House Creep

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.