From The Detroit News, 7-11-23:

Charles E. Ramirez, The Detroit News: DNA and genealogy websites ― the genetic tools millions now use to connect with relatives or unlock questions about their ancestry — are playing a key role in another way that experts say will happen more: helping police investigators crack decades-old cold cases.At least three cold cases in Michigan, all of them more than 20 years old, have had breakthroughs in the last year thanks to DNA and genealogy sites. One involved a west Michigan woman whose body was found in her home in 1987. A suspect was finally identified and charged in 2022.Another involved an infant in the Upper Peninsula whose body was found 25 years ago; her mother was charged last year and has been ordered to stand trial. And earlier this year, Livingston County sheriff’s deputies identified a Livonia man as the killer of a woman whose body was found in a state game area four decades ago.

“It’s being used across the country right now,” said Michigan State Police Detective/1st Lt. Chuck Christensen, commander of the agency’s Fifth District Special Investigation Section, of more law enforcement agencies using the technology.Stanford University estimates that forensic genetic genealogy has been used to solve more than 400 cold cases, many of them three and four decades old, since 2018.Three Rivers Police Chief Scott Boling said he’s seeing more agencies use it, “especially with cold cases where DNA was found but investigators couldn’t match to anyone in (the criminal database) or there are no other leads.” Relentless:Daughters refuse to let mother’s unsolved murder fade into past While Michigan investigators are using science to crack once seemingly unsolvable cases, the technology is providing long-sought answers for loved ones that for decades seemed elusive.”Not only does being able to wrap up an investigation give closure to the family and community of the victim that has been suffering and waiting in limbo for years, but it also helps with public safety,” said Rachel Oefelein, chief scientific officer of DNA Labs International Inc. in Deerfield, Florida, which works with police agencies all over the country to solve cold cases.The company currently processes 7,000 to 10,000 DNA samples a month, she said.”Being able to give investigators potential leads that may stop active serial killers or serial rapists from committing additional crimes is huge,” Oefelein said.

When DNA sites emerged

Experts say it isn’t as simple as plugging DNA found at a crime scene into a genealogy website to pinpoint a suspect. Funding is a challenge for more advanced analysis for many police agencies. And polls show some people don’t want their genetic information shared with law enforcement.Most people are familiar with how many are using genealogy websites, such as Ancestry.com or 23andme and home DNA testing kits, to bring pictures of their family trees into focus. The technology behind them has been around for decades.But it wasn’t until 2018 that it stepped into the spotlight after it helped police capture the so-called Golden State Killer, according to experts. The serial killer was linked to the murder of 12 women and 50 rapes that happened between 1976 and 1986 in California.Prosecutors said investigators matched crime-scene DNA with genetic material stored by a relative on an online genealogical site to tie former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, who was 72 years old in 2018, to the deaths.In 2020, DeAngelo, then 74, pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 rapes under a plea deal in which the death sentence was dropped.

Michigan cold cases

Investigators closer to home have also used the technology to help them crack cold cases.Ashlyn Kuersten, a professor at Western Michigan University’s Department of Sociology, said she thinks the trend is fairly recent and began in the last two or three years.Kuersten teaches in the university’s Criminal Justice Studies Program and is the director of the school’s Cold Case Program with Michigan State Police. The program teaches students forensic science, law, and criminal investigation tactics. They also work with investigators to review cold homicide and missing person cases.Two long-unsolved cases benefited from the work of students in the program, Kuersten said.Michigan State Police last year said they matched evidence left at the scene of the 1987 killing of Roxanne Wood, 30, in Niles to an Indiana man using DNA and a genealogy website.Wood’s body was found in her home’s kitchen by her husband after a night of bowling. The two drove separately, and Roxanne arrived home first.Investigators identified Patrick Wayne Gilham, 67, of South Bend, Indiana, as their suspect. He was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded no contest, which courts in Michigan treat the same as a guilty plea or conviction. He was sentenced in April 2022 to at least 23 years in prison.The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office also used DNA evidence and genealogy tracing to help them finally pinpoint a suspect in the death of a baby girl whose body was found in an Upper Peninsula campground’s septic tank in 1997.The investigation led to the baby’s mother, Nancy Ann Gerwatowski. She was extradited from Wyoming to Michigan. In August, a judge ordered her to stand trial on a murder charge in connection with the case.In February, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office said they used DNA and genealogy websites to find the killer of a 19-year-old Redford Township woman whose body was found in a state game area in 1983. Christina Castiglione was found in Deerfield Township. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Forty years after her death, investigators used the technology to determine Charles Shaw of Livonia was her killer. Shaw died accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation in 1983.But even when DNA helps police find crack a case, there still isn’t always closure.In May, Three Rivers police worked with Michigan State Police and students with Western Michigan University’s Cold Case Project to use DNA and a genealogy website to find a suspect in the 1988 murder of a 19-year-old mother, Cathy Swartz.Swartz was beaten, stabbed and strangled in her Three Rivers apartment while her 9-month-old daughter, Courteney, was in the next room.Detectives identified the suspect as Robert Odell Waters. Waters, who had moved from Michigan to South Carolina, was arrested. Three Rivers police said a few days after officers announced his arrest in South Carolina, Waters was found dead in his jail cell.

Courteney, now a mom herself, said growing up, her family didn’t really talk about her mom’s death.”So speaking on it brings up everything every time,” she said in a message to The Detroit News on Facebook.

‘It takes a lot of work’

The process starts when detectives find DNA at a crime scene and send it to a forensic laboratory. DNA is the biological material in the cells of almost all living organisms that contains the genetic information, or blueprints, that determine how their bodies are supposed to develop and what physical traits they have, such as eye color, hair color and height.The lab uses the DNA found by investigators to create a genealogical profile of potential suspects. The profile is then compared with DNA in genetic databases, which can narrow down investigators’ search to a specific family.Detectives then speak to members of the family, ask for DNA and determine whether members were ever in the same vicinity as a victim to refine the search until they can pinpoint a suspect.”It takes a lot of work,” Western Michigan’s Kuersten said. “Investigators don’t just access a public genealogy website to find the bad guy. Typically, a distant relative of the person is found, and then a family tree needs to be built down to the suspect.”Since the early 2000s, police have been able to use a national database of criminal DNA information called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. The FBI maintains the repository.”But if someone hasn’t been arrested anywhere in the country for a crime that requires them to be put into the system, you could have a good sample of DNA in evidence, but you would never get a hit,” the state police’s Christensen said. “Forensic genealogy is a tool that’s used to build out a family tree that can be paired down to siblings.”Experts said a growing number of law enforcement agencies are using the technology as they realize the answers it can provide. Another reason is more funding for using it has become available.”I think part of it is that they’re realizing the capabilities of the technology,” DNA Labs’ Oefelein said.

Funding challenges

The Livingston County Sheriff’s Office received a grant in March 2022 to conduct advanced DNA testing, which was used to help solve the Castiglione case, the woman last seen in 1983. The grant was from the Season of Justice, a nonprofit group.”The cost to use the technology is very high, and small departments can’t afford to do it,” said Livingston County Sheriff’s Deputy Edwin Moore. “I don’t know if we would have been able to solve the case without the grant. We have other cases that are still open, that we know we have good biological evidence on, but we’re looking at how to get the funding for it.”Moore is a member of the sheriff’s Cold Case team, which worked on the Castiglione murder. He is also a retired law enforcement officer who worked on her murder case in 1983.Oefelein said more federal funding for using the technology has been made available to police agencies than before.”It was something a police department couldn’t afford to do off the bat,” she said. “But now there are things like grants and GoFundMe campaigns, which has made it more accessible.”But the technology isn’t a silver bullet, and it has limitations in addition to the cost.Investigators can only compare evidence they’ve collected with DNA on genealogy websites when end users have given their permission.Another is that any profile generated through DNA testing and genealogy technology depends on the quality of the sample collected as evidence in the investigation.”We don’t always get DNA from just one person when evidence is collected; there’s a mixture,” Oefelein said. “That can be very challenging, but as the technology develops, it will be a non-issue.”

Privacy issues

And while most Americans favor police using DNA and genealogy technology to help solve cases, some are concerned about privacy.An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in 2018 found that about 17% of American adults have undergone genetic testing, with a majority of those people wanting to learn more about their ethnic heritage.The survey also found that 51% of people say genetic information should be shared with the police, but only with the consent of the person tested. Of the rest, 33% said consent to share genetic information with police is not necessary, and 13% said they were against police using the information altogether. The margin of error was plus-minus 4.1 percentage points.Meanwhile, a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that about half of Americans, 48%, said they’re OK with DNA testing companies sharing people’s genetic data with law enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. A third of the people in the survey said it’s unacceptable for the information to be shared with police, and 18% said they weren’t sure about it. The poll of more than 9,800 respondents had a margin of error of plus-minus 1.5 percentage points.The use of the technology promises to become more common in investigations of violent crimes, experts and law enforcement officials said.”I think we’re heading to a time of few cold cases because DNA technology has given police an avenue to investigate them that didn’t exist before,” Kuersten said. “For many of these cases, DNA evidence is really the only thing they have.”cramirez@detroitnews.comTwitter: @CharlesERamirez

**********************************************************

The failure to use a third-party lab like Othram in the OCCK case to reevaluate the evidence in FOUR homicide cases means the murder of four kids doesn’t matter to the MSP or Oakland County. Which means their deaths don’t matter, which mean the kids’ lives didn’t matter.

They want to tell you all about the degraded hair samples that yielded only mtDNA, the partial Y-str sample they didn’t even discover until 2019, that the state lab has tested all the evidence “many times.” A case this old, with evidence improperly stored and treated like garage sale items, needs the attention of a third-party lab. And then the public needs to be informed of the findings or lack thereof.

The no-man’s land of the OCCK case means these kids didn’t matter; they certainly didn’t to L. Brooks Patterson or Richard Thompson. Lack of action by today’s MSP and Oakland County speaks even louder than the silence in this case.

A source said he’d been been stabbed in the back and the chest.
— Read on www.thedailybeast.com/larry-nassar-stabbed-multiple-times-in-florida-prison-report

55 years ago, all six members of the family were slain in their Lake Michigan cottage near Good Hart. Their killer was never caught.
— Read on www.petoskeynews.com/story/news/history/2023/07/08/robison-murders-in-good-hart-still-haunt-55-years-later/70372285007/

55-year-old murder mystery still haunts N. Mich.Entire family slain at cottage; officials have never quit case

---

Jillian FellowsPetoskey News-Review USA TODAY NETWORK

---

GOOD HART – Author Mardi Link speaks fondly of the safety and serenity in Northern Michigan.“I think, in Michigan, we have this unique image of the words ‘up north,’ ” she said. “Our state is so divided between woods and industrial areas that this idea of coming ‘up north’ is so idyllic.”But that tranquility was shattered on a quiet night in June 1968, when an entire family was gunned down in their summer cottage along the shores of Lake Michigan near Good Hart.“It was a terrible murder where a whole family was taken and it happened in a little sleepy village, in Good Hart, where things like that aren’t supposed to happen,” said Emmet County Sheriff Pete Wallin. “Just a sleepy little place with a general store and a post office. Things like that aren’t supposed to happen, but they did.”Link – who wrote about the case in her 2008 book: “When Evil Came to Good Hart” heard about the murders, including all six members of the Robison family, as a little girl on the car radio. Her own family was driving north for vacation.“A father, a mother, three sons, and one daughter. All dead,” Link wrote. “All killed with guns, the newsman said. There was more to the report: the girl, the daughter, the sister, was seven years old. The same age as me. My dad turned off the radio, and it grew quiet inside our car. How does a seven-year-old girl come to understand that evil exists in this world? How does a whole town come to understand it?”The murders shook the small, tight-knit community and surrounding area. Neighbors reported fellow neighbors who’d been acting strangely. Law enforcement agencies investigated thousands of tips. And 55 years later, the case remains unsolved.The Robison family – husband and wife Richard and Shirley; sons Richard Jr., Gary and Randall; and daughter Susan – traveled to their cottage in the resort community of Blisswood two miles north of Good Hart from their home in Lathrup Village in metro Detroit on June 16, 1968.In the days before their deaths, the family was seen out and about. On June 24, they went shopping in downtown Petoskey. Later that day, Richard paid his respects to Chauncey and May Bliss, whose grandson, Norman, had been killed in a motorcycle accident the night before. Richard left $20 to buy flowers for the funeral.Chauncey and his son, Monnie, had built many of the cottages in Blisswood themselves, including the Robisons’. Monnie worked as the caretaker for the cabins.Richard told the Blisses his family was traveling to Kentucky and Florida the next day. Later, investigators learned Richard was hoping to view prospective real estate property.It was one of the last times a member of the Robison family was seen alive.Exactly when and how all six members of the family were killed remains unknown. Some facts from the following days and weeks are certain. Neighbors heard gunshots sometime during the evening of June 25. A note was found stuck to a cabin widow which read: “Be back by 7-10.” Two cars used by the family sat parked outside gathering dust. An overwhelming stench pervaded the area, and neighbors complained to the caretaker Monnie.Monnie, who believed the smell was a dead animal, opened the cabin door and discovered the bodies on July 22.The July 23 edition of the Petoskey News-Review ran a big, bold headline announcing the “mass murder.”“When the cottage was entered yesterday, police found all windows had been closed and all shades or curtains drawn,” the article read. “The front door leading to the lawn facing Lake Michigan was locked from inside and the other front door on the east side of the house had been locked from the outside by a padlock.”The article said the murder was “believed to be the first mass murder in Emmet County and the first apparent homicide since 1959.”The Robisons’ cozy cottage was a bloody crime scene. Shirley was found in the living room, partially covered by a blanket. Three more bodies – Richard, Randall and Susan were piled in the hallway. Richard Jr. was found lying in the doorway from the hallway to a bedroom. Gary was sprawled in the same bedroom.They’d all been shot, and the coroner determined Susan had also been struck with a blunt object. Officers found evidence from both a .22-caliber and a .25-caliber gun at the scene.Because a month had passed between the time of death and when the bodies were found, first responders were faced with a gruesome scene. Thousands of dead flies littered the floor of the cabin. Some of the bodies had been left on a heating vent. In the original complaint file from the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office, dated 3:15 p.m. on July 22, one of the bodies is described as “in a very bad state of decomposi-tion and mummification.”Officers called for gas masks to investigate the scene “as the odor was almost unbearable.”Emmet County Undersheriff Clifford Fosmore held up a bloody hammer outside and pointed out bullet holes in the side of the cabin as news reporters snapped photos and neighbors milled about.Officers struggled from the get-go. “Although the trail is as ‘cold as the winters in Northern Michigan,’ Emmet County Prosecutor Wayne Richard Smith and Undersheriff Clifford Fosmore are pressing their search for the killer or killers of the Robison family,” reported the Petoskey News-Review on July 25.Investigators needed to identify suspects, and ideally find the murder weapons. They combed through the surrounding woods, fields and roadways in search of a gun that might have been discarded. Residents brought their own guns to the sheriff’s department to be tested.“(Emmet County deputies searched), the state police did, and it’s never been found,” Wallin said.In the meantime, investigators zeroed in on people of interest. One was Monnie, who died in 1980.Wallin described Monnie as “a little different individual.”“Monnie’s son, Norman, had been killed prior to the murders. Mr. Robison felt bad about it and went over to offer money for flowers, but you’ve got to remember Monnie Bliss was a little different individual,” Wallin said. “There’s theories that he was not happy with the gesture, so people think he did it, too. There’s so many theories out there.”Officers interviewed drifters, prisoners at nearby Camp Pellston, and others.In the July 25 edition of the News-Review, it’s noted that “Mr. Robison’s business associate Joe Scolaro flew to Petoskey from Detroit on Tuesday on a chartered airplane to talk with authorities. Scolaro assisted Robison in the publication of an art magazine called ‘Impresario.’ He told Fosmore he was particularly shocked by the murders since he and Robison were ‘more like brothers’ than business associates.”In time, Scolaro became the prime suspect.Scolaro had been left in charge of Robison’s advertising and publishing business while he was away. While once a close confidant of Richard’s, investigators uncovered evidence that Scolaro was embezzling.His alibi for the day of the murders was filled with inconsistencies. He failed lie detector tests and, even more damning, he was known to have once owned .22-caliber and .25-caliber guns.“There’s other things that point to him, too, but his alibi just couldn’t be confirmed,” Wallin said. “The question is, did he do it himself or did somebody help him? That’s the thing, because it’s hard to believe that a guy could kill all six people by himself.”Michigan State Police investigators presented their case to Emmet County Prosecutor Donald Noggle in 1970, who declined to issue an arrest warrant.“As far as I am concerned, this case is far from being closed,” Noggle told the News-Review in a Jan. 14, 1970 article. “In fact, a murder case is never closed until a suspect is proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. In the Robison case, I feel that we do not have enough evidence at this time to warrant an arrest.”But the case didn’t stop there. In 1973, Oakland County’s Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson expressed interest in the case. He had reason to believe the crime had originated in Oakland County, and took steps towards re-evaluating an arrest warrant.“Scolaro, I don’t how he caught wind of it that there were charges that were going to be coming against him for the murder of the Robisons,” Wallin said.Scolaro killed himself on May 8, 1973. He left a note on his office door warning his mother not to come in. In another note, Scolaro called himself “a liar-cheat-phony,” but again denied having anything to do with the Robisons’ deaths.“I had nothing to do with the Robisons,” he wrote. “I’m a cheat but not a murderer. I’m sick and scared. God and everyone please forgive me. I hope my family will understand.”With their prime suspect gone, the case stuttered to a standstill. It remains there today.“It’s never been solved,” Wallin said. “There’s a lot of theories about how it happened, but it’s been 55 years and it hasn’t been solved yet. And probably, and I’m pretty darn sure, all the players are dead.”Work has been done on the case intermittently over the years, but no significant progress has been made.“We tried some DNA testing years ago with one of the hairs that was found on Mrs. Robison’s body but it was inconclusive,” Wallin said. “If we had the technology we have today, if we had that back in 1968, it’s pretty good that it would have been solved.”Every five years, when another notable anniversary passes and people are reminded of the case, Wallin said the sheriff’s department receives more tips. They investigate every single one.“It’s an open case. It’s never been closed and it will never be closed until they determine exactly what happened,” he said. “When the (anniversary) stories run, we do get tips. We do follow up on all of them. Nothing has brought closure to it yet.”Link said she hears from people interested in the case “all the time.”“Usually they’re the same theories that I hear all the time: that Scolaro did it, or that Scolaro did it with help, or that it was the mob, or that it was a serial killer, or that it was Monnie Bliss,” she said. “Those are pretty much the range of theories that I’ve heard.”The case continues to have a long lasting legacy in Northern Michigan.“A screenwriter and I have finished a screenplay based on this crime that’s currently making its way around Hollywood, so yes, I’ve definitely seen an interest,” Link said. “There’s always been an interest in this case in particular, but I think true crime is sort of having its moment and perhaps we as readers or as viewers when it comes to movies and TV want to understand why these awful crimes happen.”But, while the case has been extensively documented over the years, Link said it’s important not to lose sight of the human tragedy at its center.“I’ve gotten to know the surviving Robison family members, and I see firsthand through them how this case has affected their lives,” she said. “When you kill a whole family, the people who are left are aunts and uncles and cousins. They’re going to forever wonder what happened to the people they loved. It’s impossible not to be moved and have an emotional reaction to that. I feel for their family, but also for people who were wrongly accused, like the Bliss family. I feel for them too.”As it stands, both Link and Wallin doubt there’ll ever be a definitive resolution to the Robison family murders.“I think there’s still the possibility of a deathbed confession by someone who knows the outcome or knows who the guilty party is and has proof that we just are unaware of,” Link said. “So many people were interviewed for this case, so there could still be a deathbed confession and I think that, perhaps more than science, is our best hope for an open-and-shut conclusion.”“It’s a mystery,” Wallin said. “A terrible murder mystery that these people were killed – the husband, the mother and the kids. It’s tragic.”Contact Jillian Fellows at jfellows@petoskeynews. com.

On June 18, 2010, one of my brothers sent Ms. Link an email:

Dear Ms. Link:

My name is Chris King. I just obtained a copy of your book on the Robison murders at the suggestion of my sister. We’re looking into another notorious unsolved Michigan case involving the murder of our brother, Timothy King, in 1977. Tim was the last known victim of the person or persons known as the Oakland County Child Killer.

I haven’t read your entire book yet, but I have read the forward, which discusses the aid provided by the Michigan State Police and the access you gained to the files. We’ve been trying to access the files in my brother’s murder for several years and have not had any success. Our FOIA request for just a portion of the files was rejected, and in a second request, costs for a redacted version of non-exempt materials were estimated at over $12,000.

The cases have a lot of parallels. Would you mind sharing some information about the access you had to the files and the costs you incurred? We’d appreciate any suggestions you might have. If you’re open to discussing it by email or telephone, please feel free to contact me at [].

Thanks for your time. I look forward to finishing your book.

Email from Chris King to Mardi Link, June 18, 2010

Neither my brother nor I remember her ever replying. Probably too busy working on her $creenplay.