I am going to keep this as short and simple as I can. I had hoped to add greater detail, but I was not present at the meeting I am going to describe and this is as good as it’s going to get. Because SHHH!!!!!! Everything is a secret in this 50-year-old case! Everything is so much horse trading of information, withholding, waiting for monetized projects to drop, law enforcement manipulating survivors.
In February, reporter Heather Catallo interviewed Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Mark Stebbins. She asked if his office had reached out to the families. Uhh–that would be a big NO because we had only ever heard rumors of some cold case examination by the sheriff’s office into the OCCK case, which was assigned for better or worse, to the Michigan State Police. After all, Bouchard’s office denied my FOIA request for OCCK documents a few years prior, stating that the office had no such documents and please contact the state police.
In fact, the interviews granted by the sheriff over the ensuing few weeks in February/March, would be the first public acknowledgment that the OCSD was operating a parallel investigation of this cold case. So guess what? In the wake of the interview with Heather Catallo, a meeting was hurriedly put together for the following week with two siblings of OCCK victims–Kristine’s sister and one of my brothers. The meeting was attended by two detectives from the OCSD and one detective from the MSP. I won’t name names, because SHHHHHH!!!!!
Both siblings showed up with a long list of questions, having not been contacted by law enforcement for years. None of their questions were/could be answered. When asked about the hair that had been linked to Vince Gunnels, the detectives did not know his name. They knew nothing about Chris Busch. Both siblings stopped asking questions when they realized we are right back to 1977. There is only so much head-banging one can engage in. Two of the detectives said they would get back to the siblings with answers to their questions. The third (OCSD) apparently sat there scrolling on his phone the entire time, saying nothing beyond introducing himself at my brother’s request.
That was almost two months ago.
Do you see how the game is played? Come meet with us so we can tell reporters and the public that we are in touch with the families! Come see how we just pass this case to a new set of youngish, earnest detectives who will never understand the case or take the time to get up-to-speed. We will wear your asses down for another 50 years.
That’s how the game is played in the OCCK case. Pass the turd until maybe (hahaha) there is some DNA hit in the world’s most misfiled and poorly stored evidence in a serial murder case, and then these assholes will fall all over themselves to get a finger in the pie.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Sometimes you don’t get justice, but you may get some honest answers. Sometimes you don’t get either, no matter how hard you bang your head against the wall.
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Absolutely infuriating. I’m continuing to mention “Guarded By Jackals” wherever I can. And I think people are catching on to the game. But the count on time obscuring it all.
Thank you, Anne.
Heather Catallo should take your brother’s questions and get some damn answers!
Here is the sad fact: You and I know more about the OCCK case than the sheriff or any of the detectives currently assigned to the OCCK case ever will. In fact, the average diligent reader of the FOIA documents on this blog knows more than these people. They can’t answer the questions. That’s why all the OGs want to talk about what bad asses they were back in the day and how hard they worked spinning their wheels. And no one at the MSP will go on camera anyway. They have this game down to a crude science. It works for them. Their silence demeans the victims.
I banged my head against the wall when I got to the not knowing Busch or Gunnels. I guess their green nature in this gives them a plausible deniability and now I have a headache.
I have so much to say about this, mostly that any swinging dick could watch any of the myriad documentaries on OCCK and find out who was whom in this case.
So. Many. Secrets. And they just keep doubling down.
Exactly right. The double down at every, single turn. And I don’t give the “greenhorns” any slack for just the reason you describe. And of course they never called back as promised. The swinging dicks don’t do dick in this case. But they are good actors, I’ll give them that.
It’s quite sad that Vincent won’t put the past behind him ,he will be haunted to the end of his days for not simply telling the truth and giving the families some sort of answer.This isn’t an individual crime,it’s a crime of many but all it takes is for one person to finally tell the truth and put the past in the past.
The limited record we have seen in this case legitimately can establish the following. Vince Gunnels was sexually assaulted by both Chris Busch and Greg Greene. He was the complainant in two CSC cases filed against Chris Busch. He received a threatening phone call warning him not to testify in one or both of those cases. Busch’s mother, Elsie Niemi Busch, was driven to Flint and offered to write a check to Gunnels to keep him quiet. After a photo of Gunnels in his late teens started floating around (probably after the documentary Children of the Snow aired), more than one person wrote me to say this was the person who tried to abduct them when they were kids. I know cops like to discount this kind of thing, but people don’t forget that shit. Gunnels had turned from survivor to victimizer. While none of the cops involved in the “rejuvenated” task force post-2005 would ever fucking explain to me or anyone else how Vince Gunnels ended up with his very own “person of interest” binder in the child killing case, along with Busch and Greene, there it was on a table when Det/Sgt Garry Gray met with relatives of Kristine Mihelich. Perhaps it was because there was some kind of a mtDNA match between Gunnels (in and out of prison his entire life for drug and related crimes) and a hair found on Kristine’s jacket. How they managed to find Gunnels in this mix given their horrendous record-keeping in the OCCK case, would otherwise be inexplicable.
As I understand it, this particular hair was extinguished during testing years ago. But the fact remains that police had long opined that the hair found on Kristine was probably from the person who dumped her body, having thrown her over his shoulder to carry her from the car to the dump site. What better way to force a person into silence than to make them dump the body, making him an accessory after the fact?
Gunnels the sexual assault survivor became a drug user and has since claimed that his brain is too fried to remember much of anything. Gunnels the possible lure and accessory after the fact will never make the connection to righting any wrong in his life. He appears more than capable of living with it all, past present and future be damned.