FORTY-NINE years ago today, 12-year-old Mark Stebbins, a kid who wanted to be a marine when he grew up, left the American Legion Hall in Ferndale, Michigan in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. His family never saw him alive again. His body was found four days later in a Southfield parking lot. He had been raped and his wrists and ankles showed signs of being bound. No one has ever been charged with this crime. No one has even come close.
Mark’s mother and brother have since died, never knowing any truth about what happened to their son and brother. Despite light-year type advances in DNA testing and forensic genetic genealogy, Mark’s case sits in file cabinets and storage rooms at the state police and the Oakland County sheriff’s department, along with the cases of Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich and Tim King. Collecting dust and degrading.
Two survivors of Ann Arbor/Grosse Pointe/N. Fox Island pedophile Frank Shelden have told me over the years that they saw a boy they believe was Mark in the presence of Frank Shelden during the period Mark was being held captive. One was a survivor of sexual abuse by Shelden and said he is sure he saw Mark at Christ Church Cranbrook–in the church–in the presence of Shelden and his “buddy,” pedophile and child pornographer Gerald Richards. They were alone in the church; Shelden was on the board of Cranbrook boy’s school.
The second man told me he realized Shelden was grooming him when he was a boy and had one outing with him that thankfully (and remarkably) did not turn into an assault. Shelden stopped at the gas station pedophile Arch Sloan worked at in Oakland County. This man said that there was a boy being kept in the bathroom of the service station and that he now believes it was Mark Stebbins.
There is no way of knowing if either of these recollections are accurate, but they are incredibly distressing. And most readers will recall that 11 months after Mark’s murder, violent and prolific pedophile Greg Greene told Flint detectives that his old pal Chris Busch had killed Mark Stebbins. This resulted in a call to the OCCK task force and a flurry of activity law enforcement in Oakland County hoped would never see the light of day. See Chapter 9 in the free preview of Guarded by Jackals, Predators, the Public Officials Who Protected Them and Resolution of Michigan’s Most Notorious Cold Case, which you can access via a link listed here: https://guardedbyjackals.com/.
When Greg Greene and Chris Busch’s name “resurfaced” in 2007, we–including Mark’s brother Michael–were hopeful the case might be solved or at least advanced. That was almost 18 years ago. No such “luck.”
This possible connection with Frank Shelden and Gerald Richards, in Mark’s case based on the above recollections, and in Tim’s case in investigative notes from the investigation into Ted Lamborgine and Richard Lawson that he was murdered on film–a film allegedly commissioned by Frank Shelden; has never been carefully investigated. Nor has the connection between Shelden and Chris Busch. Or the connections between an alleged pedophile ring operating in the corporate offices at General Motors in Detroit.
More on some of this in the next post.
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