Worthy was particularly rankled because it was her office, she said, who pushed the Michigan State Police and Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office to collect all the hair and fiber evidence and get them analyzed and tested.
“This evidence had been sitting dormant for years and we pushed and pushed them to have it analyzed knowing that this could potentially be a big lead,” Worthy said. “It was not just a request, we had insisted. We were pushing to have it tested long before Cooper ever became prosecutor.”
Despite numerous attempts to contact her, Worthy said Cooper refused her calls. “There has been no communication with that office for a year, and not just on this case, but any case. It’s certainly not from lack of trying. We have even tried to work through other channels to open lines of communication. I have sent email after email without hearing a thing. We even tried working with a new investigator. Basically, we have prostrated ourselves in terms of putting egos aside.
“Understand: I certainly don’t need this to be a feather in my cap. My reputation has been established for years. We were the ones that were able to regenerate this investigation back in 2004 (with Lawson and Lamborgine) and we have worked on this consistently since then. Even when they weren’t talking to us or shut us out, we still shared information because our sole purpose was to get to the bottom of this and to find out who killed Timothy King.”
When asked why she felt Cooper would have blindsided her office with the press conference, Worthy said: “I am not going to try and get into anybody else’s mind, I’ll leave that to others. I will say the timing is interesting.”
Asked for a response to Worthy’s comments, Cooper said: “Contrary to Kym Worthy’s unfortunate assertions, the release of information made by the task force to seek the assistance of the public has indeed produced several valid leads in less than 24 hours….16
“I have the greatest respect for Kym Worthy, however one of her investigators assigned to the newly expanded task force was asked to leave on two separate occasions. Our task force headed by the Michigan State Police and many Oakland County agencies including the Oakland County Sheriff’s office works together as a cohesive unit.”
For his part, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson minced no words. “What you have here is a panicky candidate for reelection for prosecutor’s office and that’s Jessica Cooper,” Patterson told me, “Just in this case alone, she has managed to alienate almost everybody. She’s looking for anybody to blame but herself.”17
Cooper’s direct hit aside, Williams’ reaction to the press conference was in lockstep with his boss’: it had made his job infinitely more difficult. Letting Sloan know that he was not a match eliminated any leverage investigators had on getting him to talk. Cooper had taken away their one bargaining chip; as long as he knew the hair was not his, Sloan had no incentive to give up what he knew about Mark Stebbins and Tim King being in his Pontiac Bonneville. “What it did was tell Sloan: he’s good to go,” Williams said. “His DNA did not match. He’s on easy street now!
“Talk about leaking grand jury evidence in a case. I mean, my God, she’s the biggest leak of all. She hammered the cops not to talk to the media—just so she could. She just undermined our entire investigation—she let the bad guy know he’s clean, he’s off the hook. It was all politically motivated for her.
“I’ve said for years that when you’re working a cold case, especially a case thirty five years old, it doesn’t hurt to get some information out into the public to generate conversation and get folks talking again. But she was against that: she called everything a leak. Now she wants to take a page out of my cold case guide and appeal to the public all for her own selfish needs to get re-elected. If she really cared about the families, she would appeal to Kym Worthy and offer assistance.”
Close to 4 a.m. the morning after the press conference, Barry King padded down to the basement and fired up his computer. He wrote what he always wrote about: the endless incongruities of the case that eat away at him. And as strong as the Sloan evidence was, he still found it suspect. Under the heading “LIE DETESTOR TESTS,” he wrote:
In late 2006 or early 2007 MSP tells [me] they have their first hard lead. Lamborgine flunked a lie detector (l/d) test. Sloan passed a l/d test in 1976 and Busch does in January 1977. Both results are made public by the OCP.
In 2006, Wasser tells Coffey that he knew who killed his neighbor boy and both the culprit and his attorney are deceased. This information is privileged because of l/d laws.
Three experienced polygraphers review the Busch reading and conclude Busch did not pass the 1977 test. This was privileged. Have 3 other polygraphers reviewed the Sloan test?
Gunnels, a suspect, takes 2 l/d tests. One result is inconclusive because he takes deliberate action to disqualify the test. He takes a later test which he may have failed. Both of these tests are redacted because they are privileged.
Why are some tests privileged and others public knowledge? Did Cooper violate the law when she mentioned the Sloan result?
If one result is public knowledge all of them should be!
MITOCHRONDRIAL DNA TESTS (MtDNA)
The hairs from Mark and Tim have a MtDNA match. This information is the best lead yet and involves a live suspect whom we cannot identify. OCP says we need your help.
The hair from Mihelich matches Gunnels, a live suspect. The OCP tells us this is only a 1% match and has no legal significance.
Is there some legal difference or is this an attempt to divert the Busch lead?
MEDIA DISCLOSURES
The prosecutors have publicly announced that Sloan, Norberg, Raar, Warzechka and others are possible suspects. The Sloan involvement was a major media event.
The OCP has made no such announcement on the Busch, Green and Gunnels involvement. The King family FOIA requests for this information have been denied and the OCP is fighting their request for information in the court system. Why is Busch treated differently than other suspects? Is the OCP concerned that the 1977 Busch criminal history will embarrass her office? Why won’t Judge Allerton and Richard Thompson talk to the King family about why a 4-time convicted felon never spent a day in jail and his co-defendant was-sentenced to life in prison?
AND YOU WONDER WHY I CAN’T SLEEP!
In early November, Jessica Cooper fended off Bishop’s challenge and won reelection to the Oakland County Prosecutor’s seat with 52 percent of the vote to Bishop’s 41 percent.
* * *
1. Deborah Jarvis at press conference, Detroit Marriott Hotel, April 24, 2012.
2. Tom Ascroft, email to author, April 23, 2012.
3. Paul Hughes at press conference, Detroit Marriott Hotel, April 24, 2012.
4. Kevin Dietz, “Prosecutors Say Evidence Points Away from Suspect Christopher Busch as Oakland County Child Killer,” WDIV-TV, June 26, 2012.
5. Statement of Deborah Jarvis, April 24, 2012, Detroit, Michigan.
6. Christine Ferretti and Mark Hicks, “Attorney calls for Federal Probe of Oakland County Child Killer,” The Detroit News, April 24, 2012.
7. Deborah Jarvis interview with author, April 24, 2012.
8. Kevin Dietz, “Prosecutors Say Evidence Points Away from Suspect Christopher Busch as Oakland County Child Killer,” WDIV-TV, June 26, 2012.
9. Jay M. Grossman, “Candidates Don’t Pull Punches in Prosecutor’s Race,” Observer & Eccentric, September 30, 2012, A2.
10. Statement of Jessica Cooper, July 17, 2012.
11. Statement of Jessica Cooper, Oakland County Prosecutor, Pontiac, Michigan, July 17, 2012.
12. MSP Det. Lt. Denise Powell, interview with author, April 27, 2018.
13. Chris King, interview with author, July 18, 2012.
14. Cathy Broad, email to author, July 2012.
15. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, interview with author, July 18, 2012.
16. Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper in interview with Mike Martindale, The Detroit News, July 18, 2012.
17. Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, interview with author, July 18, 2012.
20
Trying to Make All the Pieces Fit
Whatever leads the Sloan press conference generated, they did little to advance the case in any meaningful way. By 2014, the investigation had narrowed to a few last suspects. Among them was Ronald Lloyd Bailey, a notorious pedophile who escalated to murder, and his physician, Dr. Jose Tombo, who worked at the Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital.
Now abandoned, the former “Northville Insane Asylum,” built in 1952, has no shortage of YouTube footage from horror seekers and ruin porn aficionados. In the seventies, its location raised red flags when children were being snatched. As People magazine wrote in a December 1977 article on the OCCK case:
As one police detective points out, Timmy King’s body was dumped on Gill Road just a few miles from Northville State Hospital. The killer had to travel down a badly torn-up section of Eight Mile Road to reach the Gill dump site, a route someone unfamiliar with the area would tend to avoid because of the construction. The detective speculates that the killer knew the area well and might even be an outpatient at the hospital.1
Ronald Lloyd Bailey, born in Detroit in 1959, derailed as soon as he hit puberty. When he was 14, he kidnapped a 15-year-old boy at knifepoint and sexually assaulted him. The following year, he pulled a knife on a 12-year-old, and at age 16, he almost killed a 10-year-old boy by strangulation. In that case, Bailey was convicted of sexual assault and was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment at the state hospital in Northville. Starting in 1975, Bailey spent over two years in residence at the hospital under the care of Dr. Jose Tombo—a madman in his own right—who was drugging and sexually abusing his patients.
Bailey not only fit the time frame, he was a pedophile who murdered his victims and operated in the same general area. (One of his victims was from Ferndale.) Up until now, all previous suspects were bona-fide pedophiles, but it takes a special depravity to kill a child. On August 31, 1985, 13-year-old Shawn Moore left his home in Brighton on his bike to buy a root beer from a nearby convenience store and was missing for nearly two weeks. On September 12, someone spotted a nude decomposing body near a fishing cabin near Caseville. The cabin belonged to Bailey. Arrested in Florida where he had fled days earlier, Bailey confessed to the murder, saying he spotted Shawn while buying cigarettes and had forced him into the jeep at knifepoint. Awaiting trial, he also confessed to strangling 14-year-old Kenny Myers after luring him away from a mall in Westland, north of Detroit, on July 16, 1984. Bailey was sentenced to two life sentences without parole.
Bailey had been looked at earlier as an OCCK suspect by MSP Det. Garry Gray. Gray eliminated Bailey based on medical records that showed he was hospitalized in Northville and assumed to be on lockdown at the time of the OCCK murders. But Williams found that Bailey was not confined to the hospital; in fact, he could come and go as he pleased.
Ronald Lloyd Bailey was heavily investigated as a suspect in the OCCK case because he was not only a notorious pedophile, but murdered his victims as well (Michigan State Police).
Under the guise of investigating Dr. Tombo for molesting patients, Williams and MSP Det. Sgt. Becky MacArthur interviewed Bailey in prison. The once blonde, blue-eyed pretty boy was now in his late fifties, with a buzz-cut, red-rimmed eyes and an utter lack of remorse. He talked about his crimes with a macabre fondness, as if snuffing the life out of young boys he had raped was a romantic fantasy. Bailey fashioned himself as somewhat of a celebrity; he loved the fact that he was mentioned by name in the book Mind Hunter, authored by an FBI agent who pioneered the idea of profiling predators by getting inside their heads.
When told he would be questioned about his experience as a victim of Dr. Jose Tombo, Bailey became animated: at long last, a path toward retribution. “Tombo thought he was God,” Bailey said.2 Tombo acted on his own evil whims, locking up patients up for days or drugging them into oblivion. He carried a filled syringe in his pocket, flashing it from time to time, just to keep the patients in line.
Bailey earned special privileges—passes to come and go from the hospital—in exchange for sexual favors in Tombo’s office. Bailey said he and Tombo would spend entire weekends partying together—murderer patient and demonic shrink.
In 1980, Bailey was released from treatment and headed to Florida. It would take another five years for Tombo to be officially fired. He immediately fled the country. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, Tombo crossed the border into Canada on March 25, 1989, but then the trail went cold. Others told Williams they had heard Tombo fled to the Philippines and died homeless. Months after the interview with Bailey, his DNA excluded him altogether.
As Williams hunted down the last remaining suspects connected to the Sloan lead, hope diminished. One by one, they either had alibis or their DNA cleared them. Catching mistakes, finding holes, questioning what he or others might have missed became the order of the day. Maybe an error would snag him a lucky break.
Such was the case with Harrison “Fred” Kenner. Kenner had been friends with Sloan since their days at Cooley High School. After Sloan returned to Michigan from Pennsylvania in 1975, the two got reacquainted, just as Kenner was entering into his second marriage. Kenner had met his second wife, Pauline, at a Boy Scout meeting, where he was troop leader and Pauline was a den mother. They married in 1976, and after running a pizza shop, they opened a foster care business out of their home.
Fred Kenner had four kids from a previous marriage and Pauline had five with her ex. By the time he died in 2006, the couple had raised 24 kids, not including their own children. Pauline told Williams she hated Sloan, and for good reason. Their son had been molested by Sloan several times, which “drove him into drugs and alcohol.” She also said that in 2005, Fred called in a tip to the state police about Sloan; he had always believed Sloan “was involved in those killings” and wanted to let someone know.3
Williams learned that a detective from Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office had swabbed the couple’s son for DNA. As soon as Williams read the report, alarms went off. A child would not suffice as a sample comparison for DNA. The only way to exclude Fred Kenner, Sr., was to take a DNA sample from a sibling of his who had the same biological mother. And since Kenner didn’t have any living full siblings—only a half-sister—Williams convinced the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office that the work and expense of disinterring a dead body was important to the case.
And so, on a sunny spring day, almost 10 years after it had been placed six feet under, Fred Kenner’s casket was disinterred at Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly, Michigan (coincidentally the resting place of Tim and Marion King). Because this was a military cemetery, the casket was required to be moved off-site to open it. Sitting on the bed of a state police pick-up truck in the garage of the lab, the casket was jimmied, the lid coming open with a screech. The skull was black, the white shirt and dark suit deflated atop the rib cage. Scalpel in hand, an anthropologist from the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Unit, wearing protective glasses, a paper gown and latex gloves began her work. Because embalming fluids degrade DNA in the body, she would excise only those body parts where the fluid wasn’t as likely to have reached: parts of a knee cap, scalp, bones in the hands, and two molars. No stranger to the macabre, Williams did not flinch. But there is no getting used to the stench of decay.
The samples were placed in Ziploc bags with Michigan State Police insignias and carefully identified: right scalp, left patella, teeth #’s 25 and 26. Once again, hopes were high. But months later, the DNA results excluded Kenner as the source of the hairs.
With Sloan comrades exhausted, Williams investigated three cases of interest to the Kin
gs that had never been fully vetted by law enforcement.
Using the pseudonym “Berkley Witness” on website forums devoted to the OCCK case, Chris Sadecki had maintained for years that he saw Kristine Mihelich’s abduction at the 7-Eleven in 1977. In 2011, Sadecki decided to come forward with his story. His youngest son had just turned nine, Sadecki explained, the same age he was when Kristine Mihelich went missing.
Upon meeting Sadecki, you want to believe his story. But ultimately it is impossible to determine whether what Sadecki believes he saw actually happened. Sadly, in the OCCK case, witnesses with full-hearted convictions like Sadecki’s are as plentiful as they are anguishing. For all too many who called the Task Force during the time of the crimes, their information collected dust, lost among the confetti-like stream of 18,000 tips that came in between 1976 and 1978.
Up until late 2019, Sadecki lived with his family in the small bungalow where he was raised in Berkley. He had moved his family into his childhood home because his mother, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and COPD, could not be left alone. By February 2020, his mother had passed away and he moved his family “safely away from Berkley.” But his story has never changed, not in content or detail or fervor.
Chris is tall with a strong build and a face that is kind and congenial, but all that softness drains when he begins to tell his story. His eyes turn feral, like the center of a flame. When I first met him, he was seated in his small kitchen next to his wife, Janelle, whose tiny stature belies her fierce devotion to her husband. She is his buoy and his fact-checker. Married in 1997, the couple have two sons. Janelle is banking on the scripture passage that says: the truth will set you free. “My husband has no reason to hold on to this story for so long,” she says. “Other than it’s all true.”4
The Snow Killings Page 37