On the heels of George Hunter’s book, Monsters in the Corridor: How urban planners turned my Detroit neighborhood into a predator’s playground (https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Corridor-neighborhood-predators-playground/dp/B0DFH37QHJ/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= ), a podcast started today updating the HBO Max documentary, Have You Seen Andy?, featuring dozens of unresolved cases of missing and murdered children and the history of human trafficking in this country.
Filmmaker Melanie Perkins produced and directed the 2007 documentary about the disappearance of her childhood friend, Andy Puglisi (age 10), after an afternoon of swimming at a neighborhood pool in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in August 1976. The film was a 2008 Emmy Award Winner – Best Investigative Journalism.
In Open Investigation Perkins picks up where the documentary left off, with new leads in Andy’s case and the uncovering of pedophile networks preying on children during the 1970s and beyond. It will be an eight-part series.
A reader tipped me off to this new podcast and I listened to Episode 00: The Pilot Episode, this morning. Andy’s disappearance happened against a backdrop of unchecked child predation and a flourishing child pornography business, said to be a billion dollar industry, even back then.
The opening episode tells of pedophiles who worked in teams or with multiple people to abduct and rape kids. Charles E. Pierce, a convicted pedophile and necrophiliac, was said to team up with convicted pedophile Wayne William Chapman for this purpose. https://archive.boston.com/news/special/andy/chapter4.htm . Both are considered suspects in Andy’s disappearance. Both are now dead. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/wayne-chapman-convicted-child-rapist-who-claimed-100-victims-dies-at-73/2529451/ ; https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/1999/03/03/killer-s-confessions-baffle-police/51033365007/ .
Sounds like Christopher B. Busch and Gregory Greene, of OCCK notoriety. Perkins observes that if only police had listened to the little kids at the pool the day Andy went missing, the investigation might have gotten somewhere. It is stunning, but sadly unsurprising, that they did not listen to these kids.
At the end of January 1977 in the OCCK case, Greene admitted while in police custody in Genesee County, MI that he teamed up with Busch to troll for kids they could rape and sexually assault. Greene, already a convicted pedophile, had been assaulting boys from a baseball team he was then coaching in Flint. Busch was arrested in Alma and brought in for questioning. He did one better–telling police, investigators, and an Oakland County prosecutor, to their faces–about his fantasies of abducting a boy and keeping him captive–he and his partner working different shifts, so someone could always be with the boy. He told them where he liked to pick up kids and he mentioned the three places the first three OCCK victims had been near when abducted–in order of these crimes. My brother Tim had not yet been abducted.
He further freely told these law men that he also victimized boys he was paired with via the Big Brother program in Michigan. There is not one indication that these cops looked into Busch’s involvement with boys via Big Brother. They didn’t touch it. That they would have dismissed child victims, as they still do today, is again not shocking. But they sat there and listened to Busch and didn’t do a damn thing with the information he himself provided. In the midst of a child killing spree in Oakland County, they concluded there was nothing to see here.
As Perkins points out, over the intervening decades we have learned time and again that the very people we trusted–priests, coaches, teachers, even parents–were themselves abusers. In the OCCK case I think it is becoming most plain that on top of such horror, the very people we rely upon to be a voice for victims and to find the truth cannot be trusted. Talk about wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The first episode of the podcast is extremely well presented. I have to be honest–I have never been able to watch Have You Seen Andy?–but I am going to give it a try.