I know law enforcement agencies and individuals often do not share critical information with each other in serious cases so s/he/they can be the person or agency credited with solving the crime. I know a lot of murder cases—serial and otherwise, are never solved. I know in cases where there is some interagency overlord and individual officers on the street are thwarted by this person/people at the top of the food chain, that a lot doesn’t get put together. I know individual officers in this case broke their backs then and now to try to solve this case. I know forensic science has advanced in ways never imagined over the past almost-forty years. I know—but you may not—that my family and I trusted in, deferred to, sympathized and complied with law enforcement at every turn for almost thirty years. From March 16, 1977 until late-October 2009. In the many months between November 2007 and October 2009, my Dad agreed to all of law enforcement’s requests for delays in meetings. Six weeks, six months—just sit tight, Mr. King—we promise w]e will have some answers for you. Dumb asses. All they needed to do was meet with him, look him in the eyes and tell them, in general terms, where they were and what they were doing. They were stonewalling and lying and that doesn’t go over big. Trust me, he would have settled for far less in the way of a response than I would have. And if he was happy, I would have been, too. Like I said—dumb asses. At an early-enough point they seriously could have told him—“Mr. King, appreciate where you are coming from, but we are working very hard on xyz lead and, because we don’t want to get your hopes up about something that is actually insignificant, when we come across something of substance, we will contact you.” These dumb asses have no idea how far into the LE camp he was. If he told us he was satisfied with the response, and it made any sense at all—we would have backed off.
But was there any kind of response, other than a version of “get lost?” No. MSP Captain Harold Love—you have a part in this, big guy. You walked my Dad through the DNA lab and did the “feel good” tour and then screwed him over. You know you did and we do, too. Don’t any of you do some kind of victim training on a regular basis? Bullshitting is ill-advised. If you only knew how long he defended you self-serving, heartless LE people; would feel some ounce of remorse.
Long way of saying—we all know LE often doesn’t share info in big cases; that LE takes advantage of families who are so stunned and messed-up that they are incapable of asking coherent questions or ask for help; that many crime scenes in America are not adequately processed and that suburban police departments should, but don’t, reach out to regional metropolitan police departments with more experience to ask for help.
My blog shows what happens when LE doesn’t share information: what happens when evidence is not stored correctly, whether or not you know what will or will not happen with forensic science down the road (can you say “evidence checked out for Post training,” anyone?); what happens when investigations leave every possible door open and no one can be ruled out or named as a suspect; what happens when someone close to the killer or killers suspects or knows what the deal is and doesn’t come forward; what happens when these people do come forward and police blow them off.
Do you seriously want something like this to happen again? No? Then don’t complain when people want to examine what the hell went wrong here that allowed four (or more) kids to be kidnapped, held captive and tortured, murdered, and the dumped on roadsides for all to see. Jesus. I don’t even know where to start when people defend the police here. No one is saying it was easy to solve these murders or that DNA was available back in the day. What I am saying is that an answer is owed, first and foremost, to these four kids and any other victim of these monsters, and that somebody better take a goddamn hard look in the rear view mirror to figure out how the fuck this investigation went so sideways, beginning after Mark Stebbins went missing in Ferndale in February 1976.
I can assure you that the siblings in the Stebbins, Robinson, Mihelich and King families grew up awfully fast after Mark, Jill, Kris and Tim were abducted. Don’t insult our intelligence by asking us to defer to blindly defer to law enforcement or to your opinion about what happened here. A lot of people lay claim to a piece of these crimes. Unless you are a parent, sibling, grandparent, cousin or close friend of one of these victims, you, luckily, don’t get it. Please don’t try to set us straight. We work on that every day on our own. I don’t know who killed these kids. I do know that LE should have treated us all with a lot more respect, that most of them are not doing shit in this case, and that no one will be the wiser until people very close to this case write books that will make the fictionalized versions look like cartoons.
I know law enforcement agencies and individuals often…
Kick the can down the road? Don’t do their jobs? Aren’t no Perry Masons? STILL don’t utilize forensics?
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013306040032
(Note the third paragraph and laugh or you’ll cry!)
Cry.
It was natural for your father to be on the side of LE. Generationally and professionally, that’s the way he believed it worked. So did I. Theoretically, that’s how it is supposed to work. LE represented HOPE. Well, those rose colored glassed are gone, removed from our faces, thrown to the ground and crushed by the dirty boots of those who made them.
Their farce of an investigation disgusts me.
Once again, bravo Cathy.
Yes I do understand because we are exactly in your shoes all the way stuck in mud never to get out. I know you get what I just said. My heart breaks for you because I can’t believe still after all these years you have no justice. My heart also breaks because we will be at the same place you are in 30 years too and like yours it is so unnecessary. May God be with us.
Jessie Kanehl
You know, I wouldn’t dismiss this Gremlin in this case. Not that I think this guy is a “serial killer” by any stretch of the imagination, but there was some reason it was still in the parking lot after store hours. He lived nearby, or worked there, or was meeting someone there and left with them and returned later. The area where your brother was taken is a distance from the others, though the same street may lead to the drug store.
The first child: left between two cities in the event a crime was to be committed in another no one would be the wiser.
The second: left in view of the police station.
The third: a mail carrier (of all people) located the body.
The fourth: Your brother-taken near a supermarket (where women are usually found) and a drug store (where pharmaceuticals are found). Off the beaten path of the other three. Left in another county for county officials to deal with…not the same officials dealing with the other three corpses.
Dates:
1st child- day after Valentines
2nd child-just prior to Christmas and found the day after Christmas
3rd child-taken the day after New Years…kept 19 days
4th child- the day before St. Patrick’s Day….(was he too good to resist and maybe this opportunity would not present itself again?)
It probably wouldn’t have taken much to get these kids into a vehicle. Kristine, however may have been difficult to chat up. Don’t know. The width of the tire spread would seem important I’d think since economy cars and tankers were all the rage. And, in the snow, 4 wheel drives would be popular perhaps. Much like the Gremlin, a Jeep’s wheel base is designed for pulling through slush and such.