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.