The Snow Killings

by Marney Rich Keenan

  Then, Bowman tied Lamborgine to Busch and Greene: once they were done with Tim King, they dropped him off at a house and Lamborgine opened the door. He was sure of it.

  Connecting Lamborgine, Tim King, Busch and Greene was very interesting but Williams knew not to take it too seriously: it was a perilous kind of wishful thinking, inherent in decades-old cold cases where so little can be confirmed by deceased witnesses.

  After subsequent interviews and a polygraph with inconclusive results, likely due to decades of drug abuse, Williams determined Bowman so hated Busch and Greene he was “probably trying to make all the pieces fit.”

  Just to be sure, Williams paid Lamborgine a visit in the Macomb Correctional Facility in New Haven, Michigan, in early March 2009. He brought along photos of Busch, Greene and Bowman. Lamborgine denied knowing any of them. But since he also denied recognizing a string of names Williams ran by him—names of fellow pedophiles the detective could prove were Lamborgine’s comrades back in the Cass—it was abundantly clear Ted had shut down for good.

  As Williams left, he leaned in, nose to nose with Lamborgine’s smudged bifocals. “Ted,” he said to him in a whisper. “Down the road when you’re in a prison courtyard shivering your ass off or getting beat up because you’re a suspect in this case, all you have to do is call me, Ted. You cooperate and we’ll get you a new identity and transfer you to a federal prison in a nice, sunny, warm climate. Okay, Ted? You hear me, old man?”

  Ted stared straight ahead, vacant. The man who had worked for decades at Ford Motor Company, amassing a hefty nest egg only to spend the rest of his life behind bars, had nothing to say—not even to save himself. Here was the consummate, life-long, psychopathic pedophile, the tally of his victims likely exceeding 200, and he was silent, void of empathy, incapable of remorse. Whatever Ted knew about the OCCK murders, he was likely never going to tell. Walking to his car, Williams reconciled himself with what he once considered his failure to get Ted to confess. “Even if he isn’t our killer,” he reasoned. “There is a special place in hell for a person who scars so many young kids for life. And he earned every day in jail for as long as he lives.”

  After Lamborgine and Bowman, Williams tracked down another victim of Busch and Greene: James Vincent “Vince” Gunnels. Vince, his brother Paul and Busch’s nephews were often invited to the Busch family cottage at Ess Lake for weekends. Requesting permission from Gunnels’ parents, Busch presented himself like an Eddie Haskell with a Bloomfield Hills pedigree. Vince was molested several times by Busch, at the cottage in January 1976, at Busch’s home in Alpena in May of 1976, and various places in Flint, including the drive-in.

  One of eight kids born to an auto factory worker and a stay-at-home mom, Gunnels’ mother was good friends with Connie Busch, Scott and Brent’s mom. They were “two old hippies, good friends”14 who would drink and smoke pot together on the front porch. “I remember when they’d smoke pot in the house, and Brent and Scott and me and Paul would climb up on the roof and try to sniff the smoke and get high,” Gunnels would later recall. “They’d leave their pipes in the fireplace and we’d steal them.”

  By the time Williams met him, Gunnels had amassed a lengthy criminal history in four states, including Florida, Minnesota, Montana and Michigan.

  Gunnels was locked up at the Ojibway Correctional Facility, in the farthest northwest tip of the Upper Peninsula. He was then serving four to ten years in the Michigan Department of Corrections for a purse-snatching charge in Ingham County in 2004. Based on what he was hearing from the parole board, Gunnels believed he would be released in a month’s time; he planned on moving to Montana, joining his sister and brother.

  In early March 2008, Williams and Garry Gray boarded a single-engine plane to fly across Lake Michigan to the small town of Ironwood, about 20 miles south of Lake Superior. They took off in an icy snowstorm, made more hazardous by the dual lake-effect snow. The runway was slick, the plane felt like it was made of tinfoil, and the frenzied whitecaps below seemed to go on forever. When they finally arrived at the prison, Williams noted the snowbanks were piled as high as the prison’s concertina-wire fences. Their driver, a state trooper replied: “Yeah, we tell ’em if they try to escape, they’ll freeze to death. And, if they don’t freeze to death, the bears and wolves will get ’em. And they believe it.”

  Like his buddy, Kenny Bowman, Gunnels was the portrait of a drug-addled victim of pedophilia: gray in pallor, pencil thin and on the path to losing all of his teeth. But where Bowman excelled in recall (sometimes bordering on fabrication), Gunnels was mute by comparison—he sought to distance himself, especially when it came to Greg Greene.

  Gunnels admitted to being molested by Busch at both the cottage on Ess Lake and at Busch’s house in Alpena, where Busch had plied him with beer and marijuana and made him watch pornographic movies involving children.

  “That was the first time he had ever showed any kind of film footage of child molestations, I’m talking about a big screen rolled down. …They weren’t adult films. These were kids being molested. They were like homemade movies. Now, whether he was the person in it, I can’t remember. I was so freaked out about the whole thing and I was, of course, again stoned.

  “I wanted to get up and but he kept talking to me saying he is not going to hurt me, you know. And I don’t know if he slipped me something, in a drink or whatever, but I passed out and when I did come to, he was literally giving me a blow job.”15

  At one point, Gunnels said Busch tried to apply Vaseline on him. “He tried to go anal on me. I fought him off the best I could. I was literally screaming…”

  Afterward, Gunnels started acting out in school. His oldest sister, Monica, got it out of him. “My sister practically raised me. I mean I love my mom and stuff—she had twenty years of sobriety before she died—but she was the worst black-out drunk there ever was. So Monty—that’s what we called her—was kind of like a second mom. One day I was at Monty’s house, I was acting out, really bizarre-like and she basically forced me into talking about it. I didn’t know how to bring it up. But I confided in her what had happened. She called my dad and all hell broke loose. My dad went looking for Busch with a baseball bat in the back seat. After that, I had to go down to the police station several times in a row.”16

  Gunnels, accompanied by his father, sat down in an interview room at the Flint Police Department on March 2, 1977, and officers wrote down Gunnels’ story. Two charges were filed against Busch: one for anal intercourse that occurred in Midland County on May 7, 1976, the other for the rape that occurred on January 30, 1976, at the Ess Lake cottage in Montmorency County.

  After Gunnels filed charges, Chris Busch’s mother, Elsie, tried to bribe the 14-year-old into dropping them. Gunnels was playing basketball with Paul at the elementary school in their neighborhood. Somebody missed a rebound and Gunnels went to retrieve the ball near the street. When he looked up, he saw a black limo rolling up to where he stood.

  “I can visualize it perfectly,” Gunnels told Williams and Gray. “‘Cause this was not a limousine neighborhood, if you know what I mean. So, I’m standing there and all of a sudden, the back window goes down and there was this elderly lady sitting there. She wasn’t super old but definitely older than my mom at the time and she said, ‘Excuse me, are you James Gunnels?’ She says: ‘I’d like to talk to you about what you’re saying about my son.’ And she had money in her hand. She says: ‘Would you get in the car so we can talk?’ and she’s waving this wad of bills. I was scared. So scared. I was like; ‘screw you, lady.’ And we ran back to our house. I told my dad and we got in the car and started looking for a limo but never saw it. That was basically it. She was trying to buy me off.”

  After filing charges, Gunnels said his family also received anonymous threatening phone calls. But, Gunnels told the detectives, he had never been in the Detroit area with Chris. He knew Chris’ parents were wealthy, but he had never been in th
e Morningview Terrace home. He said he never saw a boy with Busch he didn’t recognize and that Busch had never forced him to perform sex on another boy. He also never saw Busch carry any type of weapon; he did not witness Busch hurting another boy or holding him against his will, and he said Busch never used him as a lure.

  The most adamant denial—and consequently the one that raised the most suspicion—was his relationship with Greg Greene.

  Gunnels claimed not to even remember the name; he said he could not recognize Greene’s photo. After reading the 1977 police report about Greene molesting him at the drive-in, all the while Williams pressing him—“The movie that night was The Exorcist! You don’t remember The Exorcist?”—Gunnels said flatly: “I don’t remember that.” Then he added, in the same monotone: “I’ve done a lot of drugs over the years so my memory is pretty shot.”

  Williams was sure that something happened between the two, something sufficient to cause Greene to despise Gunnels—so much so that during his polygraph Greene named Gunnels as one of two people he wished were dead. The other was his father. Greene could have targeted anyone. He had his pick of enemies to frame: Chris Busch, for starters, who he claimed killed Mark Stebbins; Kenny Bowman who pressed charges against him. But the 27-year-old pedophile named his 15-year-old victim, a kid whose future he had already effectively destroyed. And now Vince Gunnels was playing the fool.

  “You say that name and I don’t remember that name at all,” Gunnels told Williams and Gray. “I know Chris Busch. I mean, he molested me. He’s somebody I’ll never forget. But Greg Greene, that name I don’t…”17

  Williams showed Gunnels a photo of Greene, taken in 1977. “I know you’ve been molested by Greene, too. You were in a car with him at a drive-in, the one in Flint there. Look, you remember that guy?”

  “Vaguely.” Then, “I don’t remember him to be honest with ya. I really don’t.”

  Williams and Gray insisted Gunnels was lying. They had police reports that said he was with Greene at the drive-in theater. But Gunnels wouldn’t budge: “No, I don’t remember him at all.”

  Williams pressed: “Why is it that everybody is sayin’ they knew Greene but you? Is there a reason you’re not saying anything? You didn’t, don’t remember?

  “No! No, I honestly don’t remember.”

  “If we go back to Bowman is he going to say that you’re bullshitting, you’re lying to us?

  “I don’t know. … I don’t care about that. Whether he thought something happened 30 years ago or not. … I don’t remember the guy. … I mean you’re drawin’ something from a thirty-year-old drug infested brain. I was doing crack and cocaine up until four years ago when I got locked up on this [purse-snatching].”

  In the end, Gunnels refused to be swabbed for DNA: he wanted to talk to his attorney first. Shortly after the interview, Williams arranged to have him transferred to Ryan Correctional Facility in the Detroit area so Gunnels would be in close proximity for follow-up interviews, polygraphs and that all-important DNA swab.

  Gunnels was not happy with the transfer. He became increasingly uncooperative. Six months later, he relented and agreed to take a polygraph. Williams’ notes on Gunnels’ polygraph read: “On October 10, 2008, at MSP Northville post Gunnels appeared to be very nervous. During the pre-test interview and some pre-test questioning, Gunnels asked FBI Agent John Ouellet three times, ‘what happens if the test is inconclusive?’”18

  Observing the questioning on closed-circuit TV, Williams noted: “Inconclusive is a police term. He’s been talking to someone prior to the test.” When Gunnels was shown a photograph of the four victims from the OCCK case, he became very upset, asking: “How do I know whether or not these are the same four kids?”

  Gunnels was also shown a photo of Greg Greene but was not told who it was. He became upset and demanded to talk to Ouellet, who was in the other room. “What are they doing showing me a picture of Greg Greene?” Gunnels yelled to Ouellet.

  The official results of the test were inconclusive. Investigators believed he had purposely sabotaged the test. Knowing he couldn’t pass, an inconclusive result was his only hope of being paroled.

  Williams and Gray soon learned where Gunnels picked up his technique. A former cell mate of Gunnels, serving time in Adrian, Michigan, for “sexual deviance” charges, admitted in an interview he had schooled Gunnels on how to throw off a polygraph by holding his breath. In the four months that they shared a cell, the inmate said Gunnels told him the man who molested him had also murdered children.

  James Vincent Gunnels in 1980 at age 18, and a present-day inmate photograph (Michigan State Police).

  Three weeks after Gunnels’ “inconclusive” polygraph, he was granted parole and released on probation. He headed straight for Montana. He may have felt he could now put Christopher Busch and Gregory Greene behind him, filling his days with fishing and hunting in the splendor of the mountains. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Gunnels would soon become a central figure in the investigation, blurring the lines between victim and suspect, accomplice and scapegoat.

  * * *

  1. Charles Busch to FBI, Case ID #: 306-DE-80444 April 24, 2008, 2. All quotes from Charles Busch in this chapter were taken from this FBI report.

  2. Williams also tracked down the “little brother” Busch had “befriended.” Mike Boldiszar grew up in Berkley. Oddly enough, Williams remembered him as a teenager prancing around town wearing a fedora with a feather boa. Boldiszar’s mother, divorced and raising a gaggle of kids alone, worked as a cashier at Fisher Meat Market in Birmingham. She had attempted to file molestation charges against Busch, and while Williams could not find any record of it, retired chief of detectives for the city of Birmingham at the time, Jack Kalbfleisch, remembered the mother. Boldiszar was 55 in March 2009. Williams found him living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, renting space in the basement of a cottage that had no heat. It was so cold during the interview, Williams said he could see his breath. Boldiszar confirmed that Busch was a Big Brother of his and that Busch would often take him to “Tiny Tim’s” hobby shop at 13 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, near where Jill Robinson’s bike was found, and “Hartfield’s” bowling alley, which is across the street from the 7-Eleven where Kristine Mihelich was abducted. He said Busch tried to molest him, but he insisted that Busch had never succeeded.

  3. Charles Busch phone interview with author, September 2010.

  4. Search Warrant Affidavit of residential dwelling located at 3310 Morningview Terrace in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, October 28, 2008, 8.

  5. Melvin L. Paunovich, former evidence technician for Southfield Police department who processed Stebbins’ body said in an interview with Det. Williams on May 19, 2016, that he collected both human and animal hairs from Mark’s clothing and turned it over to the forensics scientist, Charlotte Day, at the MSP lab in Sterling Heights. Approximately two to four weeks later, he got a call from Charlotte Day, who informed him that they had a bad flood in the basement of the lab and his evidence from Stebbins was lost.

  6. In June of 2009, Williams went to Flint in search of the photos. Former Flint detective Gary Alford, who then worked with the cold case squad at the Genesee Prosecutor’s Office, told Williams there had been “a few floods in Flint over the years” and that “evidence had been destroyed.”

  7. In 2011, Barry King filed a FOIA request for documents concerning Fox Island and Francis Shelden, Gerald Richards, Dyer Grossman and N. Fox Island. In interviews by the author with Barry King and Cathy Broad, both say King was told the files were among those destroyed in a “catastrophic flood” at one of their FBI storage facilities. In addition, in January of 2009, a response to the author’s FOIA records request regarding Shelden (No: 1423617–000: Shelden, Francis Duffield) indicated that “records responsive to your request were destroyed February 28, 1991.)

  8. Det.
Cory Williams, City of Livonia Narrative Report, OCCK Investigation. Incident # 77–0006883, May 16, 2008.

  9. Det. Cory Williams, City of Livonia Narrative report: OCCK Investigation. Incident # 77–0006883, February 3, 2009.

  10. Det. Cory Williams, City of Livonia Narrative report: OCCK Investigation. Incident # 77–0006883, March 20, 2009.

  11. David Metzger, Laboratory Scientist from the Michigan State Police Lab in Northville conducted tests in July of 1977. Results are from Det. Cory Williams notes, March 10, 2008, 34.

  12. David Gorcyca to Dets. Cory Williams and Garry Gray, at briefing meeting on search warrant at Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, October 21, 2008.

  13. Anecdotal evidence of the deceased examiner’s caseload: MSP polygrapher John Wojnarski to Det. Cory Williams on February 27, 2008, as he reviewed Greene and Busch’s polygraph results conducted by Cabot back in 1977. From Det. Cory Williams notes: “We asked who conducted the test, and we told him Ralph Cabot from the MSP Flint post conducted the test in January of 1977, about the Oakland County Child Killings. Wojnarski stated right away that Cabot had a couple of polygraph problems towards the end of his career, where he got into trouble with the State Police when he screwed up a test on a homicide case. This test was done by Cabot in 1977 and he retired in 1980 from the State Police. This info about Cabot, matches what Examiner Larry Wasser said about Cabot, when he told me that he had a couple of times in the past, overturned Cabot’s polygraphs on cases.”