For fifty years the Oakland County Child Killer case has been argued as a question of who. The record supports a second question that has never been answered either: who decided what the public, and the families, would be allowed to know.
Content note: this series discusses the abduction and murder of children and the sexual abuse of minors. Details of the crimes are kept to what the record requires.
Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, and Timothy King were abducted from Oakland County communities between February 1976 and March 1977 and later found murdered. Timothy King’s body was found in Livonia, in Wayne County. No one has been charged. The Michigan State Police leads the case and says it remains open. Over five decades, control of the file has shifted among police agencies, two county prosecutors, and the courts, and the most consequential records about the investigation’s central decisions remain sealed, exempt, or released only after the victims’ families sued.
Christopher Busch was questioned in early 1977 and, in the Michigan Court of Appeals’ words, allegedly cleared after a polygraph. Timothy King was abducted weeks later. In 2013 the same court held the polygraph reports could stay secret.
The Michigan State Police produced 3,411 pages during the King family’s FOIA litigation. The family disputed how many of those pages actually concerned Busch.
DNA findings were publicized decades after the killings. Establishing when each hair was first examined, submitted, and retested requires the laboratory and evidence-submission records.
In 2012 the Wayne and Oakland County prosecutors, who share jurisdiction because Timothy King was found in Livonia, publicly fought over how the case was being disclosed.
At the fiftieth anniversary, Kristine Mihelich’s sister said the family had heard nothing from law enforcement since about 2016 or 2017.
Who were the victims?
Mark Stebbins, 12, of Ferndale; Jill Robinson, 12, of Royal Oak; Kristine Mihelich, 10, of Berkley; and Timothy King, 11, of Birmingham.
Has the case been solved?
No. No one has been charged. The Michigan State Police says the case is open and investigates every new tip.
Was Christopher Busch cleared?
He was allegedly cleared after a 1977 polygraph. The reports remain withheld under Michigan’s Forensic Polygraph Examiners Act. In 2012 Oakland County prosecutors said no evidence tied him to the killings. He died in November 1978; later inquiries into his possible involvement were posthumous.
Can families see the files?
In part. During its 2010 FOIA lawsuit, the King family received 3,411 pages and disputed how many concerned Busch. Polygraph reports, DNA profiles, sealed records, and investigative subpoena materials were withheld.
I think I finally figured out what has been bothering me about the Oakland County Child Killer case, and it may be a bigger story than any single suspect.
For nearly fifty years, people have argued about who killed these children. Suspects. Theories. Books. Documentaries. Retired detectives. Old leads resurrected and repackaged again. I have written about pieces of this case before, including the North Fox Island operation that runs alongside it. This series asks a different question.
Who has controlled the information?
An unsolved case this old does not exist in a vacuum. Over decades it becomes an information ecosystem. Law enforcement decides what gets investigated and what gets released. Retired investigators keep talking. Journalists develop sources. Authors and filmmakers build narratives. Families fight for answers. Competing theories gain audiences. Some evidence gets amplified, and some disappears from the public conversation entirely. Eventually it becomes hard to separate the investigation from the story built around it.
This is not a story about who I think did it. It is a story about the machinery, and the machinery leaves records. I want the records.
The Four Children, and the Fact Pattern Nobody Disputes
Mark Stebbins, 12, disappeared in Ferndale on February 15, 1976. He was found four days later in a Southfield parking lot. Jill Robinson, 12, disappeared from Royal Oak on December 22, 1976, and was found four days later along I-75 in Troy. Kristine Mihelich, 10, disappeared in Berkley on January 2, 1977. She was found nineteen days later in a snowbank in Franklin Village. Timothy King, 11, disappeared in Birmingham on March 16, 1977, and was found in a ditch in Livonia on March 22.
Those dates and places are the part of the case no one argues about. Nearly everything layered on top of them, including who was cleared, which evidence was tested and when, which leads were dropped, and why, sits in records the public has seen only partially. A task force described as the largest of its kind in the country at the time took in more than 11,000 tips, according to WDIV. It shut down in December 1978. In the decades since, the case has been handed off, contested, and reshaped across institutions.
The First Decision: Who Gets Cleared, and on What
In January 1977, after three children were dead, investigators questioned Christopher Busch, a Bloomfield Township man with a history of sexual offenses against children. The Michigan Court of Appeals, summarizing the record in a 2013 opinion, wrote that Busch was briefly considered a suspect and was allegedly cleared by law enforcement after a polygraph examination. Timothy King was abducted on March 16, 1977, weeks later.
The circumstances around that clearance matter. According to WDIV’s case timeline, Busch was arrested that January alongside Gregory Greene, who was facing child sexual assault charges of his own. Greene told police that Busch killed Mark Stebbins. WDIV reports that both men passed polygraph examinations. Greene was sentenced to life in prison. Busch received probation. Those sentences concerned sexual assault cases, not convictions in the child killings. Reported polygraph outcomes alone do not establish which allegations investigators tested or resolved.
Busch died in November 1978 of what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A drawing of a child found in his home was later said to resemble Mark Stebbins. Investigators later revisited his possible involvement posthumously. In 2012, an Oakland County assistant prosecutor said publicly that no piece of evidence showed Busch had killed any of the children, and that his DNA did not match.
When Timothy King’s family sued for the Busch file, the Michigan State Police withheld the polygraph reports under the Forensic Polygraph Examiners Act. In King v. Michigan State Police, No. 305474, decided November 12, 2013, the Court of Appeals agreed that the reports could be withheld.
The examination that allegedly cleared the case’s central suspect before the final abduction is, by statute, outside public view. The public cannot evaluate the clearance. Neither can the families.
Another piece of the Busch record sits in Genesee County, where my prior reporting found that Judge Harry Newblatt reduced his bond. That thread belongs to Part II, which maps who had access to whom. The structural point for Part I is narrower. A consequential investigative judgment in 1977 relied on a polygraph whose reports the courts later held exempt from FOIA disclosure. That ruling concerns access to those reports; it does not independently establish that the clearance was sound.
Fifty years of custody over one case
Select a stage. Each panel shows the documented event and the information gap it left behind.
Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, and Timothy King disappear over thirteen months. Their bodies are found in Southfield, Troy, Franklin Village, and Livonia. A multi-agency task force forms and receives more than 11,000 tips.
Gap: Timothy King is found in Wayne County. From that point forward, two county prosecutors hold jurisdiction over the same series of crimes.
Gregory Greene tells police Christopher Busch killed Mark Stebbins. WDIV reports both men passed polygraphs. Timothy King is abducted in March. Greene and Busch receive different sentences in separate sexual assault proceedings: life imprisonment for Greene and probation for Busch. Those sentences are distinct from their questioning about the killings.
Gap: The polygraph reports are exempt from disclosure under Michigan law. The withheld reports prevent the public from fully examining the reported clearance.
Busch is found dead in November of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. In December the task force working the case shuts down.
Gap: The sources cited here do not establish a complete account of the task force’s conclusions or the transfer of its files. The closing and transfer records would clarify those questions.
Wayne County identifies Busch as a suspect in October 2008, according to Michigan Today, nearly thirty years after his November 1978 death. Barry King writes that after an October 27, 2009 task force meeting, Oakland County took charge, the Wayne County investigator was asked to leave, and the Oakland County Prosecutor closed the Busch line on March 1, 2010.
Gap: The family challenged the handling of the lead. Walton later disputed that his office had killed it; the underlying decision records remain important to assessing those competing accounts.
A lawyer submits a FOIA request identifying Barry King as the client on January 6, 2010. Barry files suit on April 27; Christopher joins the suit in September. In December, MSP produces 3,411 pages. The family later disputes how many concern Busch.
Gap: Polygraph reports, DNA profiles, LEIN data, a sex-motivated crimes report, investigative subpoena materials, and court-sealed records are withheld under separate statutes.
WDIV reports the Gunnels mitochondrial DNA lead in May 2011. Such an association cannot uniquely identify the person who left a hair. Hair from Arch Sloan’s car matches hair from the Stebbins and King scenes, but is not Sloan’s. Kristine’s mother files a $100 million federal suit seeking release of files to the Justice Department. Wayne County’s prosecutor publicly criticizes Oakland County’s disclosures.
Gap: No one is charged. The reported mitochondrial DNA associations do not uniquely identify a donor or establish guilt, and the public learns about them through competing press strategies.
The Court of Appeals affirms that the polygraph reports can be withheld. WDIV reports the Mihelich lawsuit is dismissed in 2013. In 2020, Marney Rich Keenan publishes a book alleging investigative leads were buried. MSP dismisses it as fiction; Walton separately responds to WXYZ, denying obstruction and disputing specific claims.
Gap: MSP dismissed the book as fiction. In a separate WXYZ interview, prosecutor Paul Walton disputed obstruction allegations and described his office’s review. Those differing responses should be evaluated alongside the underlying records.
The Michigan State Police remains the lead agency and says the case is open. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard says his investigators are reviewing genetic genealogy and artificial intelligence. Kristine Mihelich’s sister says the family has had no contact from law enforcement since about 2016 or 2017.
Gap: Two agencies are publicly working the same case. The record does not show whether they share one file.
Who Holds the File
The OCCK case has never belonged to a single institution. The children were taken from four Oakland County communities, each with its own police department. Their bodies were found in four more. The Michigan State Police leads the investigation today. Oakland County’s prosecutor and sheriff have both claimed active roles. Because Timothy King was found in Livonia, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office has jurisdiction too.
That arrangement produced a public conflict in July 2012. After Oakland County prosecutors held a press conference about DNA evidence tied to Arch Sloan’s car, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy called the disclosure
“irresponsible”
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, on Oakland County’s July 2012 press conference, as reported by WXYZOakland County’s prosecutor’s office responded that the decision had been made jointly by the task force. Then-Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, a former prosecutor, accused Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper of political motivation. Barry King asked reporters why the agencies were running in two directions. WXYZ also reported that DNA testing in the case had been going on since 1999, contrary to Wayne County’s claims about untested evidence. The two prosecutors’ offices could not agree in public on what had been tested.
The King family’s account describes a change in task force leadership and a Wayne County investigator being asked to leave. The prosecutors also publicly disputed disclosures. These events raise questions about coordination, but do not by themselves establish that no file-sharing agreement existed or that officials offered no explanation. The agreements and decision records are needed to resolve those questions.
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$10/month ?How the Families Became the Archivists
Barry King, Timothy’s father, sought records through counsel in January 2010 and filed suit in April. Christopher King joined in September. MSP produced 3,411 pages in December. The family disputed their relevance and the fees charged. Michigan Today later reported King’s account of the records dispute.
The timing of evidence testing needs to be reconstructed specimen by specimen. The public announcement of DNA results in 2012 does not establish that the hairs had never previously been examined or tested. King also said documents described to him as destroyed later reached him through reporters, and that material withheld from him was later disclosed publicly. These allegations should be checked against the records and disclosure dates.
Kristine Mihelich’s family took a different route. In April 2012, attorney Paul Hughes filed a $100 million federal lawsuit on behalf of her mother, Deborah Jarvis, against Oakland County’s prosecutor and sheriff and state police investigators. UPI reported that the suit accused them of withholding information and asked the court to send the files to the U.S. Department of Justice. WDIV reports it was dismissed in 2013.
Fourteen years later, at the fiftieth anniversary, Kristine’s sister Erica Ascroft described where things stood for her family:
“There’s been no communication from law enforcement in any capacity.”
Erica Ascroft, sister of Kristine Mihelich, to WXYZ, 2026She told WXYZ that silence dated to about 2016 or 2017. A state police spokesman said detectives would contact families if there were updates.
The pattern is consistent across both families. The people with the greatest stake in the record have had to obtain it through litigation, through reporters, or not at all. A victim’s father built the most complete public archive of the investigation, and the agency holding the file treated him as a records requester.
The Narrative Market
When institutions release little, other people fill the space. Detroit television stations have produced investigative series and a five-part documentary on the case. Marney Rich Keenan, a Detroit News reporter for 26 years, spent ten years on The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation, published by McFarland in 2020. Her book argues that investigative leads, especially about Busch, were covered up, and that infighting between police and prosecutors damaged the case. She told WXYZ she believed Busch was involved but that his role as the killer was not established.
When WXYZ asked the state police task force about Keenan’s book, the response was four words:
“don’t comment on fiction”
Michigan State Police task force, responding to WXYZ about The Snow Killings, September 2020MSP’s response was dismissive, but it was not the only official response. In a separate 2020 WXYZ interview, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Paul Walton denied that Oakland County had obstructed the investigation or killed the Busch lead. He described a forensic review and disputed specific claims, including the description of ropes from Busch’s death scene as bloody. That interview supplied official explanations beyond the state police dismissal. Evaluating them requires comparing the reporting, the official explanations, and the underlying records.
Here is what I notice when I put the last fifty years side by side.
The suspect was cleared by a test the public cannot read.
The task force closed without a public accounting.
The testing chronology needs the laboratory records.
The family and prosecutors disputed the handling of the posthumous Busch lead.
The father had to sue.
The reporter was told her work was fiction.
The sister stopped getting calls.
Six things repeated about this case, checked against the record
Tap or click a card to see what the documented record supports.
Fact by Repetition
Every long-running case develops a canon. Some of the OCCK canon is documented. Some of it is the residue of press conferences, interviews with retired investigators, and the same claims restated across books, broadcasts, podcasts, and message boards until they feel settled. Busch was cleared. Busch was the killer. The DNA solved it. The DNA ruled it out. Each version has appeared in public at one point or another, and each depends on records the public has never seen in full.
Repetition is how an information vacuum gets filled. It is also how a case gets harder to solve. A tipster who has absorbed one canonical theory may not call with a detail that contradicts it. A new investigator inheriting a file may inherit the canon along with it. A family may spend years litigating to test a narrative that a single released document could have settled.
What became accepted about this case because evidence supports it, and what became accepted because it was repeated for decades by people who had partial access to the file? Until the institutions that hold the record answer that question with documents, the public conversation will keep answering it with stories.
How the institutions managed the record
These editorial grades reflect the public sources discussed here, rather than an audit of the complete investigative file. They assess record handling and communication, not guilt. Select a row to see the basis for the grade.
Verdict: surviving evidence and disputed explanations make a documented accounting essential.
What Closure Would Require
Closure in this case may or may not mean an arrest. Several people publicly discussed in the investigation have died or served long prison sentences for other crimes. Busch died in November 1978. WXYZ reported, citing a Michigan Department of Corrections spokesperson, that Arch Sloan died on June 12, 2026. WDIV reported in February 2026 that Theodore Lamborgine, charged in 2006 in the Cass Corridor child sex ring case, was serving a life sentence; investigators have said they believe he holds valuable information and is not the killer. Francis Sheldon, who owned most of North Fox Island and, according to investigators, counted Busch as a friend and customer, fled the country in 1976, was never prosecuted, and died in 1996. Closure here may have to be an accounting. That still requires the records.
Four changes would move this case, and every case like it, toward an accounting instead of another decade of competing narratives.
When a cold case spans jurisdictions, a single agency should be designated by written agreement as the custodian of the complete file, with every participating agency’s records consolidated and indexed. The 2026 posture, with the state police leading and the sheriff exploring new tools, should not depend on informal cooperation.
The federal Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act, enacted in 2022, provides a review process for qualifying cold cases previously investigated by a federal agency. The initial review generally has a six-month deadline; one extension of up to six months is permitted under specified conditions. Eligibility also depends on exhausted probative leads and no identified likely perpetrator. Prior FBI involvement alone does not establish eligibility. The statute does not impose this review process on state and local agencies. Michigan should consider a comparable process for its own agencies.
When a named suspect is excluded, the basis for the exclusion should be documented in a form that can eventually be released, even if the underlying polygraph or DNA report cannot. A clearance that cannot be explained is not a clearance the public can rely on.
Michigan’s FOIA lets agencies withhold records that would interfere with law enforcement proceedings. A case with no charges in half a century, whose most-discussed suspects are dead, should face a presumption that its non-forensic investigative history becomes public, with redactions for living witnesses and victims’ privacy.
The Records I Am Requesting
This series will be built on documents, and the requests start now. They target the decisions, not the evidence: the records that show who decided what, when, and on what basis.
Michigan State Police: records documenting the December 1978 shutdown of the original task force, including any closing memorandum and the transfer or retention of its files; written agreements or memoranda governing later task forces; evidence submission and laboratory request logs for hair evidence in the Stebbins and King cases from 1977 through 2012; and any written basis for closing the Busch line in 2010.
Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office: interagency agreements on the OCCK investigation since 2005, records of communications with victims’ families, and records describing the 2026 file digitization and DNA review.
Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office: records of its participation in the OCCK task force from 2005 to 2012 and of any request that its investigator withdraw.
Why This Could Happen Again
Maybe the most important thing OCCK can teach us is not only what happened between 1976 and 1977. It is what happened during the fifty years afterward.
The record raises questions about coordination, disclosure, and communication without establishing why every decision was made. Michigan recognizes victims’ information and notification rights, but the families’ accounts raise questions about how those protections work in practice. The narrower policy question is whether existing protections deliver regular, useful explanations in decades-old unsolved cases. Likewise, the absence of a published coordination agreement does not prove that none exists. Those questions require records, not assumptions.
That is why this series sits outside the suspect wars. I am not here to add a theory. I am here to find out what the institutions holding this case decided, and to put those decisions where the public and the families can finally see them. If that ends in closure, it will be because the record was opened, not because a story was told well enough.
The Michigan State Police says the case remains open and that every tip is investigated. Information goes to 1-855-MICHTIP (855-642-4847). Records, documents, or firsthand knowledge of how the investigation was managed can be sent to Clutch Justice at hello@clutchjustice.com. Background on the case and its overlap with the North Fox Island operation is in the OCCK and North Fox Island Reference Library.
Part II maps who had access to whom: the investigators, prosecutors, judges, journalists, and families who held pieces of this case, and the lines that connected them.
Rita Williams, Who Controlled the Information? The Oakland County Child Killer Case After 1977, Clutch Justice (Oct. 1, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/10/01/oakland-county-child-killer-who-controlled-the-information/.
APA 7Williams, R. (2026, October 1). Who controlled the information? The Oakland County Child Killer case after 1977. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/10/01/oakland-county-child-killer-who-controlled-the-information/
MLA 9Williams, Rita. “Who Controlled the Information? The Oakland County Child Killer Case After 1977.” Clutch Justice, 1 Oct. 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/10/01/oakland-county-child-killer-who-controlled-the-information/.
ChicagoWilliams, Rita. “Who Controlled the Information? The Oakland County Child Killer Case After 1977.” Clutch Justice, October 1, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/10/01/oakland-county-child-killer-who-controlled-the-information/.
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About the Author
Rita Williams
Rita Williams is a Michigan-based judicial oversight analyst and founder of Clutch Justice, an investigative platform focused on court system accountability, sentencing integrity, and SCAO policy. Her work examines how courts, policies, and administrative systems operate in practice, with a focus on where process breaks down and harm is created. Drawing on lived experience and systems-level analysis, she writes to make legal structures more readable, expose institutional gaps, and advocate for reforms grounded in both evidence and human impact. Rita’s writing bridges legal analysis, institutional critique, and public education, with a consistent focus on accountability without losing sight of the people most affected by the justice system.
