The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  Charles described Chris as a “gregarious and happy guy”; he was physically “big and heavy.” His hobbies included cooking, skiing and riding his Triumph Bonneville motorcycle. Chris did struggle, Charles said, with living overseas and returning to America, saying: “It is hard to go back to your own country.”

  When Chris was in his mid-to-late twenties, Charles said, he was arrested for molesting a boy in Birmingham. This boy had been mentored by Chris in the Big Brother program. Charles said he believed Chris also knew the boy’s mother, and that she possibly worked as a cashier at Fisher’s Meat Market in Birmingham. (Williams would later identify the victim and interviewed him.2) Shortly after being indicted in this case, Chris moved back in with his parents, Charles said, “because his attorneys and psychiatrists were nearby.”

  Charles had no recollection of Chris being involved in hunting; certainly, hunting was not something his father did or would have introduced his son to. So he said he had no idea where Chris got the shotgun found in his bedroom or any of the ammunition. Concerning the drawing that resembled Mark Stebbins, he said Chris had not taken any art classes outside of what was required in the normal curriculum, nor did he remember him being interested in drawing.

  Describing Chris’ suicide as a “very traumatic experience,” Charles said he had blocked much of it from his memory. He did remember going upstairs with police, opening the door to Chris’ bedroom and seeing his body lying on his bed. He recalled a terrible smell, seeing the shotgun, and the evidence that Chris had been drinking. He did not recall seeing anything else in the room—not the drawing on the wall nor the ropes lying in the closet.

  When asked why Chris would kill himself, Charles said Chris was worried about molestation charges against him. He did state that after he learned about the molestation charges, he and his wife kept their distance from Chris. They were scared enough for their own son Alexander, who was eight years old when Chris died, to have Alexander see a psychologist and never allowed him to be alone with his Uncle Chris. Charles also said that his brother, John, confided in him that Chris had molested his own two sons.

  Even so, Charles could offer no explanation for his brother’s pedophilia. He had no knowledge of Chris ever being molested as a child, though he did offer, “you just think of boarding school…” suggesting perhaps Chris was molested while in Switzerland at Le Rosey (the same school Charles attended).

  While Charles was aware that Chris was a murder suspect at one time, he said he “would have trouble believing” Chris was involved in any “violent crime.” Neither he nor his family ever talked about the Oakland County Child Killing case, he said—and certainly, Chris never talked to him about the case or the fact that he was a suspect.

  Charles offered that his father, late in life and for unknown reasons, shredded all the family documents in his possession, including birth certificates, marriage licenses, passports, family photos, which Charles thought was “strange.”

  When agents MacDonald and Daly requested a DNA saliva swab, Charles drew back. He wanted to talk to his attorney first. But then Nancy asked some questions of the agents and she and Charles conferred. Charles then agreed to submit to a DNA swab, but with a few conditions. Should results be obtained leading to any public announcement naming Chris Busch as the Oakland County Child Killer, law enforcement would agree to:

  • Direct notification to him and his wife prior to this announcement.

  • Witness protection for his brother John’s children, Scott and Brent, which would disguise their identities and protect them against retaliation.

  • No public announcement specifically naming Charles as the donor of the family DNA profile.

  Once the agents said this could be arranged, Charles provided the DNA sample and, after two and a half hours, the interview concluded.

  The agents filed their report days later. Among the many points of interest, Williams questioned why Charles would offer that his father shredded important family documents. Why give investigators a sliver of incrimination, the overt implication that H. Lee had something to hide? Was it a ploy? An olive branch?

  In 2010, I phoned Charles Busch for comment. He said he found the inquiry “very upsetting,” and that media coverage since Chris had been publicly named as a suspect in the OCCK case had been based on “prejudgments and suppositions … coming from conflicting sources.”

  “I have read recent stories and I think that he’s being judged unfairly,” he said. “I’m not going to talk to you about him. … I suggest you stick with what police are telling you because there has been a lot of hearsay floating around without any kind of proof or substantiation.”3

  After the FBI interview with Charles, Williams started working on a search warrant for the Morningview Terrace house that would involve power vacuuming the air ducts in the entire home. The Michigan State Police forensics team had advised Williams and Det. Garry Gray that, even after 30 years, trace evidence such as human or animal hair, carpet fibers, blood and DNA residue can be recovered from a house by searching in the air ducts, under baseboards, moldings or flooring. It was possible detectable amounts of DNA could be recovered if a child bled through carpeting or flooring.

  Initially, Williams requested that both the Morningview Terrace house and the Busch Ess Lake cottage be searched. But for cost reasons, he was told to pick one. Morningview Terrace had the most promise.

  Of specific interest were: the tan/gold carpeting seen in photos of Chris Busch’s suicide scene; the ropes strewn on the carpet in the closet that may have been used to bind children’s wrists and ankles and appeared “to have a dark red stain”; and the two dogs owned by the Busch family, a white-haired Welsh terrier and a light tan-haired Ibizan hound.4

  If any residue from the carpeting or ropes or any animal fur could be extracted from the house, it would then be tested for DNA comparison with the original trace evidence on the victims’ bodies and clothing.

  In preparation for the search, Williams and Gray travelled once again to Lansing to the long-term evidence storage facility to go through the case evidence, so it could be tested for DNA comparison with whatever they might find in the former Busch family home. It was an enormous undertaking. Williams discovered missing evidence attributed to everything from floods to regular purges to claims that items had never been logged in the first place.

  The physical evidence collected during the victims’ autopsies and from the body drop-off sites were scattered across state police labs in different counties, local police departments’ evidence storage rooms, and the FBI offices in Detroit. Each jurisdiction had widely varying regulations concerning evidence retention. When and if it could be retrieved, evidence had to be cross referenced with pages of decades-old typewritten lab reports.

  In addition, much of the physical evidence had been degraded due to out-of-date and shoddy collection protocols at the crime scenes. Compounding the confusion through the decades, various law enforcement agencies had rummaged through the evidence, taking what they wanted, leaving the rest in disarray.

  Williams and Gray learned that some of the original evidence had been lost in no less than three floods in evidence storage rooms. An April 1976 a basement flood at the Michigan State Police lab in Sterling Heights ruined slides containing human and animal hairs collected from Mark Stebbins’ body during autopsy.5 Another flood in the Flint Police Department evidence room during the eighties washed away some of Greg Greene’s Polaroids that may have been critical to the case.6 In 2011, Barry King filed a FOIA request for documents concerning Francis Shelden, Gerald Richards, and others involved in pedophilia and child pornography on North Fox Island. He was told the files were among those destroyed in a “catastrophic flood”7 at one of the FBI storage facilities.

  Assembling all known trace evidence in one location, reprocessing the victims’ clothing using new methods to extract hairs or fibers that might have been missed, determini
ng what happened to missing hair and fiber evidence that, according to old records, was collected during the four autopsies—all of this was nothing short of a Herculean task.

  It was also a main priority for Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who had been pressing the trace evidence front since 2005, when Williams was scouring the Cass Corridor. The effort required constant vigilance and badgering to get the lab scientists to prioritize a 40-year-old unsolved case, replete with complications and potential nightmares. Exasperated, Worthy personally contacted both Colonel Peter Munoz of the Michigan State Police and Governor Jennifer Granholm to finally get a scientist assigned full-time to the case.

  For Williams and Gray, the trips to the Lansing storage unit were never easy. The two detectives carefully sorted through a dozen large bags and several bins containing all four kids’ clothing, their shoes, boots, Jill’s blanket, Mark’s jacket. It was always heartbreaking, even for the steeliest of detectives.

  Searches were conducted at every law enforcement storage facility that might have retained original evidence. In October 2008, a search of the FBI storage facility in Detroit uncovered several packages of trace evidence from the case. Among them were slides containing animal hairs that had been retrieved from Jill Robinson’s jacket during her autopsy. Prior to this discovery, animal hairs, thought to be white dog hairs, had been collected from three of the four victims. Now they had confirmation that animal hairs were found on all four victims.

  Williams was specifically interested in locating a human hair that had been recovered from Tim King’s groin area during his autopsy. In the autopsy report, Medical Examiner Werner Spitz noted that “he believed this to be a suspect hair since the boy did not have any pubic hair.”

  Williams noted: “This is interesting, due to the fact that it appears that Chris Busch may have still had his full beard at the time of Tim King’s disappearance. The location of this facial hair on King’s body could also be explained, due to the fact that Busch was known to perform oral sex on his young male victims.”8

  It would take almost nine months of searching but finally, on February 3, 2009, while sorting through several packages of trace evidence at the Michigan State Police lab, two slides of note were discovered. One contained the hair recovered from Tim King’s groin area. The second contained a human hair fragment recovered from Kristine Mihelich’s mouth at her autopsy. While both were huge finds, Williams was particularly elated at the hair from Tim’s body. “Until today we have been unable to locate this hair,” he wrote in his notes. “It does not appear at this time that this hair has been processed for DNA and may be the single piece of physical evidence needed to solve this case!”9

  Almost a month later, during another search for fibers found on all four victims’ clothing, Williams came upon slides marked “dirt, fibers.” But when MSP lab scientist Lori Bruski put the slides under a microscope, she said: “Wait a minute, there are human hairs in here.”10 Williams couldn’t have known it then, but those human hairs, along with the hair found on Tim King, would prove to be extremely valuable to the investigation.

  By the end of March, the tally of trace evidence collected during the original investigation that would be processed for DNA comparison included:

  • White animal hairs found on the clothing of all four victims.

  • Tan/gold fibers found on Tim King’s clothing and Jill Robinson’s clothing.

  • Two human hairs found on Tim King; one on his genitals that was suggestive of a human facial hair; a second found in his mouth during autopsy.

  • Two hairs found in Kristine Mihelich’s mouth; one an animal hair, the other a fragment of a human hair.

  • Two human hairs discovered in the slides containing dirt and fibers.

  (In 1977, laboratory scientist David Metzger at the Michigan State Police Lab in Northville—to his credit—decided to compare the tan/gold fibers found on Tim and Jill. He determined: “Results: Examination of the fiber from Jill Robinson’s socks (#7A) revealed that it was microscopically similar in color and physical construction and possessed optical properties in plane polarized light identical to numerous fibers removed from the clothing of Timothy King.” In his report, Metzger maintained that a match of these fibers would solve the case.11)

  At a Task Force meeting on April 22, 2009, Bruski announced she was preparing the recently located hairs from the victims for DNA testing at the FBI lab in Quantico. The range of possibility for a DNA match to this original never-before-tested physical evidence had increased exponentially. Hopes were as high as they had ever been.

  On October 21, 2008, Dets. Williams and Gray briefed Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca on their search warrant request for the Morningview Terrace home. Gorcyca said he was very encouraged—Busch-Greene was the “best lead”12 he had seen in the OCCK case in 14 years as prosecutor. (Sadly, in a few short months, Gorcyca’s successor would undermine much, if not all, of the entire Busch-Greene lead.)

  The next step was for Williams and Gorcyca to meet with the owners of the home and their attorney to serve the warrant and answer any questions. Other than explaining that this was a decades-old unsolved investigation, they were purposely vague about the subject of the investigation. When the owners asked what part of their property would be “excavated,” Williams realized: “They thought we were there to dig up Jimmy Hoffa.”

  On October 28, 2008, a brisk, fall Wednesday morning, lab technicians from the MSP forensics lab donned head-to-toe protective body suits. They spent nine hours pulling back carpeting, vacuuming under baseboards, behind walls, in laundry chutes, pantries, and in a dumbwaiter. All three floors of the home were covered, using brand new hand-held forensic vacuums so as not to risk contamination. Dozens of bags containing hairs, fibers and dust from separate parts of the home were filled, sealed and marked.

  Once transported to the Northville lab, the evidence would be separated and profiled. Forensic scientists would sort animal hairs from human hairs from carpet fibers. Then the hairs and fibers would be compared microscopically to those found on all four victims. If they found any similarities, DNA typing would be performed. Specifically for the animal hairs, MSP hired Dr. Joy Halverson, a prominent veterinary research scientist in the specialized field of animal DNA forensics.

  By early December, the FBI lab in Quantico received several packages of evidence from the MSP lab. It would take another nine months for Williams to receive the results, a full year after the search was executed.

  Throughout 2008 and 2009, Williams tracked down all known and unknown victims of Busch and Greene, as well as their associates, family members, employers and co-workers. He swabbed for DNA in so many interviews that, at one point, the FBI lab techs in Quantico quipped: “Is there anybody in Michigan you haven’t swabbed?”

  Williams also arranged for three polygraph examiners to review Busch’s and Greene’s polygraphs from 1977. Livonia Police Polygraph Examiner Tim Larion, Michigan State Police Examiner Lt. Robert Dykstra and retired State Police Examiner (now a private examiner) John Wojnarski reviewed the charts, independent of one another. After a lengthy study, all three had come to the same conclusion: both subjects definitively showed deception. Each examiner said that if they had tested Busch and Greene themselves, both would have failed.13

  The crucial polygraph results that cleared Busch and Greene as suspects in the Oakland County Child Killings were erroneous. The infamous tip sheets #369 and #370—stamped “CLEARED” as a result of Cabot’s faulty ruling—had exonerated the most likely suspects to emerge in 30-plus years.

  Kenneth Bowman, one of the first victims of Busch and Greene Williams interviewed, had managed to accrue what Williams called “an arrest history consistent with being a victim of pedophilia.” Bowman had countless cases against him involving excessive drug and alcohol use spanning four states.

  Once a green-eyed, sandy-haired kid, Bowman’s prospects for an average m
iddle-class had gone off the rails growing up a block away from Greg Greene. Now 45, bald with a wiry goatee, he was living in a halfway house in Detroit called “Operation Get Down.”

  Bowman lived in the same neighborhood as Chris Busch’s nephews, Scott and Brent, along with their good friends James Vincent Gunnels and his younger brother, Paul. Of the five boys, who all ran together, “Kenny” was the most picked on and the most bullied, perhaps because he didn’t have a brother to help fend off Busch and Greene. It was Kenny who was most violently raped. It was Kenny who Greg Greene repeatedly tried to persuade to help kidnap a boy and kill him. And it was Kenny who Greene promised to give the dead boy’s penis as a gift.

  Bowman told Williams that Busch and Greene would often use him to lure kids over to their car so Greene could get a closer look at them. Bowman was 14 in 1976: kids would be more at ease in approaching the car once they saw he was a kid, too. He said they drove all over Genesee, Oakland and Wayne counties looking to snatch kids. The drive-in movie theater was a popular hang-out. Bowman went into detail remembering a night at the drive-in in Flint in 1976 when The Exorcist had just come out. Greene took turns with several boys that night, including Brent Busch, Vince Gunnels, and another boy.

  Bowman also said Busch forced him to have oral sex in the woods with a young boy he believes was Tim King. He recognized him right away when Williams showed him a picture of Tim.

  Bowman claimed to have been picked up hitchhiking in Ohio by Ted Lamborgine in 1976. Lamborgine took him to adult bookstores, fed him, paid him for sex and drove him to Woodward and Warren avenues—the heart of the Cass Corridor—where he dropped him off. In fact, Bowman had called in a tip on Lamborgine to Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office in 2006, when Williams was prosecuting Lamborgine and his name was all over the news.