The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  John and I agreed that the motive behind the kidnappings and killings, as far as this lead goes, was probably the money the suspects were getting for filming kids and their own sexual gratification. In 1976, Shelden fled the country to avoid prosecution on three CSC counts of children under thirteen years of age. Shelden transferred two million dollars from his trust to an off-shore account in the Virgin Islands. The money that was coming in producing child porn movies had probably dried up. Richard Lawson, Bob Moore and Ted Orr all parted ways soon after. Ted moved to Cleveland, Richard no longer had the money to put into his Detroit rental homes and torched one of the houses for insurance money. … This is just a theory at this point, but it would explain why the kidnappings and killings stopped.

  Right after Lamborgine’s guilty plea, MSP Det. Garry Gray complained to Williams that he had put too much pressure on their agency to get the lab to process the DNA evidence from the kids’ clothing. He was particularly angry with Williams’ ploy to shame the lab into working on the case by showering false praise on them publicly. He told Williams: “You’re too vocal with the media!”14

  “Garry,” Williams shot back. “I don’t work for you. I work for the city of Livonia. I’m a volunteer on this case.”

  Gray also took issue with Williams recommending Parma Heights detectives Mockler and Scharschmidt for achievement awards for their work in the Lamborgine case. The Ohio detectives were honored by the Livonia Police Department, the Ohio Patrolman’s Benevolent Association and the Parma Heights City Council and were featured in an article in American Police Beat magazine. When Gray saw the article, he threw the magazine on the table.

  “What’s this?” he asked Williams.

  “It’s a picture of Steve and Wayne accepting their awards from Livonia Police,” Williams answered. Gray said nothing and began to walk away. “Garry, what is wrong with honoring them?” Williams persisted. “They did incredible work for our case!”

  While the Michigan State Police might have felt some territorial conflict when it came to Williams’ contribution to the OCCK case, Livonia Police Chief Robert Stevenson, Agent John Ouellet from the Detroit FBI office and the Wayne County prosecutor all backed Williams.

  Nonetheless, Gray complained to his lieutenant, Darryl Hill, who made it official. Hill sent Williams an email saying Livonia PD was “removed” from the Task Force. When Williams showed the email to his boss, Chief Stevenson told him to just continue working on the case. So, he continued to field leads, working closely with Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Rob Moran.

  But the official “removal” from the case was still a slam that, coupled with the fact he had not succeeded in getting Lamborgine to talk, left Williams feeling defeated. After three years of investigating, starting with the Exavor Giller case, he also felt drained. At home, he found it difficult to compartmentalize, to wall off the day-after-day, in-your-face wicked lechery. He was barking at the kids, drinking too much. One time, he told Cory Jr. he couldn’t go to a birthday party at a friend’s house because the friend had an older brother. Michelle on more than one occasion said she would be happy to never hear the names Lawson or Lamborgine again.

  He felt he had failed on many levels, and failed others. There were the detectives he had persuaded to join the investigation, selling them on the idea that nailing Lawson and Lamborgine might solve the case. He had given the victims’ families reason to hope. And in the back of his mind was his dad. “I felt I’d let them all down,” he said.

  * * *

  1. Bertha Lamborgine interview with Det. Cory Williams, September 7, 2005.

  2. Jared Klaus, “The Babysitter Killer” Cleveland Scene, https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/the-babysitter-killer/Content?oid=1498422 May 2, 2007. (I relied on Klaus’ reporting for much of the details of Lamborgine’s daily life.)

  3. Klaus, “The Babysitter.”

  4. Dykstra interview with Det. Cory Williams, September 6, 2005.

  5. Scott Lewis, Fox 2 TV News broadcast, March 29, 2005.

  6. Klaus, “Babysitter.”

  7. Klaus, “Babysitter.”

  8. Klaus, “Babysitter.”

  9. Michael S. James, “Prison Is 'Living Hell' for Pedophiles” ABC News, August 26, 2003.

  10. Klaus, “Babysitter.”

  11. Ben Schmitt, “Molester Receives 3 Life Terms: Ohio Man Said He Paid Boys for Sex,” Detroit Free Press, April 21, 2007, 4A.

  12. Schmitt, “Molester.”

  13. Don Studt, report of interview with Richard M. Lawson #77-3333 at Macomb County jail, September 13, 1988.

  14. Quotes from Gray are from interviews with Williams and his notes. Gray declined to be interviewed for my reporting at the Detroit News, as well as for this book.

  7

  A One in a Million Conversation

  All along, Barry King had closely monitored the Lamborgine and Lawson court proceedings. Tim King’s sister, Cathy King Broad, followed some of the proceedings online. Lamborgine’s defense—that the sex with minor boys was consensual because he gave them gifts—hit her like a wrecking ball. She spent much of the time on the couch in the fetal position.

  Of the four victim’s families, the Kings had been the most actively involved with law enforcement. This was not always the case. When Tim King was murdered, his mother, Marion, vowed that his death would not destroy her remaining children’s lives. She would not saddle them with the lifelong banner of victimhood. “We’ve got three other children to raise,” she told Barry in no uncertain terms. “And that is our focus from here on in.”1

  While she was living, Barry King abided by his wife’s resolve. The sporadic updates from law enforcement, while devoid of any serious leads, led Barry to believe police were doing all they could. The case was just too cold.

  Neither Barry nor Marion talked about the crimes, but they did talk about Tim. “It’s not like we were one of those families that had a death and then never talked about it,” said Tim’s brother, Chris. “Tim was such a wonderful kid and brought so much joy, we talked about him all the time. The Tim stories were always told on Christmas and the holidays. Everyone loved him. No one talked much about that time in our lives when he was taken, though. My Dad, especially, wouldn’t touch it.”2

  Marion also made it very clear that she did not want to be singled out as the mother of a murdered child. In 1998, when Ruth Stebbins passed away, her obituary highlighted that she was the mother of Mark Stebbins, the first victim of the Oakland County Child Killings. Marion instructed Barry that her obituary not refer at all to the circumstances of Tim’s death. She was Tim’s mother. Full stop.

  This was not denial. After all, it was Marion who went to the morgue that horrible morning to identify Tim’s body. “She said she wanted to do it,” Barry reflected much later. “I couldn’t.”

  She would do everything she could to shield her children. It was a noble effort, but she was up against incredible odds. Her children’s torment was inevitable. Nothing could have prevented their sleepless nights imagining what happened to their little brother and grappling with their inability to save him.

  Later, when Cathy’s two kids were little and Marion came to visit, she enjoyed watching her grandchildren play with the dog. Marion said she felt bad she had “never got you kids a dog,” Cathy remembered. But Barry disliked dogs from the get-go (he was bitten while delivering newspapers as a kid). And, Cathy recalled, “My mom said she didn’t think she could handle it if something happened to the dog.”3

  Marion was said to have inherited much of her stoicism from her mother. Born in 1931, the eldest child of Oran and Alice Kerr of Milford Station, a small milling village north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Marion was 17 when her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. (Alice would eventually become bedridden.) Ten years later, Oran, who owned Kerr Bro
thers Lumber, died in a terrible accident at work—he had gone to power up the mill when the boiler exploded. In the aftermath, Alice Kerr shored up life for her four children, and her grandchildren, preserving the family for almost two decades while battling MS.4

  Marion’s strong sense of self was also born of some difficulty. At age 20, her college career at Dalhousie University was cut short when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent the better part of a year in a sanitarium and another two years confined to a bed.

  When she recovered, the former valedictorian of her high school class (as she was fond of pointing out to her lawyer husband) enrolled in the Pathology Institute in Halifax and became a medical technologist. In 1956, she took a job at the University of Michigan’s Department of Epidemiology lab in Ann Arbor, headed by Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., mentor of pioneering virologist Jonas Salk. Marion worked on the same team that conducted national field trials of Salk’s polio vaccine.

  A year after she arrived in Ann Arbor, she met her future husband, then a 26-year-old U of M law student. Like Marion, Barry King was also the oldest child in his family. Raised in Flint, Michigan, his father worked for the Oakland Motor Car Company (which later became GM’s Pontiac Motor Division). After graduating from Flint Central High School, Barry was awarded a four-year Navy ROTC scholarship to Marquette University, where he got his undergrad degree in business administration. Thereafter he served in the Navy for three years as a radar and operations officer for the Pacific Amphibious fleet.

  In 1956, Barry was admitted to the University of Michigan Law School, along with some 78 other students. Of those 78, only 26 eventually graduated; and of those 26, only 15 graduated within two years. According to a college friend, Barry King was one of them.

  A week after Barry passed the bar, he and Marion were wed in a small church ceremony on September 20, 1958, in Bay City. The couple decided to make their home in San Diego, a city Barry had fallen in love with during his Navy years. Barry worked as an assistant trust officer at the San Diego Trust and Savings and Marion was soon pregnant with Cathy.

  But California was too far from Nova Scotia, and in April of 1960, the family moved back to Michigan. Barry joined the Detroit law firm Dyer, Meek, Ruegsegger & McClear and focused on commercial litigation. The family rented a duplex for five years in Royal Oak before buying a small bungalow on Pembroke Road in Birmingham. Chris was born in 1961, followed by Mark in 1962. Tim came along in 1965.

  In 1980, Barry joined the prestigious Giarmarco, Mullins & Horton, PC, in Troy, the twelfth largest law firm in Michigan. The family settled in Birmingham in a three-bedroom brick home on Yorkshire Road. Located within walking distance of the elementary school, grocery store and pharmacy, the neighborhood was full of towering mature elm trees (before Dutch elm disease took hold), sidewalks, and big families.

  Marion joined a neighborhood bridge club and volunteered at the kids’ schools. While the family joined St. Alan’s Catholic Parish (Marion had converted to Catholicism when she married Barry), after Tim died, the family gradually left the church altogether.

  While’s Tim’s death devastated her—“It was a mortal blow,” Chris said—she soldiered on. “She wanted to be sure we would be okay,” he said. “She was amazing.”5

  Marion died in September 2004 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She was 73. Upon her death, Tim was disinterred from White Chapel Cemetery in nearby Troy. (At the time of his death, reporters were told he had been cremated so no one would desecrate the gravesite.) Tim’s body was moved to a Veterans cemetery in Holly, Michigan, where Barry also has a plot, and placed alongside his mother.

  By all accounts, it was a blessing that Marion was spared the Lawson and Lamborgine court proceedings. Still, Barry King now felt free to follow the investigation, if not actively participate in it. After Lamborgine rejected the generous plea deal, David Binkley, King’s personal attorney, was so convinced Lamborgine was withholding information he filed a wrongful death suit against him. Whatever the outcome, the reasoning was that subpoena powers against Lamborgine and others could push the investigation further. As far as the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office was concerned, “Anything that would screw with Ted’s head was good with us,” Williams said. To sidestep a conflict of interest with the King homicide, Binkley asked to file the case on behalf of Mike Stebbins, the older brother of Mark Stebbins. Stebbins agreed and the suit was filed.

  But a few months later, the case was dropped because of a development so unforeseen, so happenstance, at first it didn’t seem real. But it was: a seismic lead had surfaced, one that would blow the case wide open.

  Desperate not to let the information get in the wrong hands, Cathy and Chris plotted the best course going forward. They decided against giving the lead to the Michigan State Police “out of fear that they would let it die a slow death,” Cathy said. Instead, they chose to contact Williams because “Cory was the only cop who had any hustle.”6

  On July 31, 2007, three months after Lamborgine was sentenced, Williams was sitting at his office desk when his phone rang.

  “Do you have some time?” Cathy asked the detective. “I have a long story to tell you. And it’s going to blow you away.”

  Indeed, the information she relayed would dramatically alter the course of the investigation for years to come. Someone had confessed to the crimes back in 1977, she told him. She knew this was information she could trust as bona fide and true: it came from a longtime friend of the King family, Patrick Coffey, a private polygraph examiner in California. Coffey had learned of the confession, purely by chance, from another examiner who had tested a subject who confessed to the Oakland County Child Killings.

  Coffey was a childhood playmate of the King boys—they had lived across the street from each other in Birmingham. Coffey had been so affected by the tragic loss of his childhood friend Tim, he chose the polygraph field as his career ambition. Now in his mid-fifties, and having recently survived a stroke, Coffey regarded this valuable information falling into his lap as providential, if not ordained by God.

  In many ways, Coffey felt that being drawn back to the Oakland County Child Killings case was evidence of his life coming full circle. He had been handed an opportunity to give back to the family that had rescued him during one of the darkest periods in his life.

  In 1972, Patrick Coffey’s father, Michael B. Coffey, a 37-year-old marketing manager for Industrial National Bank in Providence, Rhode Island, died from an aggressive form of stomach cancer. Divorced from their mother, he left behind four children: Cathleen, Patrick, Timothy and Michael.

  Two days after his father was buried, Patrick, then 11 and the oldest son, was put on an airplane bound for Detroit. His stepmother had difficulty disciplining the outspoken and headstrong Patrick, and with the absence of his father, the decision was quickly made to remove him.

  He was sent to live with his Uncle Patrick (his namesake) and his six children in Birmingham. It was understood that Patrick Coffey’s three other siblings would soon follow, a testament to his uncle’s abundant generosity.

  Patrick’s arrival came within weeks of his finishing the fifth grade. Even so, he was immediately enrolled in the fifth grade at Adams Elementary School in hopes he would make some friends that would carry over into the summer. On the first day of school, one kid went out of his way to welcome Patrick. That kid was Chris King.

  The Kings lived right across Yorkshire Road from the Coffey clan. Marion and Barry had told Cathy, Chris, Mark and Tim about Patrick’s recent loss. “Chris was able to perceive, even at a young age, all that I had lost,” Patrick recalled. “He was the first real friend I ever had, and I would never forget him.”7

  There were many hockey games in the makeshift, frozen-over rink in the Coffey’s backyard. Even though Tim was the youngest of the neighborhood boys, he played fearless goalie. “He was small in size, but he was just too quick to let a puck beat him,” Coffey sa
id. Being the youngest also worked against Tim: he was often goaded into pedaling his bike while pulling the older boys on a skateboard. During heavy snowfalls in the winter, Chris and Patrick started their own business shoveling out driveways after school or on the weekends. By the end of the day they would have as much as $15 each: “A treasure in those days for a young kid whose only wants were a soda pop, comics, a Mad magazine or candy,” Coffey said. Most of the goodies were bought a few blocks away at the Hunter Maple Pharmacy, the same spot where Tim would go missing.8

  Coffey lived for two years with his cousins. By January 1975, his mother had regained her footing and Patrick, his sister and two brothers were reunited with her in Galesburg, Indiana. But those two years on Yorkshire Road were life-defining for Patrick Coffey. Alone and grieving over the loss of his father, he relied heavily on the kindness of his cousins and the normalcy of the King family. So much so that when Tim King died, Coffey took it personally. From that point on, he was determined to pursue a career in criminal justice.

  After high school, Coffey joined the Navy. He became an intelligence specialist and received special recognition and a Navy Achievement Medal for his help in rescuing several boats of refugees from coastal Vietnam. In 1987, he graduated from the San Francisco Center for Polygraph Studies. Coffey excelled in his chosen career, believing, as his mentor had preached, the polygraph was “the silent symphony of the human body.” He devoted himself to living the polygrapher’s credo that “one adhere to being a committed, independent, unbiased seeker of the truth.”

  Coffey went into private practice, opening an office in downtown San Francisco. In subsequent years, he developed a special computerized polygraph to be used in asylum and immigration law cases. His pioneering method was a watershed for the polygraph profession because it provided the credibility and high level of proof required by the medical and psychological communities in cases of those seeking asylum. Many first-generation Americans owe their status to Patrick Coffey as a result of this contribution.