I forgot that there was a photo of a door that was wide open leading into the Busch garage on 11-20-78. There were no photos of the garage itself or the basement of the home, but it is a photo from the lower level of the house. As is always the case, any time I reread these documents the cavalcade of fuckery proceeds to pour out. I have posted about most of this before.

As described below, this door was found to be wide open after police attempted to break the glass on one door and then broke open the front door.

I reread the Bloomfield Township Police Department Incident Reports dated 11-20-78 on the death of Christopher Busch in his parents’ home. One is handwritten and the other typewritten, with additional information. The bottom of all six of these pages is cut off and they do not include the reporting officer’s name. He refers to himself in the report as “writer.” Is the responding officer, Cpl. McNamee, the author of the handwritten report and Officer Uhrig the author of the typewritten report? The top of the handwritten report has “Uhrig” written on it; maybe it was assigned to him instead of McNamee. Without the bottom lines of these pages, we have to guess.

For more on McNamee, see for example–https://catherinebroad.blog/2020/08/27/bloomfield-township-police-department-corporal-richard-james-mcnamee-dob-12-21-29-dod-6-13-96/.

The handwritten report indicates that “the writer” learned from the Busch’s maid that she could not enter the house with her key because “the nite latch was locked from the inside.” “Writer” spoke with the maid and with Chris Busch’s brother Charles, who was present at the scene.

“Writer” describes trying to gain entry by breaking the glass out of the storm door on the west side of the house. Unsuccessful, writer went back with Charles to the front door and forced the front door open, breaking the chain lock from the wall. They (presumably McNamee and Charles) proceeded to Chris’ bedroom and found his rotting corpse.

As described in the handwritten report, “writer” then “made a check of the home inside & out finding all doors & windows had been locked from the inside except the door from the garage it was standing open but the outside overhead doors were closed.” This door was wide open. Nobody thought to check the overhead garage doors or the adjacent garage side door to gain entry before breaking the front door latch. If “writer” was indeed McNamee, he may well have been in that basement before. “All good down here except for that wide open door–weird.”

As I have noted before, the typewritten report indicates that family friend W. Aitken was also present in the home during the investigation.

The report also indicates, as we have long known, that liars/cowards/incompetents John Davis and Ron Pierce of the OCCK Task Force arrived within the hour, seeing as there was a diorama of evidence implicating or attempting to implicate Chris Busch as the OCCK. If these task force members ever reported back to anyone in writing, it certainly wasn’t contained in the MSP’s FOIA responses.

I remind you that Det. Cory Williams with Livonia PD and later the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, attempted on numerous occasions to speak with these two men as part of the investigation into Busch. These fucks actively avoided Det. Williams and one had his wife run defense for him on the phone. You are both complicit in this coverup as far as I’m concerned. Rot in Hell with your pal L. Brooks Patterson.

After rereading the incident reports, I had to go looking for the photos from this un-crime scene. I had forgotten there were FOIA hoops to jump through at every turn. First, the initial FOIA documents of photos from the scene were Xeroxed, black and white, and were redacted. My dad then asked for unredacted copies, which were sent in black and white. I believe it was Kristine’s sister who requested color copies of the photos, which when received were in color and more numerous, but back to being redacted.

Black and white, unredacted, includes open door from lower level:

Here are three pages from a report prepared for our family by a friend who is retired law enforcement. One page observes that there is no evidence of an attempted access via the kitchen/west door as described in the handwritten report. The next two pages make interesting observations about the wide-open door leading outside from the garage.

Maybe W. Aitken was there for moral support for Charles. Maybe he was there to report back to H. Lee. Maybe he was there to help ensure this suicide investigation was cut and dried and did not involve any deep search of the house or the basement. I’d hate to begrudge someone a friend at a time like this, but interesting that Aitken was there during the investigation. “Personal friend of the family.”

Finally, here are the report pages I refer to above:

If that POS McNamee is the author of the handwritten report, he is the one who “made a check of the house inside & out.” Somehow that is not very reassuring.

***Update: A reader let me know that William Aitken, the “personal friend of the family,” lived three houses south of the Busch residence at 151 Overhill Road.

https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/william-aitken_id_G5266133428523525497

He was an executive for the General Motors Overseas Division. 

Click to access np-3627-17.pdf

His obituary mentions he was a member of the GM Senior Men’s Club.  According to the reader, many of the highest level GM executives were in this club. I think he was there to report back to H. Lee, who was in Europe with his wife Elsie when this went down.

The Boulder home where JonBenet Ramsey was murdered is on a site called House Creep, under its current (not the original) address:

https://www.housecreep.com/ee/749-15th-st-boulder-co-80302-us

The Bloomfield Village home where Christopher Busch was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head is also on the site, having been added 8 years ago:

https://www.housecreep.com/ee/3310-morningview-ter-bloomfield-hills-mi-48301-us

The house was initially outed in a very big way on October 26, 2009, when a photograph of the beautiful residence appeared on page 6A of the three-page article in The Detroit News written by Marney Keenan (“Finding Timmy’s Killer: King Family Believes They Know Who Killed 11-Year-Old in 1977, But Police are Slow to Act.”)

Months before that article, I was in Michigan and photographed this home from every angle. Garages in that neighborhood are all back-facing or with homes on nearby streets, well into the backyard. Because the Busch house is on a corner lot, the garage is even more secluded from the prying eyes of neighbors.  More importantly, the house is built on a hill.  Instead of being on the main level of the home, the garage for the Busch home goes directly to the basement.  A reader pointed out, and I agree–a pedophile could not have designed a better home.  It is no wonder that H. Lee chose this home despite the inconvenience of a basement garage entry. I am not exaggerating when I say that when I looked down into that yard and saw the garage, I had an overwhelming feeling that this garage entrance was where Tim was initially taken on the night of March 16, 1977 and his fate was sealed.

When I next drove to the homes owned by John Hastings’ parents on nearby Tuckahoe Street, and realized just how close they were to the H. Lee “party” palace, I was so shaken I walked down the middle of the street after I photographed both homes/garages. There was no one around in the middle of the day; the neighborhood was quiet as a tomb.

I then drove to the corner of Oxford and Mohegan in Birmingham and saw for myself how close Chris Busch’s older brother’s home was to playground equipment and basketball courts in Poppleton Park. Chris Busch must have loved visiting that area–Adams School, Poppleton Park, the big parking lot behind Hunter-Maple Pharmacy where kids skateboarded. How close it was to our home on Yorkshire. How big brother and his wife must have seen the helicopters landing right there in the park during the search for my brother.

Chris Busch exposed himself to a young teen girl near his brother’s home. A disturbing Polaroid sex photo was found on the sidewalk by the parents’ home by a neighbor girl. She showed her mother, a neighbor of the Busch family, and was told to stay away from that place, as “bad things” were going on over there. Decades later, the mother would say she had no recollection of any such thing. Her daughter remembered it; it had quite an impact.

During the execution of the search warrant on the Busch home on October 30, 2008 (31 years too late), a storage room in the basement was discovered that had been completely drywalled over. Like the basement room where JonBenet Ramsey was found in was bricked over and made inaccessible. Containing the evil?

Shelves were removed from this walled over Morningview Terrace storage room (described as a fruit cellar) and taken away as evidence. Entire shelves. FOIA documents indicated that all of the evidence from the search was eventually “filed” by a state lab worker and was ready should anyone ever want to test any of it. I do not believe any of it has ever been evaluated or tested in any way.

Recall that none of the photographs from the Chris Busch “suicide” report are of the basement. His bedroom, his closet, the kitchen, the entryway. That’s it. No where in the police report is there any indication that the basement was entered or searched. There is no indication that H. Lee and Elsie Busch, who were in Europe at the time of their youngest son’s death, were interviewed by police. The brother, the housecleaner, a neighbor, some friend of Busch’s; but not the parents. There is a one-liner that H. Lee told police his son was set to start a new job on November 27. And the little receipt H. Lee signed when he arranged to keep the gun as a memento of the big day. That’s it.

I am told that the basement was partially finished over the intervening years, but that it is easy to see what it looked like in 1978.  This is what else I’m told: Today it has a very, very different feel from the rest of the home. It is still a labyrinthine dungeon.  There are several rooms with large, bricked storage enclosures.  It was described to me as the stuff of nightmares.  The victims were not being brought to the main level or upstairs to Chris’s bedroom.  Elsie wouldn’t have that.  The main level had to keep the refined veneer of class that H. Lee and his wife projected.  Victims could easily have been brought in through the private garage entrance where they could not be seen.  They could be kept in the basement dungeon which was connected to one of the many closed off rooms where screams could not be heard.  It is entirely arguable that the crime scene at the Busch home was rushed in November of 1978 because of what was found in Chris’s bedroom (which was appalling and incriminating enough).  It was perhaps rushed to keep the police out of the basement and to prevent them from finding evidence of what happened to countless children therein. 

If you have a hard time believing this, you have not been reading my blog very carefully.