When I reread the preface, I see one good reason why McIntyre’s book spins more like an anthem to the police instead of a hard-hitting investigation: The preface states that in 1984, then-retiring Michigan State Police captain Robert H. Robertson approached McIntyre with the idea for the book—not the other way around, with McIntyre seeking out his own subject. Robertson actually edited each chapter for “accuracy of fact and police procedure.”
That McIntyre, a well-respected beat writer of the era, appears to have flipped his position from reporter to conduit for police revisionism must be unintentional. I assume that, like the best of journalists, McIntyre fell sway to his sources, the manner of his reporting being less a product of negligence than naïveté at the time, the way a ten-year-old boy gets into a car whose driver he should have either run from or attacked at the scene.
However, I, too, may be a revisionist at heart. Have I not wanted to believe in motivations I’ve known nothing about? My father’s fists swinging into the drywall in those early years, the holes he left behind as detonations in my heart. But what those holes were to him I cannot know; the product of his frustration with the terms of his life, or maybe with his own mother, who I believe hurt him for years with her words?
What, then, will my own children say about me? How will they revise what I have said in these pages after decades have passed? Were there even holes in the walls of my childhood to begin with? Will my own children remember detonations of their own?
Have I hurt my father inordinately by prioritizing my happiness over his anger? My story over his pain? What do I owe his crimes? Discovery? Retribution? How often can the book be written, and rewritten?
MURDER-SUICIDE
With police from cities in both Wayne and Oakland Counties actively involved in the original investigative months of the OCCK, the Michigan State Police was compelled to step in and oversee the proceedings almost from the beginning. While the task force comprised members from multiple jurisdictions, the MSP was boss of the machine, with then lieutenant and soon-to-be captain Robert Robertson as kingpin utilizing his first-in-command, Detective Sergeant Joe Krease, six feet tall and lean but pointedly sturdy, to project manage.
Krease, with the MSP for fourteen years working multiple homicide investigations, was now in charge of the largest manhunt in Michigan history and the largest in the U.S. at the time. Whom they were looking for, Krease couldn’t know, but he was a methodical, streetwise cop with an even temper and a pleasant personality that often fooled the unsuspecting. Krease was the cop who would catch you just by sifting through the information and being around.
It’s hard to say how much of the information available to Krease during the OCCK years was pre-sifted and culled before reaching him, but it’s important to understand how interwoven Detroit and its environs are. The suburbs might have appeared flashy when compared to the more dismal-seeming streets of Detroit, but the inner-city power structure, the political suits downtown, had far-reaching tentacles. While the MSP ran the business end of the investigation, Detroit was its quiet investor.
Although Richard Lawson, for example, was immediately a person of interest to the task force, it is easy to see how being on the city of Detroit’s payroll as an informant might have precluded him from more than cursory inquiry. Like Christopher Busch, another untouchable man, Lawson had been vouched for.
The reach of Detroit was inbred at times. Oakland County’s sheriff and undersheriff, Johannes Spreen and John Nichols, respectively, had each been Detroit police commissioners prior to working the OCCK case. Nichols had been commissioner during the 1967 riots that tore the city apart. Spreen began as commissioner a year later, remaining in that capacity until 1970. Both men had cut their teeth on a city in the throes of chaos. With regard to the Oakland County Child Killer case, Spreen and Nichols would have known too much about Detroit to push too deep, against the Lawson lead, against the underbelly of the Cass, against the foundations like the Yondotega Club and its underwriting of the privileged. The two prior police commissioners would have known enough to know less, even when they knew more.
Krease, even with financial resources never before allocated to such a degree for one case, was isolated in his hunt; the long arm of the law was the short end of the stick for Krease, and an apparently good cop’s emotional investment in the case went unrequited. That feeling of isolation must have lasted. In 1992, fourteen years after the OCCK Task Force officially shut down, Joe Krease got into an argument with his girlfriend in the parking lot of their apartment complex and shot her through the window of her car as she was trying to drive away.
Neighbors had heard them screaming at one another just prior to that, then watched from their apartment as Krease pulled his gun. The glass on his girlfriend’s vehicle shattered, and they knew she’d been killed.
Then Krease put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger again.
The operations leader of the largest criminal case in Michigan’s history went down in a crime of passion, murder-suicide in broad daylight, with witnesses.
I’m out, he must have thought. I’m getting the fuck out.
THE PROFILER
In 1977, while the task force was still engaged with its hunt, a national search for criminal profilers beyond the MSP’s own experienced detectives began. Dr. Nicholas Groth from the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons became a member of the profiling team. The profiler said:
The killer was intelligent but with no formal education.
I think, Greene.
The killer was not of a moneyed background or esteemed social standing.
Greene.
The killer was not in a position of authority in the workplace.
Greene.
The killer had a previous record of criminal activity for violence just beneath the degree of violence now being perpetrated by him.
Greene again. Greene, I think.
The profiler said the sex of the child was less relevant to the killer than the age of the child, since the killer’s preference was not homo or hetero based but age based in service to the avoidance of confrontation with adult sexuality. This also suggests Greene: Note his belief that he emotionally bonded with the young baseball player he’d molested.
Dr. Groth denoted that the cleansing of the bodies was in service to purification, although I know that the bodies were not cleansed but may have been sloppily wiped down, if that. The haphazardness of any cleaning suggests haste, which certainly can be seen as a rushed cleansing of the act of murder from the killer’s conscience. Read Greene in California, hurrying his victim to the hospital after a wave of remorse.
Dr. Groth said that while Mark Stebbins had been struck on the head, no violence other than sexual was inflicted upon his body, suggesting that the strike was unanticipated by the killer and had come only as a reaction in order to subdue. The same can be said about the shotgun blast to Jill Robinson. Think of Greene’s striking of the boy’s throat in California.
The profiler added the positioning of Mark’s and Kristine’s bodies to a list of things interpreted as ritualistic. Their final positioning was likely more utilitarian than that, however: They had been shoved into a small trunk for transport, resulting in rigor after several hours of driving. Remember Greene’s statements about “driving around with” the unconscious boy in California before dumping him? Timmy’s body positioning suggests minimal time in the trunk; Timmy was dumped facedown, suggesting haste. If not for an unknown event that caused the killer to drop Timmy sooner than he’d wished, Timmy would have been positioned more like Mark or Kristine had been. Jill Robinson’s shotgun blast to the face, as well as lack of fetal positioning, suggests the possibility that, while initially smothered, she may not have been dead prior to transport and therefore no rigor had set in.
The profiler stated that the killer’s “fair” treatment of the children while in captivity suggested his longing for affection and validation. This again calls to mind Greene’
s statements about seeing himself as a father figure to the boy in California.
What can we assume, then, about why neither city nor county nor state police pursued the Greene leads in light of mounting circumstantial evidence, his admission to hundreds of similar crimes, confessional evidence to his knowledge of at least the Stebbins murder, and a fitting psychological profile?
The only real assumption to make is that competent police from all jurisdictions did follow the Greene lead more closely and would have eventually charged him with the OCCK murders if those charges would not have eventually forced them to charge Christopher Busch as well.
It would have been impossible to publicly take down one for the OCCK without taking down the other as a conspirator, as Busch and Greene were virtually joined at the hip in the commission of the crimes.
In short, Greene wasn’t charged because Busch was involved.
I AM, TOO
My sister appears on my Facebook wall, commenting on photographs. She tells me she loves me in emailed messages. The syntax is hurried but heartfelt and crisp with affection.
She says, “I am glad you’re my brother. I am glad we’re talking again.”
She’s referring to the bounce back from that silence we’d both nurtured well into our thirties, a couple of decades when the pain of our family was too much to triumph over—years that were lean in happiness for her and that had found me cored-out by depression and alcoholism.
She calls me at five a.m. and leaves messages that I can follow, whereas I couldn’t years ago, when they were full of desperation instead of the delight of today in them. When I call her back it goes to voice mail, but these days at least I know she’ll be listening.
I don’t know if she’ll be happy forever, but she is happy today, and I can more or less predict that she’ll be happy in the immediate tomorrow.
This is my sister thirty-five years ago: her long brown hair running down into legs that build to a spring across our drying lawn in midsummer, her cheeks flushing red in anger, over what I can’t remember—over the fury of awakening in a war zone, maybe—the sunlight on her face like a lashing of napalm.
And this is my sister now, thirty-five years later: her voice mails like a hand reaching for my own, saying Come with me and Help me, too, speaking the language of a girl who would give her brother thirty cents to buy candy, who would beg his forgiveness for a world she couldn’t protect him from and didn’t herself yet know existed.
When I finally get my sister on the phone, I’m parked outside a coffee shop at the foot of the mountains, and there’s snow on the highest peaks and fog beneath them, and after a while she says, “So, did you solve the case?”
My cell phone is hot in my hand, and I am thinking about how fucking young we were so long ago and how everything in my sister’s life was still before her and how some of it could still be when I say, “I think so,” and then I say, “But maybe it doesn’t matter, I guess.”
“Yes it does,” she tells me.
I can hear her crying over the phone but I think she’s maybe smiling through it when she says, “I’m glad I got to see you.”
I tell her, “I know you are. I am, too.”
WHAT IF THAT FUCKER IS CLEAN?
In August of 1999, some twenty-two years after the killings stopped, Detective Ray Anger traveled to Wyoming to take part in the exhumation of bone, hair, and tissue samples from the grave of David Norberg, the former autoworker from Detroit who’d moved west with his wife and young daughter after being questioned early on about the killings, then died in a car crash in 1981.
Three different tips had come in on Norberg before he moved, based on multiple accusations of sexual advances toward children, but he was cleared of involvement in the OCCK murders after his wife provided multiple alibis. Of lingering interest was Norberg’s possession in 1977 of a silver cross with “Kristine” etched into it, although Norberg himself had no publicly known relation to anyone of that name. The necklace, when shown to Mihelich’s family, proved not to belong to their Kristine. It was circumstantial, if odd.
Long after his death, Norberg’s wife recanted those earlier alibis and professed her belief that Norberg was the Oakland County Child Killer.
In 1999, Ray Anger and the Oakland County medical examiner traveled to Wyoming, collected Norberg’s DNA, and ran it against a pubic hair found on Timothy King. They attempted a mitochondrial match using the same technology that would eventually be used to match the Gunnels and Sloan hairs, although Anger and his representatives left Wyoming without the match they’d been hoping for.
“Now we keep hunting,” Anger said to the press. Reflecting on comments he’d reportedly made to Mark Stebbins’s mother prior to her death, he added, “I told her, I can’t promise I’ll ever solve [the case], but I can promise I won’t ever stop trying.”
I do not know if Ray Anger is among the most sensitive of his brethren in the police or among the most troubling. There remains the possibility that, as relates to the OCCK, Ray Anger is both. It can certainly be said that, just as Christopher Busch remains the fulcrum on the dead end of things, Ray Anger remained at the center of my notes on the living.
I keep coming back to Cathy’s texts—That fucker is dirty—but what if, at the end of the day, and surprisingly so, Ray Anger is clean?
BUNDLED
In contrast to Gregory Greene’s chipped-paint, blue-collar childhood home, the Busch family compound at 3310 Morningview Terrace in Bloomfield Hills was a six-thousand-square-foot, redbrick-and-stone, 1950s-era manor squatting on upwards of an acre of manicured lawn with a sweeping driveway that bisected the lawn and led to a well-kept, columned porch.
On November 20, 1978, the temperature was approximately 30 degrees Fahrenheit at nine a.m., frigid for autumn. The lawn would have been crisped-over and white from the overnight freezing of dew when Charles Busch, the eldest son, arrived with an officer in tow to check on his younger brother after the housekeeper couldn’t enter the house.
The officer broke out a window to gain entry. Upstairs in the bedroom where Christopher Busch lay, nothing seemed right. The body was wrapped tightly in a blanket, there was no blood anywhere, and the officer implied that the room felt almost staged, complete with ligatures, shotgun shells of the same caliber used to blow Kristine away, and a pencil drawing of one of the dead boys that’d been missing at first, although he later claimed not to believe in the actual staging theory.
Four hours later, at 1:00 p.m., an autopsy was performed by the Oakland County medical examiner, Dr. Robert Sillery. Christopher Busch’s blood-alcohol level was a prodigious 0.41 percent, the result of drinking combined with postmortem fermentation. He had been dead for at least a couple of days, Sillery said. A greater toxicology screen was done, with no indication of poisoning prior to the gunshot wound between his eyes.
By the end of the afternoon, Sillery had labeled Christopher Busch’s death a suicide, although—factoring in the minimal evidence obtained by Sillery at the autopsy, the positioning of Busch’s body, the lack of residue and blood spatter, and the absence of a suicide note—it would be impossible to reasonably conclude that the reported gunshot wound was self-inflicted.
Two years later, Sillery was investigated by the attorney general’s office for providing fraudulent autopsy results in an unrelated case. He was suspected of bribe taking and gross incompetence. He was eventually suspended from practicing medicine.
CHRISTOPHER BUSCH HAD been tucked tightly into his blanket. His hands had no access to the trigger of a rifle held firmly to his forehead, so he’d either been shot in the head while sleeping like that—shot in the head while either sleeping differently or awake and then bundled up afterward for a failed attempt to transport him (he was heavy!)—or carried into the home postmortem via the garage and dropped onto his bed.
Regardless, Christopher Busch and the circumstantial treasures within his room had been intentionally left for discovery.
At the time of Busch’s death,
Gregory Greene was already imprisoned and would be serving life. Even if not publicly revealed as the Oakland County Child Killer, Greene would die behind bars and maybe that was good enough for those in the know.
Busch, however, had been a loose end, until his death.
Cathy Broad had been adamant that the PD was stonewalling the families to hide the incompetence of their original investigators, and I’d agreed—but wasn’t it possible that they’d been protecting something else completely, maybe having bundled loose ends in their own special way?
Who did kill Christopher Busch, after all?
Dirty and clean—in a politically complicated world, sometimes the two can be very much alike.
LITTLE MONSTER
I am accustomed, by now, to losing everything I gain. Even out here in Idaho, I remain a product of Detroit inside, set out to rust beside the river. Through the surrender of fall to winter this year, I have receded into isolation.
But I can no more continue to accept the gradual icing-over of streets in the neighborhood outside my window than I can bear the solitude of my anger, whose winters seem never-ending. The way I will win, if there is victory at all, will not be via a blood fighting of my father, of the crimes against the children of Detroit, of my station in the past—haunting me still—or of even the details in the whitewashing of the OCCK murders, but via, as all truths are pulled from war, the stamina of my compassion on the battlefield.
Or that’s what I have been told in therapy, anyway, during the past six court-ordered sessions that have dog-eared the changing of the seasons for me after the beginnings of a custody battle over my son. In therapy, I am told to be cautious of the tendency of a sense of moral superiority to cloud understanding, and to accept that true knowledge exists only through compassion for the imperfect. How this affects my hunt through the OCCK terrain is no doubt as substantially esoteric as engaging with these rules in my personal life.
The Kill Jar Page 21