Wayno was five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds, and had brown hair and brown eyes. The newspaper photos showed him to resemble both Stebbins and Timothy King. When he disappeared, Mark Wayno was wearing blue corduroy slacks, a blue pullover sweater, and a blue knit hat with matching knit gloves.
His father was so certain that Mark Wayno was dead that he publicly called for vengeance on the killer.
But two days later the Wayno boy was found alive. He claimed he’d run away and had spent two nights sleeping inside a shopping mall. He was hungry but unharmed. When found, he’d been riding a bicycle along I-75. Mark Wayno returned to his father, where they lived in their house directly across the street from the Stebbins home.
People disappear all the time. Occasionally they come back in one piece, sometimes in a few. When you set out to prosecute, you start to gather facts, but survivors, especially children, are not often forthcoming.
The most common thing an abductor says to his victim is: “If you tell on me, I will kill your family.” Very few children tell after hearing this. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and by far the most effective.
We do not know, after all, where Mark Wayno really was during those two days he was absent from the same block as Mark Stebbins, their homes within spitting distance.
FUCK
H. Lee Busch and his wife were described by many as being cold to their four children, occasionally pawning them off on European boarding schools such as the Le Rosey institute in Switzerland. Three of their four children predeceased the parents, one from an overdose, one from rumored complications with AIDS, and Christopher Busch from the gunshot wound.
H. Lee reportedly had an intolerance for his boys that may have stemmed from his own transgressions and subsequent self-loathing. Barry King, Timothy’s dad, told me that he had heard rumors that Bobby Moore, Theodore Lamborgine’s roommate, had procured young boys for H. Lee. These accusations, if true, would provide a much greater understanding of how H. Lee and Mrs. Busch could morally adapt to the consequences of using their political influence to repeatedly spring their son from trouble instead of attempting to get him help.
They had posted bond for Christopher several times on a number of molestation arrests over the years and were known to have paid off children and their families related to horrifying incidents that, because of their cash flow, had been quieted.
One of the victims, who would later become a sidekick to Busch and Greene, stated that Mrs. Busch once showed up in his squat neighborhood in a darkened limousine, requesting his silence and offering an envelope full of money.
The Busch family had an understanding of how to present a proper image, do whatever was necessary to mask indignities, and move forward. The children gained an understanding that money could buy them not only their own freedom but, in Christopher Busch’s case, the silence of anyone he chose to zero in on.
His exploits peaked during periods when H. Lee and Mrs. Busch were in Europe, which were frequent due to H. Lee’s position with General Motors. When the folks were gone, Chris Busch had full rein of his childhood home, the cars, and the cabin in Ess Lake four hours north, a straight shot east of the Fox Islands.
BUSCH BONDED OUT of the sexual misconduct charges on March 4, 1977. Timothy King was abducted twelve days later, on March 16, and it would be six days before his body was found. Three days into King’s captivity, an anonymous caller placed Christopher Busch at the cottage in Ess Lake with two young boys. This would seem to align with the 2008 witness recounting his time with Busch and the boy whom he’d thought to be King, how they had first been at the cottage together.
The caller, a middle-aged woman, spoke with a local Montmorency County sheriff’s department employee on March 19.
The caller was specific about wanting to speak with a Detective Junior Brandenburg, who had originally arrested Busch on the sexual misconduct charges and had previously searched the cottage to find two shotguns, three-quarters of a pound of marijuana, and the two now-missing suitcases that had contained both the child pornography and rope-style ligatures.
The sheriff’s department employee indicated that Brandenburg was out and that a message could be taken. The caller replied, “No. By then it will be too late.” The caller was then heard speaking with someone in the background, who advised her against divulging more information. The caller, without giving greater detail, begged the employee to send somebody out to the Busch family cottage.
The employee stated in a report that the female caller seemed sober and serious but refused to divulge more information, so there was no rush put on the call. Timothy King’s body was found three days later, on March 22. Nobody had been sent to the cottage, and the incident report of the call was not passed to Brandenburg until March 24, two days after Timothy’s murder.
TWO MONTHS PRIOR to this, during the sexual misconduct interrogations in January, Gregory Greene—not having the benefit of political connections or powerful attorneys—gave up Christopher Busch as the killer of Mark Stebbins, victim #1.
That same day, in another office, Christopher Busch was being questioned by Michigan State Police detectives for the second time. Greene’s betrayal had been relayed. When asked about it, Busch denied involvement in the Stebbins murder but told detectives that he and Greene had often discussed fantasies of kidnapping a boy, tying him up, and sexually abusing him.
Busch stated that, in the fantasy, either he or Greene would work their regular job at night and the other would work during the day, so that somebody would always be with the boy. When detectives asked what Busch and Greene had imagined they would do with the boy when they were done with him, Busch didn’t answer.
While Busch was talking to investigators about being a pedophile, noting the usual areas he seduced boys away from, luring them into his vehicle, he named the first three OCCK abduction sites, their exact locations in the blue-collar suburbs at 9 Mile and Woodward in Ferndale, 13 Mile and Woodward in Royal Oak, and the 7-Eleven store on 12 Mile in Berkley. Even with this information, Busch was bonded out on the sexual misconduct charges and no further OCCK link was sought after the polygraph he’d reportedly passed.
Greene had reportedly passed one as well. Presumably his own polygraph would have included the statements he’d made about Busch and Mark Stebbins. Until 2010, news media and the public remained completely unaware of Christopher Busch’s existence as a suspect, and yet he had implicated himself by claiming the exact OCCK abduction locations as his prowling grounds, had multiple pending molestation charges, had been in possession of binding ligatures and child pornography, had confessed to having fantasies of abducting children, and had been given up by his accomplice for the murder of victim #1.
If not for H. Lee’s prestige in the General Motors family, it’s likely that Christopher Busch would have downgraded his living quarters to the inside of a prison cell. At the very least, news media and the families of the victims would have been informed of the mounting incriminating evidence against him, with further investigation pressed on the PD.
But none of that happened. The ligatures and child pornography were either negligently lost or intentionally destroyed within custody, Christopher Busch’s statements were buried, and his accomplice was put away for life, silenced behind concrete and bars.
WHITED OUT
The Busch family home in Bloomfield, thirty minutes from where I grew up, was massive and tidy at the corners. At the time of Christopher Busch’s reported suicide, his parents were in England, visiting an older brother, David, with whom they’d had a falling-out over his homosexuality. Christopher Busch’s penalty of probation and a $1,000 fine had recently been handed down on the sexual misconduct charges, and he’d been staying at the family residence by himself.
The Busches’ regular cleaning lady arrived and tried to gain entry to the house but couldn’t. She had no house key, and Christopher wasn’t answering the door. She called Christopher’s older brother, Charles, to let her in. In their conversation
, she told Charles that something didn’t feel quite right. For some reason, according to the police narratives I’ve been studying for months, Charles then called the police instead of simply driving over to check on the house himself.
As we know, Christopher Busch was found lying in bed next to the rifle that had presumably killed him. Across the room from him, a painting on the wall had multiple bullet holes through it. A newspaper was found open to the movie section, as if Busch had been making plans for the night.
His attorney at the time, a powerhouse named Jane Burgess, would later be quoted as saying to the police upon Busch’s death, in reference to the OCCK case, “You don’t have to worry about it anymore.” While not explicitly stating that Christopher Busch had been guilty of the OCCK murders, she’d clearly insinuated that his parting might rightly prompt an end to further investigation.
Prior to that, while defending Busch, Burgess was paid extensively and flown around the state on private planes to post Busch’s bonds and meet court appointments for him. In 2007, Jane Burgess’s husband—she had died by then—stated that they’d received quite a bit of money from Busch’s father, who “was more concerned with the family being humiliated publicly . . . than [with] trying to help [Busch] with his problem.”
The same police report that quotes Burgess’s husband also indicates that three new police examiners had been brought in in 2007 to review the original Busch and Greene polygraphs, administered by Ralph Cabot in 1977, for flaws in the interpretation of the tests’ results. The confidential police statement about those polygraphs, after their 2007 audit, reads:
After a lengthy review of Busch and Greene’s polygraph charts, they scored these charts and collectively came to the same conclusion, that . . .
The rest of the page is whited out, the consensus hidden from public consumption.
GETTING OUT
I learn that Vincent Gunnels, whose name I first heard in connection to the hair found on Kristine, is also the boy whom Christopher Busch’s mother approached in her limousine in Flint, offering cash for his silence, presumably about her son molesting him. My file on Gunnels is splayed across the table at a Starbucks at midday, and I wonder about the possibility that Busch’s mother had been attempting to silence Gunnels about more than the molestation—that, in addition to being a victim, he’d been used as a lure in the OCCK abductions, and that she’d known or suspected as much.
Given the picture that we have of the Busch family, it’s easy to see the mother figure in her limousine, luxuriously detached from the horrific realities of her son’s behavior. She would have seemed an iconic, impenetrable symbol of power to the young Gunnels, who was only fifteen at the time.
In 2009, Gunnels’s ex-cellmate gave testimony to four months of conversations they’d had while incarcerated together. Gunnels, he said, had confided about having been “molested by a guy that killed multiple people,” adding, “The victims were kids.” Gunnels was out on parole during that testimony, living in Butte, Montana, at a homeless shelter. Of interest is that Gunnels’s DNA was taken while he was still in prison, but the sample was backlogged at Quantico, the FBI analysis lab. Gunnels had been paroled and allowed to leave the state by the time a match had been made to the hair on Kristine.
After testimony from his ex-cellmate, representatives from local, state, and FBI offices traveled from Michigan to Montana, where they interviewed Gunnels at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office. They explained to him that his DNA matched the hair they’d found. They showed him a picture of Kristine and studied his reaction. He closed his eyes and refused to look at the photograph.
He was polite, did not deny or confirm any charges that were suggested, and requested a lawyer. Officers agreed to provide him with an attorney but in the meantime assured him that they were aware of his young age at the time of the murders. They suggested to Gunnels that, by maintaining his silence about anything he might know, Busch and Greene were continuing to victimize him years after their deaths.
Gunnels made a phone call from the jail to his sister. The call was recorded and transcribed. At some point his sister repeated back to Gunnels, “Your DNA was on one of the victims.” He responded by saying, “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
Gunnels ended up back in Michigan, imprisoned for a while on parole violations. He was freed in February of 2011 with no OCCK charges pending against him.
In 2012, information about Gunnels was finally leaked to the press. In addition to local reporters, two family members of the victims reached out to Gunnels for further questioning about the murders. He remained silent, like a lot of us fighting to get rid of a past: We simply won’t talk about it.
“I’m out,” we say. “I’m getting the fuck out.”
And it’s the only thing we can do to move forward.
FATHER FIGURE
The sexual misconduct charges that Christopher Busch and the two other men had faced stemmed from the systematic sexual exploitation of an estimated thirty boys, aged ten to fourteen, in multiple areas along the multilane, massive I-75 freeway toward the Fox Islands.
One of those areas, Flint, Michigan, became infamous in 1989 after the documentary film director Michael Moore chronicled its collapsing economy in his movie Roger & Me, about the auto industry abandoning that city and leaving behind ghost villages. Homes in Flint had been vacated by the block. Manufacturing facilities that had cost millions to build had been gutted for scrap; they rotted like quarter-mile-long whale carcasses beached along the city’s concrete edges. The city’s infamy spiked again in 2015 after the discovery that its residents had been subjected to more than a year and a half of untreated lead exposure from a fractured water system.
Gregory Greene, arrested alongside Busch, was a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Flint, already on probation for criminal sexual conduct in California a year earlier. He had been charged in Huntington Beach with sodomy of children, granted a suspended sentence, and allowed to leave the state to finish out his probation.
In Michigan, Greene reported regularly to his probation officer, maintained employment, and participated in mental health treatment. He also regularly engaged in oral and anal penetration of a preteen boy he coached on a baseball team.
In sentencing documents, Greene stated that the routine molestations of the twelve-year-old ballplayer were more for companionship than sex. “I was like a father figure to him,” he stated. “He was someone I could get close to, to tell about my problems.” The victim, for his part, stated that he never told anyone about Greene because Greene bragged that, in California, he had once choked, presumably to death, a boy who’d been planning on turning Greene in.
Before serving prison time on the sexual misconduct charges, Greene had worked as a night janitor at a Kmart. He was obsessive-compulsive, had an above-average intelligence, and claimed a fear of women due to experiences with his mother in childhood. Court documents assess his molestations to have been mechanical and ritualistic.
Gregory Greene’s inmate identification photo and multiple mug shots betray a very solid likeness to the now-famous composite sketch that circulated Detroit during the thirteen months spanning the OCCK murders. The composite had a photo of a suspect, his description, and a likeness of that blue Gremlin he’d been seen standing beside on the night of Timothy King’s abduction.
Greene’s 1974 arrest in California stemmed from forty to fifty charges of child molestation, false imprisonment, and attempted murder. During his California intake interviews, Greene named fifteen young male victims whom he’d sodomized, adding that he had probably molested them over two hundred times in total. His victims ranged in age from six to fourteen.
Greene told police that he’d worked with a pedophile friend who ran a local baseball league, allowing Greene to coach in exchange for Greene bringing him young boys to molest. The California arrest came after Greene had driven a twelve-year-old boy to a wooded area skirting Los Angeles under the guise of Greene needing to momentarily retrieve a bi
cycle he’d left behind on a different occasion. In the woods, Greene attempted to molest the boy, who then became uncooperative. Greene got carried away. Out of frustration he struck the boy in the neck. The boy struggled further. Greene stated that he then held a hand over the boy’s mouth until “he was quiet.”
The boy stopped moving and Greene wasn’t sure whether the boy was unconscious or dead. He pushed a lit cigarette into the boy’s belly three times to see if the boy would wake up. He didn’t. Greene then dragged the boy through the woods and threw him facedown into his car. He drove around Los Angeles, listening to his radio and trying to figure out what to do with the boy. Eventually, Greene dumped the boy outside of a hospital and drove away.
The boy survived, but the method of operation here fit the OCCK murders in regard to the age of the victim, method of suffocation, and the subsequent dumping of the body where it could be easily found.
Even after confessing in a manner that would implicate himself in habitual molestation, attempted murder, and a variety of other charges, Greene avoided serious prison time and was instead sent to a psychiatric hospital in Patton, California, where he stayed for less than a year. He was released into his own custody and in the summer of 1975 traveled to Michigan, where he somehow connected with Busch six months prior to the first OCCK murder.
After Busch was found dead and Greene was sentenced to a life term for the Flint molestations, the OCCK Task Force shut down. No more related murders occurred. Greene died while institutionalized.
GREGORY GREENE, ORIGINALLY from Flint, appeared to have come from a home in which his immediate needs were met. He attended a parochial school, St. Agnes High. Although his mother died during his junior year, he graduated on time. He continued to live with his father, a senior employee at one of the many Flint auto plants that eventually closed. According to Greene, his father and mother had loved him and given him a moral understanding of right and wrong. His brother, however, also had a “sex problem,” Greene had said in police interviews.
The Kill Jar Page 9