Who Had Access to Whom? The Oakland County Child Killer Case and the Same Names in Different Chairs

The people who made the investigation’s first decisions in 1977 did not leave the case when they left those jobs. Some of them came back decades later holding different titles, with authority over how the same case was handled and described.

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. Survivors who have not spoken publicly are not named.

Part I asked who controlled the information in this case. This installment asks a narrower question, and in some ways a harder one. Who had access to whom?

Every long investigation has a cast. Detectives, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, reporters, families. In most cases the cast turns over. People retire, move away, or die, and the file passes to strangers who come to it fresh. What I notice in the Oakland County Child Killer record is how often that did not happen. The same names appear decades apart in different roles. A prosecutor who made a decision about a suspect in 1977 is later a public critic of the prosecutor revisiting it. A lawyer who sat in on a suspect’s polygraph is later the county’s chief law enforcement officer. A sheriff whose office was named in a family’s lawsuit is later the official promising that family new answers.

The people evaluating this case were often evaluating their own institutions’ earlier choices, and sometimes their own. That is the structure this piece maps.

January 1977: Who Was in the Room

By January 1977, three children were dead. The investigation was run by the Oakland County Special Task Force, headquartered in Southfield and led by the Michigan State Police and the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department, with First Lieutenant Robert H. Robertson of the state police as a key commander. Officers came from nine police departments. The prosecutor was L. Brooks Patterson, who had held the office since 1973.

That month Gregory Greene, then 27 and facing child sexual assault charges, told police that his associate Christopher Busch had killed Mark Stebbins. Barry King later obtained a handwritten police report dated January 28, 1977, documenting that officers told Busch what Greene had said. The same day, Busch was polygraphed in Flint. According to King’s account of the records, Patterson’s chief assistant, Richard Thompson, attended. A February 22, 1977 newspaper story reported that Busch had passed.

Busch’s January 1977 encounter with the system also ran through Genesee County, where my earlier reporting found that Judge Harry Newblatt reduced his bond. Flint, Genesee County’s seat, is where the polygraph took place.

Busch’s release had nothing to do with his risk to children. He had admitted to investigators that he was a pedophile. He pleaded guilty in Oakland County that year to a sex assault charge carrying a ten-year maximum. Investigators, according to WDIV’s 2012 reporting on the plea file, wanted him held. He received probation. Greene, the man who accused him, was sentenced to life.

Same Names, Different Chairs

Patterson left the prosecutor’s office in 1988 and became Oakland County Executive, a post he held until he died in August 2019. Thompson succeeded him as prosecutor and held the office into the 1990s, gaining a national profile for prosecuting Jack Kevorkian before losing a re-election bid in 1996. He later became president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center.

In June 2011, Barry King mailed Thompson the January 28, 1977 police report along with an undated state police email stating that Thompson believed Busch and Greene were involved in the child murders. King has written that Thompson initially agreed to meet, said he had limited recollection of the case, and then stopped responding.

The 2012 sequence is where the access question becomes most visible. In June, WDIV reported on the Busch plea file and asked why a confessed pedophile received leniency in the middle of a child murder investigation. The office that approved the deal had been Patterson’s. In July, after Prosecutor Jessica Cooper’s office held a press conference on DNA linked to Arch Sloan’s car, Patterson publicly accused Cooper of political motivation and warned she could lose cooperation from Sloan if he hired a lawyer, according to WXYZ. A county executive whose former office had released the case’s most discussed suspect was now the most prominent public critic of the prosecutor reexamining it.

Who Got Named, and by Whom

Between 2006 and 2012, the public was told about three different men, by two different prosecutors’ offices, in three different press cycles.

In December 2006, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced charges against Theodore Lamborgine, a 65-year-old Parma Heights, Ohio man accused of child sexual assaults tied to a Cass Corridor sex ring, and described him in the OCCK case as

The lead had come from Richard Lawson, a convicted murderer. Garry Gray, then heading the state police task force, was part of the investigation. In March 2007, Lamborgine pleaded guilty to 15 sex-related counts involving boys. He refused an offer that would have cut ten years from his sentence if he took a polygraph about the child killings. Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Robert Moran told reporters

By October 2008, Wayne County had moved to Busch. By 2010, Oakland County had taken charge of the task force and closed the Busch line. In July 2012, Oakland County held its own press conference on hair from Arch Sloan’s car, which matched hair from the Stebbins and King scenes but was not Sloan’s. Worthy called the disclosure irresponsible. Patterson called it political. Investigators have since said they believe Lamborgine holds valuable information but is not the killer.

Each of those announcements reshaped public understanding of the case. Each came from an elected official. And each named a person the public had no way to evaluate, because the underlying files stayed closed.

Reporters Had Files. Families Had Lawsuits.

In 2012, WDIV’s Local 4 Defenders reported that they had obtained Busch’s 1977 plea documents and a 6,000-page OCCK case file. That same year, Barry King was two years into his litigation with the state police, which had produced 3,400 pages and would go on to the Court of Appeals over what remained withheld. King told Michigan Today that documents he had been told were destroyed later reached him through reporters.

The public record does not show how the station obtained its file, and reporters protect their sources. Either way, access to this case has run through relationships. Reporters with sources inside agencies got material. Families without those relationships went to court. Officials who had worked the case in 1977 had institutional memory and the ear of the press. The children’s parents and siblings had FOIA forms.

Former Detroit News reporter Marney Rich Keenan spent ten years on the case and published The Snow Killings in 2020, alleging that leads were buried and that police and prosecutors fought among themselves. The state police response, covered in Part I, was to call it fiction. Barry King published his family’s record himself, chapter by chapter, at occk.info, with police reports and affidavits attached. The most complete public accounts of the investigation were built by a reporter and a grieving father working from the outside.

The Customers Nobody Named

Access in this case also meant something more literal. In the 1970s, men in the Oakland County suburbs could buy access to boys from Detroit, and two people told the task force so decades apart.

The first was Richard Lawson, the convicted murderer whose 2005 statements led Livonia Detective Sgt. Cory Williams to Ted Lamborgine. According to Williams’s notes, which former Detroit News reporter Marney Rich Keenan shared with Clutch Justice, Lawson told him that he and others in the Cass Corridor were prostituting children to

The second was a man who had lived with Bob Moore, the Cass Corridor bicycle shop owner tied to the same ring. Williams and an FBI agent went looking for him in April 2006, and Williams and Detective Garry Gray found him that September. He told them that at about 14 he lived in Moore’s house on Henry Street, worked in Moore’s bike shops, and was sexually abused by Moore about once a week for a year, in exchange for money, drugs, or food. In a later interview he told Williams that when he was 12 to 14, Moore drove him to wealthy people’s houses in Oakland County, where the homeowners paid Moore to have sex with him. Moore paid him afterward. He described one of the homes as a large house on a lake off Telegraph Road.

Money also shaped what happened to Christopher Busch. Williams later found two of Busch’s nephews, who told him their uncle had molested them as boys. They said their grandfather, H. Lee Busch, a General Motors finance executive, “took care of all the family problems,” and that their grandmother had her driver take her to the homes of Christopher’s victims, where she wrote checks so the families would not go to the police. Busch never served jail time. He always made bail, he had two lawyers, and some of his files in other Michigan towns were destroyed or lost. A few weeks before Timothy King was taken, Flint police found film on Busch tied to a boys’ camp on “Fox Island,” and that charge was still pending when he was polygraphed in the child killer case. Those accounts are recorded in Julia Cianci’s 2009 thesis After the Snow, from what Williams told Timothy’s sister, Catherine Broad.

The people with access to boys in this case were not hiding in the margins. They had addresses in the suburbs, lawyers on retainer, and families with checkbooks. The investigation reached the boys who were sold. It has never publicly reached the men who bought them.

The North Fox Island Thread

One more set of relationships runs through this case. Francis Shelden, a Grosse Pointe native and Ann Arbor millionaire, owned most of North Fox Island in Lake Michigan, where investigators say boys were brought and filmed. Investigators have described Busch as a friend and customer of Shelden, according to FOX 2. Shelden fled the country in 1976, the year Mark Stebbins was killed, and was never prosecuted. He died in Amsterdam in 1996. Police have said they do not believe Shelden or Gerald Richards, the Port Huron teacher convicted for recruiting boys for the island, was the killer. (Earlier Clutch Justice reporting, like most broadcast coverage, spelled the name “Sheldon.” Court records spell it Shelden.)

I have mapped that overlap in the OCCK and North Fox Island Reference Library, and Shelden’s years in Europe are the subject of a separate series, Fled, Not Gone. For this series, North Fox matters for what it says about access. A network of men with access to boys operated in Michigan in the mid-1970s, and a man investigators tied to that network was in custody, polygraphed, and released during the child killer investigation. Whether the 1977 task force had the North Fox Island material in hand when it made those decisions is one of the questions the records requests in this series are meant to answer.

What Independence Would Look Like

The fix is not complicated, and it is not unique to this case. Michigan already requires judges to step aside when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Nothing comparable governs a prosecutor’s office reviewing its own earlier decisions in a cold case.

The Records I Am Requesting

Why It Matters Beyond This Case

Every county in Michigan has cold cases whose original decision-makers still live nearby, still practice law, still hold office, or still talk to reporters. That is ordinary. What made the OCCK case different is how long it stayed inside the same small circle of institutions with no rule requiring anyone to step back.

I keep coming back to a simple fact. The man investigators wanted held in early 1977 was released on probation by a prosecutor’s office that, decades later, still controlled the file. The families of four children spent the following decades trying to learn why. The people who knew were never required to tell them.

Marney Rich Keenan, who spent a decade on this case, put it in one sentence when she sent me Williams’s notes.

Part III asks which theories received investigative attention, which did not, and what the record shows about why.

The case was never short on people who knew things. It was short on rules requiring them to say so.