The day before the meeting, Det. Williams got a phone call at the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office from MSP Det. Lt. Darryl Hill, inviting him to Cooper’s meeting. Hill said it would be a convening of all the chiefs of police in Oakland County to review the status of the case, and that MSP Capt. Harold Love wanted Williams to speak at the meeting. So, Williams called Love on his cell.5
“Hey, Captain Love. I just got off the phone with Darryl,” Williams said. “I understand there’s a big meeting at the prosecutor’s office tomorrow in Oakland County and you might want me to say a few words.”
“Yes,” Love answered. “That would be great. Why don’t you just bring some of your notes?”
“Sure,” Williams said. “By the way, is there any news on our DNA from Quantico?”
“As a matter of fact,” Love said excitedly. “Yes, there is. We have a positive match.” Then, quickly catching himself: “But … ah … I can’t discuss it until we get the full reports back.”
Williams was elated. He ran up several flights of stairs to tell Rob Moran and Kym Worthy. He knew this could be big. It had to be the DNA from the once long-lost slides Williams, Gray and Ouellet had found and sent in last spring. Love’s words quite possibly meant the oldest evidence in the case, never before processed for DNA, had yielded a match. Worthy and Moran were in a meeting, but two hours later when everyone filed out, Williams walked into Worthy’s office and told her what Love had said.
“Get Love on the phone,” she said.
Williams used her office line and they put Love on conference call. “Cory tells me you said there’s new DNA evidence.” Worthy said. “Tell us what’s going on.”
Love didn’t skip a beat. “No, I never said that. We haven’t heard anything. There is no new evidence.”
Williams and Worthy were stunned. In a matter of two hours, somebody must have gotten to Love and told him to walk it back. The question was why.
The following day at the meeting, close to two dozen uniformed officials from MSP, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and the local chiefs of police gathered in a conference room in the high-rise tower of the Oakland County administrative offices. Oakland County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Paul Walton presented a PowerPoint presentation that, in his words, detailed “the strengths and weaknesses of the OCCK investigation.”6
Within the first half hour, it became abundantly clear to Worthy and Williams that Capt. Love wasn’t the only one playing dumb.
“Sure enough, we got to the meeting the next day and Walton and MSP put on this entire dog and pony show,” Williams recalled. “They said: there is no new evidence in the case. Lied to everybody. There is No. New. Evidence. It’s all good. Everybody go home. Garry Gray just sat there with his head down the whole time. Wouldn’t even look at me. Kym and I walked out of the meeting and we just looked at each other: like what was that all about?”
Rob Moran characterized the meeting: “You have to understand: all the police chiefs in the room and the Oakland County sheriffs are scratching their heads, saying: ‘What’s going on?’ Basically, it was a Power Point presentation about how nothing has been solved and they talked about the biggest four or five leads in the last three years and how we really are no further ahead than we were thirty years ago.”7
Worthy said they completely downplayed most of Wayne County’s contributions to the case. “Lamborgine, Lawson, Busch and Greene,” she said. “Pretty much everything we had done was dismissed.”8
Confused, the local police chiefs came up to Williams and Moran after the meeting. “They said, wait a minute, we’ve got to get to the real story of what’s going on,” Moran said. One member of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office came up to Worthy and thanked her for all the work her department had done on the case. “We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you,” he told her.
“I thanked him,” Worthy said. “And then I gave him some spiel about how this was a team effort even though I didn’t really believe that. So then, when Cory and Rob wanted to go forward with a meeting with the chiefs, since they all seemed ripe for discussing it further, and also since we weren’t happy with the way things had been presented at Jessica’s meeting, we agreed to set something up.”
But when Cooper got wind of the proposed meeting with the chiefs and Wayne County, “it got ugly,” Worthy said. Through a series of emails Worthy characterized as “very nasty,” Cooper accused Worthy of interfering with the investigation.
“It was like, how dare I talk to police officers in her cities,” Worthy said. “And I thought this is America. I didn’t know I couldn’t do that. I think she said how could ‘your people.’ … I sent her back an email that I thought was very nice that said: ‘these are police personnel who simply want to talk with other police officers.’ But she sent a very nasty email back. And at that point, I said, well, there is no reason for me to have another conversation with her.”
It would be several months before Wayne County would fully appreciate the deception that played out at that meeting. They had been played by their colleagues, supposed comrades-in-arms.
Seven weeks prior to the “no new evidence” meeting, on January 8, 2010, the MSP Task Force and, in turn, the Oakland Prosecutor’s Office, received a report from Dr. Constance Fisher from the FBI lab in Quantico. The DNA evidence submitted the previous spring—those human hairs that Wayne County was instrumental in locating and pushing to get tested—had yielded the most compelling scientific evidence in the history of the case.
According to Williams, once they were briefed on how powerful the evidence was, MSP and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office conspired to keep the information to themselves. Wayne County, the only department to ever name a suspect in the case (Lamborgine) and the department that had unearthed and developed the most promising lead in the case, was to be cut off at the knees.
Williams would later learn that at a Task Force meeting at the Michigan State Police Post, Cooper asked the detectives involved in the case to sign an oath of fealty—a pledge of loyalty—if they wanted to remain on the Task Force.9
Why it happened was fairly evident. But how is less clear. Apparently, there was little to no incentive built into inter-departmental protocols for sharing the results of DNA testing with other law enforcement agencies. Because the agency that submitted the evidence for processing—in this case, the Michigan State Police—was the agency that received the results, it was considered their evidence to share or not share, as they saw fit.
“Cooper was planning her own ticker tape parade,” Williams said ruefully. “Remember, they had gotten the results from Quantico in January, more than a month prior to that meeting. So, the purpose of holding the meeting was to be a diversion, to distract all of us so they could focus on the new DNA all alone and be the big heroes. They wanted to get rid of us after we had done all the work.”
To this day, it sticks in his craw. Williams sometimes finds himself driving down the freeway, working himself into a rage. “I was fucking furious,” Williams says. “I wanted to scream from the rooftops that I was being called a patsy. I was being thrown under the bus for nothing! I wanted to tell the media, I wanted to tell everybody!”
But his boss retained her steely resolve. “Kym said, no, just take the high road. We’re going to keep doing our own thing and keep our nose to the ground.”
No one could predict how long the stalemate would last. But Worthy never wavered. No one would malign a member of her team and not be held accountable, no one would get away with lying and, above all, no one would hijack this investigation.
By May of 2010, seven months after the Kings went public with little to nothing to show for it, Barry King filed two lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking release of all records pertaining to the investigation of Christopher Busch. The first was against the Michigan State Police, the second was against the Oakland County Prosecutor’s
Office.
Through her comments to the media, it was clear Jessica Cooper was ditching the investigation on Busch. This incensed Barry King. There was too much evidence against Busch; she had to be protecting somebody. Barry King was determined to find out who and why.
It was one thing for Cooper to say she was not in the business of charging dead people. He got that. But to dismiss the case out of hand, and furthermore to paint him as a desperate man, confused and possibly senile, was to pour salt on the gaping wound. Every morning Barry King’s feet hit the floor was another day he would devote to seeking justice for Tim.
Cooper’s office fought the suit with a vengeance, taking the case to the Michigan Court of Appeals (twice) and then up to the Michigan Supreme Court.
Barry King was especially interested in the Power Point presentation given by Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Paul Walton to law enforcement at the infamous “No New Evidence” meeting in February.
While King could not have known the back story of that meeting and the significance of what was being withheld, he was interested in the PowerPoint presentation because he believed it laid out why Cooper was closing the case on the Busch investigation, and thus might be a clue as to who she might be trying to protect.
Barry King had tried repeatedly to attend the meeting. He phoned the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office repeatedly, leaving messages each time. Cooper never called back. Instead, she enlisted an intermediary to contact King—Don Studt.
Cooper knew King trusted Studt. As instructed by the prosecutor, Studt called to tell King he was not allowed to attend, but he would debrief him after the meeting. Studt did call him but didn’t have much to report. He was not at liberty to talk about Walton’s presentation, other than to say it laid out the position that there was insufficient evidence to conclude Chris Busch was involved in the Oakland County Child Killings.10
Barry King was floored: how could Cooper’s office summarily dismiss Busch in light of the mountain of evidence that had been amassed? And if she was trying to bury the Busch lead for lack of evidence, why then would she fight so vigorously against the release of case records?
Among the many scenarios that kept King up at night was the relationship between Larry Wasser, Wasser’s attorney James Feinberg, Jane Burgess, and Jessica Cooper. Barry King was so convinced of a secret pact he had a name for it: The Wasser-Feinberg-Burgess Triangle.
When Chris Busch was criminally charged in 1977, his family took the the matter to Larry Burgess, a prominent defense attorney with offices in Detroit. Burgess was busy at the time so he turned the matter over to his wife Jane, also an attorney. Jane and Larry Burgess were partners in an office downtown with James Feinberg. Faced with an investigative subpoena concerning his conversation with Patrick Coffey, Wasser hired James Feinberg. Underpinning this triad was Jessica Cooper. Jane Burgess and Cooper were a rarity in the seventies—both were female criminal defense attorneys considered pioneers in the field of law. Both were Wayne State University law school grads, only four years apart. They attended the same professional functions and traveled in the same social circles in Detroit.
If one ascribed to the theory that H. Lee Busch was paying off everyone in a key position to keep his pedophile son from being connected to the OCCK crimes, and to keep the family name out of the headlines, how many others might have been incentivized to look the other way? And for how many years?
Why else, King wondered, would Larry Wasser, with the aid of his attorney James Feinberg, be so unwilling to cough up Chris Busch’s name under oath, as instructed by both the trial court and the Court of Appeals? If Wasser didn’t believe Busch’s confession was credible, why would he have anything to hide? Was Cooper downplaying the Busch lead to protect her old friend, Jane Burgess?
Thus, for Barry King, the principal motive for filing the FOIA suit against the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office was to determine the basis upon which Cooper had concluded there was insufficient evidence to proceed on Busch’s possible involvement. Filed in March of 2011, King’s suit made no appreciable gains. Cooper continued to dig in her heels, filing delay after delay and refusing to communicate not only with the Kings but the family’s attorney, Lisa Milton, as well.
Frustrated, Milton wrote: “The purpose of this deposition is not to harass an elected official as implied by the OCP in the previous arguments made to this court. The purpose is to determine the information which the OCP had or needs in order to arrive at a proper conclusion as to whether or not Christopher Busch was involved in these murders.”11
She continued: “Why is a four-time convicted pedophile who was granted probation in at least four cases and never spent a day in jail entitled to more protection than the families of these four murdered children?”
In public and in court documents, Cooper said her office was being harassed by King’s repeated quest for information. She argued she was not duty bound to confer with families of victims no matter how long the case went unsolved. Describing the FOIA case as a “flurry of repetitive pleadings that Plaintiffs continue to assail Defendant with,” she said the case has caused “undue burden on the operations of the Defendant’s office.”12
She regarded the Kings’ repeated requests to meet with her with disdain. The lawsuit contains, in her words, “a demand that the FOIA lawsuit entitles Plaintiffs to force a face-to-face meeting with the elected prosecutor, apparently so that Plaintiffs may demand that the elected prosecutor explain prosecutorial decisions that occurred thirty years before she took office.”
Stressing that the investigation “remains active and ongoing,” she went on to explain: “In investigations of this magnitude, nothing is done in a vacuum and information about potential suspects is inexplicably intertwined, such that the death of any one person does not render information related to that person safely disclosable.”
Still, Barry King and the court of public opinion exerted so much pressure on the Oakland County prosecutor, by May of 2011 her office released a statement in the form of a press release. “Absolute confidentiality, even, unfortunately, from the family of a victim, remains the policy of this task force.”13
King did not make much headway with the FOIA suit. (By 2015 all legal pleadings, including three separate lawsuits King had filed against the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, had ended in failure.) But the FOIA case against the Michigan State Police fared much better. On December 15, 2010, the MSP delivered several boxes to King’s home, containing 3,411 pages of investigative files relating to Christopher Busch. The fee was approximately $11,000 for the files alone, to say nothing of court costs. And this was just one of two FOIA lawsuits.
Over the next few months, King would pore over every page. There, in black and white, was confirmation that Busch had been given a get-out-of-jail-free card four times over. Charged and convicted of criminal sexual conduct in four Michigan counties, Busch got probation in each case after plea bargains were struck.
He read for the first time about Charles Busch’s request that family members living in Michigan be allowed to enter a “witness protection type-program,”14 and that his father, H. Lee, had shredded all the family documents, including birth certificates. He read the interviews with Busch’s nephews, how the victims of Busch and Greene were tortured, the treatment Tim must have endured. All the missed opportunities, the evidence lost and/or destroyed, the outright miscarriage of justice.
King told the media he was “now more convinced than ever” of Busch’s involvement. And he felt somewhat vindicated in his pursuit of information. But justice was a long way off. “I will feel like justice has been served when the Oakland County Prosecutor explains to me why Busch is not guilty. I am sick and tired of a four-time convicted sexual pedophile being treated better than my family and the families of Mark Stebbins, Kristine Mihelich and Jill Robinson.”15
When asked if he felt the documents were worth $11,000, King replied: “
It was Tim’s college money.”16
* * *
1. Gunnels, interview with author, September 2011.
2. MSP Det. Sgt. Robert Dykstra, Det. Cory Williams City of Livonia Narrative report Incident # 77–0006883, July 29, 2009.
3. Marney Rich Keenan, “DNA Stirs Up 1970s Case,” The Detroit News, May 20, 2011, 4A.
4. OCP Jessica Cooper interview with author, October 26, 2012.
5. Williams, recounting phone call in interview with author, July 2012.
6. Oakland County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Paul Walton, Bill of Particulars Case 2012–125171-CZ, August 8, 2012, 4.
7. Wayne County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Rob Moran, interview with author, September 2010.
8. Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney Kym Worthy, interview with author, September, 2010. All quotes from Worthy, Moran and Williams are from September 2010 meeting with author at the prosecutor’s office.
9. Det. Cory Williams Narrative report, Wayne County Prosecutors Office Investigation, The Homicide of Timothy King. Body found in Livonia in 1977, June 7, 2011.
10. Statement of fact: Barry King vs Oakland County Prosecutor Case No: 10–110251-CZ: “On Monday, March 1, 2010, Chief Studt again called Barry King and indicated he was calling at the request of the OCP. He advised Barry King that the OCP did not have sufficient information to conclude that Christopher Busch was involved in the murder of Timothy King or the other children. When Barry King asked for the basis of this conclusion, Chief Studt indicated that he could not discuss this information.” March 30, 2011, 2.
The Snow Killings Page 31