I am literally shaking with fear, rage, and horror right now. I suspect you will be, too, after reading this post.
As a child growing up in the ghetto, I was terrorized by the thought that The Oakland County Child Killer aka “The Babysitter” would rape, feed, bathe, kill me and then dump my body at the side of the road. I wasn’t making up that irrational fear–that’s exactly what The Oakland County Child Killer did to each of his victims, Mark Stebbins, Kristine Mihelich, Jill Robinson and Timothy King.
According to Wikipedia, on February 15, 1976, Mark Stebbins left the American Legion Hall, telling his mother he was going home to watch television. Police believe Mark was held captive for four days. His body was later found in a snow bank near an office building on February 19, 1976. Mark was fully clothed; he had been sexually assaulted with an object and strangled. He also had rope marks around his wrists.
Jill Robinson, 12, of Royal Oak, packed a backpack and ran away from her home on Wednesday, December 22, 1976, following an argument with her mother over dinner preparations. The day after her disappearance, her bicycle was found behind a hobby store on Main Street in that city. Her body was found on the morning of December 26, along the side of I-75 Big Beaver Road in Troy. She was killed by a single shotgun blast to the face. She was fully clothed and still wearing her backpack. The body was placed within sight of the Troy police station, once again, laid out neatly in the snow.
Kristine Mihelich, 10, of Berkley, was last seen Sunday, January 2, 1977 at 3:00 p.m. at a 7-Eleven store on Twelve Mile Road at Oakshire in Berkley, purchasing a magazine. A mail carrier spotted her fully clothed body 19 days later on the side of a rural road in Franklin Village. She had been smothered. The body was laid within view of nearby homes, eyes closed and arms folded across the chest, once again in the snow.
Timothy King, 11, borrowed 30 cents from his older sister and left his home in Birmingham, skateboard in hand, to buy candy at a drugstore on nearby Maple Road on Wednesday, March 16, 1977, at about 8:30 p.m. He left the store by the rear entrance, which opened to a parking lot shared with a supermarket, and vanished. In the late evening hours of March 22, 1977, two teenagers in a car spotted his body in a shallow ditch alongside Gill Road, about 300 feet south of Eight Mile Road in Livonia, just across the county line in Wayne County. His prized skateboard was placed next to his body. His clothing had been neatly pressed and washed. He had been suffocated and sexually assaulted with an object. The postmortem showed that Timothy had eaten fried chicken before he was slain, the same meal his mother famously told reporters she hoped to serve him once he came home.
Back to my fears of getting attacked by the killer. I’ve always been afraid of violent people. I’ve been a victim of violence my entire life. I believe my own half-brother could be a serial killer. His father was a sociopath. Throw in a child serial killer on the loose and it’s no wonder I am who I am and I’ve become completely fascinated with all serial killers. Not only was my home life violent, but my neighborhood was a little rough, dark and scary.Someone once tried to kidnap my neighbor on Halloween after the killings of 1976-1977. Heck, some man even tried to kidnap me, when I was at the park around the block from my house, while I was playing on the swings by myself. My mom, ever the vigilant Bipolar, had seen a strange man in a car talking to me through a back window & before I could tell him to get lost, she was chasing him away with her car. It wasn’t an AMC Gremlin, but the whole thing was still pretty scary.
You can’t imagine the horror I felt this morning when I read about Michigan’s most-famous serial killer, who has never been identified … until now–well, sort of. I’m especially horrified because I have met a parent of one of the victims and I can’t get the look of that person’s sorrow out of my mind. I wonder what they are thinking about this morning. Plus, I even know someone (but know nothing, so don’t even bother asking) who has investigated this very cold case.
Christopher Busch, pictured above, died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head on Nov. 20, 1978. He was 27 years old.
Was Christopher Busch, convicted pedophile, Oakland County resident and the son of Harold Lee Busch (who worked as the executive financial director in the United States and Europe for General Motors) The Oakland County Child Killer? Attorney Barry King, also the father of Timothy King, believes so and my gut tells me that Christopher Busch did commit these murders, based upon what I’ve read this morning.
The worst part of this story is that the last child to be murdered, King’s son Timothy, age 11, didn’t have to die. Christopher Busch was in custody and released after (my guess) passing a lie detector test. I hope you all know that people can pass them, even when people are lying. I wonder what the former Oakland County Prosecutor (at the time of these murders), L. Brooks Patterson, will be thinking this morning when he reads the latest news about “The Babysitter.” Will Patterson wonder if his own son died young because he couldn’t prevent the death of Timothy King?
The following story was written by Marney Rich Keenan and published by The Detroit News. It is so interesting, rather than recap it, I’m including it in full in this post.
For the last 33 years, Barry King and his family have sought to learn who killed his 11-year-old son in 1977, one of four children who were abducted and murdered in the mid-1970s in Oakland County.
For the past three years, King was convinced that he knew the answer.
And today, following the recent court-ordered release of 3,400 pages of investigative records compiled by the Michigan State Police, King says it is clear to him that Christopher Busch, a pedophile who was convicted four times of rape with a minor, was involved in the killing of Timothy King.
“I am now more convinced than ever,” King said in an interview.
But the Michigan State Police, who head a task force investigation into the crimes, decline comment. They say the investigation is still active.
The documents were released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the King family against the State Police. A judge ordered the agency to release the investigative files. The agency has billed the King family $11,000 for the documents, though the court will ultimately decide what charges, if any, there will be.
The records reveal: Busch had been charged, and later convicted, four times in the first three months of 1977 with criminal sexual conduct with a minor in four counties: Oakland, Montmorency, Genesee and Midland. With each charge, Busch’s father, H. Lee Busch (a prominent General Motors executive) posted cash bonds to free his son. One of his victims said Busch’s mother drove to his Flint neighborhood in a limousine, offering him money if he agreed not to say anything to the police. Busch pleaded to a lesser charge and received probation in each of the four cases.
Other children molested by Busch and his companion Gregory Greene told the Oakland County Child Killings Task Force in 1977 that the two men would drive them around in their cars and would have them “lure kids closer to the car by talking to them.” One victim said he had been choked unconscious while being molested.
This victim also said he recognized photos of Timothy as being the same boy seen with Busch. He said he saw a Polaroid photo of Timothy tied up in Busch’s car.
In an Oakland County Child Killing Task Force interview about his pedophile activity, Busch is said to have listed the locations where he picked up and dropped off boys in the same chronological order that matched the abduction sites of the other three Oakland County children who were killed: Nine Mile and Woodward Avenue in Ferndale (the same location from which Mark Stebbins disappeared), 13 Mile and Woodward in Royal Oak (Jill Robinson was last seen near the Tiny Tim Hobby Center) and the 7-Eleven on 12 Mile in Berkley (where Kristine Mihelich went to purchase a teen magazine). Timothy had not yet been abducted.
On March 16, 1977, Timothy was kidnapped near a Birmingham drugstore and was found six days later alongside a road in Livonia. King said the records are proof that if Busch had been detained by police, his son might be alive today.
Busch questioned, released
Busch lived in Birmingham while the community was being terrorized by the rash of kidnappings and murders of the four children that began in February 1976 and ended with Timothy’s death on March 22, 1977. Each child’s body was clean, fully dressed and tossed by public roadsides. All were found in Oakland County except Timothy, who was found in Wayne County.
In late January 1977, Busch, then 27, was facing a rape charge in Flint and was questioned by Flint and task force investigators about the murder of Mark Stebbins, the first victim in the Oakland County child killings. According to the records, several investigators and then-Deputy Oakland County Prosecutor Dick Thompson thought Busch would be charged with the Stebbins murder, based on his criminal record and responses to investigators. But after a lie detector test was administered by Michigan State Police examiner Ralph Cabot, Busch was released.
Six weeks later, Timothy was abducted and murdered.
Busch committed suicide in November 1978. The State Police records reveal evidence left at the suicide scene that might have linked Busch to the killings was never pursued by law enforcement. The evidence included ropes and ligatures found on the floor of his bedroom closet and a drawing closely resembling first victim Mark Stebbins that hung on his bedroom wall.
“I still think it is possible there was a cover-up,” King said. “I also want to know why it took over 30 years for the Chris Busch lead to be uncovered.”
Michigan State Police Capt. Harold Love said he has no comment on the release of the records, adding: “We continue to work the case and pursue all leads.”
Reports reveal evidence.
Part of the reason King and his children said they are suspicious of the investigation is because the family, not law enforcement, was responsible for bringing the Busch lead to light. Timothy’s mother, Marion, died in 2004.
In 2006, former neighbor Patrick Coffey, a licensed polygrapher, called the Kings with information that Larry Wasser, a Southfield polygrapher, had confided to him that Busch had implicated himself in the child killings during a polygraph exam he conducted more than 30 years ago.
Armed with Busch’s name, Detective Sgt. Cory Williams of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office and Detective Sgt. Garry Gray of the Michigan State Police examined the State Police records, conducted their own investigation and uncovered the circumstantial evidence tying him and Greene to the killings.
Other findings in the State Police report: A tip was called into the Montmorency Sheriff’s Department while Busch was at his family cottage on Ess Lake near Hillman. A woman pleaded with police to go to the cottage, saying she had seen Busch — known to her as a pedophile out on bond — in town with minors. The call came on March 19, 1977, during the time Timothy was missing, which was between March 16 and March 22. There was no indication that law enforcement acted on the tip. A former cellmate of Greene’s told detectives Williams and Gray that Greene said “he got away with killing four kids in the past.” Greene died in prison of a heart attack in 1995. He was 45.
In early 2008, Williams enlisted three independent polygraph examiners to re-examine the original polygraphs of Busch and Greene that led to Busch’s release in the Stebbins investigation. Their findings are blocked out in the documents the King family received.
In April 2008, in an interview with the FBI in New York City, Charles Busch, Christopher Busch’s only living sibling, requested that as a condition for supplying his DNA, family members living in Michigan be allowed to enter a “witness protection-type program.” He also said that later in his life, his father, H. Lee Busch, who died at age 90 in 2002, shredded all of the family documents, including birth certificates.
Prosecutor refuses to talk
In light of this evidence, King said he feels some vindication in his pursuit of information but failure in his pursuit of justice. He said he wants to meet with Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, but she has refused to talk with him.
“The Michigan Constitution says that crime victims have a right to confer with the prosecutor,” King said.
“I will feel like justice has been served when the Oakland County prosecutor explains to me why Busch is not guilty. I am sick and tired of a four-time convicted sexual pedophile being treated better than my family and the families of Mark Stebbins, Kristine Mihelich and Jill Robinson.”
Cooper responded in an e-mail that she cannot comment because “there is an active, open and ongoing investigation that would be compromised by the release of any information regarding Christopher Busch.”
The King family also filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Oakland County prosecutor seeking its Busch-related files. Oakland County Circuit Judge Wendy Potts decided against the Kings, saying the prosecutor’s information on Busch was “sensitive,” and disclosure of the information could interfere with the investigation. However, the judge urged the prosecutor “to communicate as openly and freely as possible with Plaintiffs and other family members of the OCCK victims.”
When asked if he felt the documents were worth $11,000, King replied: “It was Tim’s college money.”
Are you just as chilled to the bone as I am, after reading all of this? I certainly hope so. And I hope that Christopher Busch will someday be identified as The Oakland County Child Killer.
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