The amorphous bond between Chris Busch and Frank Shelden

I forgot to add a very important quote from Genesee County Prosecutor Robert Leonard in my post of yesterday “April 1977.” Leonard and Traverse City Record-Eagle reporter Marilyn Wright seem to be the only two people in Michigan who would acknowledge the much bigger picture of pedophelia and CSAM (then referred to as child pornography) in 1977.

As pointed out in Guarded by Jackals at page 340-341, Leonard commented on the arrest of Chris Busch and Greg Greene as follows:

Genesee County Prosecutor Robert F. Leonard said yesterday [February 22, 1977] that the defendants may have passed boys from one to another and the scheme may have had “nationwide” ties. He said his office is investigating the possibility the defendants may have been linked to Grosse Pointe millionaire Francis D. Shelden, missing since allegations that his youth camp on a Lake Michigan Island near Traverse City was a homosexual haven became public last fall.

Detroit News, February 22, 1977, 16A.

Of course it was not a homosexual haven, but a pedophile haven.

The Traverse City Record-Eagle picked up on reports of the Busch and Greene arrest in article about a freshman legislator from Lapeer who was proposing legislation to outlaw child pornography. Dated March 12, 1977, four days before my brother Tim was abducted, the article discussed police seizure of film containing CSAM from a Marine City man affiliated with Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission (Fox Island), as well as the arrests in Flint. Christopher Busch is named outright.

Flint police also confiscated eight rolls of film from Christopher Busch, 25, of Birmingham, one of three men arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct involving 10 to 14-year-old boys. Police say as many as 50 youths could be involved.

Traverse City Record-Eagle, March 12, 1977, Page 1.

While the article was “From staff and wire reports,” reporter Marilyn Wright (who had joined the staff in July 1976) was at that point at least four months into her investigation into Frank Shelden and the massive criming that was taking place on his pedophile island, N. Fox Island. She would begin writing about this monster and his “associates” in early April, after my brother had become the fourth known victim of the Oakland County child killers.

Wright, like Leonard, knew that money and respectability helped advance pedophile predation and wrote that society needed to realize these criminals were basically operating out in the open and not in dark alleys.

As I have noted many times, Wright’s work breaking down and exposing the criminality of Frank Shelden, Gerald Richards, Dyer Grossman, and “Adam Starchild” (Malcolm Willis McConahy) was amazing and the Detroit area media didn’t touch it. Looked away.

Notably, her reporting figures prominently in the FBI “Vault” on Shelden (starting around page 83), that showed up online a few years ago in spite of the previously described catastrophic flooding of their records repository. https://vault.fbi.gov/francis-shelden/Francis Shelden Part 01/view. Somebody thought it was important.

Wright didn’t mess around. In August of 1977 she was awarded first place in the Fourth Annual Advancement of Justice Awards presented by the Michigan Bar Association for a series of articles and editorials about the plight of two neglected kids who waited five years for their case to be heard in court.

Despite the proximity in time of the reporting on Shelden, and the obvious parallels, the child killer task force doesn’t take a real look. I’ve posted these two baffling entries from the MSP file on Shelden before–they are the only references to the child killer case or the task force in the FOIA documents they provided:

With this weak sauce, Robertson’s son doesn’t have a lot to work with in 2009. Not that he would have ever thought about interviewing Marilyn Wright, or figuring any of this out anyway. I am not sure of the date Marilyn Wright passed away, but I am quite sure she was still alive in 2009.

Take a gander at these maddening entries from the MSP “supplemental” incident report covering December 2009.

I found no follow up to these entries about Busch and Shelden in the FOIA documents.

I think it’s safe to say that if investigators weren’t even going to ask the parents of Mark, Kristine, Jill and Tim if just maybe their families ever knew a Chris Busch or if he looked familiar, after they found an OCCK diorama at his death scene in November 1978, nobody back then was going to look very carefully for a connection between Chris Busch and Frank Shelden. Or Arch Sloan. Or John Hastings. Or Ted Lamborgine. Or Bobby Moore.

The public deserved the truth in this case, no matter how ugly. It would have saved other kids. And the current stonewalling and foot-dragging is the ultimate disrespect to the dead. Get that DNA going and report to the public. You’ve hidden your shit for almost 50 years.

More on Sloan and the fucked up DNA in this case another day.