“How can I just leave it alone?”

I recently wrote about a new podcast about unsolved cases of missing and murdered children that grew out of Melanie Perkins McLaughlin’s investigation into the 1976 disappearance of her childhood friend and neighbor, Andy Puglisi (age 10).

Open Investigation. The truth has no statute of limitations.

Episode 2 of the podcast, Pandora’s Box, will hit you with a brick ton of similarities to the OCCK case and that of untold numbers of missing and murdered children.

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Perkins McLaughlin describes this episode as being “the hardest to write,” as she uses data to confirm the widespread nature of crimes against children during the era of Andy’s disappearance and the failure to use the many CSA crimes against kids to inform cold case police investigations.

This episode features the story of several [children who went missing or were murdered in Massachusetts in the 1970s]. It is dedicated to them and to all the others who remain missing or who have been recovered as homicide victims. I know this content can be hard to hear, but please, listen for the kids who deserve justice and for the people who love them so that maybe one day we can get some of these cases resolved.

It is impossible for me to hear this episode and not be transported to Flint PD the last days of January 1977, when police had Greg Greene and Chris Busch in custody and were privy to detailed explanations of their crimes against children and Busch’s sick fantasies (reality). How in the living hell could those two days of interviews, some attended by Oakland County chief deputy prosecutor Richard Thompson and his investigator Gary Hawkins, not have informed the child killer cases in Oakland County?

Not only was short-shrift made of all of it, Busch released on a $1,000 bond, and the two obvious suspects immediately dismissed in the press by prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson, but a mere six weeks later my brother would be abducted. Patterson and Thompson wanted everyone to believe the child killings were just an anomaly–something that would pass like a bad dream. Flint PD Detective Tom Waldron knew WTF was up. That’s why he called OCCK investigators after he heard what came out of Greene’s mouth. Oakland County looked the other way.

Not only was no one on the ground fighting for these Oakland County kids in any kind of effective way, when my family raised questions in 2007 after polygrapher Larry Wasser opened his own Pandora’s Box, we–and especially my dad–were vilified by then prosecutor Jessica Cooper and her deputy Paul Walton. The community did not support us. Be quiet and take your lumps. Get over it. Go away.

At least we stayed in the arena, as hopeless as it is. The rest are cowards. The going got tough and no one helped us hang in. I guess it’s to be expected. But contrast the outlook of Perkins McLaughlin, who is speaking up on behalf of other child victims: “How can I just leave it alone?”