The Judge Who Let Christopher Busch Walk: Harry P. Newblatt, the Bond Reduction, and the 22 Days Before Tim King’s Murder

The Flint Journal ran the story on page 2. February 22, 1977. The headline: “Three bound over in sex abuse case.” The article was straightforward. Three men had been bound over to Genesee Circuit Court on charges of criminal sexual conduct involving more than 30 area youths, ages 10 to 14. The names were Gregory W. Greene, 26, of Flint. Douglas E. Bennett, 18, of Flint. And Christopher Busch, 25, of Alma.

The article stated what each man’s situation was at the time of publication. Greene was in Genesee County Jail, held on $75,000 bond, facing arraignment on three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. He was also wanted in California on 37 similar charges and had been paroled in February 1976. Bennett was in jail on $15,000 bond. And then, the sentence that matters: “Busch, free on $1,000 bond, is awaiting arraignment on one count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct.”

That sentence appeared in print 22 days before Tim King was abducted.

What the Document Shows and What the Newspaper Confirms

The Michigan State Police court record that appears in Marney Keenan’s book The Snow Killings shows the 67th District Court number, the name Newblatt in the judge column, and a handwritten correction crossing out $75,000 and replacing it with $1,000, dated January 31, 1977. The caption on that document, drawn from the Michigan State Police file, reads: “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.”

The Flint Journal article from three weeks later confirms the outcome. Busch was free. Greene was in jail. The figures match. The bond that appears on the court record is the bond that appears in the newspaper. These are not inconsistent sources offering competing accounts. They are two independent contemporaneous records describing the same fact.

The charge disparity runs in the wrong direction. Greene faced three first-degree counts, which carry a maximum of life, plus 37 additional California charges. Busch faced one third-degree count, which carries a maximum of 15 years. By any conventional logic of bond-setting — which is supposed to reflect flight risk and the seriousness of the charges — Greene’s bond should have been higher, not Busch’s. It was. But Busch’s original $75,000 was reduced to $1,000. The record does not explain that reduction. The record only shows that it happened, and who authorized it.

Harry P. Newblatt: The Judge on the Record

Harry P. Newblatt was the first presiding judge of the 67th District Court of Michigan, which covered all of Genesee County outside the city of Flint. He was first elected in 1968. He was re-elected in 1972. In May 1978, the Flint Journal profiled him as he sought a third six-year term. The profile described him as 52 years old, of Flint Township, an ex-Marine who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1952, practiced law in Flint for 16 years, and served as a former president of the Genesee County Legal Aid Society and former vice president of the state American Civil Liberties Union.

In January 1977, when Christopher Busch appeared before the 67th District Court, Harry P. Newblatt was that court’s presiding judge. The court record shows the number 67 and the name Newblatt. There is no ambiguity about which Newblatt that was.

But here is what that court record does not show — and what a FOIA document reproduced on Catherine Broad’s blog does. When law enforcement first picked up Christopher Busch, they did not take him to a courthouse. They went to Harry P. Newblatt’s personal apartment to conduct the arraignment. The judge who would later authorize the reduction of Busch’s bond from $75,000 to $1,000 was not an administrator reviewing a file from a distance. He was the judge who conducted the initial arraignment proceedings at his own home. The same hands that set the $75,000 figure were the hands that later crossed it out and wrote in $1,000.

The significance of this is not subtle. Bond reduction hearings are supposed to be adversarial proceedings — the defense makes a motion, the prosecution responds, the judge rules. They are not supposed to be informal encounters between a wealthy defendant’s attorney and a judge at home. The documented pattern across the full Busch case file is that wealth and access produced outcomes that poverty and exposure did not. The apartment arraignment, if accurately documented, is not an exception to that pattern. It is the earliest entry in it.

His brother Stewart Newblatt had left the Genesee County Circuit bench in 1970 and was in private practice in January 1977. Stewart would not return to the bench until President Carter appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1979, where he served with distinction until taking senior status in 1993. A 2012 portrait unveiling at the federal courthouse in Flint honored Stewart’s career.

The Newblatt who reduced Christopher Busch’s bond on January 31, 1977 was Harry. The record is unambiguous on this point. Harry P. Newblatt died in April 2002. He was 76 years old.

Flint, General Motors, and the Architecture of Deference

To understand what H. Lee Busch’s position meant in Genesee County in 1977, it is necessary to understand what General Motors meant in Flint in 1977.

Flint was not a city that happened to have a large employer. It was a city that General Motors had effectively built, sustained, and continued to define. The company’s payroll was the county’s economic backbone. Its charitable giving shaped civic institutions. Its executives moved through social and professional networks that connected business, politics, law, and the judiciary in ways that were not hidden and were not accidental. They were the structure.

H. Lee Busch was not a plant manager or a department head. He was the Executive Financial Director for General Motors in Europe and the United States. In a city built around GM’s gravitational pull, that title carried weight that extended beyond the corporate campus. It extended into the networks that determined how institutions behaved, how decisions were made, and how much friction any particular outcome encountered.

According to Marney Keenan’s reporting in The Snow Killings, based on Michigan State Police documents, H. Lee Busch paid a defense attorney to fly across Michigan in the family’s private plane to arrange plea deals in all four of his son’s criminal sexual conduct cases. He personally posted bond in each case. The result: Christopher Busch was convicted four times of criminal sexual conduct with minors and served zero nights in custody. In every case, he received probation.

The Prosecutor Overseeing This Environment

The man responsible for prosecution in Genesee County during this period was Robert F. Leonard, the county’s lead prosecutor. In 1979, Leonard was convicted of federal embezzlement and sentenced to 44 months in a federal penitentiary. He served his sentence. He never recovered his law license. According to Marney Keenan’s reporting in The Snow Killings and contemporaneous Flint Journal coverage, his conduct and its consequences are a matter of documented public record.

This means that at the time Christopher Busch’s bond was reduced from $75,000 to $1,000 — at the time Busch walked free, at the time Tim King was abducted — the senior law enforcement official responsible for prosecution in Genesee County was already engaged in the criminal conduct that would eventually send him to federal prison. He was not merely ethically compromised in hindsight. He was a felon in the making, operating with the full authority of his office, in a county built around the institutional gravity of General Motors, while a GM executive’s son moved through the legal system without spending a single night in custody across four separate criminal convictions.

What the Prosecutor Said in February 1977

The Flint Journal article does more than confirm the bond figures. It puts Lenore Ferber, the assistant Genesee County prosecutor in charge of the investigation, on record in February 1977 describing what law enforcement understood about the network surrounding these men.

Ferber stated that more than 30 boys had been identified as involved with the four men. She stated that as many as 100 boys and possibly more adults may have been involved. She stated that no force was used on the boys, but that they were coerced through implied threats, general respect for adults, and the prospect of receiving gifts, drugs, or alcohol. And she stated: “This is not an organized ring, but some of the men knew each other and traded boys or referred the youths to other men.”

This is the prosecutorial understanding of the network as of February 1977. Busch was free on $1,000 bond inside that network. The OCCK task force was active. Three children had already been murdered. Law enforcement knew the men were connected. Law enforcement knew the scale. And Busch was not in custody.

Tim King was abducted 22 days after Ferber made those statements and the Flint Journal put them in print.

What the Record Supports and What It Does Not

This piece is built on primary sources: a Michigan State Police court record, a 1977 newspaper article, and documented public records of Robert F. Leonard’s federal conviction. Evidentiary discipline requires stating what those sources establish and what they do not.

What they establish: Harry P. Newblatt, sitting presiding judge of the 67th District Court, authorized a reduction of Christopher Busch’s bond from $75,000 to $1,000 on January 31, 1977. That bond was confirmed in print by the Flint Journal on February 22, 1977. Busch was free. Greene, facing more serious charges from the same proceedings, was in jail on $75,000. The assistant Genesee County prosecutor stated publicly that the network surrounding these men involved potentially 100 boys and was characterized by referrals and trading of victims among the men involved. The county’s lead prosecutor was a federal felon. Twenty-two days later, Tim King was murdered.

The record does not establish that Harry Newblatt made this decision with knowledge that a child would die, or that Christopher Busch was the Oakland County Child Killer.

But the record demands an accounting for why a four-time convicted pedophile, whose father was a wealthy GM executive and whose attorney had been flying across the state arranging plea deals, received a $74,000 bond reduction that his co-defendant, facing more serious charges, did not — in a county whose lead prosecutor was simultaneously committing the crimes that would send him to federal prison. The answer to that question is not in these documents. But these documents are where the question begins, and where it has to be asked.

What General Motors Did to Flint Afterward

There is a final piece of context that belongs in this record, and it is not subtle.

In January 1977, Genesee County’s legal and judicial infrastructure moved with notable efficiency to ensure that the son of a General Motors executive did not spend a single night in custody. A judge conducted an arraignment at his own apartment. A bond was reduced from $75,000 to $1,000 with no documented explanation. A prosecutor who was himself a federal criminal in progress oversaw the office responsible for accountability. The institutional deference to GM’s gravitational pull produced the outcome that institutional deference to wealth reliably produces: the wealthy man’s son walked free.

General Motors began closing Flint plants almost immediately afterward. The Fisher Body Plant No. 1 shut in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s Buick City — GM’s largest manufacturing complex in the United States, employing more than 27,000 workers at its peak — had begun its long contraction. By 1999, GM closed what remained of the Buick City assembly operation. In 2010, the powertrain facility shuttered as part of GM’s bankruptcy proceedings. The city that had organized its entire civic identity around the company that built it was left with a fraction of the jobs, a collapsed tax base, a poisoned water supply from a river it turned to after it could no longer afford its previous water source, and a state government that responded to the resulting fiscal crisis by appointing an emergency manager who made decisions over the heads of elected officials.

The institutions that protected H. Lee Busch’s son in 1977 were built by and for a company that had no durable loyalty to the city those institutions served. Flint bent its legal system around GM’s social weight, and GM returned the favor by leaving. The workers whose labor made H. Lee Busch’s executive career possible watched their jobs, their city, and eventually their water disappear over the following three decades. The judge who reduced the bond in his apartment in January 1977 is not responsible for the Flint water crisis. But the institutional logic that produced the bond reduction — the reflexive deference to the company’s interests and its executives’ social position — is the same institutional logic that left Flint without the political or economic capital to protect its own residents when the company that had defined it decided to move on.

Tim King

Tim King was 11 years old. He loved chocolate milk and fried chicken. He rarely went anywhere without his skateboard. On March 16, 1977, he walked to a pharmacy on Maple Road in Birmingham to buy a candy bar. He never came home.

His father, Barry King, spent the last years of his life in legal proceedings trying to obtain the full investigative record from the Michigan State Police and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. He obtained more than 3,400 pages of documents through FOIA. He lost three lawsuits.

As a mother, it breaks my heart that he died in 2020 without answers.

Thankfully, his daughter, Cathy Broad, has not stopped. The case has not been closed. Yet.

And as the case ages, more and more of the truth comes out, casting doubt on the investigative skills and integrity of those in charge.

Don’t believe me? The Flint Journal ran the bond confirmation on page 2. The name Newblatt appears on the court record in the judge column. The date is January 31, 1977. The county’s lead prosecutor went to federal prison two years later.

Tim King had 44 days left.