I am not a cynical weatherman, but a cynical sibling of murder victim Tim King. That cynicism is legitimately born of 20 years of being gaslit by police and prosecutors in the OCCK case.
While the OCCK and related child homicides enter their 50th year of being “unsolved,” I say 20 years because prior to that we all just accepted what the Oakland County Prosecutor(s), the MSP, and local police departments implied for the 30 years before that–boy oh boy were those tough cases! We worked like dogs, but the maniacal killer just was always two steps ahead of us! He didn’t leave any evidence behind. At least there were no more killings. It’s a sad history we leave in the rearview mirror as we drive on to decades of a highly stable triple-A bond rating in Oakland County. Still a great place to raise the kids!
That triple-A bond rating was achieved on the backs of Mark Stebbins, Jane Allan, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, and Tim King. If you don’t believe that, read Guarded by Jackals (2024) and attempt to refute what is written and documented there. I will gladly post your enter responsive argument.
So as this month of February marks 50 years since the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Mark Stebbins, the first known/acknowledged victim of the Oakland County child killers, some of us continue the vigil for the children murdered in that county who received no justice. While it might seem hollow to many who just want to move on and forget the crimes ever occurred, I believe these victims and the affected communities deserve legitimate answers about where the cases stand and why. Why these cold cases are not treated like real cold cases. Why they have not been turned over to a dedicated cold case unit at the MSP.
The failures and malfeasance in these cases lands directly on the desks/lab tables of people who had no part in the reason these cases remain unsolved. They have been heavily burdened by their predecessors. That burden was not inflicted by those of us who have attempted to uncover why the cases were handled as they were and to demand answers.
Rather than acknowledge this, they recoil from the chance to reframe these cases in modern day evidentiary terms and from any degree of transparency. They frame people like me as crazy and literally punish the victims themselves by failing to act or report to the public because the ugly actions of their predecessors weigh heavily on them.
From 2006 to 2019 they (the OCP, the MSP, the FBI) punished not only my family, but Det. Cory Williams while he was working with the task force. An “outsider” from Livonia PD and later the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office, he sustained many body blows from Oakland County (Jessica Cooper, prosecutor then) and the FBI (SA Sean Callaghan, previously an assistant prosecuting attorney with the OCP). Yet Williams was the driving force during these years on the investigation, the MSP in the passenger seat when they weren’t thwarting him. He was a direct threat to the narrative the OCP had decided on in 1977 and 1978. I will always believe that the “rejuvenated” OCCK task force was created not only to provide a job for an employee in the face of a reduction in force at the MSP, but to keep an eye on Cory Williams who had uncovered possible links between Richard Lawson and Ted Lamborgine and the OCCK. (Yeah, call me crazy.)
They punished author Marney Keenan, who dared to publish a book in 2020 setting forth what happened in this investigation. They shut down any further inquiry or response to the work, immediately and apparently now permanently adopting an iron-clad “no comment” response that extends to today.
They didn’t know what to do with J. Reuben Appleman’s book before that (2018), or the Cineflix production of the documentary Children of the Snow (2019; now on Apple TV, Roku, Peacock, HBO, Hulu and Amazon Prime). But they apparently deeply regret allowing MSP employees to go on camera for that production. So now they don’t advise the public on this and related cases, ever. This silence helps avoid scrutiny of what has gone before and avoid the question of what can be done NOW.
And prior to that, the MSP punished my dad many times over for having the audacity to file and then litigate a FOIA request in his son’s murder case. They punished him for going to the press when no one in the chain of command would address his legitimate concerns.
I don’t know who the MSP answers to or why they are handled with kid gloves by officials or even the Michigan State legislature. I do know that L. Brooks Patterson and Richard Thompson were two of the happiest men on Earth when they offloaded an Oakland County case to the MSP and never again had to answer for the dead kids in their county. Wow, that was a close one, right?!
Next post I will attempt to explain the two questions I think Michiganders should be thinking about as these cases enter the ugly 50th year “anniversaries.” One, why these cases remain “unsolved.” Two, what can be done going forward.