I was easily able to respond to the person who was in kid in 1977 and explain that the memory of police stating early and often that maybe the serial killer may be in a mental hospital or dead was accurate.  My brother and I had already discussed this at length in July, 2009, including the following print articles.

The Daily Tribune, March 22, 1978:  “[Krease, no. 2 on the MSP task force, who years down the road murdered his girlfriend and then offed himself] also says some persons believe the killer may be in a mental hospital committed there by wealthy family members. Perhaps someone knows about it, but feels that because he is being treated there’s no reason to come forward.”

Here’s another.  Article in the Birmingham Eccentric, June 15, 1978, discusses theories on why the killer hasn’t struck again:  “The killer is in a mental institution:  The theory is that the killer’s family had him committed and never notified authorities because they believed this would prevent him from killing again.”  

And again–Detroit News, December 11, 1978 (two weeks of so after Busch winds up dead in his bed, wrapped snug as a bug, at his parents’ house with an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound right between the eyes, the shot gun right next to him and not collected by the Bloomfield Township Police Department for at least a week after the death).  This article discusses how the task force will be reactivated if necessary and how this type of killer could have stopped killing.  The MSP task force commander, Robert Robertson, opined:  “If I had to pin it down, I would guess that he’s in an institution or that he’s dead.”  Robertson continued “but I wouldn’t bet 10 cents on it and I can’t support it.  Anything’s a possibility.”  The article stated that “what disturbs the 23-year State Police member most is the suspicion that his investigators never came close to the killer and the conviction that someone could help identify the man.  ‘Either someone has absolute direct knowledge or at least suspicions that a friend or relative is the killer, and has not come forward with it,’ Robertson said:  ‘If the right person would call us, hopefully he’d be caught before the day is out.'”

Related is a December 1977 article in People Magazine–“Others believe the man may be in a mental institution.  As one police detective points out, Timmy King’s body was dumped on Gill Road just a few miles from Northville State Hospital.  The killer had to travel down a badly torn-up section of Eight Mile Road to reach the Gill dump site–a route someone unfamiliar with the site would tend to avoid because of the construction.  The detective speculates that the killer knew the area well and might even be an outpatient at the hospital.”  Near the end of the article:  “The score is Killer–4, Police–0.  If it ends here, in all likelihood the Oakland County child killer will never be caught.  ‘Probably not,’ even Lt. Robertson admits.”

And, finally, the March, 16, 1980, article from The Detroit News I quoted from in a prior post.  

The task force still operates, but with only one Michigan State Police detective assigned full time to check out new tips coming in at the rate of 10 per week.  State Police Lt. Joe Koenig, who took over Jan. 1 as task force coordinator, is optimistic the killer can still be found.  ‘If the case is broken, it will be through some relatively new investigative technique like hypnosis,’ he said.  While emphasizing that the task force did ‘one helluva job,’ Koenig is seriously considering another review of ‘high-priority tips’ by a special group of retired police officers.  ‘We’re not being critical of the work already done,’ said Koenig.  ‘But maybe, just maybe, they overlooked something because of all the pressure.’  Koenig says he hasn’t ruled out the possibility that more than one person was involved in the killings.  Michigan State Police Capt. Robert Robertson, who headed the task force until a recent promotion, plays down the value of reexamining tips.  ‘We went over those tips so many times,’ said Robertson.  ‘I don’t think it will do any good, but they can dow what they want.’  . . . Why hasn’t the killer struck again?  Authorities admit that of the dozens of theories, one is as good as another.  But Koenig has a new theory–a long shot, he admits, to what happened to the killer.  ‘What if the killer is from a very wealthy family,’ he said.  ‘Suppose the parents discover their son is the killer and send him off to Europe for psychiatric treatment.  The family name is spared, their son is receiving treatment, and they are sure no one else will be killed.  They can live with that.’

Captain Robertson adds that he feels the killer was somehow “taken from us” either through death or imprisonment.  

Busch dies 19 months after my brother’s murder.  I do not think for one second this guy offed himself.  It was an execution, and if he had nothing to do with the OCCK crimes, he certainly had made many enemies because he raped and sexually abused many boys over a number of years.  Plenty of people had to have been in line to aim the shotgun right between his eyes and pull the trigger, something this freak would not have been able to pull of and then end up wrapped snuggly in his covers, on his side, with the gun neatly off to his side.  No gun powder residue on his hands and his little piggies were wrapped tightly in the bed covers and clearly not used to pull the trigger.  The Oakland County ME didn’t even check out the guy’s toes anyway in his Reader’s Digest version of an autopsy protocol.  So where was Busch stashed between his arrest in Flint on CSC 1st Degree charges and the fall of 1978 when he turns up as a food service manager at some assisted living place in Southfield, MI?  He was showing up for various court appearances around the state on other CSC charges involving other minors.  

Hmm.  Taken from us via mental institution or death.  Again, where is the “we will never rest until we solve this vicious crime against innocent children who were kept alive for days, tortured, raped  and dumped on roadsides for all to see?”  Yeah, it was more like–“Sigh; we would LIKE to see THIS bastard in jail.  Too bad, so sad.”  This series of statements was so bizarre it struck a child who heard this b.s. back in the day and never realized it would still bother him over three decades later.  

 

 

Quote from then-Birmingham Police Chief Jerry Tobin in June 1977.  This quote appeared on a website devoted to these crimes in July 2009.  My brother saw this on the website and sent it to me immediately.  What did I think of this quote from an article by Jane Briggs-Bunting in The Detroit Free Press?  I think I explained early on that over the years my Mom had saved many, many newspapers covering the murder of her youngest son.  We opened these boxes and combed through them after her death in September 2004.

I checked for this particular article, but did not have it.  But I sure as hell had others that echoed the same sentiment.  But this article, appearing on another website, was particularly interesting.  What follows are quotes from this and other news articles on the same subject, as well as the email exchanges with my bro.

Here’s what the website said:

Yes, many local police already knew in June 1977 that the chances of catching the OCCK were slim.  Birmingham Police Chief Jerry Tobin thought the answer was, even if we never solve the crime, ‘We can make the killer paranoid that everyone’s watching him  . . . and prevent him from killing another child.’  . . . ‘ The first question people ask me is, will the killer be caught and the second is, will he take another child?  . . . ‘Who in the hell knows?  I’d like to see this bastard in jail.  But if we never solve these murders, preventing another abduction would be our goal.’

From website, quoting article in The Detroit Free Press, June, 1977, by Jane Briggs-Bunting (no specific date given).

As my brother observed in an email dated July 27, 2009, “[t]his quote goes against the grain of every cop quote I have ever seen.  What happened to ‘We will never rest until we bring this vicious murderer to justice,’ and ‘We will do everything we can, but we may need the public’s help to solve this case’?  As my brother observed, this article was mid-summer.  “There was shit about the killings being only in the winter in the press at the time.  Why wasn’t the chief asking the public to remain vigilant?  Why wasn’t he urging people who might have guilty knowledge to come forward?  Instead, we get ‘who in the hell knows’ and ‘I’d like to see this bastard in jail.'”

On the one hand, Tobin’s quote reflects the belief that the chances that catching the killer were slim, but another way the quote makes sense is that he knew the case would never be solved, but he was pretty sure another abduction would not take place.  And before you send me an email about me being a conspiracy theorist, when LE and prosecutors handle a case this way, it leaves it open to all of this speculation.

My brother and I discussed the fact that we initially thought any possible cover-up of Busch’s involvement may have happened after his “suicide” in November 1978 (“shit, it couldn’t have been him–there was that polygraph clearing him–and, no matter, he’s dead”), but that it was possible old H. Lee Busch was able to say “We’ll put him in a mental hospital in Europe,” and keep it quiet that way.  Yeah, it’s just a possibility.  But shoddy police work has left open a lot of possibilities.

This scenario jibes with the statement made by an ex-Oakland County Sheriffs deputy to a friend of our family–which, as my brother observed, was not “It was some rich kid from Bloomfield HIlls, but he’s dead now,” it was something like “It was some rich kid from Bloomfield Hills, BUT WE COULDN’T TOUCH HIM.”  

My brother also observed:  “When it comes to conspiracy theories, the age-old question is always ‘ineptitude/laziness or cover-up.”  A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people for an illicit purpose.  This happens every goddamn day.  All you have to do to discredit a conspiracy is attach the word “theory” to it.  Turns people’s brains right off, but it shouldn’t.

As my brother also pointed out, “the ‘this bastard’ quote is interesting [if it’s accurate–we do not have this actual article].  Does the word ‘this’ possibly connote knowledge of a specific person?  If he didn’t know the identity of the suspect, would he be more likely to say ‘the bastard’?  Compare it to ‘this killer’/’the killer.’  Also, why the assumption it is just one person?”

And the construction I’d LIKE to see this bastard in jail?  That’s a weird construction for a cop, unless you count “I’d LIKE another doughnut.”  As my brother notes, Chief Tobin is already moving the goalposts, announcing that the goal is not bringing the murderer to justice, but “preventing another abduction.”  Why?  Is Tobin implicitly indicating that they don’t have jack shit and are totally clueless, or is the real reason that there is a cover-up in place–that they know damn well they’ll never bring the killer in (because H. Lee Busch will never allow that), but are rationalizing it all by saying that at least the abductions will stop?Or simply covering bases in case, as actually happened, Chris Busch bubbles to the surface and, they don’t know if he is or isn’t the killer, aren’t about to look into it further, but he smells really, really bad and they need to squelch any further inquiry?  So, so sick,

I remember feeling really bad for Tim’s classmates after I overheard my Mom talking to someone during the week Tim was missing.  She said she knew why my brothers didn’t want to sleep in their room–because Tim’s empty bed was a reminder of what was going on.  It was one big room and all three of them shared the room.  She also observed that Tim’s empty desk at school had to be hurting his classmates every minute.  

I knew everyone in Birmingham and all Oakland County suburbs was scared out of their minds.  Over the years–even when I lived in Idaho for more than two decades, I would occasionally run into someone who lived in Oakland County during that very dark time.  Someone who was parenting young kids at that time, or someone who was Tim’s age or younger.  Their memories always rattled me.  

I went to college five months after Tim was murdered and spent as little time back in B’ham after that as possible.  It still is hard for me to go to Michigan.  When I would drive back from college in Wisconsin and see the sign marking the cross into Oakland County, I would always mentally fill in “Child Killer” after Oakland County.  A friends’ mom said to me at one point “you don’t come around much.”  I felt like saying “ya think????!!,” but I didn’t.  Long way of saying I never saw the long term impact these crimes had on the community. 

I’m guessing family members of Mark, Jill and Kris might say the same thing, but I found that in spite of the support of friends, the experience was, in addition to being devastating, incredibly isolating.  My brothers and I used the phrase “Ground Zero” long, long before 9/11 to describe it.  All of B’ham, Ferndale, Berkley, Royal Oak and Livonia can be considered Ground Zero in many senses, but let me assure you that at the homes of these four kids, it was beyond words.  When a community is doing triage after something this heinous, the completely broken people can’t really be helped.  They are goners–move on. 

So I had no idea, but I should have, how this nightmare would affect kids growing up in Oakland County post-OCCK.  I feel privileged that some have them reached out to me.  It makes me realize we really were not alone.  At least 15 people have told me over the years how this crime impacted their parenting, long before this crap bubbled to the surface in  the past 6-7 years.  

Now to the point.  A reader who was eight or nine at the time Tim was murdered recently wrote:

“I seem to recall seeing a TV news story, perhaps in late 1978 or 1979, to the effect that police officials announced that they were either ending, or at least winding down, the OCCK investigation.  I can’t remember exactly.  I do remember it being probably about a couple years after Tim’s death (and for what it’s worth, I seem to recall that I saw it on Channel 7).  But what I remember more than anything else was that the police were quoted as stating that they believed that the killer–and this is virtually as direct a quote as I can provide 35 years later–that the killer ‘was either dead, or in a mental hospital.’  Again, I was very young when I saw this, but I remember it quite well, and more to the point–this may be the only instance of a case where the police publicly announced, not an arrest, but that they believed that the killer was dead or in a mental hospital.

This observation is remarkable, not only because of its substance, but because some poor kid was dialed in to this enough to pick up on what police were saying and remembers it to this day.  

This was something one of my brothers and I were talking about in late July, 2009.  I am going to quote extensively from the emails he and I exchanged on this observation police made repeatedly in the months and years after Tim was murdered.  

In October of 1978 (yes, pre-Chris Busch “suicide”) it was reported that the OCCK task force was due to run out of money by the end of the year and that it would be disbanded.  It was officially terminated in mid-December 1978.  The investigation would always be considered open, and all tips would be actively investigated, don’t you know.  But this guy’s memory is right on.  Although the task force was officially deep-sixed at the end of 1978, those quotes about the killer being dead or in a mental institution were repeated in 1980 when the MSP assigned one guy to babysit the OCCK case in the off-chance someone grew a conscience or the police connected the dots.  Emphasis on “off-chance.”  

More on the interesting newspaper quotes my brother and I found and discussed in July 27, 2009, in the next post.