Bipartisan federal legislation has been proposed to fund advanced DNA testing in cold cases. Called “The Carla Walker Act,” it is named in honor of a 17-year-old who was murdered in Fort Worth, Texas in 1974. The case was solved after 46 years because law enforcement agreed to use the services of third-party lab Othram Inc. and the killer’s DNA was isolated and identified.
Similar legislation was proposed in the U.S. House in 2020, but never made it to the floor for a vote.
As concerns the OCCK case and the many failures and excuses regarding the evidence in the four homicides, it is important to underscore that law enforcement must ask for outside assistance by a third party lab or other genetic genealogy assistance to get to square one. There has to be someone at the agency willing to navigate funding methods if they claim an inability to pay for testing. The Michigan State Police have affiliations with three colleges/universities’ forensic/cold case programs and pulling together all of the funding opportunities seems like a good use of students’ time.
I believe the state of the evidence in the OCCK case reflects a decision that the case would never be revisited when the case was shelved at the end of 1978. Even giving investigators and lab personnel the benefit of the doubt given the era (a police officer was given permission to perform the initial evaluation of Mark Stebbins’ body before autopsy; lab worker Charlotte Day and others from the MSP brought items of Mark, Jill and Kristine’s clothing to a criminal psychologist and they all handled the clothing; lab worker David Metzger mishandled/minimized evidence from the Busch suicide; a psychic was allowed to hold items of my brother’s clothing as police took him to the scene of the body drop), the state of the evidence was in complete disarray as they “closed up shop.”
Human hair evidence was misfiled with animal hairs and this was discovered only after Wayne County (where my brother’s body was found) pressed for further evidence testing after the MSP resurrected the cold cases but would not advance the evidentiary ball. Subsequent testing by the state lab and the FBI extinguished some of the hair evidence. The Y-str sample in Kristine’s case has been further evaluated by one third party lab, but needs additional testing to narrow down the “owner” of that male DNA. This additional testing was refused by the state in 2022.
As described in Chapter 11 of Guarded by Jackals: Predators, the Public Officials Who Protected Them and Resolution of Michigan’s Most Notorious Case (July 2024), when DNA testing was starting to get real traction in criminal investigations, then Oakland County Executive and Oakland County Prosecutor at the time of the child killings, L. Brooks Patterson, engaged in an outrageous, cynical ploy when he and others flew out to Recluse, Wyoming to dig up the body of alleged suspect David Norberg. In 1999, when the case was revisited with the ghost of David Norberg, the state police and others seemed to take the illogical position that it was “one and done.” See–we tried! We flew to Wyoming on a private plane, got this dead man’s DNA and tested it. The FBI said “no match.” That’s that.
Whatever digging around law enforcement did in the improperly stored and shameful state of the evidence in the OCCK case in 1999 cannot have made things “better” for future testing. I believe the resistance by the current state lab is based on the unbelievable mishandling of evidence back in the day. DNA from Charlotte Day, Mel Paunovich, the shrink and the psych is probably all over the relevant evidence. They loved the cost excuse, but there have been avenues such as grants and now maybe federal legislation that could have been explored if they took the time to inquire. If DNA from the list of many who may have improperly handled the evidence is found, it could be easily explained. There may yet be evidence of one of the criminals who touched the four OCCK victims, just as a speck of DNA was found on Carla Walker’s bra strap.
Was the “Allen” letter ever tested for fingerprints back in the day? It has not been tested for DNA. It may have been a hoax, but why not try? Was the drawing of the screaming boy found in Busch’s room ever tested for fingerprints or DNA? We know the ropes found in Busch’s walk in closet were never tested for anything and were “lost.” Did the people who dumped my brother’s body wearing gloves when they dumped him and his skateboard? We know someone in law enforcement touched that skateboard to compare the plastic with the plastic found on bricks by the Hunter Maple Pharmacy after witness Doug Wilson told the FBI that he saw a boy matching Tim’s description jumping off his skateboard and letting it hit the brick wall. The people who dumped these kids’ bodies were probably not as careful as the people who had sexual contact with them before their deaths.
However infected this investigation was prior to the hand-off to the state police, the MSP has been a complete failure as steward of these cases. The MSP’s failure to solve these crimes after taking jurisdiction is greatly compounded by this failure to preserve the evidence and by the failure to ask for outside help using the most cutting-edge technology employed by third party labs on all of the evidence in these four cases.
It seems like the MSP owes the public and the families answers about why they will not proceed with any additional DNA testing. Why, when other cold cases around the world have been solved using evidence that was just as old, in the biggest manhunt/investigation the country had seen at the time, we are where we are. Which is nowhere.
The Carla Walker Act was designed to help families like Carla’s. Just not the families of the Oakland County Child Killers, whose kids’ cases have the misfortune of having been handled by Michigan law enforcement. Their successors will not be transparent about this, which makes it even more perverse.