Since the beginning of the internet, anonymous people have weighed in on various forums and websites about the OCCK crimes as group killings. It is not a stretch to claim that teens and younger men were used as lures to engage with kids in preparation for an abduction in the OCCK cases. Lures, “babysitters,” participants in videos, body dumpers. Vince Gunnels never admitted to any such role but that is not a stretch, either.
Another teen about the same age was more forthcoming with police and told them Busch’s pedo pal Greg Greene had tried to recruit him to abduct a boy that they would then murder and cut his penis off. He also told police he was forced to have sex with a boy he believes was my brother Tim. He recognized the photo they showed him of my brother taken at the morgue. This teen did not have half the contact with Busch and Greene that Gunnels did.
A reader sent me this compilation of mug shots from Gunnels’ various jail and prison stints. None of the crimes were sex crimes. They are the kind of crimes that someone whose life has been damaged by an animal like Christopher Busch, would rack up during life. The photos emanate despair.
In 2012 my dad and my brother Chris met face-to-face with Vince Gunnels. He offered next to nothing except the horrifying story about a weekend he spent at the Busch family cottage at Ess Lake with Chris and two of his nephews. My dad and brother drove to Kalamazoo to meet with Gunnels and they got played yet again. It’s really gross.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2012/02/28/oakland-county-child-killer-suspect-speaks-face-to-face-with-victims-family/ (“Key suspect says he knows nothing about killings.”)
I don’t believe him. I do believe that threats against him and his family are the leverage used to keep him quiet and fuel his lies for all these decades. At a certain point, it must feel a little late in the game to come clean. And then there is the worry of being left holding the bag for the bigger fish who swam free. Even a drug-addled mind understands these problems.
Here’s another guy with a history of low level crimes who might be in the same boat. Joe Sloan, Arch Sloan’s much younger brother.
He is 15 years younger than Arch, and would have been a little older than Gunnels, about 19 or 20 in 1976/77.
My family has long maintained that if we get any answers in my brother’s murder case, we will also learn just how many people knew about the OCCK crimes and stayed silent. This is so contrary to the idea that if there is more than one participant in a crime, someone is going to squeal. Somebody made sure any squealers stayed squelched.
So much more information has yet to be shared or discovered regarding L. Brooks Patterson and other officials. As a reader pointed out, they are as bad as the perpetrators.
They can’t live forever, either, although one of them appears to be pulling a Henry Kissinger, as those types are wont to do. I have posted before about the anonymous message I received from someone (so take it for what it’s worth) that when Patterson was moving on to his eternal county executive placement, word went out that no one was to speak about what went down in his prosecutor’s office in the 1970s. This edict was allegedly accompanied by threats which included family members.
As discussed in Guarded by Jackals: Predators, the Public Officials Who Protected Them and Resolution of Michigan’s Most Notorious Cold Case, Oakland County was a pretty mobbed up place. (Chapter 12, Lifestyles of the Unjustly Enriched and Shameless). Apparently it still is. Previously sweet, little Birmingham is no exception and it sounds like it has gotten worse. Are “enforcers” still in play in the OCCK case? What a pathetic and despicable thought. Doing the dirty work for pedophile protectors is about as low as it gets.
Lots of people in this case have gone to their grave taking their secrets with them. There is apparently no incentive to be the exception.
That’s a lot to live with, as those mug shots reveal.
