The Kill Jar

by J. Reuben Appelman

  It’s late afternoon already and I’m riding the cut between two worlds, my own father on one side, the victims’ fathers on the other. I do an illegal U-turn across the median and take the freeway back north.

  ERICA AND HER father, Tom, and I meet at the Stillwater Grill again. During our three-hour dinner, Erica tells me that she’s researched some of the Busch family holdings of the era and has discovered that Christopher Busch, just days before the “suicide” (she air quotes), had quitclaimed his ownership of the restaurant he worked in, signing it over to his dad, who was in Europe at the time. The timing is suspicious.

  Erica is eating pasta. I think Tom is recording our conversation with his cell phone. When I ask Erica about her mom and the alleged boyfriend who claimed to know John, I get the feeling she’s pretending not to remember anything. I don’t feel like fucking around anymore.

  BITS OF HAIR

  A grand jury’s purpose is to decide whether or not the prosecution has gathered enough evidence to bring the case against a person or entity to trial; it’s not the trial itself. While a grand jury in this case—alas, after over three decades of waiting—is exciting, it doesn’t mean that things will end well for the families. In fact, it could be the opposite, as Cathy predicts.

  If the prosecutor wants to clear Christopher Busch and Gregory Greene and put an end to any speculation by the public or, in this case, by the families of the victims, the easiest way to do that might be to call a grand jury and present a flimsy case for prosecution. The grand jury would reject the case, and the prosecutor would be off the hook for the Busch and Greene leads. The prosecutor would now be able to deflect in other directions indefinitely; no more looking into Busch and Greene.

  Calling for a grand jury may also be an attempt by the prosecutor to freeze out the press for a while. By federal law, no police personnel or other involved party is allowed to speak about information being secretly deliberated upon in a grand jury. A grand jury buys the prosecutor time, but for what?

  The arrows pointing toward Busch and Greene are accumulating in my head, but these guys were unhinged individuals with multiple charges prior to the OCCK murders and were not off-the-grid types. They were slobs with voracious appetites for self-destruction. They certainly were not the obsessive-compulsive, meticulous, sophisticated killers the police had reportedly been pretending to hunt after for three and a half decades. Busch and Greene, I have to believe, lead to something bigger and more worthy of protection than just H. Lee Busch’s reputation.

  Just as Mark Stebbins was found with animal hairs and other fibers on him, all three of the other known OCCK victims were also found with animal hair fragments, in addition to the human hair fragments on both Kristine Mihelich and Jill Robinson. The small white animal hairs on all exterior clothing are assumed to have come from a canine, likely a terrier. In addition, gold- or yellow-colored fibers were found on both of the boys but not on the girls. What we can reasonably assume is that the white dog hairs were from the interior of a vehicle used to transport each of the children at some point during their captivity, but that the boys and girls were actually housed separately, the boys at a location with gold- or yellow-colored carpeting and the girls at a location that left no fibers on them, like a wood-floored home or a concrete garage.

  If this is true, we can likely say that the abductors were not necessarily the killers, and we can also speculate that Greene and Busch could very well have been involved in housing only the boys. Indeed, the evidence related to Busch and Greene points strongly to involvement with Stebbins’s and King’s murders only.

  Who, then, was responsible for Robinson and Mihelich during their captivity, and what was done to them? No evidence of sexual penetration was found on the two girls, not semen nor blood evidence, it was routinely stated by police, although a March 17, 1977, newspaper article reported that “an autopsy found evidence of sexual assault, while a crime lab investigator found none.” Regardless of this discrepancy, based on the DNA match to Vincent Gunnels’s hair on Kristine, and his explanation, it can be reasonably assumed that Kristine at least traveled in Busch’s vehicle at some point during her abduction.

  Based on that, it is easy to conclude that Christopher Busch was, at the very least, a delivery boy for a client whose taste was female, while Busch and Greene kept the boys for either themselves or another client. The white animal hairs would have come from either the automobile or the clothing of Christopher Busch, whose family pet was a small white terrier.

  In 1995 the Wayne County Detectives Bureau collected hair fibers from the sauna room at a facility whose name is redacted from the documents. Fibers were collected from beneath the surfaces of benches and from the sill beneath the sauna doorway. The Schvitz sits squarely in my field of speculation. Detective Garry Gray pulled that evidence fourteen years later, in 2009, but the documents don’t show where that evidence might be today.

  I know, however, that none of the evidence ever catalogued can now be compared to Christopher Busch, since his father cremated the body instead of opting for the more traditional burial method of the time. Who, then, was Detective Gray analyzing the sauna hairs against, and what happened in 1995 to push Wayne County in that direction?

  Right before I fall asleep amid the documents, I get a text from Cathy, reminding me of a suspect I haven’t yet paid much attention to:

  Check on Norberg, she texts me.

  Then she adds, Check on Ray Anger. That fucker is dirty, Jason.

  TIGERS

  I receive an email from my dad, apologizing for what he calls his “apoplectic” behavior. I have to look up the word to realize he’s only apologizing for being the same jerk he always was. My kids are arriving in two days. If I can help it, he’s not wrapping them into a cycle of abuse. He’s afraid of getting close, afraid of intimacy, and so he bails, but I can make a choice to protect them from that.

  A ball game is still in the works, but I can’t afford decent tickets. On my budget, we’ll be sitting in the nosebleeds. I bite the bullet and drive to my dad’s neighborhood, flip the car around, and pull up to his mailbox. I pull an unmarked envelope from it, then close the mailbox again. When I’m leaving his subdivision I open the envelope, and inside it are the three crisp season tickets he’d been hollering about, with seats down the first-base line. My dad’s held back his own ticket, no doubt intending to show up and surprise us after I’ve already told the kids some unlikely scenario about why their grandfather won’t be at the game. I resent him most of all for this, for making me, after all these years, still somehow subject to his whims.

  In a moment of grace, I realize that I can tell my kids what is both true and a lie at the same time. I can say: Grandpa is sick. He might come to the game, and he might not.

  I PICKED MY kids up from the airport, held them in my arms near the gate for as long as they’d let me. My son, twelve, arrived with a faux hawk haircut I’d never seen on him. He’d grown in my absence. My daughter, sixteen, was like a reed, sinewy and strong, hovering protectively beside her little brother in the crowded airport terminal as we walked.

  During that week with them, we met up with my old friends, visited old restaurants, and saw my old homes, including the one in Ann Arbor where my wife and I had lived with our daughter over a decade ago, before our son was born.

  We visited with my dad’s ex, Paula, and their son together, my half brother Max, now in his twenties, and they took us on a boat ride on the lake behind Paula’s house in Bloomfield. My son did backflips into the water off the boat. At full throttle, I watched my daughter’s hair push back in the wind, studied the depths of her eyes. I could tell that she wanted to be a part of a universe that would allow her continued movement like that, at greater and greater speeds, toward something larger-than-life. With the sunlight on my boy’s face and the wind in his wet hair, I felt powerful. He’d miraculously inherited the parts of me that had gone unscathed, and I would defend those parts of him forever.

  We went on a
lengthy side trip to Lake Michigan, where we spent two days in the artsy beach town of Saugatuck visiting with my aunt and uncle, who’d timed their own vacation from Delaware to coincide with our arrival. As a boy, my mom had shipped me out to them a few times, during summer and winter breaks, as a respite from the chaos of my family. I sometimes looked back at those weeks I’d spent in Delaware as the healthiest weeks of my childhood.

  My aunt and uncle took us to dinner and ice cream. We strolled the boardwalk by the lake afterward, the sun sinking into twilight. I felt whole suddenly. I felt that I was living the life I’d been meant to live, my children by my side and the breeze off Lake Michigan vibrant, the notion of happiness somehow greater than a notion again.

  WE GO TO the Tigers game at the end of that week. I’m nervous in the strong afternoon heat. We push through a crowd, looking for our seats, where we find my father waiting for us. I shake my father’s hand. I tell him that we’re leaving after the fifth inning so my daughter can take pictures of the city. It’s a lie I’ve made up on the spot. He says nothing to me in return.

  My father shakes my son’s hand and says, looking him over, “I think I’m getting you a hairbrush for your birthday.” It’s the first time they’ve met, the first thing he’s said to the boy, ever.

  Then he kisses my daughter on the cheek and says back to my son, “I don’t kiss boys. Sorry.”

  My father laughs loudly at the joke. My son flushes. I can smell aftershave and alcohol on my dad.

  When we take our seats, I position myself between my dad and the kids. The players are called onto the field, and when we stand for the National Anthem, my dad holds his beer to his chest and belts out the words like an opera singer.

  People in front of us turn to look.

  Nobody else in our section is singing.

  My dad drinks two more large beers during the game. He buys the kids some ice cream and ball caps. After the fifth inning, he walks us to an exit, spilling one of his beers and cursing. “Fuck they put that floor there for?” he says.

  I don’t often swear around my kids. When my dad does it, they look at me to see my reaction. I hold their look, smiling.

  At the exit, my dad shakes my hand good-bye. He shakes my son’s hand, very formally. Then he hugs my daughter, and when he pulls back from the hug, his fingers linger on her shoulder, his palm cupping her arm like a baseball mitt, and I don’t like him touching her, because in my world you have to earn getting to touch somebody affectionately.

  Isn’t that what he taught me? And isn’t that what I’d never earned from him, all the times I’d tried to hug him as a boy and he’d stiff-arm me with a handshake?

  HELLO, GOOD-BYE

  My kids get on a plane back to Idaho, and I stay in my hotel for two days, watching the television and sleeping atop a pile of notes on my bed. I’m dark inside again.

  On the third day Teresa calls to drag me out of my room. I agree to her visiting with lunch. I get out of bed and work in the hotel lobby, waiting for her. There are now two grand juries convened, I’ve learned, in both Wayne and Oakland Counties. Barry King has been served a subpoena to testify, but he only hints at that on the telephone. If I press him for details, I risk setting him up for a felony charge, Cathy has warned me—something about the rules of grand jury secrecy overriding our usual expectation of public trial—so I don’t.

  I feel a little better when Teresa enters the hotel lobby with another large grocery bag of food for us.

  Sitting in the lobby with Teresa is nice. The sun comes through a large window and lights her skin. I can see marks on her face from age, strands of greying hair grasping for larger purchase. Maybe it’s okay that she’s here. She has no children that she’s compromising, no marriage vows. Maybe the two of us are working on love again, soberly but not sadly. Just clear-minded, human love that comes out of patience and caring.

  I walk Teresa to her car after a two-hour lunch and I kiss her. It takes time. It’s 100 degrees outside with the sun banking into us from the asphalt, and I know, deeply, that my guilt over Teresa’s relationship, and over my own, will have a larger hold on me now. That single kiss is a hello and a good-bye at the same time.

  We embrace one another, and when I’m walking back to the hotel without her I can feel the sweat holding my shirt down across the midsection of my back where her arms had crossed. I don’t have much time left in Detroit, and there’s so much to do. I want to know whose hand closed the mouths of those kids, and I wonder if spending time with Teresa is a way of putting off the realization that I may not get what I want with this case.

  LAMBORGINE

  Ted Lamborgine, dimed on by Richard Lawson as being connected to the OCCK killings, is seventy-five years old and serving three life sentences for unrelated crimes in a Michigan prison, which is not to say that he had no connection to Christopher Busch and Gregory Greene.

  Lamborgine is bald, with the exception of tufts of grey swooping around the sides of his head. In photos, he either wears squared-off wire-framed glasses or no glasses at all, revealing a paling canvas of a face, hued primarily by prison lighting, no doubt. As a convicted pedophile, he likely spent the early years of his incarceration, at the age of sixty-five, being assaulted by other convicts, unable to protect himself at such an advanced age for that environment.

  Prior to his capture, Lamborgine was living a relatively mundane life three hours southeast of Detroit, in Parma Heights, Ohio. He was a retired autoworker, lying low beneath the radar of the police until pedophile turned confidential informant Richard Lawson’s arrest for that 1989 cabbie murder. Lawson’s testimony during his murder trial shed new light on the 1970s Cass Corridor pedophile ring. Lawson pointed at Ted Lamborgine’s involvement with the Cass operation and fingered him as an OCCK suspect.

  In 2005, PD traveled to Parma Heights and took Lamborgine into custody for his involvement with the Cass crimes. In 2007, Lamborgine confessed to using money, drugs, and food as a lure for dozens of young boys who were abducted into hotel rooms, homes, and a bicycle shop, where they were sexually assaulted in order to make pornographic movies sold throughout the U.S. and Europe via an East Coast hub.

  Prior to Lamborgine’s sentencing, he was given an OCCK-related polygraph, which he failed. He was offered a plea deal that would allow him safe haven in a more cozy federal prison, under witness protection, at a reduced sentence of fifteen years if he would confess to his involvement in the killings. Lamborgine turned down the deal, which might make one believe he had nothing to offer and therefore no deal to broker. Yet, during his initial interrogation, with the police breathing down his neck about the OCCK murders, Lamborgine’s only response had been “I’ve been forgiven.”

  Knowing that he was unable to be charged with the OCCK crimes without a confession, due to lack of hard evidence, Lamborgine accepted a sentence that secured the promise of dying while still in custody instead of the fifteen years he could have gotten in a plea to the OCCK crimes. He either had no knowledge of the murders or was afraid of detailing his involvement.

  When speaking to the press on multiple occasions, Detectives Garry Gray and Ray Anger had opposing theories about Lamborgine. Gray was adamant about Ted Lamborgine’s association with the OCCK, but Ray Anger was quoted as saying, “[Lamborgine] said he didn’t do it, and I don’t think he did.” Anger had seemingly little to do with the investigation of Lamborgine, however, while Gray was involved with the initial interrogations alongside the younger cop, Cory Williams, the star detective from that Cold Case episode about Richard Lawson I’d watched in my hotel room a while back.

  If Anger is dirty, as Cathy had texted me before the Tigers game, then there must be motivation for publicly pronouncing his belief in Lamborgine’s innocence related to the OCCK. If you follow Lamborgine, where does he lead?

  After reading through thousands of pages of interview transcription, one thing I am certain of is that Detective Anger seems to be of relatively common intelligence, while Cory Williams possess
es a more honed intellect. His interviews with suspects read like some of our classical stage dramas, within which the true weight of a statement or question remains unknown to all but its speaker until the second or third act, when what was presumably a throwaway line comes back to haunt the play. Anger, in transcription, attempts to lasso an answer, whereas Williams opens a door, steps back, and allows each answer to cross the threshold into a snare of its own accord.

  Cory Williams, of the Livonia Police Department and a generation younger than Anger, was so convinced of Lamborgine’s involvement with the OCCK crimes that he doggedly pursued the connection for years. He made eight trips to Parma Heights, with six separate surveillance operations performed in Ohio by the Michigan State Police, the FBI, and Livonia PD, as well as conducted numerous out-of-state interviews with Lamborgine’s past victims who had relocated to Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Arizona, and the Netherlands.

  Of interest relating to the opposing viewpoints of Cory Williams and Ray Anger is that, while Anger was a Berkley, Michigan, cop during the 1970s, so, too, was Williams’s own father, serving as a lieutenant with the Berkley PD at the same time. One has to consider, then, a legacy of information about the OCCK that might have been passed down from Williams Sr., long out of the force by now, and subsequently inquire: Is Cory Williams operating with a private, personal mandate to clean house on behalf of his old man?

  If the answer is yes, then Cory Williams might be the only cop I can trust. Unfortunately, since the Wayne County grand jury has also been called, Williams isn’t answering his telephone when I try him, nor is he responding to my messages. Even operating in the dark, however, some people believe that Cory Williams won’t stop until a few of his father’s contemporaries wind up on the wrong side of the headlines.