The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  14. Vince Gunnels, interview with author in Kalamazoo, MI in April 2011.

  15. Vince Gunnels, interview with Dets. Cory Williams and Garry Gray at Camp Ojibway in Ironwood Michigan, March 6, 2008.

  16. Vince Gunnels, interview with author.

  17. Vince Gunnels, interview with Williams and Gray.

  18. Vince Gunnels polygraph, City of Livonia Narrative report: OCCK Investigation. Incident # 77–0006883, October 10, 2008.

  11

  “We don’t let the tail wag the dog”

  The middle-aged woman on the phone sounded frantic. “Please,” she pleaded to Charlotte Pelham, the dispatcher at the Montmorency Sheriff’s Department. “I need to speak with Officer Brandenburg now! Right away!”1

  When Pelham told the woman Brandenburg was unavailable but she could pass on a message, the woman cried: “No! By then, it will be too late. … All I can say is go to [Chris Busch’s] place on Ess Lake and just please check it out!”

  To what extent Busch’s proclivities were public knowledge around Hillman, Michigan, the small town near Ess Lake, is not known. But the caller knew enough about the predator’s antics that he should not be in the presence of young boys. And she insisted on anonymity, perhaps because she feared the retribution the Busch name could bring to bear.

  Williams was reading a report of the phone call in an old file he had found mixed in with Gunnels’ court papers. The date the phone call was placed—Saturday, March 19, 1977—piqued his interest. Tim King was missing from March 16 to 22.

  H. Lee Busch bought the place at Ess Lake—a relatively small (114 acres) inland lake in northern Michigan—in the early sixties as a family respite, a place to be together. But family gatherings were infrequent if they happened at all. The cottage sat at the north end of the lake, a three-and-a-half-hour trek from Birmingham that H. Lee and Elsie Busch rarely made. But Chris Busch loved it. It was his own private get-away. The small, three-bedroom, flat-roofed home with the lake within walking distance was ideal for seducing young boys.

  The woman pleaded: “Can’t you give me Officer Brandenburg’s number so that I can call him directly?”

  “Ma’am,” Pelham said. “Anything you say will be kept confidential. Let me help you.”

  The woman cupped her hand over the receiver and spoke—a man’s voice was in the background. Her muffled tones sounded tense, angry. The caller told Pelham Chris Busch was in town with two minors, but after another consultation with the voice in the background, she refused to say where.

  “Look,” Pelham said, losing patience. “It’s very important you give me as much information as you have so that we can find him.”

  Exasperated, the woman shouted to the man in the background: “Why the hell did you have me call the police at all if I can’t tell them enough to help them?”

  By now she was defeated. “I am sorry I can’t tell you more,” she said to Pelham. “But I would if I could!”

  There was no indication in the report whether anyone went to Busch’s cottage that Saturday to investigate. But, three days after the call, on March 22, 1977—the day Tim King’s body was found in a ditch downstate—Det. Junior Brandenburg of the Montmorency County Sheriff’s Department went to interview the couple, and also checked with other locals to see if anyone had seen the heavy-set bearded man.

  After several phone calls, Williams determined the caller was Susan King, co-owner, along with her husband, Kenneth King, of the A-Frame Party store in Hillman. Susan King was now deceased, but further digging revealed she called because Busch had come into the store with two boys she estimated to be ages 16 and 18 at around 3 p.m. Busch bought five candy bars and over a case of beer.

  Brandenburg also interviewed another couple, Mary and Norman Wiseman, who both said they had seen Busch on the same day—March 19—but their story differed. They said Busch had three young boys in tow while at the IGA grocery store, and they estimated their ages to be 13, 14 and 15.

  Brandenburg had interviewed Busch weeks earlier, on March 3, as part of his investigation into Gunnels’ sexual assault at the Ess Lake cottage. In that interview, Busch maintained that he did have sex with Gunnels at the cottage but he never used force. Quite telling was Busch’s insistence that “local boys” were not at risk. Brandenburg wrote in his report:

  Complaint No. 0685–77

  Interview with Christopher B. Busch on 3-3-77 at 2:30 p.m. I gave Mr. Busch his Miranda Warnings, I asked him if he would give me a written statement on the incident at Ess Lake, with James V. Gunnels. Mr. Busch said, I will not give any written statements until I talk to my attorney. All I can say is that I did not use any force on James at the cabin. Chris stated that he did not have any local boys at Ess Lake at any time. All the boys were from down state. He would not mention any names. Busch said he knew Gregory Greene, at no time did he bring him to Ess Lake. … Busch said the cops have all his movies and photographs and are holding them. Said he did not have any at the Cabin. Chris stated that his problem started when he was 17 yrs, at a boarding school.2

  Thirty-one years later, on February 12, 2008, Williams interviewed the now retired Junior Brandenburg, still living in the area near Ess Lake in Hillman. Brandenburg remembered the case and described Busch as being “a very odd guy.” He said he always felt Busch might have been involved in the child killings; so much so that when he spotted Busch’s obituary in 1978, he clipped the article and put it in his files. He remembered Busch’s father as being very wealthy—he owned a nice, big home in Birmingham, the cottage on Ess Lake and he had bought his son a big two-story restaurant. “[Chris Busch] always had young boys with him,” Brandenburg told Williams.3 He said Busch was there when police searched the cottage for the Gunnels case (finding nothing, apparently). The cottage was torn down in 2000 after a tree fell on it during a storm. The new owners rebuilt, which unfortunately meant a present-day search for evidence was impossible.

  Based on the witnesses’ estimates of the ages of the boys seen with Busch, Williams concluded they were older than Tim King. He also doubted that Busch would bring a boy he had abducted to a party store. Still, the timing bothered him. It was another loose end, another possible scenario that could not be ruled out.

  In March 2008, Dets. Williams and Gray conducted the first of three interviews with Brent Busch, Chris Busch’s nephew, at the state police post in Newaygo, located in the southwest part of the state.

  They began the interview by saying they wanted to talk about some things that went on in Flint 30 years ago. Without hesitation, Brent said: “Is this about Greg Greene?”4

  “It’s about Greg Greene and your uncle Chris Busch,” Williams said. Brent nodded and swallowed; the mayhem of his youth came flooding back.

  Brent is the oldest son of John Busch, Chris’ older brother. Brent’s brother, Scott, is three years younger. From 1975 to 1978, from age 12 to 15, Brent was repeatedly molested by his uncle and Greg Greene. Scott, only 9 in 1975, had it the worst. It stopped only because his uncle died and Greene was sent to prison for life. (Brent passed away in February 2019, at age 55, at his home in Newaygo. His obituary read simply: “Brent worked as an artist.” Memorials were suggested toward funeral expenses.)

  The brothers grew up in Flint, hanging around with Kenny Bowman and Vince and Paul Gunnels. In 1976, H. Lee Busch bought John the party store in Whitehall. John and his family lived above the store in an apartment. Not too long after, John and Connie Busch’s marriage ended in divorce. In 2001, both died within a few months of each other, in August and July, respectively. Both were 61. John died of congestive heart failure and diabetes. Connie’s cause of death became the subject of a homicide investigation when her sister claimed Connie had been assaulted by Scott three weeks before she died. The reason for the assault is redacted in police documents. It was later determined she died as a “natural sequence of her medical condition of
emphysema.”5

  Charles Busch told police his brother, John, had struggled with alcoholism but had stopped drinking by the time he died. In turn, both Brent and Scott struggled with substance abuse and had scrapes with the law, mostly misdemeanors.

  In the interview, Brent admitted to Williams and Gray that both his uncle and Greg Greene had forcibly penetrated him anally but never tied him up. He said Chris Busch would take pictures of him naked during sex. Chris also forced him to perform sexual acts on other boys while he took pictures. Brent, Vince and Paul had visited Ess Lake for snowmobiling and dirt bike riding weekends. Brent said his uncle molested him at the Busch home in Birmingham, the house in Alma, at the cottage on Ess Lake, and at another house H. Lee Busch had bought for Chris in Sanford, about 50 miles away from Alma. When Chris was arrested in Flint in January 1977, Brent said, he lost his Alma restaurant, both houses, and ended up living at his parents’ house in Birmingham until he killed himself.

  Brent Busch, Christopher Busch’s nephew, grew up in the same Flint neighborhood as Vince and Paul Gunnels and regularly hung around with his uncle and Greg Greene (Michigan State Police).

  When John and Connie were having problems, Brent recalled, he and Scott would stay at the house in Birmingham, which was “huge.” He did remember his uncle’s suicide—he felt Chris shot himself because he couldn’t live with his “problem” of pedophilia anymore.

  Several months later, when Williams was scheduling follow-up interviews with both brothers, Brent sounded nervous. He said Scott had told him recently that Uncle Chris had once driven him around Oakland County during the time of the murders. Pointing out a storefront to him, he told Scott it was the exact location of one of the abductions.

  Of all the interviews Cory Williams would conduct in this case, the one with Scott Busch, in August 2009, would make an indelible mark. It haunts him still. The transcript reads:

  Williams: You recalled something that happened when you were riding around with Chris one time?

  Busch: Yeah. There was some boys that had been missing in the paper and, um, I wanted, if he knew, I was curious to see where they were abducted from and he took me to a place where he was abducted from and said: “he was standing right over there” and I thought that was weird, that he’d know that.

  Gray: His words were?

  Busch: His words were that’s where he was standing

  Williams: He was standing right over there.

  Busch: Yeah. He physically pointed and said: he was standing right over there.6

  Several years later, Williams would remark: “What always comes back to me—and it blows me away every time—is two weeks after Tim King was found, I mean, the case was all over the news. It’s big-time news. Two weeks after Tim winds up dead, Chris calls his brother, John, out in Whitehall and gets him to allow him to take Scott for the weekend. John says yes. Well, for God’s sake, this isn’t Chris being a good uncle. He’s molesting his nephew!

  “So, Chris comes to Birmingham with Scott and Scott says to him: ‘I’m seeing this news on TV about these abductions. And Chris says: ‘Well, if you want, I’ll show you right where he was taken.’ And he drives Scott over to Hunter Maple Pharmacy and they sit in the parking lot and Chris Busch points and says: ‘He was standing right there. He was standing right there!’

  “And so, Scott tells his mom—his mom was Chris’ sister-in-law. And she said to her son; ‘Oh you’re reading into it. Your uncle is a good guy.’ Well, good God, his uncle was molesting him! But that was so compelling to me. He didn’t say he was taken ‘from this store.’ He said: ‘Tim was standing right there.’”

  “Then he takes his 10-year-old nephew home and rapes him.”

  Notably, when Scott was asked which vehicle his uncle was driving when he pointed to where Tim King had been standing, Scott said it was a Chevy Blazer. He never saw Chris’ blue Vega with the white stripe again.

  In the first week of March 2009, the FBI’s DNA lab in Quantico reported to the MSP Task Force that James Vincent Gunnels was a positive mitochondrial DNA match to a hair found on Kristine Mihelich’s sweater. It was the first strong, scientific evidence linking a suspect to one of the victims. While mitochondrial DNA is not as definitive as nuclear DNA (it is only passed down from a mother to her children, unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from all ancestors) for Williams, the finding was confirmation that he was on the right track—he was reading Gunnels accurately. His actions may not have been those of an accomplice or co-conspirator, but he was surely more than a victim. It was now Williams’ job to angle the prism, to bend the light toward truth.

  While the DNA match was cause for celebration, the news was dampened by other test results from the vacuum search of the Busch family home. Within days, lab scientists reported that the animal hairs collected from the Morningview Terrace house search did not match any of the hairs found on the victims’ clothing. (Later, results determined none of the fibers in the house matched either.) “It was not the news we’d been hoping for,” Williams said. “And it was disappointing, for sure. But we gave it a great effort and really, the human hair DNA match trumped the [animal hair results].”

  To brief law enforcement on the Gunnels DNA match and provide an update on the Busch-Greene lead, a meeting was held on March 9, 2009, at the Michigan State Police Metro North Post. While Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy had welcomed newly elected Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper when she took office in January, this was the first official briefing on the notorious, unsolved case over which Cooper now presided. All the principals were there. They represented: Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, OCCK Task Force members from the Michigan State Police, FBI Detroit office, and the Michigan State Police Forensics Laboratory.

  By many accounts, Cooper was attentive and supportive during this meeting. When Worthy pointed out previous trouble-spots with Cooper’s predecessor, David Gorcyca, and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, Cooper vowed this would not happen with her administration. She was resolute: the current Task Force can count on the full support of the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office.

  But the congeniality was short-lived. Jessica Cooper’s reputation preceded her, long before she became the chief legal officer of Oakland County.

  Prior to being elected, Cooper spent a total of 28 years as a judge: eight years in District Court, 14 years in Circuit Court, followed by six years at the Court of Appeals. In 1999, she presided over the trial of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, ultimately sentencing him to 10 to 25 years in prison for one of his assisted suicides.

  During her time on the bench, attorneys whose cases came before her filed several grievances against her with the state Judicial Tenure Commission, variously describing her as “rude,” “arrogant” and “unaccommodating”7

  But the attacks never seemed to faze her. Nor, evidently, did they hold much sway with the electorate. Over two and a half decades, the petite, jet black-haired woman with piercing dark eyes never lost an election.

  “Judge Jessica R. Cooper is an arbitrary, capricious bitch with a Napoleonic complex,” wrote one attorney in a memo sent to his staff and later copied to the commission. “…She is frequently devoid of rule-of-reason reach ability in that she has hired a staff to carry out her own mean disposition and insulate her.”

  Cooper brushed off the condemnations as spiteful attacks by a few vocal attorneys who didn’t get their way in her court. It worked. In the end, the tenure commission voted against issuing sanctions.

  In 2000, Cooper was elected to the Michigan Court of Appeals. She resigned in 2007 to run for Oakland County prosecutor. Riding on the coattails of Obama’s platform of change, Cooper, a Democrat, upset the GOP’s historical stronghold on the county, becoming the first woman ever to hold the prosecutor’s office, in one of the country’s most affluent suburban counties.

  Upon taking office in January, Cooper
immediately cleaned house and fired a dozen prosecutors. Three weeks into her tenure, one local newspaper wrote an editorial assailing her for not living up to the changes she had so earnestly promised when meeting with the editorial board to get their endorsement. That promise was to “conduct business in the prosecutor’s office in an open manner and keep the public informed.”8

  Where the press was once free to contact any one of those dozen assistant prosecutors, Cooper had designated only one person—Paul Walton, her acting deputy chief—to serve as the media gatekeeper.

  As a candidate seeking reelection in 2016, Cooper came under heightened scrutiny for appearing to skirt a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that banned states from sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Reasoning that juveniles are not throwaways, the court found that “only the rarest juvenile life offenders” have little to no potential for rehabilitation, and that life sentences for most juveniles constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” In a series of follow-up decisions, the justices retroactively applied that decision to people who had already been sentenced, allowing states to reconsider the sentences of their own juvenile lifers. By 2016, of the 2,600 juveniles in prison for life across the country, about 1,700 had been resentenced.”9

  Arguing that these were “heinous, heinous” crimes,10 Cooper decided that only five of Oakland County’s 48 juvenile lifers showed any potential for rehabilitation. She requested that the remaining 44—90 percent—receive renewed life-without-parole sentences, hardly aligning with the high court’s stipulation “only the rarest.” By contrast, Kym Worthy recommended that about 40 percent of juvenile life offenders in Wayne County be resentenced to life without parole. Regarding the remaining 60 percent, Worthy told Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press in August 2016, “I tried many of these cases myself. I remember the families. And it was difficult to get around the horrendousness of these crimes. But we had to because it came from the Supreme Court.” Dickerson concluded: “That is what a real law-and-order politician—one committed to uphold the rule of law even when it’s unpopular—sounds like.”11