Just a reminder of the passage of time and the dragging of feet. Ask me why I’m not impressed when someone goes on camera and says the cases are still being worked on.
I have posted both of these letters before, dated January 2021. Five years ago.
I know it’s a lot of reading. But I’m done hearing about war stories from the heroic efforts of law enforcement back in 1977. Fast forward to what we know we don’t know now.
Discover more from The Oakland County Child Killer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I am so sorry Cathy. This is an absolute travesty. I live in Royal Oak and was a very terrified child when your brother was abducted and murdered. I relished voting Jessica Cooper out of office (I lived out of state for a while when she was originally elected). Her behavior over the years and treatment of your father is reprehensible. And it’s so obvious that she’s hiding something–who acts like that to the father of a murdered child? I’m just finishing “Guarded by Jackals” and had planned to send a letter to Karen McDonald, as an Oakland County citizen who has followed this case for years, asking what exactly is being done now. I know with the passage of 50 years justice will never be served but the truth demands to be heard–even if it is very expensive for the OCP, MSP, etc. I’m convinced keeping this tamped down is almost exclusively tied to calling into question every case/outcome Patterson and Thompson touched in their very long (too long) careers.
Very disappointed in Karen McDonald, when she ran for office i e-mailed her and asked her to look into the OCCK killings. Now i know she just made promises to get elected. I should have known.
So galling that you have to continually be the one to hand-hold paid professionals back through the mountain of evidence staring them in the face. And to your point, paradoxical that it should seem nearly impossible to solve a case that in some regards has already been solved. One would think an oath of justice would be enough incentive for them to want to close this thing once and for all. At this point, the chain of obstructionist protection is so elderly in age that it must be like a game of telephone where the ones left to do the modern-day protecting can’t even remember who they’re trying to protect or why. That’s to say, how is there still any energy left in the tank toward keeping up the fiasco or continuing to play dumb?
Is it true the Morningview Terrace evidence from 2009 was never processed, just collected and organized? That’s criminal, if so.
To my knowledge, and as reflected in the FOIA documents I have seen, the Morningview Terrace evidence was simply “organized” and categorized and no testing was ever conducted. It was described as being “ready to go” for further evaluation that has never taken place.
The search of Morningview Terrace was, of course, 30 years too late, but the thought was that animal hair would still be in the duct work and along baseboards. But there would never be a comparison with any of the animal hairs found on the kids.
I was told a shelf of some kind was removed from the house, from a basement fruit cellar of sorts that had been drywalled over. I have also been told the shelf was taken from a bedroom closet. No one was ever willing to investigate H. Lee Busch, or listen to survivors who credibly implicate him in child rape and hosting “parties” at this house. Why would a shelf be taken from this house from either a closet or an enclosed cellar room?
In my opinion, here is why the game is still being played the way it is. The implications of Richard Thompson’s actions in Flint in the wake of Chris Busch’s arrest, reflected in the illegally redacted FOIA documents, are clear. For whatever reasons, Oakland County played ball with Chris Busch and I believe ensured similar treatment for him around the state. Busch is released from custody in Flint and six weeks later my brother is abducted and murdered. Twenty months later, Chris Busch is found dead at the Morningview Terrace house along with a staged scene that screamed “I am the child killer.” Did the public ever hear about any of this? Hell no. It was buried.
A former Oakland County Sheriff’s deputy told a friend of ours years later (in a bar in Chicago), in defending the failure to arrest anyone for these killings, that they knew who the killer was and they “couldn’t touch him,” because he was some rich guy’s kid. That’s the “lore,” which means all the old timers know this shit.
Long story short (read Guarded by Jackals), the men from the prosecutors’ offices (OC and Genesee) should have gone to prison for their actions. They wouldn’t of course, but they also could not risk Oakland County being brought to its knees by the civil lawsuit they so justly deserve. None of this could be examined too closely.
Furthermore, during that 20-month time period a number of men wind up dead in addition to Chris Busch. Richard Hojnacki, John McKinney, Chris Flynn to name a few. Two are ruled suicide and McKinney’s murder is never solved. If the “we couldn’t touch him/them” argument extends to criminal charges, it does not extend to someone taking care of business via a bullet. No one who participated in that is ever going to speak up.
Richard Thompson is still alive.
Then when Jessica Cooper takes office, the gods frown on us again. She was friends with Chris Busch’s attorney Jane Burgess and polygrapher Larry Wasser and his attorney Jim Feinberg have a direct line to the new prosecutor. Kristine’s mother files a lawsuit against the county and it’s now Cooper’s job to pull an LBP to shut this down once and for all.
The fresh-faced detectives who inherit this case never take the time to read Det. Cory Williams’ extensive case notes, let alone read any of the books written on this case. At their doorstep is the possibility that DNA might reveal a participant in one of these murders; a thread they would then have to pull and risk exposure of names their predecessors should have been all over 50 years ago.
Oath of justice? Oakland County has a 50-year plus oath of fealty to the wealthy constituents who had their thumb on the scale in this and related cases. And a code of silence.
They will never, ever come clean. DNA is a long shot because of the way the evidence was handled and stored in this case. There will be no apology, no explanation, no assurance that crimes committed by prosecutors and those they can lean on along the way, will not happen again.
The recent 50-year “anniversary” press will blow over. Anything that happens now could have happened a decade ago or more. But it won’t.
Misfeasance, malfeasance, obstruction of justice, public corruption–with a huge side of true crime intrigue to keep your eye off the ball. To keep you from asking the questions you should when you hear that law enforcement is “still on the case.”