Check out this email from 2011 that I was copied on. Then Oakland County prosecutor Jessica Cooper had not only been busy appealing my dad’s FOIA case all the way up to the Michigan Supreme Court, she was taking a page from PT Barnum/LB Patterson’s playbook and massaging area reporters with her story that the Kings were just fucked up crazy people and the Busch lead was worthless.
My brother responded to reporter Kevin Dietz’s emails regarding Cooper’s foaming at the mouth. None of the email addresses listed are still active. None of this has been addressed in the intervening years.
TWENTY-ELEVEN.
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I know Grizzly Adams was a sick ass, fat rapist, but I question whether he was a killer. Why all of a sudden would he decide to kill? Especially when he never did in the past. I’m more fixated on WHO was Tim talking to at HM? That person was involved . The probability of that person abducting Tim is astronomical. So we are pretty certain that person wasn’t fat ass. We are pretty certain that person wasn’t Gunnels, we are pretty certain that person wasn’t Grease monkey Greene. There was two witnesses that seen that freak talking to Tim. I’m so wish Polly Coltman could have seen photos of Haystack. I’m convinced it was him until proven wrong.
Haystack was “cleared” in 1992 by POLYGRAPH in Tim’s case only. We all know now that polygraphs administered by law enforcement in Michigan are worthless. But one example: https://catherinebroad.blog/2023/11/09/so-outrageous-cheating-to-win-at-any-cost-worked-for-a-time-but-now-its-gonna-cost-you-and-not-as-much-as-it-should/. No one in Michigan law enforcement acknowledged or closely examined Haystack’s 2009 polygraphs in Georgia, which didn’t go so well. He has not been eliminated as a suspect and is STILL ALIVE.
I know all about Haystacks. I know he’s alive living in the suburbs of Atlanta. I believe his ticker isn’t functioning very well. I know he failed that damn poly in 2009 . Which Georgia highway Patrol Duncan said “ he feels Hastings was involved or knew who did it”. He also said Haystack knew Bush. Well of course he knew Bush. They lived in the same damn neighborhood. Same age. Same short order cooks. It would have been an easy trip for him to go from Lasher to Quarton to Woodward to HM.
One of the reasons I focus so much on Busch is that “suicide” scene and the fact that two task force members were called to the scene. Busch was dead. Why wouldn’t the cops ask the families if they knew Chris Busch or had ever crossed paths with him? Especially with that pencil drawing that looked so much like Mark Stebbins, wouldn’t they at least ask Mark’s mom and brother if they had ever seen this fat fuck around? Show them a photograph of him? I realize assholes like H. Lee Busch could put pressure on people to keep information about their black sheep quiet, but this was a possible serial murderer of children! Under “normal” circumstances, a guy like prosecutor/US Senate candidate Brooks Patterson would give anything for national exposure for announcing a solve in the OCCK case. But not here. Total lockdown.
The man was dead–why wouldn’t they ask the families if they knew of or recognized him? Isn’t that how investigations are conducted? The cops were always running the names of dead priests by my dad. So the precedent was there.
As for Haystack, I do remember my dad telling me there was a suspect who had attended Brother Rice. This was 1992 or after. It didn’t seem like he knew a name, but he did say the parents had been very uncooperative. Could have been Haystack or Paul David Johnson (https://catherinebroad.blog/2022/03/16/more-cluster/ ).
Given that Busch was swept under the carpet in 1978, imagine the distress caused to one or two insiders when a neighbor from the same little, exclusive ‘hood is turned in for a second time in 1992 as a suspect. It’s not just Helen, it’s proximity to Busch. None of it can be dug into or investigated to a logical end. I submit that ditching Busch as a suspect derailed the entire investigation, whether he was the murderer or it was a set up. It was nuclear.
Let me pose a hypothetical. In 1976 and 1977 there was an active child sex ring operating in and around Oakland County. People were paid for running kids. It was probably more lucrative and certainly the penalties less severe than selling drugs in those days. Two men from the same neighborhood and maybe one of their brothers participate in running kids in Oakland and Wayne Counties and one may also be filming them for the group. Maybe one sees how easy it is to abduct kids in the suburbs and goes rogue and escalates to murder. After all, what better way to send a “message” to society or to his parents?
Cathy, as I’ve mentioned our family friend and detective “ Johnny Taylor” swore that Paul Johnson was the guy. I remember as a kid him telling us about how his mother was a nurse at Beaumont hospital. Also, he told us how he visited Johnson while he was a patient at Clinton Valley. He vowed that he would get him. Unfortunately he passed a number of years ago. There were a lot of similarities between Haystack and Johnson. One being they both went to Brother Rice.
JN, this is another example of why the only way this case can be concluded–one way or the other–is if all of the evidence, all of it, is handed over to a third-party lab. The cost must be borne by the MSP, which has squandered millions of dollars of grant money and taxpayer money in this case and has never accounted to the public for a damn thing. Grants are available from third-party labs. Grant writing is hard–put the college students the state police are affiliating with in cold case investigations to write a grant. They would do a better job. And they would do a better job digitizing this case. While they’re at it, they should digitize a redacted version and sell it to anyone who wants it for a nominal sum. Maybe it is already possible to use AI to redact documents. The MSP would lose the benefit of whoever illegally and cunningly redacted the FOIA documents they gave my dad, but it would keep the costs down.
No one is going to investigate Paul Johnson, John Hastings, or anybody else. No one would pick up the goddamn phone to follow up with Steve Duncan, who polygraphed Hastings in Georgia in 2009. If a sophisticated lab cannot discover previously undiscovered DNA, the MSP must account for the failure to properly store and preserve the evidence. Family members of suspects, employees of the Patterson, Thompson, Gorcyca and Cooper offices of the OC prosecuting attorney, law enforcement and others who know what happened in Flint in late January 1977 and at 3310 Morningview Terrace in late November 1978–none of them will ever come forward. They’ve lived this long with the information and there are no signs of the truth ever surfacing, so they will not speak the truth. They are no better than Vince Gunnels, Arch Sloan or Ted Lamborgine. They can live with what they know because they have for almost 50 years.
If there is DNA and a willingness by a competent agency to work with the results and/or the results of genetic genealogy research, there may be some answers–at least in the case for which DNA is found. Who will report to the public in this circumstance, especially if the suspect is dead?
We can talk about all of these suspects until the end of time, with no answers. That’s a pretty convenient situation for not only the killer(s) and those who enabled or covered for them, but also for Oakland County and the state police.
I am currently reading Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. The book concerns a powerful family in our area who live(d) by their own rules and have left a trail of bodies in their wake – including a wife and son. This has been triggering in so many ways but, In her investigation into these deaths, she’s poked a lot of bears who don’t want the exposure because the Good Ol’ Boy Network is being challenged. Over and over it is apparent, when it comes to the powerful and wealthy, corruption and incompetence and botched investigations happen a lot. Same song, different show. It’s disgusting.
Makes me sick. Jessica Cooper is a POS.
She’s certainly easy to hate. But not worth the effort.
I sank into a dark hole of email yesterday after reading that post. I have over 11,000 emails concerning the OCCK that chronicle the trajectory this has taken since 2005 even though there are hundreds more that begin in 2003 that are lost on a hard drive that no longer opens beginning with my very naive belief that cops would act immediately upon some new information. Back then, Helen was the only game in town. It’s no secret that there was no love lost between Helen Danger and LE but I honestly believed that new information would at least get some action. I was wrong. Then, when I was able to connect with you about all of this I, again, fully believed that YOU would at least be able to move the needle because, OF COURSE, the cops would act for a victim’s family. How sadly stupid was I? I spent more than 20 minutes on the phone with Don Studt in September of 2006 discussing Polly’s story, tying it to Helen’s and hoping he would take that and run. He didn’t even pay me lip service but he did spoon feed me a shit sandwich on every bad thing, every lie, Helen had told (although some were proven to be true when your finally got your hands on the FOIA documents.) It wasn’t long after that the watershed broke with Patrick and I was CONVINCED that would do it; the tipping point. But nope. From there, the tentacles on this multiplied exponentially while the smoke and mirrors show put on by Brooks Patterson (and any crony attached to Oakland County) got bigger and more involved and pedophiles were flushed out of the woodwork. And the Kings are crazy?! I have the posts, I have the emails and I can step back and look at the big picture (from my small perspective in this vast wasteland of bullshit investigations) and clearly see how massively and intentionally fucked-up this has gotten. It doesn’t have to be this difficult – cold cases are being solved all of the time by the third party labs who have the technology to deep dive into evidence and glean DNA information. So, and this is a redundant question – we have to ask why? Why is it so difficult to get movement? Because they DO NOT WANT movement. Now, ask why again.
I had to go down the email rabbit holes this weekend myself, trying to piece some shit and some shitty people together. Same deal–multiple lap tops/hard drives and folders. After all this time (and you have been at it longer than I have), it doesn’t get any easier–in fact the compounding effects are pretty harsh and seem to last longer. Maybe because it is so shockingly obvious what went on (and didn’t go on) in this investigation and there is nothing anyone seems able to do about it. “Tough shit” is the essential response. From the people who were charged with being the voice of these young murder victims who can no longer speak for themselves. It’s frustrating and maddening, but it also makes your blood run cold, even after we’ve seen this series of stunts and obfuscation for well, well over a decade. Imagine if someone you loved was murdered and the MSP and the OCP, rather than help you, fuck you over at every turn. It’s a crazy nightmare.
The phone call I had with Don Studt–the first time I had EVER asked for an update or to ask a question (and this was before the Busch information that numbnuts blurted out in July 2006)–immediately raised my suspicions. I don’t know how stupid he thought I was. Then, in November 2007 when I was home for a high school reunion (the first of two reunions that would end up being overshadowed by people connected with this case), my dad asked me to go to breakfast with him, my brother and Don Studt to tell him about Larry Wasser/Patrick Coffey investigative subpoena case that had been in Wayne County court a day or two before. To bring him up-to-speed. Because even though this shit was supposed to be on the down low, he thought Don was his friend, his contact in this case–go ahead, Cathy, tell him this remarkable situation! I felt like this was a bad idea, but I told the entire saga of how Patrick had called my brother, then me, and everything that had led to Patrick flying in from CA to testify in Wayne County and for that sack of shit Wasser to arrange to meet with the “task force” to talk about who we now know is Chris Busch. It was a complex, lengthy story that spanned the four months of effort expended by Wayne County and Livonia PD. Studt sat there and did not ask me one, single question. Not one. I did all the talking, my dad nodding, my breakfast sitting there untouched. My brother Chris said Studt did not look well as he listened to my story. Anyone I eventually told this story to had many questions, stopped me for clarification, interjected disbelief or asked for clarification. Not Don. He knew where this motherfucker was headed. He’s smarter than a lot of these cops, so he might have kept his mouth shut and just waited to see what the fallout would be. But he was also a cop in Oakland County. Think he picked up the phone?
Ten years later, after none of this or anything else had come to jacksquat in my brother’s case, I was back for another reunion. Cory Williams arranged a meeting with my dad and brother and me while I was there. He brought Marney Keenan along to record our responses to the news we already knew–this thing wasn’t going anywhere. Full circle. Have fun at your reunion.
The old Soviet guard did that; convinced sane people they were crazy.
Cathy, We talked about some of this. I find it odd that the King family was not allowed to keep the skate board. However, the Busch family was allowed to keep the rifle. In Michigan, families are allowed to ask for the suicide firearm back. However , the police usually discourage that ie; painful memories and so forth.
To your brother’s list of evidence against Busch, I would add 3.
1) During interrogation in Flint, Greg Greene fingered Busch as being involved in the murder of Mark Stebbins.
2) When Vince Gunnels was asked how his hair got on Kris Mihelich’s clothing, he stated he was in Chris Busch’s car often, implying she was in Busch’s car.
3) Under questioning from Cory Williams, Busch’s nephew Scott Busch stated several times that a few months after Tim Kings murder, he was driving around with his uncle who stated more than once that he (Tim) was standing right over there. This is information that would only be known to the kidnappers.
Either Busch got this information from a nearby friend, or he was present at Hunter Maple laying down in the back seat of the kidnap car.
Bob Kenney