The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  Wasser explained that once, sometime after the polygraph examination, he was discussing the suspect with Jane Burgess, and she had told him: “You don’t have to worry about it because the guy killed himself.”21

  On November 30, 2007, Williams and Wasser met at the Metro North Michigan State Police Post in Oak Park for Wasser’s stab at a big reveal. Over the course of several hours, Wasser stalled and feigned confusion. The details he offered were indicative of selective memory: “Something sticks in my mind about Birmingham,” “Did his parents have a home Up North?” and “He was living in Alma when they tested him.”

  Williams pressed him: “You haven’t told us anything yet. How do we find, how do we solve a case with (just) a name?”

  Wasser stammered: “Okay … I asked [the suspect] did you ever take a polygraph, he said ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Who gave you the test?’ He said ‘Michigan State Police.’ Now, I’m thinking, I said: ‘Where’d you…’ oh, no, I said, ‘What was it regarding?’ He said, ‘… those missing kids in Oakland County,’ something to that effect.”22

  However spurious Wasser’s methods, Williams would follow the breadcrumbs he had dropped. Soon, the avalanche of evidence would come tumbling down. All the pieces would start to fit together with a terrible clarity.

  * * *

  1. Marion King from author interview with Barry King, October 2009.

  2. Chris King from author interview in October 2009.

  3. Cathy Broad in email to author, 2012.

  4. Marion Kerr King’s background from author’s interview with her sister, Liz Kerr, September 17, 2016.

  5. Chris King in author interview, October 2009.

  6. Cathy Broad in email to author, October 2009.

  7. Patrick Coffey in interview with author, October 2009. With the exception of quotes from Coffey’s emails, as noted, the quotes are from taped interviews of Coffey beginning in October 2009 and over the years since.

  8. Patrick Coffey in email to author, December 31, 2010. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this chapter from Coffey are taken from this email.

  9. Larry Wasser to Coffey, from author interview with Coffey, October, 2009.

  10. Cathy Broad in author interview, October 2009.

  11. Wasser interview with author, October 2009.

  12. James Feinberg identified as Larry Wasser’s attorney, “who requested to remain nameless,” to Lisa Brody, “Unsolved Mystery: Oakland County Child Killer,” Downtown Publications, September 29, 2010.

  13. Steven Baicker-McKee, “The Excited Utterance Paradox” https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu. October 2017.

  14. Wasser, from Det. Cory Williams notes, 2008.

  15. While MSP Examiner Det. Sgt. Chet Romatowski did 95 percent of the polygraphs in the Oakland County Child Killings case, it was determined that MSP Det. Ralph E. Cabot, Polygraph Unit Flint Post did these polygraphs. Cabot retired in 1980.

  16. Cathy Broad “Profiles in Cowardice, Continued,” What the Hell Is the Deal with the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation? www.catherinebroad.blog.com February 25, 2013.

  17. Cathy Broad in email to me, October 15, 2009.

  18. Polygrapher privilege, Michigan Compiled Laws Annotated 338, 1728.

  19. Feinberg, in Det. Cory Williams notes, October 1, 2007.

  20. Phone call between Larry Wasser and Det. Cory Williams, Nov. 27, 2007.

  21. Burgess to Wasser, from Det. Cory Williams notes, November 29, 2007.

  22. Transcript of Interview 21–1787–08 at MSP Metro North Post by Det. Garry Gray and Det. Cory Williams with Larry Wasser, November 30, 2007.

  8

  “This should have been solved thirty-two years ago”

  Leading up to Wasser’s interrogation, Det. Cory Williams and MSP Det. Garry Gray had been poring over the case files in search of the name Wasser claimed to not remember. They knew their suspect was dead, as was his attorney. Because of the missed redaction in Wasser’s court filings, the detectives knew the deceased attorney was Jane Burgess. And while Wasser said he could not remember the suspect’s name—even when showed a list of 90 names—he could remember the name of the MSP examiner who did a handful of polygraphs during the height of the Oakland County Child Killings investigation. That name was Ralph Cabot.

  By this time, Livonia Police Chief Robert Stevenson had called the Michigan State Police to inform them that the detective they had “removed” from the OCCK Task Force the year before was now developing a very promising lead. When District Commander Capt. Ann Marie Gibson learned the strength of the new lead, the 32-year MSP veteran assured Stevenson and Williams that her office would direct members of the Task Force to work together with the Livonia detectives as one. Thereafter, MSP detectives Garry Gray and David Robertson began working alongside Williams, agreeing to set past grievances aside. Or, so it seemed.

  Armed with three clues—the names Jane Burgess and Ralph Cabot, and the knowledge that their suspect was deceased—Williams, Gray and Robertson climbed into a state police vehicle the Wednesday after Thanksgiving in 2007 and drove the hour and a half from Detroit to the Flint MSP post in Genesee County.

  Considering how old the records were, sorting through Cabot’s old polygraph files went smoothly. Of the 40–50 examinations Cabot administered during late seventies (he retired in the mid-eighties and died in 1990), only two files related to the Oakland County Child Killings. The first contained the polygraph of a pedophile who worked as a children’s bus driver for a Baptist church in Genesee County in 1977 and had been involved in multiple criminal sexual conduct cases that year. Originally from the Detroit area, he had lived in Rochester and attended the Calvary Baptist Church in Hazel Park. But the results of his polygraph regarding the OCCK case were negative. There was also no indication he had been arrested or charged for any criminal sexual conduct during the relevant time frame. Plus, he was still alive.

  When Williams opened the second file and read a few sentences, he knew this was what they had come for. It contained two polygraphs, both requested by Det. Lourn Doan of the Southfield Police Department. Doan had been a member of the original Task Force since the small body of Mark Stebbins had been found in a strip mall parking lot in Southfield in February 1976. In January 1977, Flint police had arrested two suspects on criminal sexual conduct charges with a 13-year-old boy. During interrogation, one of the suspects said his companion had killed Mark Stebbins. Flint police immediately alerted the Task Force downstate. Doan was one of the first officers from Oakland County to arrive in Flint to check out the lead. At the time, three children from Oakland had been abducted and murdered: Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson and Kristine Mihelich.

  The name on the first polygraph was Christopher Brian Busch. The second was Busch’s associate, Gregory Woodard Greene. Busch had died in 1978, a year after the killings stopped. Greene died in prison in 1995.

  Busch was born in 1951, the youngest son of H. (Harold) Lee and Elsie Busch. From 1970 to 1979, the Busch family lived on Morningview Terrace Road in Bloomfield Village, an upscale neighborhood in the city of Birmingham. The Busch family’s sprawling house, with back garage entrance, was two miles from the King home and within a seven-mile radius of the homes of the other three victims. H. Lee Busch was General Motors’ executive financial director in Europe and the U.S.—a highly-placed corporate officer in what was then the largest auto manufacturer in the world.

  Police records revealed Christopher Busch had racked up several felony criminal sexual conduct charges with minors—four offenses within a seven-month period from January 1976 to July 1976, in four counties: Genesee, Oakland, Montmorency and Midland. All four charges were brought by two victims, both of whom grew up in Flint. One was 13 when he was sexually assaulted by Busch; the o
ther was 14.

  In his arrest records, Busch was described as having a “husky build,” 5'8" inches tall and weighing 260 pounds. With dark, stringy shoulder-length hair and a full beard, Busch looked more like Grizzly Adams than the scion of a well-to-do, powerful auto executive.

  Christopher Brian Busch booking photograph, 1977 (Michigan State Police).

  On March 15, 1977, H. Lee Busch replaced the attorney representing his son—R. Keith Stark of Stark Reagan, PC, in Bloomfield Hills —and hired Jane Burgess of Burgess & Burgess in downtown Detroit. If the fundamental duty of a criminal defense attorney is to zealously defend one’s client regardless of personal feelings about guilt or innocence, Jane Burgess was the consummate choice.

  In keeping with the kind of epic hubris accorded only the very wealthy, the Busch family’s private jet flew Burgess to the courthouses of all four counties where charges were pending against Chris Busch. At each stop, she arranged to have bail posted and the bushy-haired repeat offender was freed four times over.

  Christopher Busch’s $75,000 bond was reduced to $1,000, while Gregory Greene, charged with the same crime by the same victim, was denied bond reduction and was sentenced to life in prison (Michigan State Police).

  Access to cash was not a problem. In two of the four counties, cash bonds of $10,000 apiece were paid. In another, $12,000 was posted. In the fourth, a bond of $75,000 was reduced to $1,000.

  Burgess proved to be an adjudicator extraordinaire; she successfully negotiated for all of Chris Busch’s charges to be reduced or dropped, and convinced four separate judges that probation and psychiatric treatment would curb the otherwise “intelligent, concerned, conscientious”1 pedophile’s predilections.

  Busch’s accomplice, Gregory Greene, charged with the very same crimes, could not post bail, much less hope for any leniency. Born in Flint in 1950, Greene grew up in a tiny white bungalow with his parents and three siblings—an older sister and brother, and one younger brother. His father worked on the factory line at GM.

  As a teenager, Gregory Greene’s first scrapes with the law were petty crimes. By his twenties, he had become a serial child molester (Michigan State Police).

  Greg Greene’s mother passed away when he was 16. From that point on, he began to slowly self-destruct. His first scrapes with the law were petty crimes: burglary, smoking pot, selling pot and having police radio equipment installed in his car. When he was 19, Greene took off for California. Within days of his arrival, he was arrested on marijuana charges by Santa Ana police. Somehow, he steered cleared of law enforcement for five years, working as a night-shift janitor at K-Mart and, during the day, sodomizing young boys on the baseball team he was coaching.

  Finally, in 1974, Greene was arrested on 45 counts of child molestation, kidnapping and false imprisonment of young boys. He spent six months in the Orange County jail, then was institutionalized for another six months at Patton State Mental Hospital as a mentally disturbed sex offender. All told, Greene admitted to molesting more than 200 children in California between the early and mid-seventies.

  The sexual assault that finally landed Greene in the mental hospital involved a boy he raped near the freeway in LA—Greene choked the boy so badly he thought he killed him. When burning the unconscious child with lit cigarettes didn’t rouse him, Greene dumped him in a ditch near the Orange County Hospital, then made an anonymous call to the hospital. The boy lived and eventually identified Greene.

  In early 1976, Greene was released from the hospital. He was allowed to serve out the rest of his parole in Michigan because his father had agreed to be his guardian. In fact, the reverse was true: Greene’s father suffered from severe ulcers and needed someone to take care of him. According to Orange County sheriff records, Greene was put on a plane to Detroit on February 11, 1976, four days before Mark Stebbins went missing. He would later give a different date for his return, February 14; the same date Chris Busch would tell police he returned from Europe when they questioned him about his whereabouts on the day Mark Stebbins disappeared.

  Greene had movie star good looks; his dark hair and dark eyes were accented by chiseled cheekbones and a square jaw line. Yet, even with such distinctive features, it would take 35 years for the resemblance between Greene’s mugshot and a police artist’s sketch of a suspect seen talking to Tim King at his abduction site to emerge. For Barry King, the spitting image likeness was personal: the first of many betrayals on the part of law enforcement.

  In January 1977, both Busch and Greene were arrested on multiple first-degree criminal sexual conduct (CSC) charges brought by Kenneth Bowman of Flint. Bowman, who was 13 in 1976, said he had been raped by the two men in a field near Mt. Holly, in Oakland County, and again in a car in Flint, in Genesee County. Greene was arrested by Flint PD on January 25, 1977, on the Bowman charges. Busch was arrested on the same charges a day later while working at his restaurant in nearby Alma.

  The young Flint victim, Kenneth “Kenny” Bowman, told police that he met Christopher Busch through his friend Brent Busch, Chris Busch’s nephew, one of two sons of Chris’ brother, John. Greg Greene lived one block away from Chris Busch’s nephews. In the summer of 1976, Bowman said he was forced to perform fellatio on both Busch and Greene on several occasions—at a drive-in movie theater, behind a high school, and behind a roller rink. On the day Busch and Greene drove him to the woods in Oakland County to molest him, Bowman said he feared he was going to be killed; he said Busch had a handgun underneath the seat of the car.

  Greene was the more violent of the two, Bowman said. Greene forced him to have anal intercourse despite his tears and pleas to stop. Bowman said it was so painful he broke all the blood vessels in his face. Once during sex, he said, Greene grabbed him by the neck and choked him until he passed out. Bowman said that Greene had told him Busch “had killed a kid out in the woods by Chris’ house,” and that Greene once asked to go to a “Playland” store to help him kidnap and kill a young boy.2 Bowman also identified four vehicles driven by the two pedophiles: a 1974 Chevy Van, a 1970 gray Impala, a sixties-style dark blue Pontiac, and a 1974 blue Chevy Vega hatchback with white interior and a double white hockey-stick stripe on the side (which could easily be mistaken for a blue Gremlin).

  The second boy to press charges against Busch was James “Vince” Vincent Gunnels, who lived on the same street in Flint as Busch’s nephews. In fact, Gunnels’ mother was good friends with their mother, Connie Busch. Gunnels said Busch had molested him several times. The first time was on January 30, 1976, when Busch brought Gunnels and his younger brother, Paul, and Busch’s two nephews, Scott and Brent Busch, to the family cottage on Ess Lake in Montmorency County for a “snowmobiling party.” Gunnels was 14 and in eighth grade at the time. He said they smoked marijuana and that Chris Busch forced him to have oral sex.

  In a 2008 interview with Cory Williams, Gunnels recalled he had been invited to go dirt bike riding in Midland County on or about May 7, 1976, at a house Chris Busch owned in Alpena, Michigan. At the house, Busch had a large movie screen in the bedroom where he showed Gunnels “movies with two guys having a sex affair and two guys and a girl having sexual affairs.”3 He said they were tied up with ropes. Busch then tried to tie him up and put Vaseline on him so that he could anally rape him. Gunnels said he ran off.

  Gunnels said he did not tell anyone about the abuse, but when he dropped out of sports and his grades started slipping, his older sister started asking him questions.

  On February 25, 1977, Gunnels’ father, duly enraged, brought his son to the Flint Police Department to file charges against Busch. He told police that he gave permission for his son to go away on weekends with Busch because “He said if we had any questions that he was a Big Brother in Midland and that we could check with them.”4

  Greene was arrested on the Bowman charges at his home on Baldwin Street in Flint. Greene told police he and Busch met at a bar in Oakland County. He also told police outright
that Busch had killed Mark Stebbins. A search of Greene’s Chevy van found two Polaroid pictures of “a young boy involved in Flint’s case and 2 pairs of young girls panties.”5 Greene submitted to two polygraphs over the course of three days. The first, conducted by Flint PD Officer Melvin Scott, determined Greene was being truthful when he said he did not know for sure who killed Mark Stebbins. The second, conducted by MSP polygrapher Det. Sgt. Ralph Cabot, came to the same conclusion: “Mr. Green [sic] is telling the truth … and he was not involved in the killing of the victim.”6

  In an April 2008 interview, James Greene, Greg’s brother, told Williams that after his brother’s arrest in Flint, he found a hidden room Greg had built in the attic of his father’s house. The room had a small, latched door and Greg had installed paneling and carpeting. James Greene said he knew Greg had kept a boy in there that he was molesting. He also said that, for a long time, he could not understand why Greg drove a minivan. Once his brother was arrested, James said the realization of what his brother was doing made him sick to his stomach.

  A month before meeting James Greene, Williams met with a former prison cellmate of Greene’s, who had also done time for first-degree CSC with a child under 13. The convict had since been released and was being interviewed at his home. Williams handed over photos of the four OCCK victims to impart the seriousness of the matter; he told him the families had been waiting for over 30 years for closure. But the young man kept looking in the direction of his elderly mother in the next room. Finally, Williams suggested they go outside. Inside the police car, the man broke down crying. He said he and Greg Greene had a sexual relationship while in prison. Greene talked readily about kids he had molested in the past, he said. He told Williams that Greene once boasted that he had gotten away with killing four kids. Later, a polygraph confirmed that the cell mate was telling the truth.