Against Gray’s will, Erica and her mother looked at the photograph, which depicted a body laid out in a bed, presumably Christopher Busch’s. His head was covered by a sheet, which was covering the reported gunshot wound as well. That the photograph would be taken after covering the wound seemed counterintuitive to me.
And they flipped through other photographs as well, she tells me, absorbing a new world of information, an opening into the case.
Tacked above Christopher Busch’s bedroom dresser: a pencil sketch of what looked to be victim #1, Mark Stebbins.
On the closet floor: the suitcases.
On the bedroom floor: the set of bloody ligatures.
When Erica asked Detective Gray about the ligatures, he said, “That’s where it gets a little tricky.”
He told her that the ligatures found in Busch’s Bloomfield home, similar to the ligatures found at the family cabin in Ess Lake, had been “lost.”
If Christopher Busch killed himself, he did so after setting out evidence that would link him to the crimes—the ropes, the suitcase, possibly the drawing of Mark Stebbins.
Erica sat back in her chair, realizing that John Edward had been right: the ligatures, the suitcase of pornography—evidence on the books for decades, and nobody had told the families of the victims.
THERE ARE TWO different narrative reports of the Christopher Busch suicide, one of them saying that a .22-caliber rifle was “by [Busch’s] side” and the other saying that the rifle was “pointing at his head” when it was found. Either way, we know there was a .22 rifle present. Both reports conclude that Busch shot himself with this rifle, and yet five different cotton swabs of Christopher Busch’s hands showed no gunshot residue.
H. Lee Busch, upon being notified of his son’s demise, returned from Europe. For some reason he was allowed to keep the .22-caliber rifle, the reported instrument of death, in his possession for over a month. The police had him sign a handwritten promissory note saying that he would return the weapon as evidence when convenience allowed.
Just days after Christopher Busch’s death, the OCCK Task Force, comprising hundreds of investigators in multiple jurisdictions, disbanded for reasons that were cited as financial. They claimed they’d been drained of resources.
No more OCCK killings occurred after that.
I’M LOOKING OVER the Christopher Busch suicide papers at a diner. They seem thin for such a high-profile suspect. I’m supposed to meet Ellie again in a few hours. I slide my coffee aside and take out a few of the massive case files from my bag. I place them on the table in front of me and when I dig into them I’m searching for commonalities in suspects.
Right before I realize I’m running late for Ellie, it finally occurs to me that every suspect file, every crime scene report, and every statement from a witness has the appropriate police department stamp at the top with an officer as signatory at the bottom.
The police themselves are the only commonality, and yet so obvious a link hadn’t crossed my mind until now, years into my investigation. Like Cathy’s father, I’ve been giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt because I generally believe in the sanctity of our institutions. However, it’s that same belief system—our blind acceptance of the authority of a badge—that allows a young boy to get into an unmarked car with a man in uniform, if for no other reason than because he’s been told to.
When I think about this, I get angry, like Cathy, who emails me statements like “These pussies don’t know who they’re fucking with now.”
None of us has forever. Sometimes our obsessions are the truth. All we have time for is to follow their paths, to look into a crowd and think, like the psychic, What am I getting a hit on here?
THE HAUNTING
There are large gaps in time.
Or there are no gaps in time, and today I am as close to 1976 and 1977 as I am to whatever happened in my life this very week. I see photos of myself as a young boy and photos of my children at that same age, all spread atop the table in front of me, and there is nothing to tell me that time has passed between the taking of an older photo and a newer one.
There is set dressing to indicate change—a chair and a card table from thirty years ago, and now a vase with an old flower in it from 2009, everything exactly where it should be—but I am the same in each photo, the ones of myself and the ones of my children, whom I see my features in. I am in there with them.
Now, in January of 2012, it has been fourteen months since I last saw Ellie, which means it’s been fourteen months since I was last in Detroit, although it feels like weeks or minutes ago. Here in Idaho, the weather is a balmy forty degrees. My wife and I, now separated, are sharing the kids one week on, one week off. This week I’m alone, and there’s a sinking in my gut that started the moment I dropped the kids at her house yesterday. Things haven’t gotten better, the way people said they would—they’ve gotten lower and wider inside, without my kids.
Over the previous year, we’d spent months falling apart, even after I came home. At night, on the long, L-shaped couch we’d raised our kids on and that I’d taken to sleeping on, I’d run the case through my head, falling asleep only in fits. The streetlight outside our living room windows would slant across my body.
Sometimes I’d see the headlights of our various neighbors swinging around the corner at odd hours. I’d hear the guy across the street pulling into his carport some nights. I didn’t know it yet, but he’d been coming home from hiding out with my wife.
Lying there, images of eleven-year-old Timothy King at his drop location would begin to haunt me: laid onto his stomach in the snowy ditch, his face smooshed sideways, his lips parting slightly as if drooling onto a pillow. I’d thought for a long year that he’d been deposited neatly, tucked in like a teddy bear off Gill Road that night in 1977. Hundreds of news articles I’d read had led me to believe this, but those articles had been a misdirect, like so many other things I’d thought about the case.
Timothy King, contrary to those articles, lay twisted onto himself in the crime scene photos, a broken body, washed in the photographer’s light.
When my wife’s car arrived home one night in late summer, only a minute before the neighbor’s car swooped into his own driveway, something in me clicked and I began to understand that they’d been having an affair.
It took me three months to prove.
First I asked my wife about it, and she denied everything. I told her that I wanted honesty in our lives. She told me that all of this “searching for criminals” had made me crazy.
She said I needed psychiatric help. She said, “You can’t keep thinking everybody is lying to you.”
The neighbor’s daughter and my son were in the same class that year. At the Back to School Picnic at the end of August, my wife and the neighbor took special pains to avoid one another so as not to alert me. I watched the guy crack jokes in a corner of the playground, his smile so greasy you could simmer fries in it. The heat in me rose but I stayed quiet, wanting to save my kids from the heartache of divorce.
WHEN MY WIFE and I were finally over, I cried into the empty rooms of our house, which we put on the market. I eventually lost my car and job, as I was mentally unable to work. Soon I was forced to sell most of my possessions. Very few of my friends called to check on me. Eventually my wife and I began living in rented homes and I got on with my life, but only in five-minute intervals that felt stretched and darkened across my eyes.
Later I spent long evenings on the edge of violence, wanting to corner my wife’s new lover, the man who’d been living within eyeshot of my children, within eyeshot of the couch I’d been sleeping on those nights before everything fell apart.
Most people don’t know the kind of violence that takes over a heart in situations like that. Whatever your endgame was for your life, it changes without notice on you. The endgame is now, you realize, and that’s all you can see. You’re suddenly a silhouette standing in an open street, holding a weapon in the darkness, until a set
of headlights swings around and drapes you, locks you in their net of light, and you see yourself for who you are. You see yourself as they do.
There were times when I’d call Cathy Broad, needing somebody who understood in me what my wife couldn’t, how a haunting takes over, how when you look in the mirror after a while all you can see is this unnamed thing that’s darker than you, that got inside.
Cathy told me that people were reading her emails and texts, that there was a ghost in the machine. I’d been feeling the same for months, watching the cursor on my laptop move sometimes, with seemingly no one at the controls. One afternoon I got into my car and realized that somebody had been riffling through it.
I stepped out the driver’s-side door and looked under the oil pan. I popped the hood and stared at the battery. When I got home that evening, there was a light on over my sink that I hadn’t turned on.
MARK STEBBINS
Mark Stebbins was the first victim of the Oakland County Child Killer. He was twelve years old. On February 15, 1976, he was at a work-related party with his mother at the American Legion Hall in blue-collar Ferndale, where the buildings are mostly brick and the streets turn grey from slush in the wintertime.
It was midafternoon, the day after Valentine’s Day.
Mark Stebbins left the hall and began a short walk to his home, supposedly to watch a movie on television instead of hanging out with his mom, who stayed behind and didn’t return home until evening to check on him.
Four days later Mark Stebbins was found in the parking lot of a small strip mall in Southfield, just up the road from a Michigan State Police outpost and about two miles from my own boyhood home. His body had reportedly been laid atop a low brick wall bordering the rear of the lot. Along with the double-barrel-shaped imprint on his head, a postmortem report showed Mark Stebbins had been sexually penetrated and his wrists and ankles showed ligature marks, although none of that information was released to the public.
At the Christopher Busch crime scene, where Busch had been found dead in his bedroom, a pencil drawing of a boy found tacked to his wall showed a great likeness to the Mark Stebbins publicity sketch previously released to the press in an effort to help with their search during the boy’s captivity period. In the Busch sketch, however, Stebbins is wearing a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his hair, his eyes closed, his face screaming out in pain.
The sketch found at the Busch residence was concealed from the press and the Stebbins family, as well as from the families of the three other OCCK victims, even though there were many in law enforcement who presumed the sketch to implicate Busch in at least the murder of the Stebbins boy. Busch, they believed, had sketched the young boy as he’d looked in captivity, then showcased the drawing as a memento.
There were two officers at the Busch suicide scene, a flurry of investigators afterward, and countless other cops over the decades who had looked through the files. Outside their own ranks, they were silent about the drawing.
There are questions surrounding the sketch’s placement at the scene, however. While some take it at face value, to have been drawn by Busch, it may also have been planted there after his death. Adding to the mystery of the sketch is that, decades after his alleged suicide, one of Busch’s nephews claimed to have seen the sketch in Busch’s bedroom months before the Stebbins abduction even occurred. If the nephew is to be believed, the Stebbins likeness might be a coincidence, a sketch of another boy somehow, or it might be a foreshadowing of the Stebbins abduction: Busch may have somehow known Stebbins prior to abducting him and sketched out the look on his face as he fantasized about it.
Busch could have held on to the sketch for a period prior to the murder, then played out the scene in real life. Alternatively, the nephew could be lying about having seen the sketch earlier, hoping to deflect law enforcement’s interest in the family line.
When considering the pencil sketch, however, it should be taken into account that Busch had no genuine artistic skills and that the likeness, which is very astute, even if coincidental, likely could not have been drawn by Busch in the first place.
The pencil sketch in question, then, was either gifted to Busch by an associate or planted in his bedroom after the supposed suicide. Busch did not draw the boy—that much can be assumed with accuracy. He simply didn’t have the talent for it.
EYEGLASSES
I’d been talking on the phone to Ellie about her recovery, almost daily, from the porch of our home in Idaho. It freaked me out that she’d survived her addictions and come out ahead. That hadn’t seemed in the cards for Ellie, not ever. Now she seemed so honest with herself—and honest with me about my own problems, too. She’d been teaching me to forgive myself for whatever darkness I carried.
Talking to Ellie felt right at the time, and I saw nothing about that as a violation of morality, as a transgression. In retrospect, I was blinded and propelled. No better than my wife in those moments. But we often only learn these lessons in reverse proportion to their usefulness.
What I did see, in moments of clarity and calmness, was that with Ellie’s help I’d become a better person on the whole. Even though my life at home was falling to pieces, I’d thought I was falling in love again, surprised at being capable of such a thing after living so long without real connection to anyone other than my kids. Sometimes I worried that we’d all inevitably end up like the OCCK victims, either discarded or simply alone. I fought against that feeling by latching onto Ellie, imagining us together somehow: Ellie a companion to my darkness, someone to hold my hand through the loneliness.
But I’d been confusing intimacy with love. It had been so long since I’d opened myself to anybody. So many years had gone by since I’d allowed myself to be vulnerable that I didn’t understand how human connection and romantic love were two different things.
So when Ellie stopped calling me out of the blue, the same year that I’d eventually discover my wife’s affair, it was like I’d been drugged, then placed on a table and cut into quarters for wrapping, one piece of me over here, another over there, my center point—an anxiously beating heart—set adrift without oars to guide it. One day everything had been ordinary and dependable, and the next day Ellie was a ghost. She—a person I’d come to depend on—wouldn’t answer her phone and wouldn’t respond to texts.
I tried for months to get in touch with her and couldn’t—months I spent in a daze, not so much depressed as numb. I withdrew from my life and the few friends I had, even withdrew from my children.
I made very little impression on my class at the university and eventually quit teaching without consulting with my wife. We’d soon be poor again, but I couldn’t care about that. All I could think about was that Ellie must have been using again, that she’d slipped away into whatever drugs she’d stumbled onto at the very right moment for them to take hold, because that’s how a relapse happens.
And maybe I had relapsed, too, but in a different way. I’d been trying so hard to become somebody I could respect and yet I’d let myself get jacked up by Ellie once again, just like I had during our first go-together. I’d asked her to marry me back in our twenties but instead of saying yes she’d broken up with me, confessing to coking out and screwing a bassist in a punk band nearly every day of the entire month that I’d been planning our vows.
Now I’d been choosing to replace the impending loss of my marriage with a woman who I must have known would abandon me over and over, no matter how hard I tried to prevent that from happening. It was what I’d looked for my whole life, since my father had stopped showing up on visiting days when I was a boy: for that pain to keep repeating itself.
Ellie disappearing on me again was everything I’d ever asked of the world.
I WAS STANDING in the airport in Detroit, having arrived to continue my investigation. I waited for my duffel in the terminal and checked my phone to find a friend request from Ellie on Facebook. She must have known I was coming back. A few independent news articles had come out online, and
maybe she’d read about my continued work on the case.
For a moment I imagined accepting her friend request, exchanging a few messages with her, getting resolution over coffee, falling in love again, starting the whole thing over like I’d never learned a lesson in my life. It would have been so easy.
The baggage carousel circled. I felt stupid. I felt young and dumb and pulsing with want for her. I ignored her friend request, grabbed my bag, and texted my father, who’d been circling the airport in a rental car he’d put on his credit card for me while waiting for my plane to arrive.
I walked outside into the humidity and stood near the taxi lane. My father texted me three more times because he’d been circling the wrong terminal. Eventually he called.
“Where the fuck are you?” he said.
A few more minutes later I got into the car. We shook hands.
“Those are some ugly fucking glasses,” he told me while puffing out steam, frustrated after getting lost. I took my glasses off, put them in their case. I checked my phone for messages again. I checked my emails. Ignored the friend request.
My father and I barely spoke as he drove.
HUG YOUR MOM GOOD-BYE
My dad took me back to his house for dinner right after picking me up at the airport. My dad’s new wife, his third, was there to greet me with a Crock-Pot full of sausage and kale. She was my age, studying to get into a nursing school in Detroit, and they’d been married for five years.
She smiled a lot during dinner.
We ate the sausage and kale out of bowls, sitting at their small table in the galley-style kitchen. My dad had come around since his car-ride silence, asking me questions about the case. They had three cats and I’m allergic, so I tried not to touch the tabletop while I ate. My father was also allergic but took an antihistamine every day. The cats were his wife’s. When he’d met her, he’d had to make a decision about that.
The Kill Jar Page 11