Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors, No. 2: Robert F. Leonard Knew What Christopher Busch Was, Organized a Meeting to Stop It, and Then Let Both Go

By Rita Williams · June 22, 2026 · Michigan’s Worst Prosecutors

The Contrast That Defines the Argument

Before examining what Robert F. Leonard did wrong, it is necessary to establish what he did right, because the institutional failure here is not the failure of a man who was simply negligent or indifferent. Leonard was, by the documented record, one of the few officials in Michigan who grasped the actual scope of what Busch and Greene represented.

Leonard publicly stated on February 22, 1977, the day after Busch’s arrest, that the defendants may have passed boys from one to another and that the scheme may have had “nationwide” ties. He said his office was investigating the possibility that the defendants were linked to Francis D. Shelden, the Grosse Pointe millionaire who had gone missing after allegations that his North Fox Island youth camp was being used as a pedophile operation.

That statement is documented in Guarded by Jackals at pages 340 to 341, sourced to contemporaneous press coverage. Catherine Broad has noted that Leonard and Traverse City Record-Eagle reporter Marilyn Wright, who had been investigating the Fox Island network since at least July 1976, were the only two people in Michigan publicly willing to name the bigger picture: that what was happening was not isolated predation by a handful of men, but an organized, networked, mobile operation targeting children across jurisdictions and state lines.

That is not a small thing. That is precisely the analysis that the OCCK investigation needed in early 1977, and it was coming from the right office. Leonard had the Genesee County prosecution. He had Greene. He had the intelligence. He understood what it pointed to.

What he did with it is the problem.

January 1977: What Leonard’s Office Had

In late January 1977, Flint police arrested Greg Greene for criminal sexual conduct in the first degree. During his interview, Greene told police that Christopher Busch had confessed to the murder of Mark Stebbins, the first confirmed OCCK victim, killed in February 1976. Greene also stated that Busch had a cabin near West Branch where he took young boys, and that he would help officers any way he could, including locating the site.

Officers searched Greene’s van and found two Polaroid photographs of a young boy involved in the CSC case and two pairs of young girls’ underwear. They then went to Greene’s residence, where they recovered additional evidence. Greene subsequently told investigators where he had hidden a pack of Polaroid photographs of child victims, wrapped in tinfoil and buried under snow near a downspout in his backyard.

Those photographs were recovered. According to Flint PD detective Waldron, as documented on Catherine Broad’s blog citing FOIA documents, those pictures were never provided to the OCCK task force for comparison, because Busch and Greene had already been cleared by the MSP polygraph administered by Ralph Cabot. Waldron later told a detective that everyone was shocked when Busch and Greene received passing results. A modern review of those polygraph results revealed deception and failure. Waldron wept when told. He said, “those poor families.”

Busch was arrested separately in Alma on January 28, 1977. During transport, he told investigators that he and Greene had planned to have one work days and one work nights so that someone would always be present with a potential victim. When asked what they would do when they were finished with a child, Busch did not answer.

Leonard’s office was now holding, or had access to, the following: a man who named Busch in the Stebbins murder, photographic evidence of child victims, Busch’s own statement about plans for continuous child access, physical evidence from Greene’s van and residence, and Greene’s offer to cooperate fully with investigators. Leonard had publicly identified a nationwide network and a specific named suspect in Shelden. The case was not a mystery at this point. The pieces were in front of him.

The Sentencing Disparity That Has Never Been Explained

Greg Greene was sentenced to life in prison in Genesee County for criminal sexual conduct of a minor. Christopher Busch, prosecuted for offenses involving the same victim in Oakland County, received probation.

Greene, who had prior CSC convictions in California including a case where he believed a child victim was dead and left him at a hospital, received the sentence his record and conduct warranted. There is no dispute about that outcome. The dispute is the contrast.

Busch was the son of H. Lee Busch, a senior financial executive at General Motors. That fact is documented. No official explanation for why the two men received such radically different outcomes for crimes involving the same victim has ever been provided by the Genesee County Prosecutor’s office, the Oakland County Prosecutor’s office, or the Michigan State Police.

Greene, from his prison cell, later wrote to his sentencing judge asking for leniency and offering information about a pedophile ring. The judge forwarded Greene’s letter to Leonard’s office. The documented record does not reflect any meaningful follow-up by Leonard on that information. Greene died in prison in 1996.

The April 11, 1977 Meeting That Never Happened

Leonard organized a meeting of Michigan prosecutors for April 11, 1977. The purpose was to share information on child sexual abuse and exploitation cases across jurisdictions. The meeting was set up explicitly in the context of the Busch and Greene arrests, the active OCCK murders, and the emerging picture of a networked operation connecting multiple counties, Fox Island, and potentially national-level trafficking.

April 11, 1977 was three weeks after Timothy King was abducted on March 16. He was murdered before that date.

The meeting never occurred. Leonard set it up. Leonard scuttled it. The scuttling of that meeting is documented in Chapter 27 of Guarded by Jackals, a chapter titled “Cesspool.” Catherine Broad has written that the message Leonard was delivering publicly, that pedophiles and child pornographers were not all dirty old men but wealthy, mobile, educated, important members of the community, was not one that worked for L. Brooks Patterson or his wealthy constituents. It also did not work after Patterson and Thompson had already taken a “pass” on Busch and Greene two months earlier.

The question the documented record forces is not whether Leonard meant well. He almost certainly did, at least in part. The question is what happens when a prosecutor who understands the institutional stakes organizes the right response and then does not follow through on it. The children do not benefit from prosecutorial intentions. They benefit from prosecutorial action.

The Patterson Contrast and What It Reveals

In the Patterson installment of this series, I documented how L. Brooks Patterson built a public identity on being uncompromising on crime while his office approved probation for Christopher Busch, cleared both men on a disputed polygraph, and later claimed amnesia about Busch’s name for three decades. Patterson’s failure was characterized by studied indifference wrapped in performative toughness.

Leonard’s failure is a different shape. Leonard was not indifferent. He named the network publicly. He sentenced Greene to life. He organized the meeting. The failure is in what happened after each of those correct actions: the photographs not forwarded, the Busch sentencing disparity unexplained, the meeting scuttled.

Catherine Broad has noted that after Patterson and Thompson took their “pass” on Busch and Greene, Leonard’s public messaging about wealthy, mobile, educated predators was institutionally untenable. Patterson’s office had already decided what the Busch case was going to be. The April meeting, had it occurred, would have put information from multiple jurisdictions in the same room at the same time. It would have been very difficult, after that meeting, to maintain the fiction that Busch and Greene represented no ongoing threat.

The meeting did not occur. Busch was free. Timothy King was dead. And the institutional record on what happened inside that coordination failure remains, in significant part, classified or missing.

What the Genesee County Files Show

When Barry King, Timothy King’s father, later sought the Genesee County court files on Christopher Busch and Greg Greene through his secretary, the Genesee County Circuit Court informed her that the Greene file could not be located and that the Busch file was in the archives. When King’s office called back for the Busch file, the clerk reported it could not be located either. Both files were eventually produced by journalist Heather Catallo in February 2010.

Files for two men who were the most significant leads in an active child murder investigation, one of whom had been sentenced to life in prison, went missing from Genesee County Circuit Court. That is not a filing error. That is an institutional pattern.

Why Leonard Belongs in This Series

This series is not a simple inventory of bad actors. It is a documentation of how prosecutorial failure operates across a spectrum: from Patterson’s aggressive, performative indifference, to Leonard’s more complicated failure of follow-through. Both men held positions where their decisions directly shaped what happened to the children who were being killed and the families who were left without answers.

Leonard is in this series because the April 11 meeting matters. It matters because it was the right idea, organized by the right person, at precisely the moment when it could have done the most good. And it was scuttled. The chapter in Guarded by Jackals that documents what happened is called “Cesspool” for a reason. The institutional environment in which Leonard was operating was not one that rewarded the kind of public accountability he briefly attempted.

That does not excuse what happened to the meeting. It contextualizes it. And it raises the question that Clutch Justice will continue returning to across this series: who, specifically, benefits when the right institutional response fails to materialize? Follow that question. It tends to lead somewhere.