Several interviews with Det. Williams finally culminated in a tearful confession by the neighbor. After careful prodding, the man broke down—there was a big hole in his story, he confessed, something he had never told anyone. When he was 17, he worked for a year at McCracken’s, alongside Sloan and Stevens. Stevens never touched him, he said; but Arch Sloan sure did. He had pulled him into his bedroom upstairs at the Sloan family home while Stevens waited downstairs.
Once, he said, Stevens gave him a sawed-off, single-shot, 12-gauge shotgun—the same caliber used to finish off Jill Robinson—saying he just wanted to get rid of it. Venturing further down the rabbit hole, Williams learned that Stevens’ sister worked at Hartfield’s Bowling Alley with Deborah Jarvis, Kristine Mihelich’s mother, and that Stevens’ nephew was Kristine’s babysitter. All of which meant the sister had to be investigated, as did the babysitter. Each new person of interest brought an ever-widening net of others with possible ties to Mark, Jill, Kristine and Tim. It was both an exhilarating and infuriating rollercoaster: pursuing promising new leads only to be brought back down by a single call from the FBI crime lab reporting negative DNA results.
While investigating Sloan, Williams was also looking into John Crosbie, the man whose car was searched alongside Sloan’s, and who had raised suspicions because he was quite possibly the last person to speak to Mark Stebbins before he was abducted.
The Crosbie and Stebbins families had known each other for several years before Mark died. Edna Crosbie, John’s mother, and Ruth Stebbins both worked together for a time waiting tables at the Rialto restaurant in Ferndale. When Ruth Stebbins was bartending at the American Legion Hall, Mark would often hang out with his mom, finishing his homework in the afternoons or playing pinball. The American Legion was one of John’s favorite hangouts, so his offer of a ride as Mark was leaving the Hall to walk home did not, in and of itself, raise a huge red flag.
Edna had called the Hall the afternoon Mark disappeared and told John to come home for dinner, asking him to stop for some groceries first. John told police he had gone to pick up the groceries and went straight home.
But John Crosbie was a loner fraught with personal demons and disposed to deviant behavior. Born with significant intellectual disabilities, he took special-ed classes up until high school, but then dropped out.
Crosbie’s sisters told Williams their brother “was different and he knew it.”16 They said their parents, Edna and Neil Crosbie, were very protective of their only son, since he could be easily influenced and exploited in the wrong situations.
Still, Crosbie held on to his job pumping gas at the Texaco station on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale for over 10 years. When he wasn’t at the gas station he could be found sitting on a bar stool at the Nu-Way or Stan’s Bar or the VFW Hall, until Edna would phone and the bartender would call out: “John, your mom says it’s time to go home for dinner.”
When his folks died, Crosbie stayed in the family home and lived there alone until 2003 when he passed away at the age of 52. To this day, Mark’s brother, Mike Stebbins, insists John Crosbie “was a scary dude.”
Within one hour of Mark’s body being discovered, Ferndale police put a surveillance team on Crosbie. They were specifically interested in searching his vehicle—a brown 1965 Chevy with a black vinyl top. According to a police report, Mark’s “remains were found in a crouched, folded position that indicates being confined in a small area, i.e., a trunk of a car, and that the remains were found in an area consisting of soil, dirt and various types of foliage.”17
In an unmarked car parked on Academy Street in Ferndale, Southfield Police Officer R. Frank perked up when he spotted Crosbie, then 24, turning into his driveway. He watched intently as Crosbie got out of his car, unlocked the trunk and started unpacking items, carrying them into the house. As soon as he saw Crosbie remove a large rectangular cooler, Frank approached Crosbie.
Frank politely but firmly asked Crosbie to come down to the station for questioning and Crosbie complied. In his report, Frank said he spotted: “reddish blonde hairs on the hinge of the cooler, which were consistent with the hair type of Mark Stebbins.”
Crosbie was interrogated and on February 23, 1976, was given a lie detector test. MSP Det. Sgt. Chet Romatowski, who administered the test, noted that Crosbie appeared to be slow mentally. He appeared to grasp some things very readily and others not so readily. Still, the polygrapher determined Crosbie had passed.
In September of 1976, Crosbie was arrested for molesting a 13-year-old girl at the Dairy Queen on Nine Mile Road in Ferndale. He rubbed up against her while in line and called her a whore. This, coupled with the unsavory characters Crosbie hung out with (and whom he was eager to please) led Williams to believe his possible involvement in the OCCK case deserved more than the perfunctory exclusion that Williams’ predecessors gave him.
Because the Crosbie and Stebbins families had known each other as neighbors in Ferndale, Williams obtained a search warrant for Crosbie’s sister home in Brighton. On January 14, 2011, he made a startling discovery in the home. Crawling around in the attic, he found two magazines neatly stacked atop some insulation—issues of Tiger Beat and Teen. Both were December 1976 issues: issues that would have been on the shelves at the time Kristine Mihelich walked up to the 7-Eleven to buy a magazine featuring Donny and Marie Osmond. The Tiger Beat cover story was “Donny & Marie: Too Busy for Love?”
As tantalizing as that discovery was, Williams later interviewed Crosbie’s niece who identified the magazines as her own. She said that as a teenager she would often go up to the attic through a hatch in her closet and sneak booze, since her mother kept a case of liquor up there. She also identified a blouse Williams found up there as belonging to her.
It was another dead-end, an abrupt full stop in a long and exhaustive list of close calls. At times he wondered where the brink was—whether the entire investigation was becoming a pathological obsession, a means to no end. And yet, most mornings, he would wake up with a new idea, a new tack or approach.
Williams tracked down every person who logged in to the American Legion Hall the day Mark disappeared, and on the day his body was found. He located every person who had signed into the guest registry at Mark’s funeral. In his spare time—in the hours that come after 24—he began reading over every single one of the 18,000 original Task Force tips, to see if anything, with his deep knowledge of the case, stood out.
Thus, the Crosbie investigation didn’t end with Crosbie. More than one bartender mentioned Crosbie’s drinking buddy, William Yarbrough, who had several tips called in on him when Mark Stebbins disappeared. Little wonder: Yarbrough was a pedophile on steroids, highly violent and vicious. After being arrested in 1963 for the assault of a child, he steered clear of authorities by turning to incest. He molested his own children, both girls and boys, and beat them until their ribs broke. After his divorce, Yarbrough rented a room in a house in Ferndale owned by a friend and his wife. The wife just happened to be Mike and Mark Stebbins’ babysitter. And Mark was the couple’s newspaper delivery boy; he rode by every day on his bike. Yarbrough’s weird obsession for keeping his fingernails clean brought to mind the cleanliness of the children’s bodies, particularly Tim King’s scraped-clean fingernails.
Another regular at the American Legion Hall, Ronald Johnsonbaugh, had three tips called in on him back in the day. One of those tips said Johnsonbaugh was trying to talk a young boy into his car in Ferndale. Known to hang with “truck drivers and grease monkeys,” Johnsonbaugh was discharged from the 82nd Airborne in the early sixties after two years, for theft. He came home embittered and was, according to his brother, “the type of guy that was always sticking his nose into everyone’s business and known to get into fights in bars.”18
An interview with a former girlfriend revealed that Johnsonbaugh also had a conversation with Mark Stebbins the day he disappeared. Johnsonbaugh was walking into the American Legion Hall w
hen Mark was walking out and stopped to chat with him. A check for vehicles registered to Johnsonbaugh showed that he owned a Gremlin. Johnsonbaugh “abruptly” left the state in 1978 (the child killings stopped in 1977), dying two years later in Pennsylvania.
Williams was also interested in a man named Robert DelProposto, who had a tip called in on him in the Task Force files. He lived on Seminole Street in Southfield, across from Arch Sloan’s home from 1973 until 1980. Williams was unable to locate the details of the tip. At the time of the murders, DelProposto had a painting business. In phone interviews, DelProposto told Williams he had never heard of the Oakland County Child Killings and had no idea why a tip may have been called in on him. He also denied knowing Sloan, even though he admitted he painted a gas station at Ten Mile and Middlebelt—the same gas station where Sloan worked. He also said there was a mechanic at the same station who changed out the motor in his green Pontiac, but he didn’t know his name. At one point, DelProposto’s wife grabbed the phone and ending the conversation saying: “My husband is a good Christian man.”19
Interviews with DelProposto’s daughter raised more questions: she said she had no idea why her father would deny knowing Sloan since she and her sister all played at the Sloan house. She also remembered her family driving another car for a while, while her dad’s car was being worked on. She thought she remembered Sloan driving her father’s Pontiac. More specifically, Williams noted: “A small item of interest is that DelProposto had a van he used for his painting business. Victim Mark Stebbins’ boot was found to have blue paint on the side of it when his body was found.” Williams learned that DelProposto now lived in California. But before he could dispatch someone from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to collect a DNA swab, he had passed away.
As with so many other persons of interest, because DelProposto, Yarbrough and Johnsonbaugh were deceased, their living blood relatives had to be tracked down, interviewed and hopefully persuaded to consent to a cheek swab. “For exclusionary purposes” is not a very compelling argument to sway relatives into submitting to DNA testing, especially when they mistrust law enforcement from the get-go.
And yet, however distant or obscure the possible link, Williams had to pull every last thread. The one left hanging was the incessant loop in his head: the one question he didn’t ask, the one door he didn’t knock on.
* * *
1. Pre-Sentence Report for Washington County, Pennsylvania, Arch Edward Sloan, January 29, 1971, 3.
2. Pre-Sentence Report, January 29, 1971, 8.
3. Jodie Froster, “The New OCCK Suspect on the Block: Arch Sloan,” Ididitforjodie.com, September 12, 2012.
4. Pre-Sentence Report, January 29, 1971, 2.
5. Det. Cory Williams, Wayne County Prosecutor’s Narrative report: The Homicide of Timothy King, August 29, 2011.
6. David Ashenfelter and L.L. Brasier, “Do You Remember Seeing This Man or This Car?” Detroit Free Press, July 18, 2012, 5A.
7. David Ashenfelter, Gina Damron, L.L. Brasier, Matt Helms, “A Chilling History of Child Sex Abuse,” Detroit Free Press, July 19, 2012, 10A.
8. Oakland County Sheriff’s Polygrapher Chris Lamphere, Polygraph of Arch Edward Sloan, December 2, 2010.
9. Det. Fred Allison, Investigation Follow Up Comp. #76–03079, Homicide, Mark Stebbins, February 19, 1976.
10. MSP 1st. Lt. Denise Powell Interview with Arch Sloan, October 22, 2013. From Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King.
11. Det. Cory Williams, interview with author, July 2013.
12. Det. Cory Williams, Narrative Report, January 2014.
13. Joe Calcaterra, interview with Det. Cory Williams, from Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King. Body Found in Livonia in 1977, March 10, 2011.
14. Interview with former cell-mate Scott Robinson by Det. Cory Williams, from Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King. Body Found in Livonia in 1977, April 28, 2011.
15. Morgan Humecky, interview with Det. Cory Williams, April 17, 2014.
16. Betty Roe, interview with Det. Cory Williams, from Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King, January 10, 2011.
17. Det. Lt. Patrick T. Sullivan, Affidavit for Search Warrant of a 1965 Chevrolet with a black vinyl top and registered to one John Crosbie, 333 Academy Ferndale currently in custody of the Ferndale Police Department. February 19, 1976.
18. Robert Johnsonbaugh, brother of Ronnie Johnsonbaugh, interview with Det. Cory Williams, from Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King, September 12, 2012.
19. Interview with Robert Delproposto by Det. Cory Williams. Narrative Report: Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Investigation: The Homicide of Timothy King, December 3, 2010.
18
Finally Righting the Ship
The investigation into Arch Sloan spanned four years, involved several hundred interviews and more than two dozen DNA swabs. Travel involved trips all over the country: Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Williams’ relentless digging took the concept of “six degrees of separation” to its maddening extreme. Just vetting Sloan’s seven siblings and extended family (Arch Sr. died in 1986, Carolyne in 1994) was mind boggling.
At one point, Det. Williams thought he had hit on a connection between Sloan and Busch. In May 2011, while researching Arch’s brother, Dennis Sloan, one of Dennis’ previous street addresses was listed as Pinecrest Circle in Montmorency County in northern Michigan. Pinecrest sounded vaguely familiar. Google Maps showed Pinecrest to be on Ess Lake. Zooming in on the address showed the Sloans’ Ess Lake cottage to be less than 500 feet away from Christopher Busch’s cottage on Norway Court—they were right around the corner from each other. It was too good to be true, and yet there it was: the two most promising suspects in the history of the case owned vacation properties separated by a short walk.
Williams and Harper Woods PD Det. Tim Matouk, along with Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Rob Moran, drove the four hours to Hillman to visit what they now called “Pedophile Lake.” When they arrived, sure enough, the two cottages were around the bend from each other, quaintly kitty-corner.
But when the officers checked with the Register of Deeds at the township hall, a clerk told them Dennis Sloan and his wife, Susan (both deceased), did not purchase the cottage until 1991, long after Chris Busch had died and the Busch family cottage was sold. Later, an interview with a man who had dated Susan Sloan after Dennis died confirmed the two suspects’ presence at Ess Lake was indeed many years apart.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to detectives, WDIV-TV reporters from Detroit had travelled to Montmorency County and the Ess Lake cottage in pursuit of information on Christopher Busch. They saw police officers in the area and—since no one was aware of the Sloan lead outside of the OCCK investigators—the reporters concluded the cops were digging up dirt on Ess Lake’s most infamous resident, Chris Busch. Later that same week, reporter Kevin Dietz aired a story about his camera crew encountering a Wayne County prosecutor and an investigator on Ess Lake who were looking into new developments in the case.
Top brass at the Task Force were furious when the story aired and immediately assumed Wayne County had leaked the Sloan lead. A meeting was called at MSP headquarters and Williams was once again the face on the bullseye. One top official kept repeating: “Oh, so it’s just a coincidence that Williams is up in Montmorency and the media shows up?” Finger-pointing ensued. Rob Moran and Chief of Investigations James Bivens reminded the assembled group that because of the secrecy inherent in the Wayne County Grand Jury still in effect. They wouldn’t dare discuss the Sloan
investigation with anyone.
“Including the families and especially the media,” Moran insisted. “We have absolutely no motive to talk to the media or break down what should be a collaborative effort here. Wayne County wants to work together with everyone.”1
Matouk, who had been attending Task Force meetings in Williams’ stead, reminded everyone of Wayne County’s lengthy background and commitment to the investigation, from Lawson to Lamborgine to Busch and Greene.
Nonetheless, an Oakland County Sheriff Captain decreed: “The only way Wayne County is going to be allowed to continue to work with the Task Force is if Det. Williams is not investigating the case!”2
The following day, June 6, 2011, Williams and Matouk met for three hours with newly named OCCK Task Force Director Lt. Denise Powell of the Michigan State Police. Appointed in January, Powell was still studying the massive case, but she knew enough to immediately put a halt to the sandbagging of the investigator who had done the most to advance the investigation.
By many accounts, when Powell assumed leadership, the finger pointing and territorial squabbles amongst the rank and file ceased. Whatever rancor remained—the top prosecutors at Wayne County and Oakland County would be at war for years to come—Powell shielded the investigators from any of the bureaucratic power-grabs that might trip them up. During her tenure, Powell also secured funding—$40,000—to have the voluminous 40-year-old paper files on the case digitized into an electronic database.
Born and raised in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar community south of Detroit known as Downriver, Powell rose through the ranks at the MSP thanks to her low-profile, nose-to-the-ground demeanor.
The Snow Killings Page 34