits. In his notes, Williams wrote: “Justice served.”
Bob Moore owned a bike shop in the Cass Corridor and was a prominent figure in the child prostitution and pornography ring operating at the time of the Oakland County Child Killings. He died in his apartment in 1995 of cardiac arrest (Michigan State Police).
Locating Ted Orr was more involved; it didn’t help that “Ted Orr” was an alias. While the name “Orr” was listed on the mailbox of Ted’s home in Detroit, Lawson said he thought Ted’s real last name began with the letters LAM. Beginning his search at a time before the case records were finally digitized, Williams spent entire days searching old typewritten tip files at the state police post—some 26,000 of them—looking for a Theodore or Ted whose last name began with LAM. Finally, he came across a 1977 tip on a man named Theodore Lamborgine. Lawson had called it in. It had to be Ted Orr. Right behind it was another tip, from Lawson—this one was on Bob Moore. Lawson had said he believed both Moore and Ted “Orr” could have been involved in the child murders. Neither tip had been investigated.
A Nexis search showed Lamborgine, now in his mid-sixties, living in Parma Heights, a city of 20,000, west of downtown Cleveland. Lamborgine left Detroit in 1978, right after the killings stopped.
Up until this time, police had not considered the possibility of multiple killers. “The original theories were always a white, single adult male, ages twenty-five to thirty-five.” Williams said. “It was even thought he could have been a cop or a priest since he had to have lured kids into the car.” But after hearing Lawson’s story, the more plausible theory was that pedophiles like those in the Cass Corridor worked as a team, one coaxing kids to cars, another as a look-out person, and another to grab them, muffle their screams.
Lamborgine was living in an apartment and worked on the line at the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park. Shy and timid in the presence of adults, he was aggressive and violent around little boys.
For a time, he had tried owning a home. He purchased a little lemon-colored house in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood, with a tiny front yard. He kept to himself, having coffee in the morning at McDonald’s, then going to work, then directly home. A big night was heading out to the all-you-can-eat soup-and-salad special at the nearby Olive Garden, alone.
After five years, Lamborgine didn’t like the job of taking care of a home, didn’t want the responsibility. So, he sold the house and donated most of his furniture, moving to an apartment in Brook Park, closer to the Ford factory. Even though he had saved enough money to retire, he would often take on overtime.
Williams interviewed Bertha Lamborgine, Ted’s mother, in the family home in Redford, a working-class suburb west of Detroit. Ted’s father, Theodore Lamborgine, Sr., was confined to a bedroom, rendered invalid from a stroke he suffered five years earlier. During the interview, Bertha said she knew her son was a homosexual; it was the reason he was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1963. Ted had moved out of the house at age 18. He would come back to visit, but never stayed overnight. When Williams informed Bertha that her son was a pedophile and was being investigated for possible involvement in the abduction and murder of young children, Bertha was visibly shaken. She said her only son had struggled with “what I thought was homosexuality” for years.
“I had no idea it was about kids,” she said. “Ted would go to church for a while, but then go back to his old ways. It was always back and forth.”1
Williams explained to Bertha that it would be in Ted’s best interest for him to cooperate in this investigation because arrests were going to be made. He made a point of telling her: “Richard Lawson is talking to us.”
Co-workers said Lamborgine was affable, but quiet. Perhaps a lost soul, said one. After word leaked that police were looking at Lamborgine in regard to four children’s murders in Detroit, a reporter for an Ohio newspaper quoted a fellow employee saying: “I didn’t know what his thing was. Whether a woman had jilted him or something.”2
On August 24, 2005, Lamborgine left his apartment in his new shiny burgundy Ford pickup. Parma Heights Police Sgt. Wayne Mockler followed, put on his flashers, and pulled him over. Mockler told Ted detectives from Michigan were in town and wanted to talk to him. Ted sighed and said: “I knew my past would catch up to me.”3
Cory Williams was waiting for Lamborgine in the interrogation room at the Parma Heights Police Department. Over the next three hours, Lamborgine admitted his involvement in pedophilia in Detroit in the seventies with Lawson, Moore and others. But when it came to the Oakland County Child Killings, he said he had nothing to do with it. He said Lawson and Moore gave him the nickname “Ted Orr” so he started using it on the street. He talked about participating in a “boys’ night out” where he and the others would pick up young boys and molest them. He would first show them pornographic films to get them aroused and then he would perform oral sex on them. But he insisted he was not a child killer; he agreed to take a polygraph in Michigan to prove it.
On September 6, 2005, in a small examination room at the Michigan State Police Post in Northville, a nervous and shaky Ted Lamborgine was being prepped for a lie detector test. Lt. Robert Dykstra, a 10-year veteran in the field, asked his subject the following questions:
“In 1976–77 in Oakland County did you participate in killing any of those kids?”
“Were you present when any of those kids were killed?”
“Did anyone tell you they killed any of those kids in Oakland County?”
“Did you see anyone kill any of those kids in 1976–77 in Oakland County?”
The needles spiked like a fault line. Lamborgine failed the test so definitively, Dykstra opened the door to the room where Williams had been monitoring the examination. “This is your boy,” he said.4
Williams was stunned. In the entire history of the case, more 300 suspects had been given polygraphs. All had passed. Lamborgine was the first to fail in 30 years.
“We worked Ted over hard that day after the polygraph, trying to get him to give it up and tell us why he failed,” Williams remembered. “Ted would hold his head in his hands and then look up to the sky, worried as can be. All he would say was that he was scared.”
Williams pressed Lamborgine: “You didn’t fail that polygraph because you were scared, Ted. You failed the polygraph because you killed those kids.” Lamborgine bowed his head, looking at his hands. “God has forgiven me,” he said. Then he shut down completely.
Williams could not arrest him on the basis of a failed polygraph; he needed evidence, the kind of evidence Lamborgine had had 30 years to destroy. When Williams executed a search warrant on Lamborgine’s home, the apartment had brand-new furniture and brand-new clothing with tags still on them. “There was no food in the fridge or freezer and he had only a few family pictures, nothing in boxes or closets, and no computer,” Williams said. “There wasn’t any sign of any proper
ty that would have been saved or collected over the last sixty-four years of his life.”
In the weeks after the failed polygraph, Williams presented his investigation at a meeting held at the Michigan State Police Metro North office—a multi-agency meeting, involving high-level law enforcement officers across four different agencies. In attendance were Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, Wayne County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Robert Moran, FBI Agent John Ouellet, Michigan State Police Detectives Garry Gray and Dave Robertson, and Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca. Williams handed out a printed timeline and presented the case he had built against Lamborgine, Lawson and Moore. The timing could not have been better. Come 2006, the Michigan State Police planned to publicly announce the reopening of the case for the 30-year anniversary of the crimes. Now they had something to show for it.
Gray said the top brass—MSP commanders and the colonel at the state capitol in Lansing—had stressed the importance of keeping these developments confidential. Every agency represented pledged support and cooperation. There were to be no leaks to the media. Williams was asked to continue to lead the investigation and keep them informed of developments. Williams was pumped.
In September of 2005, Williams, along with Gray and Robertson drove to the long-term storage facility in Lansing, where physical evidence in the case had been stored for decades. Worthy wanted to determine what could be obtained from the children’s clothing that could be processed using new, enhanced DNA testing and compared with DNA profiles of known suspects. Up until this point, the only DNA-worthy evidence they had were some hairs found on Kristine Mihelich’s shirt and a hair found on Tim King’s clothing.
The Snow Killings Page 11