The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  Williams was specifically interested in locating a slide containing a hair found on Tim King’s groin area during his autopsy. He knew the slide existed because it was in the logbook. He also knew that because the hair was found on Tim’s genitals, it likely belonged to the killer.

  Talking with the lab director to stress the need to get his scientists reprocessing the evidence was the easy part of the trip. Seeing the kids’ belongings for the first time was jarring. There on the concrete floor, under the glare of stark fluorescent light, was Jill’s bike, Tim’s skateboard, Tim’s hockey jacket, Mark’s fur-lined coat, and Kristine’s boots. Williams felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “It was overwhelming. Just really hit home.”

  The lab director promised to get his scientists to start reprocessing the evidence. But it was not a promise kept. Thereafter, the forensics lab run by the MSP dragged their heels. Every time Williams inquired about the status of the kids’ clothing, the response was that they were so inundated with present-day cases, there was no telling when they would have time for cold cases. “They didn’t even know where some of the evidence was,” Williams remembers. “That’s the first thing you do in a cold case: search for physical evidence.”

  Williams used the media in an attempt to shame them. Every time he got in front of the camera, he would prod: “We really feel we will be able to solve this case with DNA evidence so we’re encouraged by the progress the state police lab is making.”

  But, even after several requests, including a phone call from Kym Worthy to MSP Colonel Peter C. Munoz, the DNA processing still took well over a year. It was a harbinger of how future developments in the case would be handled—a seemingly inexplicable disinterest in pursuing promising evidence.

  While Lamborgine returned to Cleveland, Williams typed up the search warrant for his apartment. With the assistance of local police in Ohio, he would watch Lamborgine’s every move for close to a year, hoping he would crack, make a wrong move.

  Williams enlisted Parma Heights detectives Wayne Mockler and Steven Scharschmidt to head up a team that would conduct the surveillance. This included installing a GPS tracker under the hood of Lamborgine’s truck. Because their department didn’t use the same GPS system as the Livonia PD, Mockler and Scharschmidt met Livonia detectives halfway along the Ohio Turnpike every 10 days to pick up fresh batteries, so Livonia could monitor Lamborgine’s movements around the clock on their computer.

  One Saturday night, when Williams and his wife were at a party in Detroit, he got a call from the Parma Heights surveillance team. He ducked outside to take the call. Lamborgine had picked up a young boy on the street. Should they confront him? Williams asked them to see if they could get a closer look to determine if the kid was underage without blowing their cover. An hour later, they phoned back. They were able to get closer look at the pair in the lobby of Lamborgine’s apartment building. The “boy” turned out to be a short male in his twenties—probably a prostitute.

  Williams also arranged for FBI aerial surveillance of Lamborgine. They were trying to discern if he had a secret safe house, a place where he might have stored his pedophilia paraphernalia, like the luxurious pompadour wig made of real human hair he used to wear back in seventies.

  Williams had many long conversations with Lamborgine’s minister, Pastor Albert Richards at Midbrooke Baptist Church. Richards said that Lamborgine had approached him a month or two earlier and asked to meet for breakfast. Lamborgine told Richards he wanted to put him in his will, leaving him everything and giving him full power of attorney, so Richards could access his apartment in case he died. Richards told Williams it didn’t make much sense to him at the time. But now, knowing about his parishioner’s possible involvement in child murder, he thought Lamborgine might be considering suicide. “I explained to the pastor that there are families in Michigan that have been waiting for closure in this matter for thirty years and that the murders of these children affected the lives of thousands of people in the Detroit area,” Williams said. “I asked the pastor to help us by getting Ted to open up to him. I told him he was going to have be somewhat of an actor, so that Ted would not know he was cooperating with the police. The pastor was great. He said he knew what we were looking to accomplish. He even agreed to preach a few sermons on forgiveness to appeal to Ted’s conscience.” Lamborgine never took the bait.

  Williams also tried using the media to apply pressure on Lamborgine. After Williams and the MSP let it leak that he had failed a polygraph in the Oakland County Child Killings case, a camera crew from Detroit’s Fox 2 station showed up at the Ford plant as Lamborgine was leaving work. With a microphone stuck in Lamborgine’s face, a reporter kept pace with him as he walked to his truck, asking why he had failed that polygraph.

  He said only one word to the reporter: “scared.” When Lamborgine drove off, the reporter turned to the camera and said: “There goes a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.”5

  Soon after, Lamborgine walked into work and announced his retirement. He also stopped going to church. “I can’t face those people,” he told Det. Scharschmidt.6

  At Williams’ request, Mockler and Scharschmidt built a strong rapport with Lamborgine, to keep him talking. For the entire year, William’s head was in two places at once. While the Parma Heights detectives cozied up to Lamborgine, Williams was travelling the country, trying to jar loose repressed memories from his victims.

  Mockler and Scharschmidt would frequently stop by Lamborgine’s apartment unannounced. He would open the door in his bathrobe and boxers and invite them in. They talked sports or the weather, anything to loosen him up. The detectives told him they were looking out for his best interest, that they would not let on to the Michigan cops whatever he told them. Sometimes, he seemed close to cracking. Then a switch would flip and he’d close up. At one point, he told them: “I don’t want to be labelled a murderer or an accessory to murder.”7

  After these conversations, Scharschmidt would call Williams. The two would spend hours on the phone, most often at night, plotting Lamborgine’s fall. Williams was obsessed; it drove his wife, Michelle, nuts.

  One day, a FBI agent followed Lamborgine into the post office and overheard him ask the clerk about insurance because he was sending a large amount of money. After Lamborgine left, the agent determined the check was for $9,000 and was addressed to a preacher in Pennsylvania who ran an international Bible ministry. Not long after, Pastor Richards related to Williams that Lamborgine had asked him to be his power of attorney, should “anything happen, like an accident.” Williams was convinced: Ted was contemplating suicide.

  Because Lawson had not gone to trial yet, Williams would often taunt Lamborgine, telling him his old friend was ratting him out. On Christmas Eve, 2005, Williams told him in a phone call: “Lawson is laying it all out, Ted. You have an opportunity here to climb on the cooperation train here first and beat Lawson to the punch.” Lamborgine said nothing.

  In one of his last interviews, Lamborgine told Williams: “I haven’t done what you think I have.” Williams felt the statement itself could almost be construed as an admission of guilt since the conversation was specifically about the child killings and his involvement. “He could have said that he had nothing to do with it,” Williams said. “He never took that stance. Never.”

  Because of the statute of limitations, Williams and Robert Moran were not sure what, if any charges, they could bring against Lamborgine. But then, Moran found a loophole in the law—the clock had stopped on the limitations statute when Lamborgine moved out of Michigan in 1978. Williams’ notes of that day read in all caps: “WE CAN CHARGE TED!”

  In all, Williams had secured testimony from 16 victims who were on record describing Lamborgine’s brutal assaults. Williams called Scharschmidt and read him the names. If he and Mockler could get Lamborgine to confess to any one of them, it would be a huge help in prosecuting these decades-old crimes.
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  One morning, wearing hidden recording devices, the Ohio cops sat in Lamborgine’s kitchen, half-marveling, half-horrified at his recall. In a monotone voice, devoid of emotion, he remembered faces, times, locations, graphic details.

  Scharschmidt and Mockler had far exceeded Williams’ expectations. “We got him to admit to fourteen victims,” Scharschmidt told Williams over the phone. “It’s all on tape.”

  By December 2006, Michigan police were finished waiting. Williams, FBI Agent John Ouellet, MSP detectives Garry Gray and David Robertson and Det. Ray Anger of the Berkley Police Department traveled to Ohio for Lamborgine’s arrest. Anger was a longtime Berkley detective who had worked alongside Williams’ father on the case when Kristine Mihelich went missing.

  With the Michigan contingent watching from another squad car, Lamborgine stepped off a downtown bus as Parma Heights detectives Mockler and Scharschmidt pulled up. They told Lamborgine he was under arrest for raping eight children. They didn’t even bother cuffing him. Sitting in the back of their squad car, Lamborgine said: “Maybe God has a plan.”8

  At the police station, Gray took charge of the interrogation. Anger and Robertson helped conduct the interview with Lamborgine while Williams and Ouellet watched through a one-way mirror.

  Williams was livid: “When it’s your case, you take the confession. I knew every detail about Ted, but here we were watching Ray and Dave stumble through this thing—all because Garry wanted MSP in the room. Just in case Ted started giving it up. … And he’s going to coax a confession out of a suspect he knows nothing about in the biggest case in Michigan history? I could’ve wedged my way in there, caught Ted in a lie, started to trip him up a little bit. But Garry said no. And Garry was running the show. A virtual shit-show.”

  In the end, even under the threat of multiple life sentences, Lamborgine said nothing that would implicate himself in the Oakland County Child Killings. When it was over, he was transferred to the Wayne County jail in Detroit. He sat in a jail cell awaiting trial for over three months—plenty of time in which to rethink decisions about his own fate.

  The warrant for Lamborgine included three felony counts of child molestation, punishable by life in prison, and 11 felony counts of child molestation with sentences of 10 to 15 years apiece. Working with the U.S. Attorney’s office, Ouellet obtained a “cooperation agreement.” As part of this agreement, if Lamborgine would provide truthful and complete information to investigators about his and/or others’ involvement in the Oakland County Child Killings case, he could be confined in a federal institution instead of a state prison. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy authorized Williams and Moran to offer Lamborgine as few as 10 years, even if he was the killer.

  Lamborgine would also be sponsored by the FBI into the Federal Witness Protection Program. He could receive a new name and be known in prison as anything but a child molester if he so chose.

  This would spare Lamborgine the scourge and abuse pedophiles face behind bars. In prison, the social hierarchy is often based on offenses, with snitches and child molesters occupying the bottom rung. Because many inmates are parents—and, too, because many convicts were sexually abused as children—pedophiles are the most reviled population. They are routinely assaulted and frequently murdered. Whatever possessions they have, even food, is often stolen; their cells are used as toilets.9

  Lamborgine and his attorney went back and forth with Moran. At one point, 15 years was on the table. Then a second polygraph. Then the second polygraph was off the table. Then Lamborgine asked for 10 years with other stipulations. At one point, he was weeping and his attorney asked for an adjournment. They agreed to five days so Ted could think about it some more.

  In the end, Lamborgine turned them all down. Offered a 10-year sentence in exchange for telling what he knew, he pleaded guilty—on all 14 counts, including three life felonies.

  On April 20, 2007, Lamborgine, dressed in green prison fatigues and wearing his coke-bottle glasses, was led in handcuffs to greet a throng of cameramen, reporters and policemen in the courtroom of Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Annette Berry.

  Berry motioned to two haggard-looking men: Lamborgine’s victims. One was in a wheelchair, his foot bent at a 90-degree angle from being hit by a bus. He had been in and out of prison. “Give him the most you can give him,” he said. “I can’t do nothin’ about it.”10 Prosecutor Moran read a letter from another victim. The writer said he was nine years old when Lamborgine held him captive and tortured him. “I know the monster that is hiding inside you,” he wrote. “I have seen him myself.”11

  Upon sentencing, Judge Berry glared down at Lamborgine from the bench. “You know what they do to people like you in prison?” she said. She then handed him three life sentences, saying: “May God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Lamborgine.”12

  Ted Lamborgine at his April 2007 courtroom appearance, upon receiving three life sentences (photograph by John T. Greilick, The Detroit News).

  David Binkley, the King family attorney, was at the sentencing. He congratulated Williams and Moran, relaying the King family’s gratitude for all the work that had been done on the case. It had been too long since there had been any movement in the investigation, he said.

  Lamborgine would baffle Williams for years to come. “He knows something,” Williams reflected. “Whatever it is, he has decided to take it to his grave. He said no to the opportunity to have some say on where he lives out the rest of his life and instead chose to plead guilty to seventeen felonies that got him three life sentences. All he had to do was talk to us and take another polygraph. That just doesn’t even make sense. Even if he wasn’t involved, all he had to do was cooperate with us.”

  And there was this: While Williams was consumed with preparing for Lamborgine’s court proceedings, Detroit FBI Agent John Ouellet uncovered a police file containing stunning information involving Richard Lawson and Barry King. In 1988, a year before Lawson murdered Exavor Giller, Lawson was stuck in a jail cell in Macomb County, unable to post bond and awaiting trial on molestation charges—four counts of criminal sexual conduct with a child under 13. Lawson phoned King collect, and when Barry accepted the charges, Lawson told him he knew who had killed his son. When they hung up, Barry King called Det. Don Studt, the rookie officer assigned to provide security for the King family while Tim was missing. Studt would rise through the ranks to become Birmingham’s chief of police. King always called him first when calls like these came in—standing guard those five horrendous days in the King household had solidified the friendship. Studt said he would arrange a meeting.

  So, on a Tuesday morning in mid–September 1988, Barry King and Don Studt, along with Birmingham Police Officer Herb Duncan, sat down in an interview room at the Macomb County jail with Lawson for two and a half hours. Lawson told them how he developed his “expertise” in pedophilia, cruising up and down Six Mile Road and Woodward Avenue in the seventies.

  He described how the child pornography ring operated in the Cass Corridor, estimating that close to 140 kids were involved. He claimed he knew of four people that were directly involved in Oakland County Child Killings. One was a wealthy Grosse Pointe real estate developer named “Shelden” who financed child porn films. Lawson said Shelden “absconded on a very high bond—maybe a million dollars” and moved to an island off the coast of Spain where he ran a child pornography operation internationally. Lawson said the reason Tim King was abducted was “he must have matched the general description, age and features which Shelden had requested for his film.”13

  He referred to the other three child killers by number. Number One was a gambler who frequented late night poker games in the Highland Park area. Number One also trafficked in cocaine “and really didn’t do any other work except provide children to other pedophiles.”

  Number Two’s name was Bob. Bob made films in an apartment house—well known in the area as “The Mansion”—one block north of Cass Te
chnical High School, his production equipment funded by Shelden.

  Number Three was a pedophile who worked at Ford Motor Company and had moved out of the state years prior. He liked to wear wigs, had “very strong hands and arms” and, Lawson said, was capable of murder.

  Both Ouellet and Williams were astounded by Lawson’s detailed mirroring of the information Williams uncovered about Bob Moore and Ted Lamborgine 18 years later, down to the details of Lamborgine’s wig and the location of Moore’s home.

  But the report was also maddening. Once again, in 1988, no one sought to investigate further. Lawson was the first to connect Francis Shelden to the Oakland County Child Killings. But all the dots that could have been connected had disappeared like skywriting.

  Lawson had asked Studt for immunity in exchange for this information. Records show Lawson’s child molestation case was indeed dismissed; but the information he provided was never followed up on. Lawson passed away in prison in 2012.

  “To this day it is still unbelievable to me that we were the first to charge people in connection with this case,” Williams said. “That should not be. As proud as we are of arresting Lamborgine, over the years there should have been a lot of arrests in this case. A lot of them.

  “The problem all along was that detectives wanted the smoking gun or nothing, so they’d shit-can it and move on,” he continued. “They all wanted the trophy, the big prize for solving the case. But they never took the time to arrest and charge pedophiles with crimes. You have to lock people up to get what you’re after. You have to put hammers over their heads to get them to talk. Arresting and charging takes a lot of time and a lot of work. And it does slow you down. But, oh my God, it’s definitely worth it. Because bad people know bad things. And bad people only care about themselves. You have to give them an incentive to get out of the jam they’re in.”

  However frustrating, the 1988 interview did prove instrumental in developing a plausible theory about what happened in the OCCK case. In his report on the discovery of the Lawson meeting, Williams wrote: