Top of the list for lowest clearance rate for homicide cases, meaning it has the most unsolved murder cases:
Unsurprisingly, the most “chilling and infamous” unsolved case in Michigan is the Oakland County Child Killer(s) case.
Here is how Michigan is represented on the map:
At least four children were held captive and killed. They were always found wearing the clothes they went missing in. Despite an abundance of evidence tying several pedophiles to the case, no one was convicted.
There you sit, Oakland County, right next to the 1892 Borden murders in Massachusetts. Nice work.
Thank you to Already Gone podcaster Nina Innsted for sending the infographic.
Outrageous! So may questions come to mind. Can the public search the microfilm? From researching 1970s cases in California, I was able to visit the courthouse and look through ledgers that had A to Z handwritten indexes (filled out at the time of the cases) at the beginning of the ledgers, and locate the case numbers, then the clerk found the corresponding microfilm reel and sped through to the number. Usually the files are microfilmed in numerical order, unless they were out of order or missing. Missing means someone in the office removed the file prior to microfilming, which usually means something nefarious.
What’s missing never made it to the point where it would be memorialized on microfilm. Just one example, even the original task force commander Robert Robertson muses on tape (later transcribed): “One question that came up–Why did the Birmingham Police Department erase the tapes of incoming phone calls, March 16, 17, 18, 19 and so on? One would think that incoming telephone calls that were on tape that that particular tape would be stored for several reasons. #1–There might be an identity to the killer in that series of tapes, conversations; and #2–The caller calling in the information would be properly recorded with time and date, so that if the question of payment of the reward ever became critical, we could go to that tape.” https://catherinebroad.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/OCCK-Files-1.pdf
See also Chapter 22 of The Snow Killings, “No Such Thing as Closure.”
Pure Michigan…
Bob K
Somehow this doesn’t surprise me ( 52% cold case rate).
Most of the LE and county prosecutors etc. you come across in the OCCK case couldn’t find a criminal in the state penitentiary!