The phone went dead after that. The PD buried a microphone in Danto’s chest hairs the next night and shoved him into the Pony Cart Bar like a blindfolded kid swinging at a piñata.
A detective, undercover as a student, sat at a table pretending to read a textbook while Danto sat at the bar and waited for the mysterious correspondent to show up. Danto was talkative with the bartender, overacting. Meanwhile, a man with broken English approached the undercover detective, Jerry Tobias, and offered to buy him a drink. The Pony Cart was a gay bar, and the detective got flustered. He sent his solicitor packing.
Allen never came forward that evening, or ever again. In retrospect, the PD speculated that the man offering their cop a drink must have been the man they’d been waiting on, testing to see if Tobias was a cop or a regular patron. It was a missed opportunity, lost because Tobias couldn’t fit in.
THE “ALLEN” STORY is suspect to me, however. The initial letter presents not just broken English but the disjointed, nearly illiterate, almost psychotic thinking of a person of extremely low IQ, yet simultaneously the letter writer was smart enough to track down a psychiatrist with a specialized interest in violent perpetrators instead of just shooting off his letter to the police or press, which would have been much easier.
In the letter, he requests “like you call it immunity,” which suggests a certain naïveté about the process of being granted such things; but then, in his phone call to Danto, he is very forthright about requesting immunity by the governor himself, suggesting a more educated understanding of the system.
Possibly more interesting than Allen is Danto’s involvement. When the letter writer refers to his roommate’s Gremlin being junked “out in Ohio to never be found ever,” I remember Danto’s own connection to Ohio, where he’d once talked a serial killer into giving himself up. I remember that Ted Lamborgine was known to have spent time in Ohio, too, trolling for hitchhikers. Another dead girl, Jane Allen, had been found in a river down there, her abduction and murder having similarities to the OCCK crimes—there was often speculation that the Allen murder was related.
Danto had too casually strolled into the largest homicide investigation on the planet at that time, turning up hot evidence in the form of an anonymous letter, requesting a boot gun, loitering around task force headquarters, and going over evidence with the PD—then eventually showing up in an email accidentally sent to me.
THE DRY CLEANER
I come across a notation in the Tommy McIntyre book Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. McIntyre was a fine, respectable reporter in the Detroit area during the 1970s and 1980s, with police department inroads that, I’ve come to believe, undermined his objectivity about those he trusted. The book seems slanted toward a thesis of praise for the investigation and without diligent inquiry, although there is indeed some important information contained in its pages, including the content of the “Allen” letter and telephone call. The book also includes a transcript of a letter from the FBI lab in D.C. to their field office in Detroit, disseminating that letter and call. The portions of the Allen letter stating that the OCCK had carted his victims home in a clothes hamper and had a delivery route of some sort seemed especially interesting to the FBI analyst, as indicated below:
It is noted that all of the victims were thoroughly cleaned with “Phisohex,” a product which was taken off the market several years ago. Since this procedure would necessarily require a fairly large amount of this product, the possibility exists that the individual involved in these killings is employed by a company . . . laundry, etc. . . . that would have used this product in large quantities . . .
If the FBI believed in the myth of the Phisohex-scrubbed bodies, then it did so based not on its own autopsy examinations but on reports pushed up the chain to it.
If I start from scratch with the Phisohex—ignoring what I know about the state of the bodies—I’d look at the dry-cleaning establishment next to Hunter-Maple Pharmacy, whose parking lot Timothy King disappeared from. When I followed that lead, I found reports of sexual misconduct from one of the dry cleaner’s employees.
As it happens, that employee was friends with Christopher Busch.
LAWSON AND LAMBORGINE
Richard Lawson, aka Coyote Negro Lawson, offender #598802, a white male standing six feet five inches tall and weighing 210 pounds, passed quietly away a few months before my phone call with Chris King in which King reminded me that nobody dead can testify.
We’d both assumed Lawson was still behind bars, yet his corpse was already decomposing while we’d had our talk.
Lawson lived a long life, mostly as a free man and without a known murder attempt on his person. At the age of sixty-six, he’d served only six and a half years of the life sentence handed down to him for the killing of the cabbie, a murder he’d committed seventeen years prior to his sentencing.
THEODORE LAMBORGINE, AKA Ted Orr, is still alive, serving out his life sentence on fourteen convictions for criminal sexual conduct (CSC), twelve of them stemming from the summer of 1976, only months before the first OCCK murder.
There are two additional charges of CSC with a person under thirteen against Lamborgine. The date of offense is listed as December 31, 1980.
Only three years after the last known OCCK murder.
On a holiday.
During the winter months.
TRUST
On September 18, 1976, seven months after Mark Stebbins was murdered and two months before Jill Robinson was murdered, Francis Shelden of Fox Island began to establish a revocable living trust, organized in the British Virgin Islands, to control the majority of his relatively liquid assets.
The Trust Company of the Virgin Islands, Ltd., held approximately 2.5 million 1970s dollars, some of it as cash but mostly as shares of marketable securities in twenty-four corporations. Shelden’s investments were in oil, booze, newspapers, mining, transportation, chemicals, banks, and manufacturing, with the exception of his 40,000 shares in the entity known as North Fox Island Company.
Shelden’s wealth was far greater than what the trust controlled, but he was in a hurry to abscond with those funds that could be accessed easiest, as two months prior he’d received a call from Dyer Grossman saying that Gerald Richards, the gym teacher who had collaborated with Frank Shelden on child molestations, had been picked up by the PD. At Grossman’s suggestion, Shelden contacted Adam Starchild, a specialist in offshore financial shelters. Francis Shelden had never met Starchild, but after a phone call to him in New Jersey, during which Starchild convinced Shelden of his expertise, Shelden removed his investment certificates from their safety-deposit box at a local bank and flew to Starchild for a covert meeting, his stock certificates in hand.
At Starchild’s suggestion, a loan was obtained against some of the stocks. Two bank accounts were opened, each holding around $40,000, one account for Shelden and one for Starchild as payment for the ongoing administration of Shelden’s account.
Shelden first fled to Europe via Canada. Later, at a meeting at the Shelden family home in Antigua on September 28, 1976, the trust was signed into effect, with Starchild as legal administrator and Shelden reserving the right, via his attorney L. Bennett Young, to remove Starchild and replace him with a successor if needed. Shelden returned to Europe and, two months later, the MSP issued warrants for his arrest that would go unrequited.
In 1977, while Shelden was living in Amsterdam, he began to realize that Starchild had been skimming large amounts of money from the trust. By April of 1978, Shelden removed Starchild and appointed a new successor, Edward Brongersma, his attorney in Amsterdam who at one time was a member of the upper house of the Dutch senate and chairman of the judicial committee. Shelden had once again established the deep political connections he’d become accustomed to in the States.
Eighteen months later, in October of 1979, Shelden again transferred control of the trust, but this time back to the U.S., with L. Bennett Young and the Detroit Bank & Trust Company now serving as cotrustees. Shelde
n’s brother, Alger Shelden Jr., eventually jumped into the mix as a coadministrator. Starchild, in frustration at being removed from the trust, illegally attempted to exercise his previous status as administrator and fraudulently replaced Shelden’s choices of oversight with his own, forging paperwork and naming a disbarred New York lawyer (himself convicted of a 1975 cocaine smuggling conspiracy) as president and treasurer of the trust, as well as sole beneficiary of both bank accounts. The move allowed a temporary shift of funds back into Starchild’s domain but was eventually overturned.
Shelden’s status as a fugitive in Europe would, theoretically, prevent him from receiving financial transfers from the States. In practice, however, Alger, Young, and multiple others, all Americans and easily accessible by law enforcement, would be responsible for Shelden’s continued survival as a predator of means and affiliation. Regardless of the nearly one million dollars Starchild had reportedly siphoned from the accounts, Shelden still lived high on the hog until his death and was not known to have returned to the U.S. since his initial flight, meaning that he was overseas prior to the final three known OCCK murders. He can therefore not be considered a suspect in the deaths of Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, or Timothy King.
STARCHILD
By 1980, Adam Starchild was temporarily residing in a small house in a pasture outside of St. Petersburg, Florida. From his living room office, he ran an international financial bilking front known as Minerva Consulting Group, Inc. He was thirty-three years old and heavyset, and wore thick-framed, horn-rimmed glasses. He had business cards stating he was a member of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce. He had done time in both American and British prisons for mail fraud and forgery.
It had been four years since Francis Shelden had absconded, but, from his pasture in Florida, Starchild again surfaced as a man of mystery, this time with ties to U.S. representative Richard Kelly, one of nine congressmen implicated in an undercover FBI investigation, code-named Abscam, an entrapment scheme by the feds that eventually rooted out evidence of a culture of bribery and influence peddling among our highest public officials.
Starchild’s involvement with Representative Kelly was murky, but not as murky as the con man’s past. Born Malcolm Willis McConahy on September 20, 1946, in Minnesota, he faked his death sometime between the February of Mark Stebbins’s murder and that following spring by submitting an obituary for himself to a New Jersey newspaper, mailed in from a location in Vermont, claiming an auto accident took his life in Minnesota.
In August, six months after the Stebbins murder and one month before Shelden fled the country, McConahy took the name Adam Aristotle Starchild. What Adam Starchild left behind as Malcolm McConahy was a history of arrests for sexual perversions, including possession of child pornography and multiple charges of indecency with a minor.
Court records in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Washington, and New Jersey show McConahy to have been an avid litigant and prodigious writer of complaint letters to local politicians. He once sued President Nixon on a trumped-up accusation that was thrown out of court. McConahy even sued his own mother in an effort to extort $90,000 from her, in a case that was eventually settled by the estate after her death.
In 1968, at the age of twenty-two, McConahy was running a Milwaukee travel agency specializing in adventures for youth groups. That same year found McConahy facing the aforementioned sex charges. He fled the state in the middle of his sex trial, embarked on a letter-writing campaign denouncing American justice, and crossed the Atlantic.
In 1970, McConahy began his four years in a British prison on forgery charges. He was eventually deported in 1974 to face his pending charges in America, where he served out a brief stint at the federal penitentiary in Sandstone, Minnesota. Shortly after release from that prison, the OCCK killings started.
IN DECEMBER OF 2012, the Boy Scouts of America was compelled to release what is known as “the Perversion Files,” naming the accused in over five thousand case reports of sexually related crimes and tracking internal correspondences related to decades of molestations that had been concealed to protect the puritanical image of Scouting in America.
Malcolm Willis McConahy is named in those Perversion Files as assistant scoutmaster of Troop 27 in Minneapolis, having confessed, while facing insurmountable evidence and personal testimony against him, to the sexual molestation of multiple boys in his care in 1965 at the age of nineteen.
THE MINERVA CONSULTING Group remained an umbrella organization for decades’ worth of Adam Starchild’s organized criminal business dealings, beginning with his relationship to drug and gun smuggling, then accelerating to stock inflation, and political influence and corruption during the Abscam days. In later years, Starchild made a hefty ancillary living self-publishing his how-to books on eluding the government, gaining multiple citizenships and dual passports, setting up non-traceable trusts, and remaining off the grid.
Secondary businesses in its last decade included the distribution of over a hundred trademarked gift products: shot glasses, backscratchers, barbecues, bookmarks, baby toys, and all manner of other items imported cheaply and sold under monikers related to traditional American heroes (for example, the “Paul Bunyan Axe”). Nearly every application for trademark listed the address 4440 NW 73rd Avenue PTY-362, in Miami, Florida. Google Maps shows the location as a nondescript tract of industrial warehouses. Multiple searches for the Minerva group cite Adam Starchild as director and president, with one Javier E. Castano as vice president.
An online obituary shows Starchild to have passed away from tumor complications on September 20, 2006, and indeed most of his trademarks are listed as having been abandoned, with the notation of “DEAD” having been input by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for cause.
Castano remains listed with the company, yet other searches for Starchild list Castano as an alias for him. In fact, an obituary for Javier E. Castano says he died three years before Starchild. I contemplate whether Starchild could have faked his death again and be living under another assumed identity.
Not surprisingly, Starchild’s obituary notes him as having been a member of MENSA, an organization whose entry is reserved for those with the highest two percent of IQs in the world. I confirm Starchild’s membership with the MENSA organization and realize that Starchild, man of mystery, was no doubt brighter than every 1970s cop in Detroit, brighter than the Frank Sheldens of the world, and possibly brighter than anybody Starchild himself ever laid eyes on.
LEMANS
The snow was heavy and freshly fallen at the Kristine Mihelich drop site on Bruce Lane. The dead-end turnaround was banked with new buildup over the plow-pushed edges of the street. The vehicle that had been used to drop Kristine had backed into a snowbank before pulling away and left a rear bumper impression, which was identifiable as belonging to a 1973 Pontiac LeMans, Pontiac Tempest, or Buick Skylark—all of which looked nearly identical—with a damaged driver’s-side back end and a crooked trailer hitch.
The ghost of this damaged vehicle continues to haunt insiders to the case. Contrary to the blue Gremlin, a Pontiac or Buick is the last thing anybody in the public thinks about when they recollect the Oakland County Child Killings; like nearly every other detail of relevance, it had been redacted from the official storyline.
The ghost vehicle was not just at Kristine Mihelich’s drop site, either. A motorist identified a Pontiac LeMans or Tempest with driver’s-side rear damage as a vehicle seen creeping along the shoulder of I-75 in the predawn hour just before Jill Robinson’s body was found there. A witness places yet another LeMans at the Timothy King parking lot abduction site, stating that a suspicious-looking “older man” sat in the driver’s side of the vehicle while a “young man” was outside talking to a boy with an orange skateboard: Timothy King. This would corroborate Chris King’s conviction that the blue Gremlin wasn’t the abduction vehicle because it was still in the parking lot in the hours after Timothy’s abduction.
As well, evidence collected from the Mark
Stebbins drop site is catalogued to include what investigators labeled “Pontiac debris.” We do not know how long the rear damage to the Pontiac had existed before leaving its imprint at the Kristine site, but if this is indeed the same vehicle used in at least one stage of the crimes, either the abduction or the drop of the OCCK kids, then we can speculate that its damage occurred as it backed into the brick wall where Mark Stebbins was dumped, leaving behind the collected debris. It would have been in a hurry to dump the body, slamming into the wall.
A witness places a Pontiac in the parking lot where Mark Stebbins was found that same morning.
RETIRED POLICE LIEUTENANT Jack Kalbfleisch from the original investigation, who spends his time helping out the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has kept a file on the circumstantial and physical Pontiac evidence these thirty-five years and is convinced that it should have been a major focus of the investigation, both internally and publicly.
At Ray Anger’s request in 2005, Kalbfleisch turned over his personal work on the case to supposedly help the investigation. The file contained multiple theories about the Pontiac and backed them with solid police work. Kalbfleisch waited patiently to learn Anger’s thoughts about the file but never heard back. He sent several follow-ups via email but received no response.
IN APRIL OF 1977, the Timothy King parking lot witness was hypnotized by the FBI and recalled seeing Tim skateboarding on the evening of his abduction. This recall helped the FBI nail down composite sketches of the “older man” and “young man” associated with the LeMans in the parking lot. The sketches of the men were never released publicly and are redacted from the FOIA documents, but their existence supports at least one theory of multiple perpetrators that was never disseminated to the press.
The Kill Jar Page 19