Also, upon inspection of Kristine’s body, investigators decided that Kristine’s killer had redressed her. She was found with her blouse tied in front and not in back, the way her parents said she usually tied it. Her pants were tucked into her boots, something her parents said she never did, but something her killer might have frequently done with his other victims, police believed. This might have been part of a signature, as if the killer were wrapping up his victims for discovery. Even though Kristine had been away from home for over 19 days, her clothes were neat and clean, which meant that she had been physically cared for by her captor.
The police response to the three child murders was to organize a meeting of officers among the local and state police agencies to consider setting up a task force. This was an unprecedented move by the Oakland County Homicide Department, but was necessary since the frightened community was up in arms. At this meeting, the problem of handling duplicate leads was discussed and resolved by a then-revolutionary plan to track those leads by computer. It was only 1977 and the use of personal computers had not yet become a common practice.
Timothy King
By now, as he was telling me his story, Captain Robertson’s voice was quivering with emotion. His frustration at not catching the child killer really affected him, drawing him closer to the line that divides the stone-cold resolution of a professional from the burning desire for personal revenge. Captain Robertson continued his story. He told me next of the disappearance of the fourth victim in the series, Timothy King, a slender and attractive 11-year-old boy who lived in Birmingham, Michigan, who was last seen on March 16, 1977. It was almost as though the killer wanted to tangle directly with the investigators, Robertson said, because the child was abducted in the face of the police dragnet for the killer of Kristine Mihelich. Most killers would have laid low until the intensity of the police search subsided. But this killer wanted to show the police that even while they were fully mobilized, he could snatch a child right off the street. King was last seen by his older sister at
7:40 P.M. when she gave him 30 cents to spend on candy at a nearby store. When he went out, Tim asked his sister to leave the front door ajar so he could get back in, since she was leaving to see a show with her friends. When his parents returned home at nine P.M., they found the door ajar and the house empty.
The family’s search for Tim was fruitless. His parents canvassed the neighborhood, telephoned friends, and then reported Tim’s disappearance to the Birmingham Police Department. By 9:15 the next morning, the small task force working the three previous murders knew that Tim King was missing’the Birmingham police chief requested their help in pursuing many incoming leads. They obliged and had set up their headquarters in Birmingham by the afternoon of March 17.
A saleswoman at the drugstore where Tim was supposed to buy candy described to the detectives a boy who resembled Tim. She had seen him the night he disappeared. However, the most important break for Michigan police was the account of a witness who had seen Tim at about 8:30 P.M. on the night he disappeared. A woman who had been loading her groceries into her car in the parking lot also used by patrons of the drugstore observed a small boy talking to a man standing by a car about two car lengths away from her car. The boy was wearing a red jacket with emblems on it, which resembled Tim’s red nylon Birmingham Hockey Association jacket. The woman was able to provide enough details about the man’s face so that a police artist could produce a composite sketch of him. She described his car as well. It was a dark blue Gremlin with a white, sweeping stripe, called a “hockey stick” stripe, along its side. This woman’s description of the man and his car was a valuable set of leads for the police. It became their central focus. For the first time, the police had a possible suspect, and they immediately covered the neighborhood, trying to locate someone who could recognize the description and name the man.
Again, however, in a move of sick bravado, the killer openly displayed Timothy King’s body in a ditch in Livonia, Michigan, six days after his disappearance. A person passing by saw the body and reported it to the police. At the time of his discovery, Timothy was wearing his red nylon jacket with a Birmingham Hockey Association crest, a denim shirt, green trousers, and white tennis shoes with blue and red stripes. This was the same clothing he had been wearing when he left for the store. Timothy’s orange skateboard was found about 10 feet from his body. Police concluded that Timothy King had been smothered to death about six to eight hours before his body was found, and investigators determined that the boy was placed in the ditch about three hours before discovery. This would mean, as with the other children, that the killer had kept King’s body at another location for several hours before dumping it. The autopsy revealed that King had eaten a meal that included fowl about an hour before death. His body was very clean, including his usually dirty fingernails and toenails. Although the bindings were not present, Timothy’s wrists were marked as if he had been bound for a period of time. There was evidence of sexual assault in the form of a distended and penetrated anus.
The four murders were similar in nature, which suggested to Robertson that they might have been committed by a single killer or small group of killers who operated like a predatory wolf pack. The reasons for his belief were clear and simple. First of all, the victims were all alone when abducted from or near parking lots adjacent to business areas where they were last seen. Two victims were abducted on a Sunday afternoon and two on Wednesday evening. These were clean, almost seamless abductions with none of the signals of turbulence or violence that might alert anyone passing by that a child was being taken against his or her will. Each child was held captive for from 3 to 19 days before death. They were well nourished, well cared for, and kept clean during the days preceding their deaths. Their bodies were not subjected to extreme weather or exposure before or after death. Authorities concluded that the children had adequate toilet facilities because there was no evidence that they had fouled themselves with urine or excrement. The children seemed to have been cleansed after their death, and Tim King’s body appeared to be clinically sterile. The killer’s ritual included neatly dressing the children just before or after death. All of their remains were found alongside roadways, openly displayed to ensure discovery. There was no evidence of sexual assault on either one of the girls, but both boys showed obvious anal assault.
However, there were some clear differences in the murders that disturbed the investigators and made them doubt they were firmly connected. For example, a shotgun was used to kill Jill Robinson. The killer risked attracting attention with a noisy shotgun blast. The shotgun was not used on the other three, who were smothered, possibly by holding something over their mouths and noses. Therefore, one widely promoted theory was that the Robinson murder was not related to the other three murders. I took this to be a premature assumption because it relied on a belief in “the exact modus operandi” theory that police often use to connect cases. This is a wrongheaded theory because, as Ted Bundy and Wayne Williams so clearly demonstrated, serial killers often change their modi operandi during a skein of killings for a variety of reasons, one of which is to throw investigators off the track. When the most obvious elements of a signature are present—similar victim profile, similar handling of the bodies before and after death, similar or identical patterns of body discovery—police should assume that they are looking at the signature of the same killer. In other words, police have to be inclusive when they look for evidence of a serial killer, not exclusive.
Many investigators believed that the timing was inconsistent and that there were too many unexplainable gaps between murders for the children to have been killed by one person. The Stebbins boy was killed in February 1976, the next suspected victim was murdered 10 months later at the end of December 1976, and another child was found dead 3 months later, in March 1977. Also, the time the killer kept the children in captivity exhibited a lack of consistency, ranging from 3½ to 4 to 6 and then to 19 days. But Robertson reasoned that maybe the killer
’s inconsistency was a premeditated effort to not form a definite pattern that could be detected by authorities. The clever killer didn’t want the police waiting for him when he dumped his next victim. But there could have been other reasons that had more to do with what the killer used the children for than with the killer’s plan to outsmart authorities. What if the children were used to pose for pornographic photos or films? What if the killer took them out of the area and then returned to kill them? What if these murders were part of a national pattern that was so broad, no one noticed it back in the 1970s? If these were some of the killer’s ploys, they were successful, because the murderer was never caught and whatever larger conspiracies might have existed are still unknown.
Other Michigan Child Murders: The Same Killer?
As Michigan investigators tried to crack these crimes, they were faced with two major questions. Was the Stebbins murder the beginning of the series? And had the murderer struck in other locations, either inside or outside the Oakland Corridor? There were three additional murders of juveniles along the Oakland Corridor during the same time period. Was the same killer responsible for these, too?
Cynthia Cadieux
In the early morning hours of January 16, 1976, the nude body of 16-year-old Cynthia Cadieux was found by the side of the road in Bloomfield Township. She suffered from a fractured skull caused by impact from a blunt object. Cynthia had been sexually assaulted and sodomized. Cadieux was last seen on January 15 at about 8:30 P.M. in Roseville, Michigan, her hometown. Informants heavily influenced the police investigation, since the only information police developed was speculation from those sources that she had been abducted, raped, and murdered by four hoodlums. Supposedly, third- and fourth-hand information revealed that her clothing was once in the possession of one of the slayer’s girlfriends. Her clothing has never been located, and none of the information originally given to police about the four hoodlums could be confirmed by the original source when investigators looked into the case again later.
Sheila Srock
The murder of Sheila Srock, a heavyset 14-year-old, was also never officially linked to the Michigan child murders. Srock was babysitting at a house in an affluent community in the north end of the Oakland Corridor on the night of January 19, 1976. Much to the horror of a neighbor who was shoveling snow and watching from a nearby roof, an assailant sadistically raped and sodomized Srock. With brutal finality, he executed her with a rapid-fire barrage of gunshots from his small-caliber semiautomatic pistol. The neighbor described the killer as a thin, white male, 18 to 25 years old, 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall, with a sparse beard, prominent nose, and pointed chin. This was a slightly different description than the police had received for the abductor of Timothy King.
After murdering Srock, the killer stole a .38 revolver, some jewelry, and some other loot. Following his burglary-murder, the intruder mingled with the crowd that assembled after hearing the shots. Like a curious observer, the slayer calmly asked several people what was happening, listened to their responses, and then got into his 1967 Cadillac parked nearby, and drove away. Though investigators had a clear description of the assailant and his car, they were never able to solve Srock’s murder.
Jane Allan
Not wanting to rule out any possibilities, Robertson cautiously included the murder of Jane Allan on the list of those deaths loosely linked to the four child murders he was investigating. To other homicide investigators, the linkage of Allan by members of the news media to the series of crimes was erroneous. Allan, a 14-year-old frequent hitchhiker, was last seen on August 7, 1976. That afternoon, she hitchhiked from her Royal Oak home to see her boyfriend in Auburn Heights, Michigan. He scolded her for hitchhiking, after which she left his home. Four days later, her decomposed body was found floating in the Miami River. The coroner believed that she was dead before she was dumped in the river near Miamisburg, Ohio. Owing to her state of decomposition, it was impossible to tell if she had been assaulted, but it was noted that she died possibly from carbon monoxide poisoning. A river disposal was thought by police to be too different a modus operandi for this killing to be included in the series of murders of young children. Another difference between this and the other cases was that the victim’s hands had been bound behind her back with pieces of a white T-shirt.
Police informants linked Allan with the Dayton Outlaws motorcycle gang. However, the police had no evidence that connected her killing to the outlaw gang. Even though there was proof of Allan’s association with the gang, police still openly theorized that she was picked up hitchhiking.
The murders of Cadieux, Srock, and Allan remained unsolved and were not conclusively linked by investigators to the series of child murders. The existence of those three murders in the midst of the child murders series exemplified the problems that investigators will always have when trying to determine which murders to include in a series. These three deaths were reasonably close in proximity and time and possessed somewhat similar characteristics in modus operandi to the other child murders, yet they were different. Robertson knew the question of whether they should have been included in the series would be second-guessed until the murders were solved. The fact that Robertson didn’t arbitrarily rule out any murder was just another reason for me to admire him as an investigator.
The police authorities reacted to and investigated the Michigan child murders in a very predictable manner. Not unlike the Ted investigation, a small task force was formed initially to investigate the first two murders that officially were linked as a series. They were totally unaware of the enormity of the investigations to come. But unlike the Ted cases, over 200 detectives eventually worked on the four murders as more and more leads piled up. The Timothy King case brought forth the first potential suspect information from a witness who observed King talking with the suspected killer. The description of the man and his car was widely publicized and resulted in the accumulation of over 11,000 tips. Just like the Ted Murders Task Force, the Michigan Child Murders Task Force members were forced to create a tip sheet of their own. To handle all the incoming information, they stored the tips in a computer. Computer database programs enabled investigators to improve handling procedures, prevent duplication of effort, and provide for clear and organized recordkeeping. Strangely enough, most serial killer investigations that I have reviewed had adopted, out of necessity and without the knowledge of what was done in any other similar investigation, some form of lead, tip, or clue sheet to handle the mountains of incoming leads. By using the tip sheet, investigative supervisors could better evaluate and prioritize what was crucial to investigate immediately.
In keeping with their trailblazing nature, Michigan’s police authorities were the first serial murder force to apply for federal assistance in the form of a $600,000 grant from the now-defunct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The grant money was needed to cover a steadily increasing heavy burden on the budgets of many police departments. The only string attached to the grant was that the police force that received it would have to continue funding the task force so they could continue to search for the killer. Altruistically, the grantor and Robert Heck, program manager and VICAP committee chairman, performed a retrospective analysis into the investigative activities of the Michigan experience that he hoped would serve as a guide and be a benefit to future serial-murder investigative efforts. That formal evaluation process remains unique to the Michigan child murders case. Unfortunately, previous serial-murder investigations were buried like their victims, because they were too frustrating, stressful, and embarrassingly inept for investigators and members of their departments to participate in a meaningful critique of their work. Most supervisors of those cases would just as soon have forgotten what went on in the past, even though clues from those investigations could help solve future serial-murder cases.
Similar to the beliefs of investigators on the Atlanta Child Murders Task Force, Captain Robertson was convinced that the Michigan Child Killer was right in front
of their noses all along, that they had probably even talked to him. In his sadder moments during our conversation that night, Captain Robertson said that he fantasized that the killer probably laughed to himself in the shadows as the Michigan Child Murders Task Force’s own life expired.
As our conversation came to an end, the darkened lounge emptied out, leaving us alone with our mutual frustrations, brought on by unresolved serial-murder investigations. We were thankful that at times, the roaring laughter from police officers across the room responding to one war story after another had interrupted us during the evening. But what happiness there was around us disappeared when those people left the lounge. The preceding hours of discussion had left their mark on Robertson. I sensed his seriousness, stress, and intensity in his constantly changing body movements and his carefully chosen words. At least I knew who committed the Ted murders, even though Ted was still beyond my reach. Robertson hadn’t had the same kind of closure; the unsolved child murders wore heavily on him. Even with all his frustrations and the embarrassment of never catching the killer, he was clear in his resolve to air the problems confronted by the Michigan child murders investigation so that other dedicated investigators would not suffer similar experiences. In any serial-killer workshops, Robertson was the most vocal and strong-willed of any of the participants. When it appeared that the wheels of the federal bureaucracy were not moving fast enough toward establishing a serial-murder tracking program for him, he started one of his own in Michigan, independent of VICAP. He—and I, too—felt that those slow wheels meant more of our children murdered at the hands of serial killers.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 18