This powerful conclusion is that of Rita Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of Clutch Justice, an independent Michigan-focused investigative accountability journalism platform. It covers judicial misconduct, prosecutorial conduct, and public institutional failures. I referenced her website this past July, specifically noting her N. Fox Island reference library and evaluation of the OCCK case.
Check out this OCCK & North Fox Island Research Reference Library
A reader wrote yesterday about Williams’ website and work and said it is nice to see someone else writing in 2026 about the problems never explained in the OCCK case.
I urge you to read this piece, entitled “The Oakland County Child Killer Case Did Not Go Cold Because the Killer Was Untouchable. It Went Cold Because Michigan Institutions Were Fractured, Self-Protective, and Built to Fail at Exactly This.”
https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/08/rre-occk-oakland-county-child-killer-institutional-failure/
Here’s the bottom line, but I urge you to read the entire piece and the other two links.
Multiple compounding failures: no shared investigative database, jurisdictional fragmentation across municipal and county lines, a botched polygraph clearance of a documented prime suspect, and institutional self-protection that prioritized reputation over accountability. The killer was never identified. The failure was not mysterious.
See also
https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/25/occk-newblatt-bond-reduction-christopher-busch/ [Context is not evidence of corruption, but the context is pretty goddamn depressing.]
https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/26/occk-christopher-busch-staged-suicide-forensic-evidence/ [“The state questioned Busch and released him; the state’s forensic lab produced results inconsistent with the suicide ruling; the state disbanded its task force weeks after Busch’s death; the state withheld Busch’s identity from the victims’ families for 28 years; and the state fought Barry King’s FOIA requests through three lawsuits. Whether those facts support a civil claim is a question for lawyers. The question of why the state has fought this hard, for this long, against the families of four murdered children, is a question anyone can ask.”]
Thank you for your work, Rita Williams. It helps to see things from another perspective and it’s pretty boiled down and undeniable at Clutch Justice. And thanks to the reader for reminding me to circle back.
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Another example from Western Michigan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyBQi0M-T6I
Check out the comments, too.
Well my hypothesis is the deep involvement of the Catholic Church Seminarians from Maryglade Seminary.
The suspicious sudden closure of that establishment just a relatively short time before the high profile murders adds to my concerns.
The holy stink must be covered up at all costs but there is a solid line of connection able to be drawn between Frank Shelden and North Fox paedophiles, and local priestly beasts predating for boy sex.
The sick abuse of girls has religious fingerprints all over it metaphorically.
I believe Catholics in authority in law enforcement and government have carefully buried these investigations to protect their beloved church.
I have a friend who has done a deep and impressive dive on this. The Church was playing some big time musical chairs with these priests in Detroit and the suburbs, bordering on panic, after my brother’s funeral at Holy Name. Quite literally the only tip I have ever seen that was marked “High Priority” was that of a priest who had served at St. James Catholic Church and at Holy Name during the 1970s. Like many suspects, I don’t think he was ever “cleared.” Even Chris Busch wasn’t “high priority,” but I guess we know the reasons behind that.
I didn’t do the work on the Church angle and don’t have permission to publish it. There is obviously still concern about what the Church–all the way to the Vatican–would still do as concerns this case.
I think this is the kind of inquiry that could be built upon or ruled out once and for all if the documents in this case are made public after they are digitized. Anyone who fights this, openly or behind the scenes, will have some explaining to do. And hopefully they will lose any such battle after thwarting justice in this case for 50 years.
St. James–The Stebbins family. Holy Name–The King family.
Michigan isn’t alone in this type of shit show. The Golden State Killer in California was operating roughly during the same time frame and with similar structural dynamics. Despite several, overlapping, regional task forces, the jurisdictions involved were not communicating, nor were they sharing outside their regions. Additionally, these earlier task forces did not even agree they were looking for the same person. It wasn’t until the 2016 task force that involved every jurisdiction plus the FBI, where they all cooperated with each other, and looked comprehensively at all cases, that they made any forward progress. Sadly, that is unlikely to happen here in Michigan.
Follow-on thought: other famous cases around the country also had jurisdictional issues that hindered investigation: Ted Bundy, Hillside Strangler, John Wayne Gacy, and so on. So this is not unique to the state of Michigan. In the case of GSK and OCCK, these task forces were formed after numerous victims and local police had already spent significant time gathering, analyzing evidence and coming up with their own assumptions. But there is another phenomenon we fail to look to consider: With the exception of the Hillside Strangler, each of these cases are spread across the suburbs.
After the explosion of suburbs in the 1960s, by the 1970s, offenders could operate across a large, mobile, suburbanized country faster than police could integrate information. Postwar suburbanization created dispersed residential areas, less pedestrian visibility, and greater privacy. For residential predators, detached homes, night-time routines, limited neighborhood familiarity, and car-based travel could make surveillance and escape easier. The Oakland County victims’ disappearances along ordinary suburban routes—stores, walking paths, neighborhood travel—show that danger appeared embedded in everyday mobility, not in a clearly bounded “dangerous place.”
Further, police departments are designed to be decentralized. Early police officers were hired, trained, and patrolled in the neighborhoods they lived in, which likely influenced how the policing system developed. So add an old policing model to a relatively new model of geographic dispersement, and it is pretty easy to see how this went incredibly wrong in the early years.
All that said, there is absolutely no excuse for the decades of bullshit that followed.
Hi Cathy.
If it’s the one thing I think you’re referring to. It’s not exactly a ‘botched up’ polygraph. It’s something even more PATHETIC than that!
It’s the cover up of the polygraph test itself that may have been done correctly. It seems like every trace of this polygraph has completely disappeared from existence as you have proven time and time again. Only thing still around is the limited wording in the FOIA papers that slipped through the redacted process. All traces are missing because it reflects on a connection between Hastings and Busch which simply cannot be allowed. The strong suspicious conclusions written from it, point to guilt involving murder or at least that is how it’s worded to my interpretation. It’s still hard to believe that MSP has no accountability for all the missing data from the polygraph test including a DVD that was made documenting it. If any of the details could ever be uncovered of this polygraph and why the strong conclusion written from it, it may actually point to solving the OCCK case. That is the part that seems to be difficult to comprehend.
It is obstruction of justice. Even if one wants to debate the Georgia polygraph results, the information was deep-sixed. Hastings is one of many leads that were never followed “to their bitter end.”
It is OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.
What does “the killer didn’t ruin everything” mean? I think the killer(s) ruined everything and LE shit the bed on all of it.
Cathy Broad and her father before her, and the authors of the two books I can think of off the top of my head, already did an excellent job of calling out the BS and ball dropping of the MSP, OCP, and various other players over the last 50 years. I appreciate how difficult it is to distill all the information down into a succinct paragraph or two. I am typically unsuccessful when I try to do this.
But if something reads like AI which turns everything into a technical paper and loves to use the word “structural” with antecedents everywhere—I get lost.
Read on if you’d like to see how I can get lost——-
I don’t know where to ask this question. I hope G-Man and anyone else with a good knowledge of the sketchy people in this case have read this far. LOL.
Who TF is Ted Rodinsky and why does he not show up in public records in Michigan and only shows up in AR in the 1990s and why is he quoted in a story about Jill Robinson as a family friend?
I know who he is based on files in this case found on this blog—but who is he really?
His obit says he was a PI and worked for Lakeshore Investigation Services and other “international child find” services, was married to a social worker named Wanda in AR, and his old man photo on his obit looks vaguely like one of the 167 sketches of the OCCK to me.
He worked in Chicago as a copy writer in the mid 1960s. (I have a photo of him from that era)
TR was rescued at about age 14 from the Rouge River by a monk in 1947.
He is related to a Wozny (unclear if it’s the same Wozny family of the mailman who found Kristine M).
He and his wife had charges against them for passing bad checks in AR.
Jill Robinson’s mom confronted him and asked him if he did something to Jill. (This was relayed by Jerry Self to someone in LE found in a file on this blog). In the interview it also mentions Jill’s mom blaming Ted for his advice on how to handle Jill and she would have never told Jill to leave the house if not for his advice in this. Wtf is Ted giving advice on child rearing—he has NO kids. Never had kids in his entire life according to his obituary. He had step kids only.
Rodinsky allegedly had a BA, an MA, and was a PI but he worked nights at Burger King in the 1970s?
Anyone got anything more on Theodore Frederick Rodinsky? Born in 1932 in Detroit and lived in and around Redford and Schoolcraft in Detroit?
Oh! Ted’s parents and a boarder were held up by 3 people pretending to be police in their house in the 1950s. They were robbed.
Ted was also ticketed for playing calypso music on Belle Isle along with a Robert Stevenson in 1957. (What a weird thing to get ticketed for but the story was in newspapers across the country) Both of them were called: Wayne State students.
To Cathy—if your stats have shown an increase in searches for Ted Rodinsky, Arkansas, etc…it’s me.