Using nuclear DNA from a 1980 rape kit in the case, Holes and his team of investigators created about 25 family trees, some going as far back the early 1800s. It took several months but one branch of the family tree led to a 72-year-old retiree, Joseph James DeAngelo, living with his daughter and granddaughter in Citrus Heights, California. Detectives lifted traces of DeAngelo’s DNA from his car door and from a tissue tossed in a trash can. It matched the rape kit DNA perfectly.3
DeAngelo had been a police officer in a small town in Northern California, which would explain how the killer was able to anticipate police tracking him and slip away. It would also explain why the killer’s DNA was not found in criminal DNA data bases: the criminal was a cop.
In the six months following DeAngelo’s arrest, GEDmatch helped provide essential clues that led to suspects in over a dozen cold cases. Regrettably, the same method could not be used effectively in the OCCK investigation because there was no nuclear DNA retrieved from the crime scenes or the children’s bodies—no semen, tissue or blood. The hairs in the case, such as they are—mislabeled, improperly stored, degraded—can only be a source of mitochondrial DNA.
Nonetheless, Williams put the mtDNA profiles from the hairs to the test. In May of 2018, the FBI DNA unit in Quantico supplied him with a haplogroup code of numbers and letters developed from the Sloan car evidence. (A haplogroup is a specific group of people whose share a common ancestor on the father’s side or the mother’s side.) When the haplogroup was put into a genealogy website, the database provided 11 continents and regions of the world consistent with the profile, nine of which were European countries—Poland, Sweden, Bulgaria, Slovenia and North America. In sum, the results indicated a high probability of a white male being the donor of the hairs. “The problem is … it’s impossible to get a family tree from a genealogy site with mtDNA because it would give us hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of family trees,” Williams said. “MtDNA just isn’t specific enough to narrow it down.”
Williams had to explain to the victims’ families that the genealogical approach was a lost cause, once again dashing hopes in an increasingly hopeless case.
Fortunately, Williams was able to buffer the disappointment with a new discovery. Just as the Golden State Killer arrest was making headlines across the country, Williams received word from the biology lab at MSP that scientists were able to retest a vaginal swab taken from Kristine Mihelich’s autopsy in 1977. Using new and highly sensitive DNA software, the scientists were able to identify a partial Y-str DNA profile from the swab. Passed through fathers, Y-str (short tandem repeat) is a marker from the male Y chromosome. Just as mtDNA traces exclusively through maternal lineage, Y-str DNA tracks paternal lineage: all male descendants. The news that the cells on Kristine’s vaginal swab had provided male identifiers was exciting.
While the Y-str profile developed from Kristine’s swab was not a 100 percent full Y-str profile—it was only a partial male profile—the MSP scientists did say it had enough markers to exclude or not exclude suspects. Williams submitted the more than 60 DNA samples from all suspects that had been swabbed. As of this writing, most of the suspects had been eliminated.
Until quite recently, the only way a strand of hair could provide nuclear DNA was if a root or follicle were attached. In the fall of 2019, news broke that a paleogeneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz had developed a way to extract and sequence nuclear DNA from hair lacking a root.
Dr. Ed Green had been quietly working with several law enforcement agencies developing the method to extract genetic profiles from the hair evidence in long-unsolved crimes. Green collaborates with genetic genealogist Dr. Barbara Rae-Venter, who was widely credited with helping investigators identify the Golden State Killer.4
Ultimately, Williams believes scientific advances down the road will allow for comparisons using the Y-str DNA from Kristine Michelich, and the mtDNA from the hairs found in Sloan’s car and on Mark Stebbins’ and Tim King’s bodies.
* * *
1. Staff Reports, “Inmate Testifies Why Killed Molester Priest,” The Associated Press, January 24, 2006.
2. Justin Jouvenal, “To Find Alleged Golden State Killer, Investigators First Found His Great-Great-Great-Grandparents,” The Washington Post, April 30, 2018.
3. Jamie Ducharme, “Investigators Collected the Suspected Golden State Killer’s DNA While He Shopped at Hobby Lobby,” Time Magazine, June 2, 2018.
4. Heather Murphy, “Why This Scientist Keeps Receiving Packages of Serial Killers’ Hair,” The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2019.
22
No Such Thing as Closure
In the process of reviewing all the original evidence, Williams took another long hard look at Christopher Busch, focusing on law enforcement’s role. From the beginning, the King family believed there had been a cover-up involving Busch and Greene—and with good reason. Had the happenstance conversation between Patrick Coffey and Larry Wasser never taken place, the name Christopher Busch would have been buried forever. Once the avalanche of evidence came tumbling out, the Kings were convinced the Michigan State Police had conspired with the Busch family to put an airtight lid on the entire case.
Williams’ review forced him to conclude his predecessors in uniform had indeed abused their power in the early Busch investigation—they realized at his suicide scene that Busch was probably the killer, and had covered up their suspicions rather than expose the fact they had him in custody and let him go. But this also meant they chose to close the door on investigating Busch’s involvement when they had the chance—before bodies turned to dust rendering DNA irretrievable, before autopsies went missing, before family records were destroyed, before drawings and ropes in police storage were purged.
In September 2017, Williams asked for a meeting with Barry King and his children at the King family home. Since Cathy King Broad was attending a high school reunion, Williams scheduled it for when Cathy was in town. As the most strident (to put it mildly) critic of law enforcement’s mishandling of the case, it was best for Williams to meet face to face with Cathy. He felt he owed it to her.
To the extent Williams could be chastened for coming so late to the table, he explained that he had gone dark in the years after 2012 out of necessity. At the time, he was hunting down the (top secret at the time) source of the Sloan hairs. For the King family, and the public too, the black-out on the Busch investigation had only deepened their mistrust, and given cover-up conspiracy theorists free reign.
Chris King, who normally attended these meetings with authorities as the lone sibling, was buoyed by Cathy’s presence. If Chris had his way, he would disengage from the case all together—past, present and future. Tim’s murder was a bomb that exploded inside his childhood home, and his PTSD symptoms are triggered by these meetings, forcing him to re-experience the trauma.
Barry King was his congenial, gentlemanly self. While he appeared tired and weary, his recall of dates and court proceedings was flawless, an encyclopedic memory of injustices.
Williams began by passing out a three-page, single-spaced report, asking that its contents be kept amongst the Kings for now. The report was titled: “Timeline of theory into possible cover-up involving Chris Busch.”
While the verbiage “theory” and “possible” were likely an affront to the family responsible for first exposing the cover-up, they understood Williams was conceding to their long-held conviction that they had been deceived for decades.
At the outset, Williams tempered the family’s expectations: his view of the cover-up was not as far reaching and multi-layered as they had maintained. “I don’t believe that it involved several crooked police officers, prosecutors and or judges over a period of forty years,” he said. “That’s just way too many people to keep something like that quiet for so many years.”
And: “I can’t take myself to a place where cops may have
been involved in killing suspects.”
But there was no sugar-coating the deception. Bottom line, Williams said: “There were cops who covered their asses once they found Busch dead in 1978. They realized they may have blood on their hands.”
In the timeline, Williams lays out his premise: Polygrapher Larry Wasser realizes after talking with Chris Busch that he may very well be the child killer. Wasser tells Jane Burgess, Busch’s attorney, that her client never should have passed the polygraph on Mark Stebbins and the Task Force never should have let him go. Burgess then informs H. Lee and Elsie Busch and their worst fears are confirmed. Now in full panic mode, the parents are desperate to keep their son both out of jail and out of the public eye.
“The Busch family suspected their son might be the killer but they were not going to turn their son in to the Task Force,” Williams told the Kings. “So, they decide to get out in front of this and be proactive. They tell Burgess to do whatever it takes to get their son off.”
While Burgess did succeed in keeping her four-time repeat offender out of prison, he was not completely off the radar. Local newspapers at the height of the public hysteria, between February 22, 1977, and March 3, 1977, named “Christopher B. Busch” in three separate articles as a suspect charged with criminal sexual conduct with young boys.1
One article, published in the Oakland Press, identifies Busch as “a Birmingham man” residing at “3310 Morningview,” booked on March 2, 1977, by the Bloomfield Township police and charged with having sexual relations with a 12-year-old boy in Oakland County. He was freed on a $12,000 bond and ordered to obey a 7 p.m. curfew. Fourteen days later, 11-year-old Tim King left his Birmingham home to buy a candy bar and never returned.
The article is accompanied with a large and grainy mugshot of Busch, all 250 pounds of him stuffed like a sausage into a Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt. His build was listed as “large,” his complexion as “ruddy.”2 Busch is holding at chest level a black sign identifying his case number and the date. With a full beard and long greasy hair, his dark eyes glare at the camera. If H. Lee Busch’s GM business associates hadn’t taken notice of the youngest pedigreed Busch before, they surely would now.
Indeed, there is evidence, if only circumstantial, that GM was aware of its chief financial officer’s problems with his son. Whatever the largest automaker in the world may have done to curtail this impending public relations disaster, it could not completely contain rumors of H. Lee Busch’s black sheep. Sometime during the 19 days Kristine Mihelich was missing, Chrysler Corporation executive Harwood Rydholm, an avid stamp and coin collector, told his stamp dealer that police knew the identity of the Oakland County Child Killer.
Rydholm, then vice president for Chrysler’s civic affairs, told Fred Minch, proprietor of Eastland Stamp and Coin: “The killer is the son of a high-level GM executive but the police aren’t doing anything because GM is protecting the father.” Rydholm passed away in 1987 at age 65, and Fred Minch’s memory is by now beginning to falter. But his daughter, Valorie, never forgot the conversation her father had with Rydholm.
It took some courage on her part, but in 2018, Valorie decided to come forward with her story after reading Cathy Broad’s blog. “I read it and realized: Oh my God, Mr. Rydholm was right,” she said.3
Valorie Minch was 15 when her father and mother told her what Rydholm said: GM knows who the OCCK is and they are keeping it quiet. “I’ve been carrying that conversation in my mind for years. I just figured the grown-ups were taking care of it. Turns out they were burying it all along. I remember thinking if those creeps would have done something about this, there would be two kids still alive.”
Over the years, Minch said, she never went to authorities because she feared retribution. “I’ve been scared of the police, the pedophiles. That someone might come back and hurt me or my family. I figured if Ted Lamborgine couldn’t cut a deal because he was too afraid, well, what could happen to me?”
There were other indications that GM and/or H. Lee Busch might have had some kind of chokehold on the local police. In the months preceding Tim King’s abduction, an eight-year-old girl living a block away from Chris Busch’s older brother Charles, and three blocks away from the Hunter Maple Pharmacy parking lot where Tim was last seen, was flashed by a man in his car, creeping alongside her as she walked home. Before breaking into a sprint, the young girl had the smarts to memorize the license plate. When she told her parents, they were enraged and went to the Birmingham PD to file charges. But as soon as the department identified the driver as the son of a prominent GM executive, her father abruptly decided not to pursue it.
The father, now deceased, was an attorney for GM. “My father told us he would lose his job if he pressed charges,” a family member told Williams in 2018. “It was so unlike my father to not have fought this: my dad always did the right thing.”4
It is not surprising that the family never spoke of it again. The realization that following through with the complaint might have prevented Tim King’s death must have weighed heavily. When FOIA requests were made for the complaint, no record could be found, likely because no charges were ever filed.
A similar incident occurred in the same parking lot where Tim King disappeared, involving a young girl and her brother as they waited in the car while their mother went inside the grocery store to pick up a few items. In a 2010 interview, the mother and her daughter told Williams that, just as the mother was coming outside, a man came up to the window of the car with his penis in his hands. The mother yelled at him and wrote down his license plate as he sped off. The family went to the Birmingham police twice. First, police told her they knew who it was but could do nothing about it. When the family sent their attorney to press charges on their behalf, he too, walked out empty-handed. The suspect was from a “prominent local family” the lawyer told the family. Once again, police said there was nothing they could do.5
Some of the most compelling evidence of a cover-up was at the scene of Chris Busch’s suicide, to many observers so apparently staged—the drawing resembling Mark Stebbins taped to the wall, the ropes in the middle of the closet floor, the 12-gauge shotgun shell left conspicuously on the dresser. The officers who arrived at the scene had to have run Busch’s name and discovered he was indeed a suspect, cleared by polygraph, and freed on bond weeks before Tim King’s death.
“They realized they may have screwed up but didn’t know for sure,” Williams said. “They couldn’t tell the families. If they did, it would leak out and the task force would look like fools for letting him go once he passed the polygraph. The task force was disbanding in a month anyway. They didn’t know for sure that he was the killer, but if he was, they figured at least he’s dead now. So, someone high up the chain at the MSP shut down the Busch investigation right then and there.”
As (now retired) Bloomfield Township Police evidence technician James Speicher told me: “They tried to keep it confidential. As I remember it was: ‘Guys, let’s just be very cool about this.’ They wanted to keep it secret in case it turned out it wasn’t the guy. They didn’t want the public to let their guard down (if Busch wasn’t the child killer). As time went on and killings stopped, that just gave more credence to the fact that he was the killer, that he couldn’t take it anymore and he committed suicide. We thought sure the task force was going to say they’d solved it and close the case.”6
When that never happened, Speicher said: “We just assumed the task force was doing its job and he must not have been the right guy.”
Jack Kalbfleisch, former Birmingham Police chief of detectives, remembered seeing the drawing resembling Mark Stebbins come across his desk in November 1978. “The state police brought that picture back to our office,” Kalbfleisch recalled. “I looked at the picture along with others and we all said that looks just like Mark. The State Police and Bloomfield Township Police were handling the case and they said the medical examiner will be looking at the
body, so we left it up to them.”7
But someone within the Michigan State Police made sure the Busch file would be buried. Someone decided the public should never know that the investigation amounted to something worse than a massive failure—it was sabotaged, the most critical evidence deliberately concealed to save face.
That’s when the legend began. Through the years, when asked by reporters why the killings stopped or why it was never solved, police officers began positing the same storyline—that the killer’s wealthy family had him committed to a mental institution for life.
Joe Koenig was one of the officers who put forth the company line. He was 34 when he replaced Robert Robertson as head of the task force in January 1980. So perhaps he can be forgiven for not remembering something he said to a reporter four decades ago.
Still his quote in the Detroit News in that year was quite prescient. Asked why he thought the killings had stopped, Koenig replied: “…what if the killer is from a very wealthy family? … Suppose the parents discover their son is the killer and send him off to Europe for psychiatric treatment. The family name is spared, their son is receiving treatment and they are sure no one else will be killed. They can live with that.”
The Snow Killings Page 40
