The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  While it was true Lawson could talk his listeners batty, the distance between his version of events and the truth was vast. Up and down Woodward Avenue near Cass Avenue, Lawson would pick up young, white male prostitutes, about 11 to 13 years old. “Lawson said he would have sex with these boys and then try and get information out of them on the Oakland County Child Killings,” Williams said. “He tried to tell me that this was all known and sanctioned by Lt. McKinnon, which was crap. I know police work was different back in the seventies, but I also knew there was no way in hell police would tell some snitch like Lawson to molest a kid just to get information.”

  But Lawson did have a lot of valuable information connecting his associates in the Cass with the Oakland County Child Killings. In particular, he talked about a pedophile named Ted Orr, who worked for Ford Motor Company and moved to Ohio shortly after killings stopped, and Orr’s close friend, Bob Moore. Moore owned a bike shop in the Cass, and Lawson said Moore had junked a blue Gremlin back in the seventies in the lot behind the shop. He also told a story about Orr showing him a photo album that belonged to Moore. Orr, Lawson claimed, pointed to a picture of a naked Tim King and said, “Cute, isn’t he?” Moore became upset with Orr for showing Lawson the picture of “the King boy” because he knew Lawson was a snitch.9

  While preparing for the Giller murder trial, Williams received a call from Det. Sgt. Garry Gray from the Michigan State Police. Gray was inviting Williams to a January 2006 planning meeting for investigators of the Oakland County Child Killings—the state police had decided to reopen the case on its 30-year anniversary and had named Gray director of the rejuvenated Oakland County Child Killings Task Force. Gray said the Task Force was inviting a representative from each local law enforcement agency in which a victim had been taken or the body of a victim had been found.

  Williams was happy to participate. “It just so happens that I’ve been developing a possible lead in the OCCK case,” he told Gray. “I arrested a pedophile named Richard Lawson for a 1989 murder in our city and it’s looking like he has valuable information connected to the case.” Gray said the Task Force would be very interested in hearing more.

  For a time, Williams worked side-by-side with officers from the MSP, especially Garry Gray. But the camaraderie would be short lived. According to Williams, instead of working as a team, Gray insisted on calling all the shots. Gray would also sharply criticize him for keeping open lines of communication with the families of the victims. (Gray declined repeated requests for interviews during the writing of this book.)

  Gray also rubbed the King family the wrong way. At one point, during a visit with Barry and his son, Chris, at the King home, Gray tried to dissuade the Kings from talking to the media. “He said any media attention would create a lot of useless leads,” Chris King remembered. It was as if Gray could not be bothered with sorting useless leads from those that could possibly useful, so why do it all. “(Gray) then said: ‘And I’m on the O.B.D. policy.’ When I asked him what that meant he said: ‘One bad day and I’m out of here.’”10

  At the time Gray was working under a “deferred retirement option plan”11 that allowed him to remain on the job past vested retirement, at full wages, while accruing additional benefits.12 In essence, he was telling the Kings he could quit anytime he wanted.

  “I was so insulted by that. I felt we’d be better off if he did quit,” Chris King said.

  Apparently, Williams said, it was also not beneath Gray to ride on his coattails. Much later on in the investigation, Williams discovered someone had replaced several official Livonia PD binders and coversheets of his OCCK investigation reports with Michigan State Police binders and coversheets, so it would appear the work had been done by MSP instead of Livonia. A small, catty slight perhaps, and Williams never asked Gray about it—still Williams felt the switch had Gray’s name all over it.

  At one point, Williams’ boss, Livonia Police Chief Robert Stevenson, warned him: “Be prepared. Because if you solve this case, politicians and state police command will sweep you off the stage like a gum wrapper.”

  By early March 2005, Lawson had been extradited from California to Michigan by U.S. Marshals in a police van. It was not a pleasant trip. Because the Marshals were officiating in other investigations, the drive took two weeks, and Lawson spent several nights sleeping on the less-than-antiseptic floors of small-town jails. By the time he arrived in Livonia, Lawson was so sick he had to be hospitalized.

  A month later, Williams was on a plane to Atlantic City, hoping he had located the ponds behind the motel where Mudica said Lawson had pitched the four handguns they stole from the Giller home. Earlier, Williams had called the New Jersey State Police and relayed the salient points from Mudica’s crudely drawn map, which they matched to a Google satellite photo of the area.

  “That sounds like it could be Absecon,” a desk sergeant had told Williams. Williams then persuaded a detective from the tiny police department in Absecon—a seedy area outside of Atlantic City—to drive by the location to see if the ponds were still there. A few hours later, Det. Ron Bescelli called Williams back. “There’s a Home Depot there now, no strip motel,” said Bescelli. “But the ponds are still there.”

  New Jersey State Police diving for guns in the muck of a pond near Atlantic City, where they had been thrown 16 years earlier. With the recovered guns as evidence, Williams had built a solid case to charge Richard Lawson for Exavor Giller’s murder (Livonia Police Department).

  Diving for guns that had been thrown in the muck of a pond 16 years prior had less than fifty-fifty odds. It also had a steep price tag. But Livonia Police Chief Robert Stevenson authorized and financed the trip, knowing that if the handguns could be recovered it would prove that Mudica, the state’s star witness against Lawson, was credible. With Williams pacing the shore, divers from the New Jersey State Police Dive Team scoured the pond floor with high tech sonar equipment. On day two, a diver found one handgun; it had sunk a half-foot deep into the silt. He then emerged from the water with a second, then a third, then all four of Giller’s stolen guns. The diver held up the rusted, soot-brown guns like trophies. With this evidence in hand, Williams could nail Lawson for Giller’s murder. He also now had the leverage to force Lawson to cough up what he knew about the Oakland County Child Killings.

  * * *

  1. Catherine Giller interview with Det. Cory Williams, December 2004.

  2. Bonnie Giller interview with Det. Cory Williams, December 2004

  3. Leticia Delgado interview with Det. Williams, January 19, 2005.

  4. Richard Mudica interview with Det. Cory Williams, January 25, 2005.

  5. Ronald J. Hansen, “Accused Pedophile Has Troubled Past,” Detroit News, January 15, 2007, 1B.

  6. Hansen, “Accused.”

  7. Lawson arrest report by Det. Cory Williams, January 26, 2005.

  8. Hansen, “Accused.”

  9. Lawson interview with Det. Cory Williams, January 2005.

  10. Chris King email to me, October 14, 2009.

  11. Mike Martindale, “Deferred Police Retirement Pay to Cost Strapped State Millions,” The Detroit News, May 26, 2009.

  12. Individual Employment History, Garry Scott Gray, Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, Information and Tracking Network.

  5

  The Sick Underbelly of the Beast

  Williams spent three years, from 2004 to 2007, unraveling the child pornography ring operating in Southeast Michigan during the seventies. An interview with a suspect would produce five more names to investigate; those five each spawned another five tentacles. In a short period, the trail widened exponentially. Williams had to draw flow charts to keep it straight in his mind.

  His footwork in the Cass was an ugly undertaking; the daily slog of ferreting out child predators was both dreadful and necessary. Unc
overing crimes against innocent children subjected to every known sexual perversion never dulls, never fails to ruin an entire day. But every interview had to be done, if only to rule the suspect out.

  Williams began to document the fast-growing child prostitution and porn industry in 1970s Detroit. Financed by a handful of wealthy lechers (among them: Michigan’s Francis Shelden, New York’s Dyer Grossman, Illinois’ Guy Strait and Tennessee’s Bud Vermilye), many of the child porn operations were incorporated under the guise of religious youth groups, camps for children and foster homes. It was not uncommon for independent contractors to infiltrate orphanages, Boys Town, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA.

  Producing films and magazines behind closed doors in private homes, basements and garages, pornographers used home movie cameras, built dark rooms and installed printers and mimeograph machines. Their output was distributed using mailings lists that, in some cases, were stored in bank safe deposit boxes. An unsuspecting U.S. Postal Service channeled underground papers and magazines far and wide.

  “It was bizarre, really, that all of this had been going underground and was never investigated,” Williams said. “It was an ugly, hidden world that nobody wanted to touch at the time.”

  Around metropolitan Detroit, pedophiles were cruising roller skating rinks, arcades, and public parks for victims. Once lured, the kids would be brought to homes in the Cass Corridor for “pedophile orgies.” Kids were plied with alcohol, coached and coaxed. Afterward, they took showers. Some were given enemas, to hide evidence. While it was risky, pedophiles told Williams they occasionally ventured to the suburbs because kids there were considered “delicacies.”

  In 2005, Lawson had told Williams that he and others were prostituting children to “rich auto executives in the suburbs” in the seventies. An interview with one of Bob Moore’s victims confirmed this. Alan McCoy, 13 at the time, lived with Moore for a little over a year. McCoy would provide sex in exchange for money or food. He also allowed Moore to prostitute him. McCoy told Williams that Moore would “drive him to rich people’s houses who wanted a young boy.” Moore took McCoy to homes in Waterford, Sylvan Lake, and Bloomfield Hills—all suburbs in Oakland County. Afterward, Moore would be paid. Then he would take Alan to McDonald’s and give him 40 bucks.

  “Who knows how much Moore was being paid,” Williams remembered. “Probably hundreds. I interviewed Alan McCoy in my car and he broke down crying, telling me the entire story of his life. It’s a very sad story. Two months later, his girlfriend called me. She said: ‘I’m calling you because Alan liked you.’ Then she said: ‘I found him hanging in the garage yesterday.’”

  In all, Williams identified several hundred men belonging to a structured organization, sharing kids for their sick pleasure. The organization was broken up into “cells” in the major cities and the leaders of each cell had appointed seconds: lieutenants and sergeants all down the chain of command.

  This flow chart, drawn by a pedophile arrested in 1976 in the Cass Corridor, illustrates the international network and operations of the underground, multi-million-dollar child prostitution and pornography industry (Michigan State Police, courtesy Cory Williams).

  Those who were being serviced by the ring included local politicians, labor leaders, auto executives and one now retired U.S. senator from the Detroit area. Other participants in the ring included a professor for a Catholic liberal arts college in Detroit, a former pastor of the Cass United Methodist Church, the owner of a successful construction roofing company and a youth community organizer.1

  Each suspect was mined by Williams for any detail that might link them to the Oakland County murders. One pedophile, a professional sports photographer who had taken hockey and baseball team pictures at rinks and ball fields in Oakland County, looked very promising. When Williams tracked him down in 2006, he was running a small photography business in Mexico. Williams asked Chris King to locate old shots of Tim’s sports team and get the name of the photographer—it wasn’t the same person.

  Sadly, it was not uncommon for parents to prostitute their own children. One pedophile, Titus “Duffy” Jones, used his position as a property manager for many apartments in the Cass to feed his predilections. On a first-name basis with many of the renters, Jones would arrange for a child to be “gifted” to him in exchange for taking care of a renter’s heating and electric bills.

  Jones was stabbed to death in 1978—the result of a drug deal gone bad. Among his remains, tucked safely in his wallet, was a neatly folded typewritten “contract.” Dated February 10, 1977, from 3532 Eighteenth Street, Detroit, Michigan, 48208, it reads

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  This is to inform any and all concerned parties that I, -------------- and my wife ----------------------, grant permission to his Godfather, Titus Jones, to have my son ------------------, live with him and to enroll the same ------------ in a school in his area of the city. Mr. Jones will be responsible for all of the activities concerning the school work and related activities.

  The letter is signed by the mother and father.

  Williams also tracked down about 50 child prostitution and pornography victims from the Cass area. Now scattered across the country, most were barely existing, living with collapsed veins from too many needles or serving lengthy prison sentences for everything from arson, fraud and stolen vehicles to felony assault and sex offenses.

  The task of convincing these victims to face their abusers was an effort requiring both dogged determination and patience, sometimes in equal measure. During one interview with an inmate in a Michigan prison, the convict broke down and cried. He said he’d never told anyone about being molested as a boy. Richard Lawson had sodomized him. He was nine years old at the time.

  It was also not uncommon for victimhood to be a family affair. Williams interviewed several pairs of siblings: brothers raised in depravity, now adults leading depraved lives. All of them told the same story: they were plied with gifts of clothes and money—$10 for oral sex, $20 for a photo, upwards of $50 dollars for a film. All threatened with their lives if they told anyone.

  One victim—a lifetime resident of the Cass Corridor, a bar owner and somewhat of a Detroit legend for rising above his past abuse—gave Williams several leads. The son of a prostitute, he told Williams his mother would take him to the dentist and the dentist would molest him in exchange for free dental care.

  Back then, kids were being molested and disappearing all the time he said. It was hopeless, he told Williams.

  In February 2005, Williams knocked on the door of Faye Goley, a 53-year-old former girlfriend of Richard Lawson’s. She was living in Southgate, a small middle-class suburb nine miles south of the city. The term “girlfriend” is used loosely here. It was not uncommon for pedophiles to cultivate females for show. The women were paid to live with the pedophiles to downplay any suspicion with the coming and going of many children who were, all the while, being molested behind closed doors.

  When Goley answered the door, Williams said he was there to talk about Richard Lawson, “This is about the kids, isn’t it?” she said.

  Short and pudgy with brown bangs and a penchant for orange lipstick, Goley lived with Lawson for nine years, from 1974 to 1983. She first met him when she was 23. At the time, Lawson was driving a newspaper delivery truck for the Detroit Free Press, an occupation well suited for prowling. He also owned several rental properties in the Cass, many of which he would fix up and then sell. Without hesitating, she told Williams she thought Lawson was the Oakland County Child Killer.

  Goley said they did not have a physical relationship “because Richard was into little boys,” and that she “looked after the kids, fed them.” In return, she said, “Richard paid all the bills.”2

  Because Tim King’s autopsy showed that he had eaten chicken with corn and peas hours before he was killed, Williams asked her what kind of food she liked to cook. Goley said stew and homemade soups, espe
cially chicken soup. “I like to boil the chicken and then pick the meat off the bone,” she said. “It’s good for the soul.”

  For ingredients she listed carrots and celery, but never mentioned peas or corn.

  Goley said Lawson kept a file cabinet full of important papers and photos. Even when one of their houses burned down in the late seventies, Richard went back and retrieved the file cabinet, she said. He took it with them everywhere they moved. She could only recall three photos at most, of young white boys, fully dressed and lying on a bed. “But they were lying in a strange way,” she remembered. “Like they’d been posed or something. I thought maybe they were dead.”

  “Could they have been sleeping?” Williams asked.

  “It’s possible,” she said, seemingly oblivious to her own complicity. “But they looked funny.” Later, Williams brought her pictures of the four Oakland County victims, autopsy photos and photos of the bodies taken at their drop sites. Goley said she didn’t recognize them. In one of their last conversations, she said she was sorry for her participation and for not talking sooner.

  Williams couldn’t contain his disgust: “You think that might have been a good idea, Faye?”

  In preparation for Lawson’s murder trial, Williams arranged for Mudica to be brought to Michigan from the California Department of Corrections to testify. Exactly one week before trial was scheduled to start in March 2006, Williams got a call from a prison official. Mudica had escaped.

  “Are you shitting me?” Williams yelled.

  In a prison van traveling 70 mph on a San Diego freeway headed for the airport, Mudica managed to work his way out of his chains in the back seat. In one swift move, he slipped the chains over the driver’s neck and choked him unconscious. The van slammed into a guard rail and flipped, sliding down an embankment. Bruised, Mudica climbed out and took off on foot.