Lamborgine, for his part, living out hard time beneath prison halogens, remains silent.
PEABODY’S
I go to the Berkley library near the Roseland Park Cemetery because of a reference in the documents given to me by Barry King about a 1976 junior class Berkley High photograph of a boy, another victim of Christopher Busch. The librarian glances at the self-imposed bruise on my cheek, then leads me to a small shelving unit.
I sit at a wooden table and look through yearbooks from ’75 to ’78. One of the boys stands out, smiling at the camera, head cocked slightly, his brown hair sweeping sideways across his forehead like a young Justin Bieber. I remember reading his name in interviews, yet the details are foggy. I’m starting to lose my memory of things previously read.
I’ve missed something, I think.
I put my head on the table and wrap my arms around its crown, and when I sit up again an hour has passed and I’ve drooled on the ’76 volume.
ON THE WAY out of Berkley, I drive by Hartfield Lanes and park out front of the covered entrance to the bowling alley. Kristine Mihelich was most likely taken from this entranceway, or from across the street at the 7-Eleven, in January 1977.
I stay parked outside of Hartfield’s. I touch the small bruise on my cheekbone. I look at it in the rearview mirror and touch it again but don’t feel anything.
I call Timothy’s brother, Chris King, on my cell, and he talks to me about two cops from the original investigative team, a cop named Flynn and a cop named Waldron, who died last January. Cory Williams supposedly talked to Waldron at some point prior to his death, and Waldron cried when Williams told him that the Busch polygraph results were wrong.
Waldron wanted the case solved. The tears seemed real to Williams, Chris reports, and I can hear him breathing heavily into the phone. I met Chris on my first trip to Detroit and we sat at his kitchen table going over link charts of the case. Chris was thick-bodied and seemed tough but had a copy editor’s intellect and eye for detail. A lot of native Detroiters are like that, even in some of the nearby suburbs: able to pass for the muscle or the brains, depending on the moment. When your daily living is a grind, you get dull or you get sharp, and Chris seemed the latter.
Over the phone, Chris reminds me about the blue Gremlin at the pharmacy on the night of his brother’s abduction—how he, like the witness who came forward, also saw the vehicle, only much later at night than the reported time of abduction. The cops were already out searching for Tim when Chris, a teenager at that time, searching on his own, saw a Gremlin and a few other empty cars in the pharmacy parking lot several hours after Tim’s disappearance.
By morning the blue Gremlin was gone. The alleged witness, who provided information for a composite sketch of the Gremlin, came forward only after the long initial night of Tim’s captivity. Chris maintains that he told the police back then that his brother must have been kidnapped into another vehicle. Tim couldn’t have been in the blue Gremlin, he told them, as that car hadn’t left the lot until hours had passed. The Gremlin, Chris believed then as now, was a red herring.
It’s possible that two vehicles were involved in the abduction of Timothy King, both men jumping into one car with the boy, leaving the Gremlin behind overnight. If true, that may have been an on-the-fly error, which does sometimes happen even in well-planned crimes. Homeland terrorist Timothy McVeigh was taken into custody in 1995 only after being pulled over for driving a car with no license plate on it. Three days later he was identified as the mastermind behind the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He had calculated a highly detailed mass murder, one of the most complicated acts of terrorism our country has seen, but was grounded by the sometimes more complicated twists of fate that often look like blind stupidity in retrospect.
I get off the phone with Chris and stop back at Barry King’s to get another thousand documents he’s set aside for me to copy. On my way back from the FedEx Office, I pass the restaurant where Barry and his wife were eating dinner on the night of Tim’s abduction: Peabody’s, in Birmingham, just down the street from their home.
The restaurant is catty-corner from the pharmacy at Maple Road. It’s possible that Barry and his wife glanced up from their meals at the traffic outside on that March night, the streaming headlights absorbed into slush or glinting off street signs and flecks of snow in the air, with Timmy in the back of one of those passing cars.
THESE FUCKING COPS
I talk to Barry at length when I return to his house. Twenty years ago, he says, the convict Richard Lawson called him from prison saying he knew something about the OCCK murders. He wanted to have a conversation. He asked Barry King to come visit him.
Barry didn’t visit Lawson but he told the police about the call. Detective Don Studt from the original task force, the cop who’d had that long-running correspondence with the Internet sleuth Helen Dagner, interviewed Lawson and said Lawson had reiterated his testimony that Lamborgine had a connection to the case. Barry said there wasn’t any reason to trust Lawson at the time because it seemed like he wanted to leverage that information for personal gain. Convicts lie, he said. The cops wouldn’t look into it.
In 2012, Richard Lawson reached out again and wrote Barry King a letter. Dave Binkley, Barry’s attorney, drove out to talk with Lawson. Lawson told Binkley that he and a man named Bobby Moore used to “get boys” for H. Lee Busch, Christopher Busch’s father.
Barry also tells me some minor details of interest: that Detroit reporter Kevin Dietz, known for doing stories on the OCCK, also went to Brother Rice High School, whose alumni include John, the suspect who Helen Dagner maintains confessed to her, as well as the famous Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen. The King family recently called Hansen in the hopes that he would do a story on the case, but they got the brush-off from his producers.
Barry’s conjecture about the two grand juries is that Wayne County may be examining what’s become known in small circles as “the Wasser polygraph” as it relates to the Busch lead—the King family is adamant that Busch implicated himself in the killings during that private polygraph administered by Larry Wasser—while Oakland County may be following up on the Cass and Fox leads. An insider from the grand jury team has recently called Barry King, I learn from Cathy, who won’t tell me her source but insists that it’s not her father, and revealed that a forensic detective has turned over three human hairs from Mark Stebbins.
Later, Barry discloses to me that, in November of 2009, a man named Tim Nummer, who used to play hockey with Tim as a boy, came to Barry’s house and told him that seventeen years earlier, in 1992, he sold some clothing to a few cops in a retail store he worked at. While ringing them up, he casually asked the cops about the Timothy King case. One of the cops said, “Oh, that’s been solved. He was killed by the son of some auto exec who was turned in by his attorney.”
Tim Nummer, Barry says, came by again just two weeks before my own visit. He told Barry he would go public about his interaction with those cops if it would help. Barry shared this offer with a Detroit news reporter named Heather Catallo, investigator Cory Williams, the Michigan State Police, and Rob Moran of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office. Not one of those people followed up. Tim Nummer’s statements to Barry were circumstantial, they rightly said.
Barry also told me that he thinks Gregory Greene was in jail at the time of Tim’s murder. Everybody outside of the police thinks that, although a note on an internal narrative summary from the initial investigation specifically states that Greene was out on bond at the time of Tim’s abduction and killing.
THAT NIGHT AT dusk I go to a coffee shop near the Lodge Freeway, get a black coffee, and sit outside on a curb watching the traffic streaming toward downtown. I call Chris King again and he tells me that, in approximately 2005, Detective Don Studt told him that there was no evidence in the case whatsoever—not even close. He told Chris, “Look, you have to come to terms with the fact that this case will never be solved.”
The only possibility, he said to Chris, was a deathbed confession. “And even then,” Studt said, “I wouldn’t believe it unless there were Polaroids.”
“Who do we fucking kill to get a confession, then?” I joke with Chris.
Chris says, “Believe me . . .” and then he trails off.
He eventually remarks on how Christopher Busch ended up dead soon after his polygraph. Then he pauses again and says finally, “I don’t know if they’re just doing a vigilante job or they’re cleaning up their own mess from back then.”
He says you can’t get a confession if everybody dies quick, and his frustration is palpable and expected, regardless of whether or not either of us knows the truth at this point.
The cell phone is hot against my ear before I hang up.
At least Richard Lawson, the convict who dimed on Lamborgine, is still alive and, as far as I know at the time, serving a life sentence for the cabdriver murder that Cory Williams tagged him on. Maybe he’ll talk to me but probably not, I think.
Chris King also tells me that a woman from the area, now a friend of Cathy’s, had reached out to John’s brother online.
“The brother had said to Cathy’s friend, ‘Oh, yeah, John knew Chris Busch, absolutely!’ ” Then Chris breathes into the phone and says, “But we got all these cops who say there’s no connection?”
I speculate that it might be Helen Dagner ruining the John lead for everybody, a kill-the-messenger scenario. The cops are not well-disposed toward obsessive amateurs. Chris sort of grunts into his end of the line. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he says.
He reiterates the death dates of some key players for me. I write it all down again because it’s hard to keep track:
McKinney was killed in September of 1977.
The cop named Flynn was a suicide on November 14, 1978.
Christopher Busch was found on November 20, 1978, but it appeared he might have been bloating a few days before he was found, putting his death date even closer to Flynn’s.
Bobby Moore, who was Lamborgine’s roommate, was found dead in 1978 or ’79, Chris tries to remember, eaten by his own pit bulls in the drug house he lived in. It was either a murder or a suicide, but nobody could tell after the dogs had chewed him up.
“But if it was cops cleaning up dirty laundry,” Chris says, “they must have realized they’d only scratched the surface.”
That’s when they took out McKinney in September of ’77, according to Chris’s theory.
The cops went into McKinney’s gallery, he speculates, and they beat him up a little to get more information before shooting him. They also stole the rope sculpture that was never found and was among the least expensive items to steal. If the McKinney murder had been a robbery and not an assassination, items of greater value would have been taken, Chris reminds me.
Soon after McKinney’s murder, Chris Busch is dead, he says.
Then Chris King tells me about the “Berkley Witness,” a guy who’d been posting online under a pseudonym. I am aware of the identity of the Berkley Witness but am using a pseudonym here and calling him Sebastian. While Sebastian’s story is believable to me and to at least some others, I cannot ignore that he may have descended or at least dipped into one of the rabbit holes that pocket my own inquiries. It may be that his tale can be further substantiated or denied, but I am leaving that for others. For this reason, too, I am not naming the police officers who he discusses beyond saying that they are names familiar to the OCCK case files.
At some point, Sebastian and Cathy had connected, Chris relays to me. Sebastian told Cathy that he’d seen Kristine talking to a cop at the 7-Eleven on the day of her abduction.
Sebastian was in third grade at the time, and after Kristine had turned up dead, he told his mother about seeing her a few days earlier. After they went to the Berkley cops about it, Sebastian says, his life became a living hell.
Sebastian, at least, is somebody alive.
SWAG
It’s late. I’m in the Cass, driving the darkened streets. Two guys are on the porch of a squatter’s home staring at me as I roll past. The last thing Chris King told me on the phone was that Jack Kalbfleisch, the original task force member I’d had a call with while I was at the mall, had recently sent a letter to multiple police departments complaining that a rear bumper imprint of a Pontiac LeMans from the snow at the Kristine site wasn’t being taken seriously.
“It turns out, Ray Anger is the contact for the bumper imprint,” Chris had said. I remember Cathy’s late-night text to me: That fucker is dirty.
It was Anger, too, who’d dug up the body of a suspect named Norberg in Montana, having booked a flight on his own dime to do it. Norberg had been under suspicion in the early days but wasn’t focused on, the cops having Busch on their radar and Norberg’s wife having provided multiple alibis for him.
In 2006, the OCCK victims’ families had a meeting with the PD and Anger was there, along with Garry Gray. They both pleaded for the families to “keep things out of the media” but that begged the question: Which things, and why? After three decades, surely the investigation would no longer be compromised by more information provided to the public rather than less. And yet Gray was a short-timer to retirement, while Anger maybe had something else to protect, according to the speculation of several people I’ve talked to in addition to Chris King.
Chris King’s theory on why Anger visited Norberg’s grave is contrary to the official release statements. In the press, the exhumation was reportedly due to a necklace found at Norberg’s home prior to his death, an insignia charm that read “Kristine,” but Kristine’s parents don’t remember her having a charm like that. Chris King’s theory is that Anger concocted the necklace excuse to dig up Norberg and test his DNA against a hair found on Tim for some other, self-serving reason.
What Anger didn’t do, I learn from internal case narratives, was compare DNA to any of the other evidence catalogued in the case files. He only compared Norberg’s DNA to the single trace hair on Tim. According to Chris King, Anger probably already knew the hair wouldn’t match Norberg’s DNA. In testing him publicly, Anger was taking a shortcut to ruling out Norberg and dropping all further speculation with his reburial, King theorized.
IN THE LATE 1980s, Ray Anger took Erica McAvoy to get hypnotized, presumably to see if she could remember anything about the necklace he said was found in Norberg’s residence during the initial police inquiries into him. The whole afternoon, Erica told Chris, she felt like Anger was a creep. He wanted to go to lunch after the hypnosis session and took her to a McDonald’s, where she felt he became too personal in his affectations, too camp with her.
In 2010, Erica called Ray Anger and told him she had some questions about the case. He was charismatic in tone. He said, when questioned, “Chris Busch has been excluded due to lack of DNA evidence.”
It was a misdirect, as Chris Busch had not officially been excluded. To the contrary, Busch was still very much on the books as a suspect in 2010. Anger ended their conversation with “Honey, you’re welcome to call me anytime.” It was a throwback to the phoniness she sensed from years past.
I GET OUT of my car at the Brewster Projects and sit on the hood. There’s a breeze like a death rattle coming from the hollowed-out tenements.
Up ahead of me, two young black guys in swagger jeans and curtain-sized white Ts approach at a snail’s pace in the middle of the street. There’s no light across their bodies except from a single bulb a dozen houses down. I watch them getting closer for a long time, eventually smell the menthol from their cigarettes in the dark. The drift of nicotine turns my chest inward, sets me on edge.
When the two guys pass, they stare at me. One of them flicks his cigarette at my car. I don’t turn my eyes away.
The other one flicks his cigarette at me, too.
I think they see in me something they despise. They might see themselves, the way I see myself in them, too. It’s why I’m here, maybe, not just in the Cass tonight, where
I’ve apparently come only to get cigarettes flicked at me, but in Detroit in general, returning time and again to the center of my own parable.
I might be here solely to enter the darkness and walk through it.
CARRYING GUNS
The next night I have another three-hour dinner with Erika and her dad, this time at the Red Cedar Grill, outside Okemos. Erica’s dad again records the entire conversation, I think, through an earpiece hanging out of his shirt, connected to his cell phone’s voice memo application. Erica confirms everything Chris had told me earlier.
When I ask her about her mother’s boyfriend, she says, “I’m not sure about all of that. I’ll have to ask her.” But I sense that she’s either being evasive or placating me, or it’s just too emotional of a thing for her to contemplate at the moment. It’s possible, too, that she doesn’t remember.
I’m troubled by Gordy, the boyfriend, as there’s substantial reason to believe that all four of the known OCCK victims were connected somewhere along the way with the case’s most viable suspects. Mark Stebbins had just left a party that John was attending. Both Jill Robinson and Timothy King were connected to John McKinney Sr. via the Coffey residence. Kristine Mihelich’s mother tended bar where both John and Christopher Busch were known to frequent.
Those suspects were not, to my eye, suspect due to their connection with the families. Those connections to the families only came to light after the men became suspects.
When I mention this to Erica and her dad, they nod their heads because they already know that. They don’t understand how the details of things are piecing together, but they are convinced they’re being lied to, which is like knowing everything at once and nothing at all.
Maybe that’s why Erica is holding back from me. Maybe that’s why her dad carries a gun, records our conversations, drives a truck you could roll through concrete in.
The Kill Jar Page 16