Who Controlled the Information? The Oakland County Child Killer Case After 1977

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.

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. Two polygraphs, two incompatible accounts, and one of the two men walked out of the system.

Busch died in November 1978 of what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A child’s drawing found in his home was later said to resemble Mark Stebbins. For decades afterward, Busch remained the most discussed name in the case. 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.

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. The single most consequential investigative judgment of 1977 was made with a tool Michigan law keeps sealed, and nothing in the system requires that judgment ever be explained to anyone outside it.

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

Oakland 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.

How the Families Became the Archivists

Barry King, Timothy’s father and a University of Michigan Law School graduate, began filing FOIA requests with the Michigan State Police in April 2010. He and his son Christopher sued in Oakland Circuit Court. By December 2010 they had more than 3,400 pages of investigative records. Michigan Today, the University of Michigan’s publication, reported in 2016 what those pages and the years after them showed King.

According to that account, the state police had held hair evidence from Timothy King and Mark Stebbins for about 35 years before mitochondrial DNA testing in 2012. King said documents he was told had been destroyed later reached him through reporters. He said information withheld from him as too sensitive to release was later disclosed at a prosecutor’s press conference. In 2016 he began publishing his family’s account online at occk.info, with affidavits, police reports, and court filings attached.

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:

She 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:

That response captures the ecosystem in miniature. A decade of reporting built partly on records the families pried loose was met with a label rather than a correction. If specific claims in the book are wrong, the records that would show it are the same records the public cannot see. An agency that will neither release its file nor rebut a reporter’s findings point by point leaves readers to choose between narratives, and the case becomes an audience contest.

Here is what I notice when I put the last fifty years side by side.

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 Closure Would Require

Closure in this case may or may not mean an arrest. Most of the people publicly connected to it are dead or decades into prison sentences for other crimes. Theodore Lamborgine, charged in 2006 in the Cass Corridor child sex ring case, is 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.

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.

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.

This outcome did not require bad faith. The structure was enough. Shared jurisdiction with no designated custodian. A statute that keeps the tool used to clear a suspect out of public view. A public records law that treats a murdered child’s father the same as any other requester. No legal duty to keep families informed. No obligation to explain why a lead was dropped. Every one of those conditions exists in Michigan today, in cold cases that have not made the news.

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.

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.