It was that expertise that led to an invitation from the American Polygraph Association to speak at their annual convention at the Hilton in Las Vegas. Coffey knew this was to be his command performance before the icons of his profession and prepared mightily for it. In July 2006, he drove from San Francisco to Las Vegas, rehearsing his Power Point presentation in his car.
Listening to Coffey that day was Larry Wasser, an esteemed forensic polygraph examiner who had served for 19 years as vice president of the APA and was the president of the Michigan Association of Polygraph Examiners. Wasser was especially interested in Coffey’s area of expertise since Dearborn, Michigan, was home to the largest Arab immigrant population in the country.
Wasser Consulting Services, Inc., was then located in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit where Larry Wasser had been practicing since 1972. Nearing 70, with more than 18,000 polygraph exams to his name, he was enjoying his sage mentor status. But, in short order, Wasser would, in an unguarded moment, jeopardize the reputation he had worked for so many years to build.
Wasser listened intently to Coffey’s 30-minute presentation. Afterward, the examiners in the audience asked probing questions. Coffey fielded them all with confidence. He felt it couldn’t have gone better. As he was packing up his computer, Wasser walked up to him. He complimented Coffey, telling him: “That was a very interesting presentation.” Wasser then asked Coffey if he would consider coming to Detroit to speak to the Michigan Association of Polygraph Examiners. “How much would you charge us if you did come?” Wasser said.
“Larry,” Coffey responded, smiling. “I’d be happy to do it and I wouldn’t not charge a fee. It would be a homecoming for me. I lived in Birmingham in my youth. In fact, part of the reason I got into this profession was because of what happened to my neighbor boy. Maybe you’ve heard of the case: it was the Oakland County Child Killings.”
Wasser’s eyes widened. Of course, he knew the case. Apparently without thinking, Coffey recalled, Wasser blurted out a divulgence that would lead simultaneously to the biggest break in the 30-year investigation and the biggest regret of Wasser’s career.
“Well, I guess I can tell you this now,” Wasser replied. “Because the attorney is dead and the guy who did it is dead. I tested the guy who killed your neighbor boy.”9
Coffey was stunned. He knew immediately the full weight and ramification of what Wasser had just said. Not only had the revered polygrapher just breached the sanctity of client confidentiality—tantamount to professional suicide—he was also saying that he knew who had committed these heinous crimes.
“Without missing a beat, I continued to pack up my computer as if only semi-interested,” Coffey recalled. “The reality is that I had, in those few seconds, gone from feeling crisp and clean in my best tie and shirt, to feeling filthy. A cold sweat was coming out of every pore of my body.”
“Oh yeah?” Coffey responded, feigning nonchalance. “How’d that go?’”
Wasser said the subject’s attorney hired him to do a polygraph on her client who had been charged with several counts of criminal sexual conduct with a minor. In the preliminary part of the examination, where the subject is asked “control and comparison” questions, the subject said he couldn’t answer “no” unequivocally to questions relating to the OCCK case. When Wasser asked why, the subject said it was because “I didn’t do this one but I did the boy in Birmingham.”
Coffey hung on every word, desperate to not be transparent. “I was trying to act like this was an interesting story,” Coffey said. “But, inside, I knew in my heart and soul as well as from nineteen years of experience, that such a confession to such a crime—occurring as it did—when he was being tested on a completely, unrelated crime—was, in fact, as pure as it gets. I remember thinking, right then and there, Oh, my dear God, this could solve Timmy’s case.”
To this day, Coffey regards this chance encounter as “the mathematical equivalent of divine intervention.”
“What are the odds, out of three hundred million people, that I would be the recipient of this information? And that Larry Wasser, for whatever reason—whether it be he was unburdening his soul or merely trying to impress me—gave me those variables: the attorney is dead and the suspect is dead. It was chilling to me. I will tell you now that every prayer I ever said for Timmy, every thought ever pondered on his behalf, was answered in that moment.”
Coffey went back to his hotel room. He first called Chris King, who was on a business trip, waking him up in his hotel. He also talked with fellow polygrapher Steve Wolf, and related the Wasser conversation to him. Wolf just happened to be a friend of Cathy Broad’s; he knew the case and he knew what this would mean to the Kings. The following morning, both Wolf and Coffey called Cathy. “The hair stood up on my arms,” Broad remembers. “I could hear in Patrick’s voice that this was the real deal. Here’s an experienced polygrapher, used to observing people’s reactions, who is describing what Wasser did and said. In a way, it made perfect sense—that’s why it was never solved, the killer had a good attorney and they put the lid on this.”10
Patrick Coffey was so affected by the unsolved murder of Tim King, his childhood friend, he became a polygrapher. If not for his chance conversation with another polygrapher, the files on Christopher Busch would likely still be buried (Facebook.com).
She talked to Coffey for over an hour. “With the attorney-client confidentiality rules, I knew this was going to be tough unless Wasser would play ball,” Broad said. “Patrick had asked for time to try to get more information out of Wasser, so the hardest part was waiting and not knowing what to do. I told Chris, my husband, and no one else. There were many, many sleepless nights for Chris and me. It was a lot to carry around.”
Chris and Cathy decided not to tell their father, in part because they did not want to get his hopes up and also because they feared Barry was likely to turn over the information to the Michigan State Police, where they felt the lead would die a natural death. “I knew if I went to the MSP that it would not only be ignored,” Cathy said. “It could well be handled in a way that left Patrick vulnerable.” So, they decided to wait it out.
Coffey also gave Wasser some breathing room in the hopes of delicately coaxing more information from him at a later date. Meanwhile, Chris and Cathy decided to search police records for the names of suspects who were deceased and whose attorneys were also deceased, without divulging any details as to why. The hope was they could independently come up with a name or names, without ever mentioning Wasser’s information. If there were just a few suspects who fell into that category, Patrick could then approach Wasser and run the names by him without forcing him to produce the name.
On July 24, 2006, a week after the conference, Coffey emailed Wasser reiterating his willingness to speak to Wasser’s group. He also attached his CV for Wasser’s review. Wasser never responded.
Wasser would later deny the conversation in an interview with me, calling Coffey’s information “totally bogus”11 and suggesting that Coffey had made it all up.12 One can only imagine the incendiary degree of his regret. In legal terms, his statements would be considered a classic example of “an excited utterance,” a term used for hearsay statements reliable enough to be used as evidence at trial. By definition, such an utterance is made in a context that is “sufficiently startling to produce a relevant, spontaneous and unreflecting response.”13 In other words, the speaker makes the statement without the time necessary for conscious fabrication.
Chris King and Cathy Broad were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to name dead suspects with deceased attorneys. Finally, in the summer of 2007, Cathy decided to call Cory Williams. “It was the best phone call I ever made,” she said.
Immediately after the phone call with Cathy, Williams conferred with Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Robert Moran and they filed a petition in the Third Circuit Court for an investigative subpoena. Two weeks later,
Williams drove to Wasser Consulting Services in Southfield and to Wasser’s home in West Bloomfield, leaving cards at both places asking for him to call.
Wasser called the following day and agreed to meet Williams at the Livonia Police Department. On a Thursday morning, August 9, 2007, Williams greeted Wasser in the glass enclosed lobby of the sprawling, modern brick building, and escorted him to a conference room. If Wasser knew why they were meeting, he did not let on. “When I told him I had a subpoena and explained to him what it was about, he about fell over in his chair,” Williams remembered. “He was taken back that I’d gone to see a Circuit Court Judge. And I told him: ‘Well, I needed an insurance policy in case you don’t talk to me.’”
Wasser appeared visibly shaken. “Do you understand how serious this is?” he seethed at Williams. He was up out of his chair, pacing the room, citing case law, adamant that he was bound by polygrapher-client privilege. He repeatedly asked Williams to name the source of his information, finally conceding: “Even though I think I know who it is.”14
“I explained to Wasser that even though I have a subpoena for him to appear and produce his records, if he (Wasser) just simply wanted to cooperate in this case and supply the information, then it would not be necessary to go forward with this investigative subpoena. And I reminded him how serious and heinous the crimes were and that the families of these victims have been waiting for thirty years for resolution in this case.”
But Wasser was firm. Even if he wanted to help in the investigation, he said, he couldn’t because of privilege.
Williams asked: “Is it true that the subject in question and his attorney are both now deceased?”
Finally, Wasser relented: “I guess you know everything.”
Wasser asked to be excused for a few minutes so he could call his attorney. When he came back, he was a bit more forthcoming, but still wary. He said he was concerned about leaks to the media. He was also worried that the suspect’s family might file a lawsuit against him. When Williams assured Wasser the information would be kept quiet and suggested he might be able to offer some kind of immunity, Wasser then agreed to give him a “a couple of clues.”
Wasser said he was hired by the subject’s defense attorney in the late seventies to give him a private polygraph on a charge of child molestation, in a separate criminal case unrelated to the Oakland County Child Killings. The subject made the statements about the OCCK case during a pre-polygraph interview, the part of the test in which the polygrapher asks a series of questions to establish a base line for truthfulness. Wasser told Williams he had asked the subject if he had ever been polygraphed before about molesting kids. The subject stated yes, he had been tested on the Oakland County Child Killings case. He said he passed and had been cleared in the case.
Because of the timing and the context of the answer, Wasser likely determined that the polygraph the subject had passed was conducted by the Michigan State Police examiner in Flint, who was not the assigned examiner polygraphs for the OCCK Task Force. Wasser knew this MSP examiner had a less than stellar track record for accuracy.15 In fact, the examiner had passed another suspect in a different sexual assault case; when Wasser later tested the same subject, he definitively failed. Wasser knew the chances were quite good that this defense attorney’s client never should have passed the polygraph in the OCCK case, and as such the young man sitting in front of him could very well be the Oakland County Child Killer.
In addition, Wasser said the young man made other incriminating statements about the case. Williams wrote in his notes: “Wasser stated further that this person made the statements (confessed) about the OCCK case during the pre-polygraph questioning portion of this polygraph. … At no time during this interview did Wasser indicate that the information about him taking a pre-polygraph confession from a suspect in the OCCK case thirty years ago never happened.”
At a polygraphers conference in Las Vegas, Lawrence Wasser allegedly told Patrick Coffey: “I tested the man who confessed to killing your neighbor boy.” When served with an investigative subpoena to give the subject’s name, he claimed not to remember. Later, he gave Williams a few clues that led to the unearthing of Christopher Busch’s name from case files (Facebook.com).
Still, for all the details he could remember, Wasser played coy about the name of the subject. When Williams asked, Wasser insisted he did not keep records or logbooks of past polygraphs. Yet Patrick Coffey told Williams that in their conversation in Las Vegas, Wasser had elaborated that not only had his subject confessed to the murder of Timothy King, he had the polygraph charts to prove it and would show them to Coffey next time they got together.
In her blog, Cathy Broad was incensed: “Keep in mind that Wasser will early and often claim to be unable to remember the name of this client, yet he expresses direct concern about the suspect’s family filing a lawsuit against him for releasing the subject’s name. Who could afford to mess with such a lawsuit—after 35 years—and who has attorneys on retainer for any number of reasons? People who have more money than God with some alleged reputation to uphold that goes along with the cash.”16
Speculating as to why Wasser would not want to help solve a serial child murder case, Broad wrote in an email: “Maybe a better question would be why would Wasser want the general public … to think about how on earth he could have kept this to himself all these years? A father and grandfather. Patrick was operating under the assumption that Wasser might want to unburden his soul and help police any way he could. Turns out that was wrong—he fought this thing every step of the way.”17
Indeed, Wasser fought all the way to the Michigan Court of Appeals in an expedited appeal. Throughout, James Feinberg, Wasser’s attorney argued that under Michigan law Wasser was protected by the polygraph privilege, which states “any communications, oral or written … shall be deemed privileged with the same authority and dignity as are other privileges.”18
Robert Moran and his team of prosecutors prepared brief upon brief to counter Wasser’s appeal. Moran stipulated the only privilege covered is that which involves communications made between the attorney and/or polygrapher and the client. In other words, the exchange of information between Wasser and the test subject were protected, but the name of the test subject was not.
On August 24, 2007, while sitting in Judge’s chambers and reviewing a defense motion, Williams spotted a missed redaction. It was the name of the deceased attorney in question: Jane Burgess. Burgess was an attorney in Detroit who had passed away January 7, 1997, of a heart attack. She was 55 years old.
Then, on October 1, 2007, in a closed-door hearing before Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny, Wasser’s attorney, James Feinberg, inadvertently gave Williams more clues to the suspect’s identity. Feinberg said that in 1977, this person came to Burgess because he had been charged with criminal sexual conduct unrelated to the OCCK case. Burgess brought her client to Wasser for a private polygraph and during the pre-polygraph interview, Feinberg said, Burgess’ client “confessed to the child killings because he believed he was protected under the attorney/client privilege and that was important for the polygraph he was preparing to take.”19
The judge ruled in favor of the prosecution.
Wasser appealed before a three-judge panel at the Michigan Court of Appeals and promptly lost. A hearing date was set for Wasser’s revelation of the name in short order.
But before the hearing was held, the parties agreed to confer with authorities. In November 2007, the week of Thanksgiving, Patrick Coffey flew to Detroit. On the 20th floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice downtown, Coffey, Williams and a stenographer sat in one conference room. Down the hall in another conference room sat another stenographer, Larry Wasser and James Feinberg. During a break, Coffey and Wasser had no choice but to sit in the same waiting room. It was the first time they had seen each other in the 16 months since that fateful conversation in Las Vegas. Neither said a word, but their mu
tual contempt could have cut glass.
During the proceedings, Feinberg insisted Wasser could not remember the client’s name. Therefore, he could not answer the relevant question under oath. By most accounts, it was clear that Wasser was doing everything he could to not be put on the stand—the risk of committing perjury was too great.
But he was also desperate to keep all of this quiet. After years as an esteemed member in the polygraph community, how could he admit to revealing privileged information? And too, how could he answer to the charge that he had withheld information that could have revealed the truth about four children’s murders?
Finally, after much back-and-forth, Feinberg offered to have Wasser appear, without his attorney, at a Michigan State Police post to look over files of suspects who had been polygraphed and/or questioned on the OCCK case, to see if he could recognize any names. The prosecutor agreed.
The day before they were scheduled to meet, Wasser and Williams talked over the phone to confirm the time. Again, Williams pressed him saying: “I find it hard to believe, Larry, that you remember the name of the dead attorney [Jane Burgess]. You remember the name of the State Police examiner who conducted the polygraph and where it was held. You remember that you polygraphed him on CSC charges at the height of the OCCK investigation. But, you don’t remember the suspect’s name.”20
“I don’t.” Wasser responded.
“How, then, do you know the suspect died not too long after you had polygraphed him?”
The Snow Killings Page 14
