Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors, No. 1: L. Brooks Patterson Built a Career on Law and Order and Let a Child Killer Walk

By Rita Williams · June 15, 2026 · Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors

The Brand He Built

L. Brooks Patterson did not stumble into power. He built toward it systematically, and he understood from the start that the Oakland County prosecutor’s office was a platform as much as it was a job. He took office in 1973 and immediately began constructing a public identity: tough on crime, intolerant of deals, aggressive on pornography, and protective of the suburban community he had chosen over the Detroit he grew up in.

The no-plea-bargaining policy was his signature. Patterson announced it for narcotics when he took office in 1973, expanded it to armed robberies and concealed weapons cases in 1975, and repeated it publicly as often as possible. His stated reasoning was institutional: plea bargaining, he argued, denied victims their day in court, demoralized law enforcement, and rewarded defendants for conduct that warranted punishment.

He backed the rhetoric with action, at least selectively. When an assistant prosecutor authorized a plea deal in a drug case, Patterson fired him. Immediately, and publicly. The message was clear: there are no exceptions in this office.

Except, as it turned out, there were.

The War on Pornography and the Politics Behind It

Patterson’s second major public crusade was against pornography. During his first year in office, a pharmacist in Oak Park named Harvey Towlen was arrested for allowing minors to purchase adult magazines. Patterson sought 83 years in prison, twice the standard sentence, because some of Towlen’s illegal pharmaceutical drug sales had also involved minors. The escalation was not incidental. It was deliberate.

Dick Thompson, Patterson’s chief assistant and loyal lieutenant, inherited the pornography crusade when Patterson elevated him. Thompson led a 40-person task force, prosecuted owners of adult video store chains, and sought prison sentences and fines of up to $5 million. Thompson stated publicly that there was a correlation between hard-core pornography and sexual violence, adding that the materials included incest and child pornography. He characterized pornography as material that “degrades women, encourages sexual violence and incites and aids child molesters in the commission of their crimes.”

Keep those words in mind as we move forward. Thompson’s office had a file on Christopher Busch that contained child pornography and evidence of serial predation. That file did not produce a prison sentence.

The “Same People” and What Patterson Actually Meant

Patterson built his political brand in a specific context: the white flight era of metro Detroit, the aftermath of the 1967 uprising, and the fight over school busing that defined Oakland County’s political culture in the early 1970s. Before he became prosecutor, he represented Irene McCabe, a segregationist advocate who became a vocal opponent of court-ordered busing to integrate Pontiac schools. Patterson was not a passive observer of that fight. He was a participant and an advocate.

His “war chant,” repeated at every available opportunity, was constructed to land in a specific way with a specific audience. He told constituents they were “being raped, robbed and murdered over and over again by the same people.” He did not define “the same people.” He did not have to. The audience understood.

A 2022 academic paper published on SSRN, titled “Suburban Law and Order: L. Brooks Patterson and the Politics of Crime Control in Suburban Detroit, 1972-1992,” documents how Patterson’s political language fused suburban fears of crime with racial anxieties about integration and urban proximity. The paper situates Patterson within a broader national pattern of suburban prosecutors who built careers on law-and-order rhetoric directed, often in coded terms, at Black Detroit rather than at the actual sources of danger in their own communities.

By the time a 2014 New Yorker profile documented Patterson’s views on Detroit, the architecture of that worldview was on full display. Patterson stated he wanted to turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, “where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” He warned suburban readers not to stop for gas in Detroit because it was “just a call for a carjacking.” He counseled people to park close to the venue, get in, and get out.

Patterson’s office issued a statement calling the New Yorker piece a “hatchet job.” The statement did not dispute the quotes.

Christopher Busch: The Contradiction the Record Cannot Explain Away

In January 1977, Flint police arrested Christopher Busch and Greg Greene for criminal sexual conduct involving minors. Busch was the son of H. Lee Busch, a senior executive at General Motors. When police searched Busch’s home, they found ligatures and child pornography. Greene told investigators that Busch had knowledge of who killed Mark Stebbins, the first confirmed OCCK victim, murdered in February 1976.

Genesee County prosecuted Busch and Greene. The Genesee County Prosecutor’s office, under Robert F. Leonard, was at that moment pursuing the possibility that Busch and others were connected to a larger network of child exploitation with, in Leonard’s documented words, “nationwide ties.” Leonard was also attempting to convene a meeting of Michigan prosecutors in April 1977 to exchange information on child sexual abuse investigations. That meeting never occurred.

In Oakland County, the handling of Busch proceeded differently. A legal document obtained by Local 4 in 2012 showed that Patterson’s office approved a plea agreement in the 1977 Christopher Busch sex assault case. Busch received probation. He was released. The file in Patterson’s office contained a document bearing the notation “no deals,” signed by assistant prosecutor R. Thompson. The deal was approved anyway.

March 1, 1977: an Oakland County court document bearing Christopher Busch’s name is filed. Fifteen days later, Timothy King is abducted from the Hunter-Maple Pharmacy parking lot in Birmingham. King becomes the fourth and final confirmed OCCK victim. He was eleven years old.

Busch died in November 1978 in what was ruled a suicide.

Patterson, asked about Busch in the years that followed, steadfastly maintained he had no memory of the name Christopher Busch until 2008. He served as Oakland County Prosecutor until 1988. He ran for Senate in 1978, lost, and remained in the prosecutor’s office. He became county executive in 1992 and held that position until his death from pancreatic cancer in August 2019 at age 80.

They Drove to Flint in a Blizzard and Still Did Nothing

The claim that Patterson’s office was unaware of Christopher Busch becomes harder to sustain when you examine what his office actually did. According to documentation cited in Catherine Broad’s blog and discussed in detail in Marney Keenan’s book The Snow Killings, Dick Thompson, Patterson’s chief assistant prosecutor, drove to Flint in the middle of a blizzard to interview Christopher Busch and Greg Greene following their January 1977 arrests for criminal sexual conduct with minors.

Let that sit for a moment. Thompson did not send a junior investigator. The number two official in the Oakland County Prosecutor’s office made the trip himself, in winter conditions, to personally assess two men who had been arrested with child pornography and ligatures, one of whom had been identified by the other as having knowledge of the murder of Mark Stebbins.

Thompson came back. The OCCK task force cleared Busch and Greene based on a polygraph administered by MSP examiner Ralph Cabot. The polygraph result was later described as questionable. Busch received probation in Oakland County. He was released. Timothy King was abducted fifteen days after the March 1, 1977 court filing.

Catherine Broad, whose brother Timothy was the fourth OCCK victim, has written extensively and with documented sourcing about the institutional knowledge Patterson’s office carried and did nothing with. Her analysis, grounded in primary documents, FOIA responses, and the detailed account in Guarded by Jackals, reaches a conclusion that the public record supports: this case could have been handled differently, at multiple decision points, and the people with the authority to make different decisions chose not to.

Patterson’s office was not ignorant of Christopher Busch. His second in command drove through a snowstorm to sit across a table from him. What happened after that interview, and why, has never been officially explained.

Secrecy, Loyalty, and the Perelli Firing

The Christopher Busch handling did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred inside an office whose documented internal culture was built on absolute secrecy and unconditional loyalty to Patterson, enforced through retaliation against anyone perceived as a threat to that loyalty.

Patterson and Thompson ran the OCP with what the source record characterizes as unprecedented secrecy, deliberately limiting information provided to defense counsel and demanding unconditional loyalty from everyone working under them. Any betrayal of loyalty, real or imagined, was handled harshly. Patterson’s judgment about who had betrayed him was not always accurate. His response was consistent regardless: outrage, and punishment.

The Sheri Perelli episode illustrates how this worked in practice. Perelli was an assistant prosecutor serving as head of Patterson’s Consumer Protection Unit. In 1975, she set up a public relations consulting company, with Patterson’s blessing, to serve the same clients she was supposed to be policing in her OCP role. Her business application was notarized by an OCP investigator. When the story was reported, Patterson told reporters he saw no conflict. Then he focused his attention entirely on identifying whoever in his office he believed had leaked the story.

He was almost certainly hunting a ghost. Corporate filings of that type were publicly available and easy to find. “Perelli” was in the company name. There was likely no leaker. That did not stop Patterson and Thompson from aggressively retaliating against a staff member they decided was responsible.

The Appel Retaliation: When Patterson Was Wrong, He Kept Going

Patterson settled on Marilyn Appel, a staff member, as the source of the Perelli disclosure. He was wrong. He demanded her resignation. She refused. Thompson cut her schedule to a two-day work week. When that retaliation became public, Thompson told reporters that Appel was “delighted” with her new schedule, while Patterson absented himself to Florida. Thompson then fired Appel, telling reporters she was “giving the office bad publicity.”

Approximately one week after Appel hired an attorney to challenge her dismissal, Patterson was forced to concede that the allegations made against her at the time of her firing “were not entirely correct.” The Detroit News documented the concession on April 2, 1975.

The book from which this account is drawn notes that this would not be the last time Dick Thompson would lie to the press and help Patterson keep his fingerprints off an unpleasant matter.

The Student Intern Sting

Patterson’s capacity for misguided retaliation was not limited to adult staff. A few months after the Perelli situation, Sheri Perelli claimed money was being stolen from her purse by someone at the OCP office. Patterson and Thompson immediately concluded the culprits were six unpaid high school students volunteering at the office for school credit.

They ran a sting operation. A $20 bill was dusted with zinc sulfide powder and placed near where the students sat. When the bill disappeared, OCP investigators rushed in without explanation, herded the students into a dark room, and demanded they show their hands under UV light. Two students were additionally frisked, again without being told why. None of the students showed the telltale stains. They were not the thieves.

When the shell-shocked students spoke to reporters about what had been done to them, Thompson called them liars and asserted they had been told why they were being investigated before the search. The students all told the same story: no explanation was provided while they were treated like criminal suspects. The parents of the students were never informed while it was happening.

Rather than apologize and assure the students and their families that this was not how the OCP conducts its investigations, Patterson fired them for talking to reporters. The internship program was ended. The thief was never caught.

Pandora’s Shoebox: Selective Secrecy in Action

On April 25, 1976, Southfield police arrested Lois Herman, also known as Teri Cole, a prostitute with an unusually organized client list. She kept the name of each client on a file card, stored in a shoebox seized by police. The box contained the names of approximately 200 prominent politicians, judges, doctors, and lawyers. The shoebox landed in the hands of Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson.

Patterson placed a note in Herman’s file directing that none of the names, addresses, or other information in the confiscated shoebox were to be released for any reason.

Eleven days after the existence of that note became public, three names from Herman’s shoebox leaked. They were U.S. Congressman John Dingell, Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan, and Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley. All three were Patterson’s political enemies. The leak became national news, covered by the Miami Herald, New York Daily News, and other outlets across the country.

Patterson’s response was instructive. He called Herman a “grandstander” from his Pontiac office and said he was not about to take the word of “a hooker” against the attorney general, a congressman, and the Wayne County prosecutor. He did not investigate whether charges should be brought. He stated he had no intention to do so.

There was no hunt for the source of the leak. No retaliation against the individual who had defied his explicit written order. No fury spilled onto the pages of newspapers. The contrast with his treatment of Marilyn Appel and six high school students requires no editorial commentary.

Two days before Herman’s arrest, Patterson had announced in the Detroit Free Press a fundraiser tied to his intention to run for statewide office, looking at both the attorney general’s office and the governor’s race. Frank Kelley held the attorney general’s office. It was a happy coincidence that the names leaked from a file Patterson controlled were those of the three Democratic officials who most directly occupied the political territory Patterson intended to claim.

In November 1976, Patterson held a press conference to announce a deal being offered to Herman. The source record notes this was not standard practice: prosecutors do not typically hold press conferences to announce what they are willing to offer a defendant. It was the same deal Patterson had offered Herman in the spring of 1976. The press conference served to remind the public, in an election cycle, that Kelley, Dingell, and Cahalan had been named as clients of a prostitute.

What the Legacy Coverage Got Wrong

When Patterson died, the coverage was, as it tends to be for long-tenured officials, predominantly valedictory. He was described as a “hard-drinking,” “wise-cracking” character who built Oakland County into one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The triple-A bond rating was cited. The $420 million in cash reserves was cited. The racial comments were described as “sometimes controversial,” a phrase that does significant work in minimizing documented conduct.

The source record on Patterson’s tenure poses the question directly: please enlighten us on how we should quantify what kidnapped, molested, and murdered children are worth relative to Oakland County’s AAA bond rating. Tell us how many child rapes are acceptable when measured against $420 million in cash reserves.

That framing is not hyperbole. It is the logical conclusion of treating financial metrics as a rebuttal to documented institutional failure. The bond rating belongs in the economic development record. It does not belong in the prosecutorial record. Those are two different columns, and Patterson’s defenders have spent decades conflating them.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying here, because Clutch Justice does not traffic in insinuation.

I am saying that Patterson’s public record contains a documented contradiction between his stated policy and the handling of Christopher Busch that has never been explained. I am saying that the political identity he built depended on coded racial anxiety directed at Black Detroit while simultaneously failing to protect children in his own county. I am saying that the man who crusaded against pornography and plea deals ran an office that released an admitted child predator on probation during an active child murder investigation, fired staff members for telling the truth to reporters, ran warrantless searches on minor interns, and selectively enforced its own confidentiality rules based on whose political interests were served by disclosure.

Those are not allegations. They are the record.

Why This Series Exists

Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors is a Clutch Justice series documenting the gap between how prosecutors present themselves and what the documented record shows. It is not an exercise in score-settling with deceased officials. It is an exercise in institutional memory, because the systems Patterson built did not end when he died. The political culture he normalized, the selective enforcement he modeled, and the deference his office received from oversight bodies that should have asked harder questions: those patterns did not retire when Patterson did.

The children simply did not matter. That conclusion, documented in the source record and supported by the evidentiary sequence, is the most accurate summary of what the Patterson era produced. Future installments in this series will examine additional Michigan prosecutors whose documented records merit the same level of scrutiny.