Sadecki grew up in Berkley, the middle child of three boys, raised by a single mom who worked as bartender in his aunt’s bar. On the day Kristine Mihelich went missing, Sadecki says he saw a Berkley police officer—in full uniform—get into a car with Kristine in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, and the two drove away. Sadecki recognized the officer, Jim Cox, because Cox had been over to his house a few times.
Sadecki was nine years old in 1976, in the third grade at Angell Elementary. On Christmas morning, he received a new bike. His mother made him promise he would not take the bike out when she was not at home. But on January 2, 1977, when his mom went to work, Chris Sadecki broke his promise, riding his bike up to the 7-Eleven to cruise around the parking lot.
The girl walked out of the store first. “She was carrying a brown paper bag that I think had a magazine and a candy bar in it and she got into the passenger side of a smallish blue and white car,” Sadeki said. “I tried to show off a little bit on my bike, do a little slide to impress her.
“Then I turned and that’s when I saw Officer Cox walk out of the store. As soon as he looked over at me, my heart stopped. I knew he knew my mom and that meant I was in big trouble.”5
When Sadeki’s mother later saw a puddle of melted snow underneath the bike and asked if he had been riding it, he said no. In days following, Kristine Mihelich’s photo was on the front page of every newspaper and on every television screen. Sadeki knew Kristine was the girl he saw, but having disobeyed his mom and lied about it, he was too afraid to tell her. He did call the Task Force tip line, twice. The first time he was told to have his parents phone in. The second time, he was told they were going to report him as a prank caller and a police officer would be sent to the house if he called again.
Two months later, when Tim King went missing, Task Force officers visited Angell Elementary and asked teachers to query children to see if they had experienced any attempted abductions or witnessed anything suspicious. Sadecki raised his hand and his teacher asked him to write it down. “I wrote down that I saw Officer Jim Cox leave 7-Eleven with Kristine Mihelich,” Sadecki said.
What followed was decades of torment for Chris Sadecki, he recalled, all at the hands of the Berkley police department.
After the handwritten report made its way through the Task Force, Berkley PD Det. Sgt. Ray Anger had Sadecki pulled out of his third-grade classroom. Anger told him he was lying, Sadeki said, and if he continued to lie, his mother would go to jail and he and his brothers would be sent to an orphanage. Two years later, in the fifth grade, Anger pulled him out of class again. Sadecki insisted he wasn’t lying. For over a year, Sadecki was so terrified he would often sleep underneath his bed.
In June of 1977, Sadecki said, a kid who looked just like him was struck by a Berkley police cruiser and has been in a wheelchair ever since. He believes this was meant to be him. Thereafter, with a terrifying consistency, whomever Chris Sadecki has told his story has ended up taking their own lives. As a sophomore at Anderson High School, Sadecki said, he told his friend, Robert Taylor, about what he had seen. Taylor called the Task Force and got a call back from Anger. Days later, on a Friday night, October 7, 1983, the 15-year-old Taylor climbed into a car with the engine running and the garage door shut tight.6
Two and a half years later, Sadecki told his friend Mike Reaume about Kristine and Officer Cox. In short order, Reaume was caught with pot at school. The reporting officer was Jim Cox. Sadecki heard through the grapevine Reaume had called the cop “a baby killer.” On Wednesday afternoon, May 21, 1986, Reaume also climbed into a car with the engine running in his garage at home. He was found dead at 4:20 p.m.7
The last person Chris Sadecki told was Scott Wheatley in 1994. He too, had a run-in with Cox and ended up taunting the officer, yelling at him: “You are the Oakland County Child Killer!” According to court records, Wheatley died from carbon monoxide poisoning on August 29, 1994, having “inhaled fumes from a running gas lawn mower.”8
Finally, in 1989, Sadecki told his mother. They got in an argument and he locked himself into the garage. Fearing for his safety, his mother called Ferndale police. Several officers showed up, among them Officer Cox. A scuffle ensued and Sadecki said to Cox: “I saw you take that little girl.” The next thing Sadecki knew he was strapped down on a gurney. He had been badly beaten—broken jaw, fractured vertebrae. It took him two years to fully recover, he said.
Janelle puts her arm around her husband. “A lot of times he thinks [the suicides] was his fault. But I tell him: I’m very proud of him for coming forward.”
In later years, Sadecki called Barry King and the FBI; he spoke directly with Birmingham Police Chief Don Studt, MSP Det. Sgt. Garry Gray, and Det. Ray Anger, all to no avail.
“Even if none of all the other stuff happened,” Chris Sadecki said thoughtfully. “If I’d never told anybody, I still believe that that’s what I saw. I know I was there and I know what I saw. And for all the people that say ‘he just has a vendetta against Cox,’ how does a nine year old have a vendetta against anybody?
“I don’t want it to be true. It would be so much easier if it wasn’t true.”
While Det. Cory Williams did not know Chris Sadecki, he has known Ray Anger ever since he was young. “It’s a very small town,” Williams said of Berkley, where he grew up and where his dad was a police officer. There’s a hint of disdain in his tone on the subject of Sadecki’s story, perhaps in response to online critics who presume to know the case better than he does.
Williams simply could not accept that Anger would work alongside a rogue child-killer cop and not know it, much less be complicit in the crimes himself. Williams also found it almost inconceivable that a police officer would abduct a child in broad daylight, in full uniform, from a convenience store filled with potential witnesses.
Nonetheless, the detective went back and reviewed Kristine’s original case file to look for any links to Sadecki’s story. He checked out Cox’s history: there were no tips called in on the officer, no red flags to raise any suspicions. The cashier at the 7-Eleven who identified Kristine did not mention the presence of any police officer in the store at the time. And two boys, ages eight and 12, said they saw Kristine with a brown paper bag in her hand walking near the Dairy Queen on Twelve Mile Road, across the street from Hartfield’s Bowling Alley— testimony that she was seen walking home from the 7-Eleven. Wade Cooper, the older of the two boys, was deemed a credible witness. He knew Kristine from the neighborhood and was able to describe what she was wearing. Again, no mention of a cop.
In an interview in 2013, Ray Anger minced no words when I asked him about Chris Sadecki. “He’s fucking nuts,” Anger said. “He’s as goofy as they come. I wouldn’t put two cents worth in anything he would tell you.”9 In March 2017, at age 76, Anger suffered a heart attack and died.
More troubling to Williams than Chris Sadecki’s account were the growing suspicions surrounding Berkley PD Officer Christopher Flynn. In part, this was personal: Williams had known Flynn most of his life.
In 1978, according to a medical examiner’s report, Flynn committed suicide in a church parking lot, using not one but two guns in an attempt to shoot himself in the heart.
On November 20, six days after Flynn died, Chris Busch’s body was found. Since Busch had apparently been dead for several days, the two questionable “suicides” occurring almost simultaneously was too close for comfort. Toss into the mix a report that, as a young boy, Flynn had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, an accusation of “inappropriate contact with a young boy”10 involving Flynn, and an already mistrustful online community was becoming very vocal about the Berkley PD. Many concluded the police were reluctant to look in their own back yard.
From his own vantage point, Det. Williams had good reason to give Flynn a pass. Williams’ father and Christopher Flynn had been partners in the early seventies. Flynn’s wife, Carol Jean Flynn, and Williams’ mo
ther, Lucy, worked in the same medical office at Beaumont Hospital. And the two families spent summer vacations together. In 1978, when Flynn died, Williams, 16 at the time, was told by his parents he had committed suicide because his wife and kids had left him and moved to West Virginia.
Lee Williams (left) and Chris Flynn (right) were partners in the Berkley PD detective bureau from 1971 to 1975 (courtesy Williams family).
The circumstances of Christopher Flynn’s death are as follows. On November 14, 1978, Flynn did not report to his midnight shift at the police station. By 12:40 a.m., he was found slumped against the steering wheel in his 1973 four-door Buick in the rear parking lot of La Salette Catholic Church in downtown Berkley. Two guns were found in the car. Flynn was still clutching a Colt .357 revolver in his right hand. The second gun, a Charter Arms .44, was found on the front passenger side of the car, lying upside down between the seat and the car door. He had been shot in the chest twice. One of the bullets, a “semi-jacketed bullet slug, believed to be a .357 cal.” was found in the back seat. The second bullet, “one lead bullet … believed to be .44 cal.” was recovered from Flynn’s body during autopsy. The .357 was Flynn’s gun and the .44 belonged to another Berkley police officer, James E. Krussell.11
At the time, detectives determined that Flynn shot himself in the chest twice, first with the .357 which “passed right through victim without hitting anything solid.” When that didn’t kill him, he used the .44, which passed through multiple organs, lodging in the muscles of the back. The autopsy determined the manner of death as “suicide,” and the cause of death as “shock and hemorrhage due to multiple gunshot wounds to chest. … Decedent has been despondent since divorce 2 years ago.” The medical examiner, Dr. Thomas J. Petinga, also noted that Flynn had become “very religious and attended church every morning.” He had no drugs or alcohol in his system.12
Indeed, Flynn, who was 41 when he died, had separated from his wife and family in 1976. In February 1977, Carol moved with their three daughters to West Virginia. The divorce became final in June 1977.
In a 2011 interview, Rick Eshman, head of public safety at the Berkley PD, told me he believed Flynn used two guns because he was “determined to go out in a blaze of glory.” Eshman took issue with “stirring up all this talk of Flynn being the killer” and “dragging his name through the mud.”13
Still, Cathy King Broad was not buying it. In February of 2014, she posted on her blog:
I have had two cops try to tell me Chris Flynn offed himself by using both guns at once, both pressed against the right side of his chest, one over the other. An ambidextrous, simultaneous gun firing. I realize people who are suicidal do things that don’t make sense, but this is truly odd. For my money, if I was trying to off myself, and was as good a shot as you would hope a cop is, I am going to shoot for the heart, or somewhere LEFT of midline. The under-the-chin method seems like a winner, too, if the person was serious about getting the job done. And then he lived long enough to toss the Krussell gun to the opposite side of the front seat area. He must have known he wouldn’t need a third shot.14
By October 2015, at the direct request of the King family, Det. Williams opened an investigation into his father’s former partner. Williams found two tips had been called in on Chris Flynn as an OCCK suspect. One tip, called in on April 11, 1977, says “See letter.” But no letter was attached. Notes on this tip sheet written on October 6, 1977, state that “Subject” Flynn was working during the times of the abductions and homicides. After Flynn’s death, OCCK Task Force Commander Lt. Robert Robertson typed notes on the back of this tip sheet saying: “Chris Flynn killed himself and he had been reported as a suspect apparently numerous times. Joe Krease (MSP) advised that he [asked] Intelligence to check him out but Intelligence has no record of this. The guys here that know him personally do not think he is involved. This tip is being closed. 12-14-78. RHR”15
The second tip, called in on 5-17-1979, was from a woman with a question about Flynn’s suicide. The tip sheet shows this was “merely” an inquiry about his suicide: “Det. Waldron notes say, ‘Flynn cleared before on many tips. #9577tk and Mihelich tip.”16
Born in Troy, New York, in 1939, Flynn and his brother were relinquished by their parents to a Catholic-run orphanage when Chris Flynn was about seven years old. While there, Flynn was sexually abused by priests. He was able to flee the orphanage at age 16 and joined the U.S. Marine Corps; the story he told was that he successfully lied about his age to get in. Of the many events that contributed to his mental anguish, in 1956, Flynn witnessed the brutal drowning deaths of six U.S. Marine Corps who had been ordered to march as punishment, in the black of night, into Ribbon Creek, a swampy tidal stream.
In Williams’ interviews with Flynn’s family, his 79-year-old ex-wife described Chris as being “mentally ill, paranoid schizophrenic that was getting worse over the years.”17 One of Flynn’s daughters told Williams her dad struggled mightily with alcoholism for years, and that he physically abused her mother. In February of 1977, the night before Carol Flynn and the girls left town, there was a terrible fight and she and her sisters ran across the street and hid in a basement. By morning, they had fled. Chris Flynn visited his daughters in West Virginia in September of 1978. He was so thin he appeared “anorexic.” He was distraught, “acting strange” and talked about wanting to become “a monk.”18
Williams also interviewed his own family. His mother, Lucy Williams, said that days before he took his life, the detective showed up at the house carrying a Bible, and said he was seeing a priest for counseling.
Flynn was also having affairs with other women during his separation; one was a police dispatcher and the other was a Farmington Hills police officer. One of his former lovers said of his deteriorating mental state: “he would stare off into the distance, sometimes mumbling and appearing incoherent.” He said he was convinced “the devil was after him.”19
Flynn was also stalking the wife of his former partner, James Krussell, whose gun he used to kill himself. (James Krussell died in 1982; he suffered a heart attack while chasing a suspect.) Krussell’s widow, Sue, told Williams that Flynn had borrowed her husband’s gun to use at the range because he was involved in competition police shooting.
Sue recalled that one day Flynn came to her house, sat down in the living room and told her he was in love with her. Sue raised her hand and said, “Stop, Chris, I don’t want to hear it,” and asked him to leave.20
After she spurned Flynn’s advances, he became obsessed. He threatened to kill her husband and once followed the couple all the way to their cottage in northern Michigan.
The tipping point for Flynn came when, after failing a written test, he was demoted from the detective bureau back to patrol duty. For a man who “loved being a detective and would brag that he was the best detective in Oakland County,” being reassigned to uniform was devastating.
In sum, Williams conceded the way Flynn took his life was “unusual,” but he found no evidence to connect him to the OCCK case.
Williams also could find no connection between the OCCK case and the unsolved murder of Birmingham art dealer John McKinney. In September 1977, McKinney, 50, was found shot in the head in his art gallery on Haynes Street. Two unsolved murders in idyllic Birmingham, occurring less than six months apart and retaining their cold case status for decades was, for many, beyond coincidence. So much so that one book on the case, Portraits in the Snow: The Oakland County Child Killings…Scandals and Small Conspiracies (2011), by M.F. Cribari, concluded that McKinney was the killer.
Police determined that McKinney had shared a glass of wine with his murderer prior to his death. He was pistol whipped, allowed to wash up and then killed with a .22 cal. weapon.
His wife, Yvonne, said she had no idea who would want her husband dead. He had two children: John, 19, and Leigh, 18.
Williams found that McKinney led a multi-faceted and somewhat strange life. T
he respected art dealer, who specialized in contemporary art, picture framing, and restoration, moonlighted as a chaplain, volunteering at the Bloomfield Hills Nursing Center, dressed in a black suit and clerical collar, Bible in hand. Records say he was ordained by the Christian Temple Association, Inc., a local non-denominational religious and philanthropic organization in Pontiac.
A Royal Oak Tribune article in November 1977 described three sides of McKinney’s personality: the minister and chaplain who cared for the elderly, and the art dealer well known in elite collector circles.
“But it’s the third aspect of McKinney’s lifestyle which baffles police,” the article read. “A counselor, Mr. McKinney’s work often took him to areas of Detroit where he met with what some investigators call ‘troubled individuals.’”21
At the time of McKinney’s death, a Birmingham police lieutenant told The Eccentric newspaper that the OCCK Task Force was notified of the murder, but cautioned the reason was “as a matter of routine because it was a suspicious death of a white male in the area the task force is concerned with.”22
The only lead police had to go on was that McKinney had been seen at dinner with a mystery woman at the Landmark Restaurant in Troy hours before he was killed. Police put out a sketch of the woman but she was never identified.
Cathy King Broad was alarmed when she discovered that Patrick Coffey—uncle to polygrapher Pat Coffey who raised his family across the street from the Kings—was an art dealer and business partner with John McKinney. As such, McKinney was a frequent dinner guest at the Coffeys, and since Tim was at the Coffey house all the time, it was not a stretch for Cathy to think: “Even if Tim didn’t know McKinney’s name, he would have recognized him on the street. McKinney could have said hey, I’m headed to the Coffeys’ house; I’ll give you a ride home.”
The Snow Killings Page 38