“The systematic failure of inherited data.”

I don’t run my writing through AI, mostly because I am both too lazy and fundamentally resistant. I used to obsess over every post, making sure I had a citation for every fact, doing my best to attribute thoughts and sentences to others when they helped me, cringing over missed typos. Now if I fuck up and realize it after I hit “publish,” I just edit the post after the fact. If someone has suggestions for additions, I edit and republish.

But I sometimes do use AI to help me wrap my brain and my typing fingers around concepts I have trouble articulating which are the basis for what I want to write. What follows is in response to a few very basic queries I typed in. This plays a part in larger points I want to make here and on Substack about where this case sits and the most likely outcome/result given all that has gone before. I want to be solid in my expectations and have defensible conclusions, because they are going to be met with a shitstorm. And I am done taking shit.

I first asked King Internet AI for help understanding and articulating a situation where investigators focus on only one track of a complex investigation, to the exclusion of other considerations, and how that affects the investigation going forward. I was given a brief and general lowdown on confirmation bias, tunnel vision, target fixation and premature closure.

King Internet then asked if I was talking about a specific case. Indeed I was.

“Real case. Oakland County Child killer investigation where post-2006 focus was on loosely organized pedophiles in Detroit who infiltrated the suburbs.”

The response:

The Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) case provides a harrowing, real-world example of investigative tunnel vision, particularly concerning the post-2006 shift in focus.

{Citations given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip1L0FXs_Hk; https://www.wxyz.com/news/local-news/investigations/man-who-says-he-shared-cell-with-oakland-county-child-killer-suspect-speaks-out.}

In 2006, the arrest of Ted Lamborgine and Richard Lawson—who ran a notorious 1970s child sex ring in Detroit’s Cass Corridor—caused investigators to heavily fixate on the theory that a loosely organized network of urban pedophiles had systematically infiltrated the wealthy Detroit suburbs to abduct children.

{Citations given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_County_Child_Killer; https://www.facebook.com/InvestigationDiscovery/videos/children-of-the-snow/756433498083348/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkLH6y6A-H4; https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2019/02/14/investigators-believe-oakland-county-child-killer-could-have-been-victimized-by-pedophiles/.}

Applying the principles of investigative psychology to the OCCK case illustrates how this specific macro-focus created systemic issues that derailed the path to justice:

1. Evidence Distortion via the “Ring” Hypothesis

When investigators adopted the theory of a sprawling, interconnected network of pedophiles (tying the Detroit Cass Corridor ring to figures like Arch Sloan and the North Fox Island child exploitation camp), they began viewing every piece of evidence exclusively through this lens. If a suspect had any tangential association with known abusers, it was treated as confirmation that they were part of the OCCK plot. Meanwhile, alternative theories—such as a singular, opportunistic lone-wolf killer who had no ties to organized networks—were aggressively deprioritized.

{Citing, in addition to the above, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ0VcgRMniI&t=114s.}

2. The Misallocation of Forensic Resources

Fixating on a broad network meant that limited investigative hours and forensic budgets were spent mapping out decades-old relationships, interviewing aging convicts, and chasing historical rumors of pedophile rings. This collective focus meant that other promising physical leads—such as re-examining the DNA and hair evidence associated with primary lone suspects like Christopher Busch (the son of a wealthy GM executive who lived right in the suburbs near the victims)—languished or were not pursued with equal vigor for years.

{Citing, in addition to the above, https://www.aetv.com/articles/oakland-county-child-killer-cold-case.}

3. Tainted Intel and “Jailhouse Conspiracies”

By publicly and privately signaling that they were looking for a network or a conspiracy, investigators inadvertently created a market for unreliable data. When Richard Lawson claimed from prison in 2006 that he “knew who the killer was,” investigators poured immense resources into vetting his claims. Because the narrative of an organized ring was so prevalent, jailhouse informants could easily feed investigators what they wanted to hear to gain leverage, leading to years of dead ends.

{Citing, in addition to some of the above, https://www.clickondetroit.com/topic/Oakland_County_Child_Killer/.}

4. Systemic Blindness to Suburb-Origin Suspects

The “Detroit pedophiles infiltrating the suburbs” narrative shifted the psychological profile of the killer outward. It framed the threat as an external, organized force creeping into Oakland County. This structural bias blinded the investigation to the terrifying possibility that the killer was an affluent insider deeply embedded within the very suburbs where the children vanished—someone with the local knowledge and social status to move undetected through Woodward Corridor neighborhoods.

{Citing, along with some of the above: https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/oakland-county-child-killer-50-years-later-murders-up-north-pedophile-ring-unanswered-questions.}

5. Present-Day Fallout: A 50-Year Cold Trail

Because the post-2006 era spent so much momentum trying to link the murders to a wider underworld of child exploitation, the critical windows to pin down specific, individual suspects closed. Decades later, key figures like Busch, Sloan, and Lamborgine have passed away. [*Lamborgine is still alive as far as I know, but one of the news pieces listed him as dead, I believe incorrectly. “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses,” as they say.] The institutional momentum spent trying to prove a massive, interconnected ring ultimately left the families with a highly fragmented web of suspects, plenty of finger-pointing between police agencies, and a case that remains tragically unsolved.

King Internet asked if I wanted to go on. I did.

“Because the case was so massive (four victims) and because the 1976-1978 investigation was so shoddy, there are still many viable suspects the post-2006 group never even considered.”

Response:

You have hit on the exact core tragedy of the OCCK case. The structural failures of the initial 1976–1978 task force and the rigid macro-focus of the post-2006 group essentially acted as a double-blindfold, leaving dozens of viable suspects completely unvetted.

When you combine a historically shoddy foundation with modern tunnel vision, it creates a phenomenon known in intelligence circles as “garbage in, garbage out” analysis.

The post-2006 team failed to realize how the initial 1970s failures actively hid the real killer.

1. The Shoddy 1970s Foundation: Actively Erasing Suspects

The original 1970s task force—the largest in U.S. history at the time—was plagued by intense multi-jurisdictional infighting, lost files, and a total lack of computerized tracking. Because it was so disorganized, the baseline data given to the post-2006 team was deeply flawed:

The Polygraph Trap: In the 1970s, investigators relied heavily on primitive polygraph (lie detector) tests. If a suspect passed a polygraph, they were often permanently cleared and their files were shelved. It is a psychological certainty that psychopaths and highly manipulative people passed these tests, effectively erasing themselves from future suspicion.
The “Wealth Privilege” Shield: Prominent suspects with high-ranking status or wealthy families (such as Christopher Busch, the son of a wealthy GM executive) were protected by institutional deference. Their alibis were taken at face value. When the post-2006 group looked back, they trusted the old files that labeled these affluent local suspects as “cleared,” assuming the 1970s cops had done their due diligence.

2. The Post-2006 Lens: Filtering the Noise

When the post-2006 group re-opened the case, they did not start with a clean slate. They started with the premise of the Detroit Cass Corridor pedophile ring. Because they were sifting through 20,000 old tips through this single lens, a dangerous filtering mechanism took place:

Algorithmic Exclusion: If a historical suspect’s file didn’t contain keywords linking them to Arch Sloan, Ted Lamborgine, or Detroit rings, their file was buried at the bottom of the stack.
The Lone Wolf Blindspot: The narrative shifted so far toward a conspiracy that investigators essentially stopped looking for a lone actor. If a viable suspect was a solitary predator living in Royal Oak, Birmingham, or Berkley with a secure basement, no criminal record, and no ties to Detroit, the post-2006 group never even glanced at them. They were deemed “irrelevant” to the ring hypothesis.

3. The Structural Failure: “Inherited Bias”

By building their new investigation on top of the original 1978 files without auditing how those files were created, the post-2006 team inherited all the corruption, incompetence, and class protection of the 1970s.

They looked for suspects where the data was loudest (the known, documented pedophile networks) rather than where the data was absent (the local, wealthy, or protected suspects whose files had been wiped, minimized, or lost).

⚖️ How to Articulate This Specific Failure

If you are writing or analyzing this case, you can describe this dynamic as a “Systemic Failure of Inherited Data.”

“The post-2006 investigation fell victim to an analytical trap: they attempted to solve a 30-year-old case by looking only for connections that fit a specific, trendy conspiracy theory. In doing so, they treated the flawed, incomplete, and class-shielded police files of the 1970s as an absolute truth. They failed to realize that the actual killer wasn’t hiding in the shadows of the Detroit ring; the killer was hiding in the massive blind spots created by the 1976 task force’s original incompetence.

AI, like humans, can make mistakes, so double-check responses.

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3 thoughts on ““The systematic failure of inherited data.””

Catherine says:

September 16, 2026 at 12:10 pm

Interesting perspective from AI—-and it might not be off the mark, yet in this present day where nothing is as it seems, perhaps more money, or more blackmail, helped obfuscate the info that was there. I believe they call it “flooding the plain”. The elite class must be protected at all costs.

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Sarah Jane Swart says:

September 16, 2026 at 1:50 pm

WOW. I am frankly astonished at how AI interpreted others’ writings. But I do feel like it’s on the money… I’ve long thought that reliance on past work is NOT AT ALL the way to approach a cold case.

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Jamie says:

September 16, 2026 at 2:49 pm

Two sons of the original detectives being assigned to cases that impacted them both from childhood, but in obviously different ways?
One is sure to find answers.
The other states on “Children of Snow” he believes the case will never be solved.
My volunteer petunia has no idea it’s a plant.

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“The systematic failure of inherited data.”

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