The Staged Scene: Why the Forensic Evidence Does Not Support the Suicide Ruling in Christopher Busch’s Death

The Four Anomalies

Christopher Busch was found dead on November 20, 1978, at his family’s home in Bloomfield Township. The ruling was suicide. The evidence does not support that ruling. It does not refute it outright — laboratory language is careful by design — but it does not support it. And when you stack what the scene actually showed, the careful language becomes its own problem.

Take any one of these alone and a case can be made for innocent explanation. GSR degrades. Wound characteristics vary. Blood pooling can be idiosyncratic. Blankets get moved. But all four, in the same scene, on the same body, in a case involving the primary suspect in four child murders — that is not a collection of anomalies. That is a pattern. And the pattern points in one direction.

What the Lab Report Actually Says

The Oakland County Sheriff’s Crime Detection Laboratory issued Lab Report No. 78-1855 on December 6, 1978. The nature of the examination was atomic absorption — the standard method for GSR detection at the time, testing for the presence of antimony and barium from primer residue. The evidence received was a sealed plastic box containing six test tubes: a control, right back hand swab, right palm swab, left back hand swab, left palm swab, and a cartridge case swab.

The results, in the words of Lawrence A. Presley, Crime Laboratory Scientist: antimony levels on items two through five — all four hand swabs — were insufficient to indicate the presence of gunshot residue. Barium testing was not conducted because the antimony threshold was not met. And then the sentence that carries the weight of the entire ruling: “From these findings no conclusion can be made as to whether the subject did or did not handle or discharge a firearm.”

That conclusion is scientifically accurate and institutionally useless. It says: we cannot tell from this evidence whether this man fired a gun. In a case where the ruling is suicide-by-gunshot, that is not a neutral finding. That is a finding that the physical evidence on his hands does not support the stated cause of death. The ruling was entered anyway. Nobody told the families. The task force closed thirty days later.

Larry Wasser and 28 Years of Silence

Larry Wasser is a polygrapher from Southfield, Michigan. At some point around Tim King’s murder on March 16, 1977, Wasser conducted a private polygraph examination. During that examination, his subject — a man later identified as Christopher Busch — made statements connecting himself to the OCCK murders. Wasser knew. He sat on it.

He sat on it through the murder of Tim King. Through the disbanding of the task force. Through the death of Christopher Busch. Through Barry King’s years of FOIA litigation. Through three lawsuits the King family lost. Through the death of Barry King himself in 2020.

In July 2006 — 28 years after Busch died, 29 years after Tim King was murdered — Wasser attended the American Polygraph Association convention in Las Vegas. He happened to fall into conversation with a San Francisco polygrapher named Patrick Coffey. Coffey mentioned that he had become interested in polygraph work as a child when his neighbor, Tim King, was murdered by the Oakland County Child Killer. Wasser’s response, according to the account that has since been documented by Cathy Broad and reported by Marney Keenan: “Oh, I know who killed your neighbor boy.”

Not a formal disclosure. Not a call to law enforcement. Not a letter to the families. A casual aside, in Las Vegas, to a stranger, at a professional conference.

Patrick Coffey contacted Cathy Broad. Broad contacted investigators. Nearly a year later, in November 2007, the name Christopher Busch surfaced officially. Busch’s former home on Morningview Terrace was searched in October 2008 — thirty years after his death.

The Task Force Timeline

What the Timeline Means

The OCCK task force did not disband because the investigation was complete. It disbanded because the money ran out and the momentum was gone. The official account says the task force could not crack the case. What the official account does not explain is why it folded within thirty days of the death of its primary suspect — a death the forensic evidence cannot confirm as a suicide — and why the families of four murdered children were never told that suspect’s name.

If Busch died by suicide, the task force’s disbanding is still troubling. Four children were murdered. The primary suspect is dead. The case is unsolved. Closing up shop rather than continuing to pursue the network surrounding Busch — the network that the assistant Genesee County prosecutor had described in February 1977 as involving potentially 100 boys and men who “knew each other and traded boys” — is an institutional failure on its own terms.

If Busch did not die by suicide — if the scene was staged, if he was silenced — then the disbanding takes on a very different character entirely. Because you can’t call it institutional failure at that point. It becomes institutional conclusion. Someone decided the case was over. The physical evidence suggests Busch did not make that decision himself.

Not only the scene of death, but the investigation itself leaves a lot on the table. As an investigator, there are key pieces of evidence I would have instantly asked for that are either being held back from FOIA requests, or were flat-out never asked for: phone records, flight logs, airline logs, business records. Something as rudimentary as fingerprints on the shotgun. Yet another missed opportunity because Law Enforcement returned it to H. Lee Busch in short order.

And for all of that, I can’t help but be confused, angry, and wonder, WHY? The OCCK Task Force was one of the highest and best funded task forces in its hay day. So was it poor investigation? Embezzlement as was happening in the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office? Or was it that Law Enforcement already knew the answer?

If there is anything I have learned in my time as an investigator, it’s that Law Enforcement protects its own and will desperately cover up its mistakes. I suspect this case is no exception.

Now Retired Livonia Detective Cory Williams, cited as the lone helpful Law Enforcement officer, did the best he could despite the time that had passed. What he couldn’t possibly fix, was the outright abysmal response from Oakland County Law Enforcement and Michigan State Police.

What Larry Wasser Still Owes

Larry Wasser knew that Christopher Busch had made statements connecting himself to the OCCK murders. He knew during the task force investigation. He knew when Busch died. He knew when the task force disbanded. He knew when Barry King started filing FOIA requests. He knew when Barry King lost his lawsuits. He knew when Barry King died in 2020.

He said nothing — until a conference in Las Vegas, in July 2006, where he mentioned it to a stranger in passing.

Cathy Broad has documented, in her own words, the legal maneuvering Wasser engaged in to avoid fully disclosing what he knew. She has described him as having manipulated professional legislation to protect the kind of decision he and Busch’s attorney Jane Burgess made in the wake of the OCCK murders. She has described the FBI arguing with her brother Mark that the families were wrong because Wasser never technically gave up Busch’s name — even after someone in the FOIA response missed redacting a “Larry” that confirmed who the polygrapher was.

The families found out by accident. Patrick Coffey happened to sit next to Larry Wasser at a convention. Coffey happened to mention Tim King. Wasser happened to say what he knew.

If he had disclosed what he knew, this case may have already been solved.

That is not a charge. It is a question. And it is a question Larry Wasser has never fully answered.

Jessica Cooper: The Prosecutor Who Looked Away

When Christopher Busch’s name finally surfaced officially in November 2007 — thirty years after Tim King’s murder, twenty-nine years after the staged death scene that the Oakland County Sheriff’s own lab could not confirm as a suicide — the Oakland County Prosecutor was Jessica Cooper. She held that office from 2008 through 2020. What she did with the Busch lead, and what she did with the documents surrounding it, is a matter of documented public record.

She looked away. And then she moved the files so no one could prove it.

Cooper’s office fought Barry King’s FOIA requests through multiple rounds of litigation. When King sought records related to the October 2008 search of Busch’s former home on Morningview Terrace, and confirmation of whether Busch had passed or failed his 1977 polygraph, Cooper’s office denied the requests. Those denials were upheld at the Court of Appeals in 2014. The man whose son was murdered — who had spent years trying to understand why Christopher Busch walked free four times across four counties — was told he could not see the records of the search of the primary suspect’s former home.

While Cooper’s office stonewalled the King family, Wayne County was pursuing the Busch lead independently. Oakland County — the jurisdiction where three of the four children were abducted, where the task force had operated, where the prosecutor’s office held the relevant files — was not leading that pursuit. It was being dragged into it by the work being done elsewhere and by the families’ own investigation.

In July 2012, Cooper held a press conference announcing a new lead in the OCCK case — hair evidence linking two victims to an associate of convicted pedophile Arch Sloan. Cathy Broad has noted the timing directly: the press conference came as Cooper was heading into her reelection campaign, and it redirected public attention away from Busch and Greene onto a new suspect. Whether that redirection was strategic or incidental is a question the record cannot definitively answer. What the record can answer is what Cooper did with the Busch files after that press conference.

It did not end there. On November 5, 2020 — the week after the general election in which Cooper lost her primary to Karen McDonald by nearly two to one — a Cooper office employee reported that documents were being shredded. It was suspected these were OCCK case documents. A cease and desist order was issued to Oakland County IT to stop the destruction of electronic files. That order came from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office. According to Broad’s documented account, it was never followed up. No one was held accountable. The shredding that may or may not have occurred in the days after Cooper lost her office has never been fully investigated.

Cooper’s public posture toward the King family throughout her tenure was dismissive. When Barry King presented evidence pointing to Busch’s involvement in Tim’s murder, Cooper told a reporter that the evidence was either “too general” or excluded Busch altogether. Her response to King’s persistence: “He doesn’t like the answer. If it were me, I wouldn’t like the answer either.”

Barry King was the father of a murdered eleven-year-old boy. He had spent years obtaining over 3,400 pages of investigative documents through FOIA. He had lost three lawsuits. He had read the lab report showing no GSR on his son’s suspected killer’s hands. He had seen the death scene photographs. And Jessica Cooper told a reporter that he didn’t like the answer.

He died in 2020 without the answer. Cooper lost her office that same year. The files she had walked to the Sheriff’s office were eventually retrieved by the incoming prosecutor. What was left of them.