Thanks to a reader who forwarded this link with the following observations about a British cold case involving the 1994 murder of a six-year-old boy. The case went cold for some very familiar reasons: failure to properly process evidence; unreasonable theorizing about the motive of the perpetrator; sloppy and indifferent interviewing of the actual perpetrator decades ago.
The boy’s mother was charged with the murder and a jury cleared her in 1996. Prosecutors conceded the not-guilty verdict was correct, adding “The decision to charge her with his murder was wrong.” (Try getting a statement like that from a U.S. prosecutor.)
The mother and her husband pressured detectives to reopen her son’s case a few years ago. Rather than punish this couple for pressuring police to do the right thing, rather than pulling a bunch of vindictive antics, detectives went through the evidence again and discovered a set of tapings (applied to the boy’s clothing in 1994 to lift possible evidence) and sent them for examination “using techniques unavailable at the time of the original investigation.” The tests found the DNA of the killer, who was interviewed at the time of the murder but not pursued as a suspect. He was finally charged with the child’s murder in 2020 and convicted last week.
There is plenty of evidence in the OCCK case, which at a minimum is all of the four kids’ clothing and shoes/boots, Jill’s backpack and bike, and Tim’s skateboard, not to mention whatever evidence was collected from their bodies at the time of autopsy. Why is it not ALL being rerun? Why is the press in Michigan not asking the state police about the status of this evidence (some has apparently been extinguished) and the failure to rerun it using technology which advances almost by the week? Why do the Michigan State Police get a pass? Why the silence? The stenography that passes for journalism in Oakland County and southeast Michigan does not involve the tough questions or pressing when they get ignorant, obstructionist “comments” from the MSP on this case, and it never has. It is a 45-year-old case. The code of silence in these serial murders is indefensible and reprehensible. As is the failure to take the most obvious, basic steps to retest all of the evidence in this case, as jurisdictions around the world have done in cold cases.
What are you afraid of?
If you are someone who worked in the offices of L. Brooks Patterson, Richard Thompson or Jessica Cooper, or who worked for the MSP and have knowledge of the obstruction that has taken place in these unsolved murder cases of children and are ready to take the high road, email me at OCCKtruth@protonmail.com.