During his eventual incarceration in Michigan on the sexual misconduct charges, Gregory Greene took multiple career development classes, as well as courses in radiology, management, advanced first aid, and personal and family survival, receiving certificates of achievement for each. He is quoted in his offender file as enjoying baseball, swimming, leatherwork, and reading the Bible.
He told an investigator, “For a long time I have been lost. My thinking has been screwed up. I am an intelligent person. I’ve accepted Christ and that has given me a whole new outlook on life.”
He died of an apparent heart attack shortly thereafter.
TRIP WIRES
The Boy Scouts of America has faced thousands of victims coming forward in sexual battery cases against its organization, detailing horrific molestations inflicted upon them in the years of their youth by troop leaders and publicly calling for mass indictment of the organization’s officers. Prior to these allegations surfacing, the Boy Scouts, as America’s largest youth program, with over four million members, was perceived to be organized and run with the highest moral direction. Behind Boy Scout conference room doors, it appears, secreted files on known molesters within the organization’s ranks, spanning almost every state in the country, were given lip service for decades: insincerely discussed by higher-ups, then set aside.
Like most of our great institutions, the Boy Scouts of America has benefited from old-money philanthropic support toward its operating expenses and acquisition of land. Its Rifle River Scout Canoe Base, located 170 miles north of Detroit along I-75, purchased its surrounding acreage from the Consumers Power Company in 1967 for pennies on the dollar. At the time, Consumers Power was the largest energy conglomerate in the United States; as such, its board members enjoyed the luxury of a monopoly and were politically entrenched in Michigan politics.
The energy elite in Detroit, along with the heads of the Big Three automakers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—also enjoyed the endorsements of a secretive “boys’ club” headquartered nondescriptly, like the Schvitz. Named the Yondotega and hidden behind unkempt concrete walls deep in the city proper, the club served as a gathering place for the international elite who dined and gamed within its sanctity. I find online that membership of the Yondotega goes back nearly a century and is limited to 150 persons total, seats being vacated only after previous members have died.
Princes and emperors, ambassadors and dukes, and captains of industry all celebrated toasts, dined on imported cuisine, and bested one another at dominoes while the city outside them slowly ravaged itself. The Rockefellers, Lindberghs, Fords, Dodges, Trumans, Hoovers, and Roosevelts all dined at the Yondotega alongside visiting aristocracy, as did a man named Russell Alger, a lumber tycoon whose wealth allowed him a seat as governor of Michigan in 1884, as well as a later appointment by President McKinley as secretary of war in 1892, and then a U.S. Senate seat in 1902.
Russell Alger’s son, Frederick Alger, was appointed by President Eisenhower as ambassador to Belgium in the 1950s. Frederick Alger, enjoying the political fruits of the dynasty he had been born into, also bore the dubious distinction of becoming great-uncle to Frank Shelden of Fox Island infamy, in line for his own seat at the Yondotega when enough of its previous members had died.
The Consumers Power Company, spearheaded by W. A. Foote in 1910, had spawned its own, equally aristocratic legions. Its sons were among the most powerful in Michigan, mingling with the fraternity of the Yondotega. In the 1970s, Frank Shelden’s contemporaries at the Consumers Power Company began development of a nuclear energy plant in Midland, nestled in the Flint Tri-Cities region where Christopher Busch would later be discovered to have been running boys for the elite.
SOME MEN ARE just born into money and power. Occasionally, however, a boy comes from nothing, builds himself from the ground up, crafts the universe to his will, and, against all odds, infiltrates the inner circles normally reserved by nepotism. Sometimes the money and power turn him. But other times his morality and work ethic forever betray him as an outsider, regardless of wealth.
Ed Cole, the former head of General Motors, was somebody who had come from nothing and gained the world. His access to the inner circle was suspect, likely even to himself. But even the best of us get used to things going our way, until they don’t. In May of 1977, Ed Cole’s small plane went down in the north of the state, near Mendon, Michigan. A skilled pilot, like Shelden, Ed Cole presumably made an error in the light fog, common to Michigan, and was killed.
Cole’s photo in the Birmingham newspaper article, tacked to my wall, appears immediately to the left of Timothy King’s, with John McKinney on the other side. Shortly after Cole’s death, the Rifle River Scout Canoe Base was renamed the Edward N. Cole Canoe Base, in recognition of Cole’s long dedication to the Boy Scouts of America.
I’m in my hotel room piecing this together, sensing there’s a link between Ed Cole and, at the very least, an insidious vein within Michigan society circles. I can’t sleep because of the suspicion but also because the deeper I get into the case, the more I think about my own family and what we didn’t have and what we did, how we survived and how we didn’t.
I call my brother from my cell phone, sitting on the hotel bed with my back to the wall and my eyes closed. He’d gone to Iraq a few years ago as a combat engineer, searching in the dead of night for desert-colored trip wires rigged to explosives. I’d kept tabs on him through his blog, updated between mission sets. There were stories of improvised bombs implanted amid the carcasses of pigs, rabid dogs shot in the head at point-blank range, mortars that rained down in the night. There were photos of my brother in wraparound shooting glasses and desert camo and with his rifle, the serial number of which he would later get tattooed on his upper arm.
Sometimes my brother slept through the bombings of their compound, people dying a few hundred yards away while he snuck in a nap, most of them just kids he’d never gotten to know the names of, although he’d passed them between errands on the operating base.
I’d emailed my brother once, after hearing that another boy had been killed.
“What did he look like?” I’d asked.
A week later my brother responded: “Like me. Only younger.”
FOLLOW THE BLOOD
I’m driving around Cathy Broad’s old neighborhood in Birmingham, holding my Flip cam out the window, when I stop in front of her and Timothy’s old house. It’s modest in comparison to the many larger homes on her block. Cathy’s father, Barry King, still lives here, in the home where he suffered after the loss of his son.
Barry King is suing the Michigan State Police because he believes they’ve been lying to him about who killed Timothy. Thirty-odd years of being derailed and danced around has led him to the idea of a cover-up. He was a successful lawyer himself, so he knows which questions to ask of whom, and how exactly to ask them, but the Michigan State Police have not been forthcoming.
For decades, Barry King gave the Michigan State Police the benefit of the doubt, but reality eventually sank in. A lot of evidence, too much of it to ignore, has been concealed from the families of the victims. This doesn’t prove that the MSP knows who was responsible for the OCCK murders, but it does mean that an old man might die without knowing how close investigators have come to finding out—and they’re damned close right now, if not sitting on top of it with their hands over their ears.
I want to knock on King’s door and talk to him. Cathy has phoned ahead, telling her father to expect me in the coming days, but I’m distracted. My sister lives nearby and I haven’t seen her since I’ve been back. I sit in my SUV for a while, idling. Since I don’t have an appointment set up with Barry yet, I turn the SUV around in the King family driveway, then travel the two miles to my sister’s home.
MY SISTER AND I lost touch completely for a few years. In my thirties I would try to call, but her voice mail would be full. She’d get back to me a few weeks later, at three a.m., when my phone was turned off, and leave long messages I
’d wake up to in the morning. I’d try to call her back and get her voice mail again. I always imagined her exactly as she’d been as a teenager and into her twenties: long, dark hair relaxing nonchalantly down her shoulders, the high cheekbones never calling for accentuation, eyes like a poor man’s nightmare.
I saw her at my uncle’s funeral and she looked weakened, having lost weight from her normal 135 pounds. She wore large sunglasses that she hid behind. She wobbled once, that I saw, during the funeral services, fatigued by grief, although certainly not entirely grief over my uncle’s passing. My sister, like myself, carried a heaviness inside that sometimes had little to do with circumstance.
When I stop by her house after videotaping the King residence, I have to wait in the street to get up my courage. I’m thinking about the only photograph I have of my sister that seems truly happy. She’s seventeen, in her boyfriend’s red and white varsity jacket, and she’s posing with our dad at a carnival in the fall. She’s wearing our dad’s cowboy hat set atop her head: briefly, only for the photo. There’s a huge smile on her face and a flicker of joy in her eyes. Her body seems to be arcing backward slightly—toward our father, just a step behind her; toward a wished-for affection.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER that photo was taken, just before my uncle’s funeral, my sister and I are in New Orleans together for a wedding. We’re having drinks at a street-side bar. My sister’s eyes, polished-looking and dilated, are drifting across Bourbon Street. They remind me of my mother’s eyes in those early days, just after my dad left, when we were always broke, always on the verge of running out of gas. We would go to the filling station up the road from our house, at Eleven and Evergreen, and my mom would send me inside with a wrinkled baggie of quarters while she pumped the fuel into our car, too embarrassed to chunk down the week’s worth of change herself. I’d stand at the fan belt–covered counter inside, wait with my hands in my pockets while the attendant waded through my clumsily spilled coins, the nine or ten dollars that would fill our tank. When I glanced back at the car I could see my mom’s Paul Mitchell–sprayed hairdo frizzing in the humidity. The sound of traffic would be muffled, an occasional unorchestrated popping of it with a lift of wind through the shop door. My mom would be blankly staring toward the street, a domesticated version of the thousand-yard stare as she surveyed her outer world without moving an eye so much, as if the world itself, the way a soldier sees it, the way my brother saw it, the way my sister saw it on Bourbon Street, were a memory of violence.
MY SISTER STANDS in her doorway, waiting for me to get out of my car, her long hair concealed beneath a baseball cap. When I meet her on the porch of this $500,000 home, I hug her and wonder if she shuts herself in every day, shades drawn against the light. The truth is that I just don’t know very much about my sister’s life anymore, which saddens me, and the sadness paints the way I see her with a grim, grey-colored brush. I want that to stop, like so many other things I want stopped in my life. I want to remember my sister as the girl again, whom I protected from lascivious solicitors when I was only thirteen and she was seventeen, laughing at my rebukes of people she saw to be relatively innocent passersby. Construction workers whistled; men at the mall threw gazes her way while walking with their wives. I flipped them all the bird and was always ready to fight if it came to that—which it never did—all 105 pounds of me at that time twitching with hostility but relatively inept.
About twenty minutes after showing up at her house, my sister and I go to an AA meeting together in a neglected retail space—the same AA meeting my father will later belittle us for attending. Not everybody goes to these meetings for the same reasons. We have our own reasons, my sister and I, and they have nothing to do with alcohol. My sister cries during the meeting. My own eyes water up. Both of us might be meant for this room, even if not entirely bonded by the same disease as the others.
We’ve been sitting in metal card chairs around a banquet table. My sister’s purse is on the ground, and when we stand up to leave, she briefly stumbles over it. She holds on to the table the way you hold on to the railing of a boat when it’s going over a wave, and I remember her at the funeral and think: Grief again, but I don’t know why.
I don’t know how I got this way, why this is my world instead of other, more bountiful ones, but when I see my sister I know that I am not alone. I wonder if I could die in this house I’ve built around my suffering, waiting for my sister to come home to me so we can soften the pain together.
There’s a big part of me that realizes, I guess, that if my hunt through this case isn’t only about the crimes—if this story is also about me—I’ll still have to follow the blood.
PSYCHIC
I’m sitting at the Stillwater Grill in Okemos, interviewing Erica and her father again, when they tell me about their experience with the television psychic John Edward. In October of 2009, Tom Ascroft, Erica, and Tom’s niece went to Cobo Hall in Detroit, where three hundred people had crowded inside a ballroom to see John Edward in action as he affirmed their links to the dead and the longed-for.
“The Edward routine goes like this,” Erica tells me, tapping out an ellipsis with her forefinger before continuing. “Guests fill up the chairs surrounding him, and then John Edward walks around and gets hits on people related to his psychic impressions of them. Or he gets no hit on you, depending. If he does get a hit, he tells you what it’s about.”
She continues, “He comes up and he tells us—and the whole place is looking, you know—and he says, ‘This is really weird, but who had the pet monkey?’ ”
Erica’s father interrupts her story, laughing, his eyes widening when he says to me, “So my niece stands up and she says, ‘Oh my God, my grandmother had a monkey when I was in Pennsylvania.’ ”
They’re all very impressed by this, but at the end of the day it’s just a monkey until John Edward says, “Hold on.” And then he points to Erica and her father and says, “Would you please get up and separate from the group?”
So they stand up and they move to some empty seats, Erica says. They’re isolated and it feels awkward.
John Edward says, “There is so much going on around you.” And then he adds, “One of you has lost a contemporary.” John Edward clarifies that, by contemporary, he means someone of not just proximity in age but of the same bloodline.
Erica says to him, “I did.”
And then John Edward says, “There was a crime committed. There’s something about bite marks. There’s a suitcase with film. There’s videotapes and pictures in it. And there’s something about bloody ropes.”
I’m impressed but also skeptical. It’s possible that John Edward has a team of researchers, that the producers preinterview the guests, that the information is just out there and that maybe he uses an email address, or a name on the credit card used to buy tickets, or anything else to find out information beforehand.
And so I ask Erica, “Could he have read about all of this somewhere?”
Erica and her father look at me. Both of them laugh. “Nobody knew about any of this,” she tells me, “until he said it at Cobo.”
“But you knew it,” I suggest. “We’ve talked about all of this. Maybe he has a team working for him.”
“We didn’t know it,” Erica says. “That’s the whole fucking point. But every one of the things he said turned out to be true.”
What she’s telling me is that John Edward, the psychic, knew about Christopher Busch before anybody outside of the police had associated him with the OCCK murders.
“We’re still looking for the bite marks,” Erica’s father says. “But the suitcase and all that shit, nobody outside of the PD knew this until we went to that show, and then we started looking into it more.”
Erica looks at her father first, then at me, and says, “And he specifically said to us, after describing it all, ‘You’re going to be opening Pandora’s box very soon. Whatever this crime was, you’re closing in on resolution.’ ”
ERICA AND KRIST
INE’S mother, Debbie Jarvis (formerly Mihelich and Ascroft), had been hands-off for decades, unable to talk about her oldest daughter’s murder, and had been in spotty communication with Erica around 2009. The day after the John Edward experience, however, Erica’s mother called her out of the blue, not knowing about their psychic consultation, as Debbie and Tom had been divorced for years. She asked Erica to accompany her to see a Detective Garry Gray, one of the original task force members in 1977, who’d also eventually traveled with Cory Williams to Atlanta.
She’d felt something inside, a voice, telling her to become involved in the case once again. She didn’t know why, but she’d decided to listen.
Later that week, Erica and her mother visited Detective Gray. It was the first time in Erica’s life that she’d spoken with anybody in an official capacity about the case. She was five when Kristine was murdered and nobody from the PD, or even local cops, had ever interviewed her. The press had never bothered her, either.
When they sat down in Detective Gray’s office, she saw, set to the side on his table, a three-ring case binder with three names highlighted on the cover of it: Christopher Busch, Vince Gunnels, and Gregory Greene.
Names that neither Erica nor anyone outside of the police had heard of in relationship to the OCCK case, until this point in 2009, over thirty years later.
When Erica asked Detective Gray about the binder, he paid her lip service by flipping through it, mentioning the three names as persons of interest but allowing only a cursory examination of the paperwork inside. When Gray came to a photograph of the Christopher Busch suicide scene, he attempted to cover it from view with his hand but Erica grabbed the binder from him and turned it toward herself.
The Kill Jar Page 10