In this YouTube video podcast about the murder of the United Healthcare CEO on December 4, a retired federal prosecutor discusses the early involvement of prosecutors in high profile cases.
Thanks to a reader for this send. It dovetails with information I received from another reader.
First, I point out that the retired prosecutor explained that there is no doubt at least one prosecutor is “totally assigned and devoted to this case,” even as it is in the initial manhunt phase. He explained that prosecutors are often on the ground in high profile cases, and that he had himself gone to crime scenes to make sure there was a proper evidentiary trail in order to succeed at any future trial.
Prosecutors always are the first to tell you that they are not the investigating agency; that’s on the cops. Police are supposed to investigate the crime and present a chargeable case to the prosecutor, who then exercises prosecutorial discretion about charging and taking the case forward. As convenient as that dichotomy is, it ignores what this retired federal prosecutor explains. There has to be someone at the prosecutor’s office who is assigned and devoted to a high profile case to prepare search warrants, arrest warrants, and advise on interrogations and constitutional and evidentiary concerns.
In Oakland County, just four days before 12-year-old Mark Stebbins was abducted on a Sunday afternoon in Ferndale, the caped crusader L. Brooks Patterson bellowed that he would seek the maximum life sentence for two Black men who kidnapped GM executive Bob Stempel’s son from Bloomfield Hills and made ransom demands.
This, he said, would serve as “a deterrent to other people driving into my county, or your county, for that matter, and selecting some little child at random.”
Four days later Mark Stebbins was abducted (and probably not by someone who drove into YOUR county, Brooks, but from within) and four days after that, he was murdered. And a few days after that, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum attended Mark’s funeral service:
Within the next 13 months, a total of four Oakland County kids were believed to be victims of serial murder. And even though Oakland County couldn’t push these cases off fast enough to the Michigan State Police, you’re damn right there were a few people in the prosecutor’s office who were monitoring these crimes, as well as Chris Busch’s pedophilia cases and his subsequent “suicide.”
In addition to Patterson and his #2, Thompson, two assistant prosecutors were apparently trusted enough to touch these files. One was Ed Sosnick, who made arrangements for and attended Kristine’s autopsy.
Edward Sosnick and Laurence Burgess graduated from Wayne State University Law School in 1967.
Laurence Burgess married Jane Kerr (Mary Jane Kerr of Grosse Pointe), seen below in this photo from the Wayne State University Law School Yearbook of 1966, on December 13, 1969.
Jane Burgess, you will recall, took Chris Busch’s sex crime cases because her husband/law partner Laurence was too busy at the time to represent this pedophile son of a high ranking GM executive.
The Oakland County assistant prosecutor whose name is on the sign out sheet for Busch’s CSC case in Oakland County was Leonard Gilman.
Gilman was also a graduate of Wayne State University Law School, Class of 1966, so he was there when Jane Kerr, Laurence Burgess and Ed Sosnick were attending.
Gilman left the OCP office in 1978, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office as chief of the criminal division. He later became a well respected U.S. Attorney in Detroit in 1981. He took on organized crime, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/statement-leonard-r-gilman-united-states-attorney-eastern-district, as well as child pornographers by using an undercover postal worker. He died February 12, 1985, during a hospitalization for an unknown condition or virus, at age 43.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-leonard-gilman/17480247
I think it’s safe to say that all of these graduates of Wayne State University Law School were relieved when Chris Busch wound up dead in his parents’ Bloomfield Village home in late November, 1978. Perhaps most especially 1964 Wayne State University Law School graduate Richard Thompson and his boss.