The OCCK Case Could Be Solved Tomorrow. The Evidence Has Been Sitting in Storage for Fifty Years.

Hairs from three of the four children. Ropes from the prime suspect’s closet. Fibers, dog hairs, and a house full of material bagged by the state crime lab in 2008. The tools to read all of it exist right now. What is missing is a lab request.

What I Want You to Notice

Every anniversary, somebody stands at a podium and says technology could crack this case someday. I have read those quotes going back to 2009. Line them up and one thing jumps out real fast. Nobody ever says what has been sent, to which lab, and when. They say “someday.” Someday has a lab address. It has a price. And the evidence that someday needs has been sitting in storage since Gerald Ford was president.

Let’s be honest about what this piece is. It is not another round of whodunit. It is an inventory: what is in the room, what has been done with it, and what could be done with it this week if somebody bothered to sign the request.

What Is Actually in the Room

Mark Stebbins was 12. He disappeared in Ferndale on February 15, 1976, and was found four days later in Southfield. His autopsy recorded smothering, sexual assault, and rope burns on his neck, wrists, and ankles. Timothy King was 11. He was taken in Birmingham in March 1977 and found in a Livonia ditch with evidence of sexual assault. Both boys had been cleaned before they were left. The killer was careful. Not careful enough to beat a single strand of hair.

In July 2012, Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper announced that FBI testing at Quantico had found that hairs recovered from Stebbins and King came from the same person. A hair from the trunk of convicted child abuser Arch Sloan’s 1966 Pontiac Bonneville matched them too. It was not Sloan’s. Investigators said it likely belonged to someone he knew. Sloan was never charged and died in state custody on June 12, 2026.

A year earlier, a hair from Kristine Mihelich’s blouse returned a mitochondrial association with a man named James Vincent Gunnels. WDIV reported that the result was consistent with roughly 1 percent of the white population. That is a pool of hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan alone. Gunnels denied involvement and was never charged.

Kristine’s case holds more than one hair. Around 2018, State Police scientists retested a vaginal swab from Kristine’s 1977 autopsy kit and developed a partial Y-STR profile, as Keenan reports in The Snow Killings, drawing on her close work with Det. Sgt. Cory Williams. That is a partial male DNA profile, taken from a 10-year-old girl the medical examiner said in 1977 had not been sexually assaulted. Nothing public shows what was done with it next. A Y-STR profile follows the father’s line, so it can be checked against male relatives of any man ever named in this case, run against Y-DNA databases, and paired with sequencing of whatever is left on that swab. A partial male profile from a murdered child does not belong in a drawer.

Then there is the saliva on Kristine’s jacket. For years, people who follow this case closely have pointed to saliva reportedly found on that jacket. According to accounts in the OCCK research community, investigator Dave Robertson said a mitochondrial result from that saliva pointed to the son of a Michigan State Police officer. By at least one account, Robertson later walked it back. No lab report on the saliva has ever been made public. Here is the thing. That is exactly why it has to be run. If that saliva was never fully tested, test it. If it was only run through mitochondrial screening, sequence it. If the result clears that family, say so publicly and end the rumor. If it does not, the public deserves to know why a State Police officer’s son was ever in the frame and what was done about it.

Quick science break, because this part matters. Mitochondrial DNA comes from your mother. Your siblings have it. Your maternal cousins have it. Total strangers can have it. It can rule a man out, but it can’t put a name on anybody. That’s why every one of those big announcements ended with a podium and a press release instead of handcuffs.

Marney Rich Keenan, who covered the case for The Detroit News and wrote The Snow Killings, has made the obvious point for years: there are four victims, which means four sets of clothing to search for hairs and biological evidence. In her words, “DNA should have nailed” the killer long ago.

The Science Caught Up. The Case Did Not.

For most of this case’s life, a hair without a root was a dead end. The standard DNA test needs the root, and shed hair doesn’t have one. So the OCCK hairs got the mitochondrial test, a shrug, and a trip back to the shelf.

Well, that excuse expired. Labs including Astrea Forensics in California now use whole genome sequencing to read the short, broken fragments of nuclear DNA left in old rootless hair and rebuild as much of the genome as possible. On September 3, 2025, Suffolk County Judge Timothy Mazzei ruled that Astrea’s method was “generally accepted as reliable within the scientific community” and admitted it against accused Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann. The evidence there was old rootless hairs found on the victims. It was the first time the method cleared a Frye hearing. Astrea’s work had already been used in the 2024 Idaho conviction of David Allen Dalrymple for the 1982 murder of 9-year-old Daralyn Johnson.

A full genome does two things mitochondrial DNA never could. It can be uploaded to genealogy databases that law enforcement is allowed to search, which is how a name comes out of a family tree. And it can be compared, one to one, against relatives of every man this case has ever named. Busch. Sloan’s associates. Gunnels. Anyone. One test. Fifty years of suspect wars, settled. Imagine that.

The Evidence They Already Lost

The hairs are the best shot. They are not the only shot. And some of what should be sitting in a lab right now is just… gone.

Mark Stebbins was tied up. His autopsy says so. Rope that someone handled hard enough to bind a child holds skin cells, and touch DNA from rope is routine work in modern labs. On November 20, 1978, investigators took ropes and ligatures off the floor of Christopher Busch’s closet. WDIV reported in February 2026 that the ropes were kept in an evidence locker for years before they went missing. Prosecutor Paul Walton later disputed reports that they were bloodstained. Nobody disputes that they are gone.

The drawing from Busch’s wall was never tested for fingerprints. Material removed from a walled-over room during the 2008 search was, according to longtime OCCK researcher Catherine Broad, filed away by a state lab worker and never evaluated. After the 2012 press conference, OCCK file boxes were reportedly moved to the sheriff’s office, and a 2021 records request to that office came back with no responsive records.

And then there’s the money. Of course there’s the money. Det. Sgt. Cory Williams, a lead investigator, reportedly told families that examining one dog hair would cost about $10,000 and that he was looking for grant money to pay for it. In 2019 he told WDIV that DNA was a large part of the investigation and that he was excited about new tools that could build profiles. Seven years later, the public still hasn’t been told whether any of those tools were used.

Ten thousand dollars. Four murdered children. The largest homicide investigation in the country at the time. In Ohio this year, Amy Mihaljevic’s father and brother worked a booth at a summer festival asking strangers for DNA testing money. Michigan should not make the Stebbins, Robinson, Mihelich, and King families do the same thing.

Police Fund Their Priorities

I have said it before and I will say it again: police fund their priorities. Whatever sits on a shelf untested is sitting there because somebody decided something else mattered more.

Michigan has already lived this lesson once. In 2009, prosecutors in Detroit found about 11,000 untested sexual assault kits, some going back to the 1980s. Every one of those kits held a person’s worst day, swabbed, sealed, and handed to police with the expectation that someone would read it. Nobody did. A 2025 University of Michigan policy brief says testing the backlog cost millions of dollars at private labs because the State Police labs were already at capacity, and that the kits ultimately revealed 817 previously undetected offenders, many of them serial rapists.

That is 817 men walking around because evidence was collected and then ignored. The science to test those kits was not new. The money was not impossible. The kits sat because testing them was never treated as urgent, and the women who gave them were never treated as a priority.

The old backlog was eventually cleared, mostly with federal grant money. The shelf has not stayed empty. Michigan State Police inventories reported 320 untested kits at the end of fiscal year 2023, 648 at the end of 2024, and 520 at the end of 2025.

Nobody has to wait for a grant to fund a priority. Departments find the money for what they actually care about. Fifty years of untested OCCK evidence tells you exactly where four children landed on that list.

Who Holds the Request

Who’s actually in charge? Depends on which week you ask. In February 2026, WWJ described the Oakland County Sheriff’s Cold Case Unit and Special Investigation Unit as leading the work, and Sheriff Bouchard said, “I will leave no stone unturned.” Fox 2 reported that Bouchard had directed his unit the previous summer to digitize the files and run them through artificial intelligence, and that the review included more mitochondrial testing. The same report said Michigan State Police is now the lead agency, and that MSP declined to let anyone speak on camera. An MSP spokesperson told WXYZ the case is open and that evidence is being evaluated as technology develops.

Evaluated. As technology develops. Babe, the technology developed. It was admitted in a New York courtroom fourteen months ago. Mitochondrial testing is the method that already failed to produce a name in 2011 and 2012. Running more of it is busywork with a press release.

Why I Think It Hasn’t Been Run

We need to stop waltzing around the elephant in the room. This is my opinion, and I will own it: I suspect the reason nobody has sent those hairs for a full genome is that everyone who has looked at this case seriously already knows what it would say. I think it would confirm Christopher Busch as the Oakland County Child Killer, once and for all.

Look at what was in front of them. Busch was named to investigators in January 1977. On January 31, a judge cut his bond from $75,000 to $1,000. He was cleared after a polygraph that later analysts reportedly concluded he did not pass. According to Keenan’s reporting, his associate Gregory Greene told police Busch murdered Mark Stebbins. Six weeks after that bond cut, Tim King was taken. When Busch was found dead in 1978, there were ropes on his closet floor and a drawing on his wall that investigators said looked like Mark. The lab could not say whether he fired the gun that killed him. It was ruled a suicide anyway, the task force disbanded a month later, and the families did not hear his name for 28 years. In 2010, prosecutors closed the Busch line, and the King family says it never got a reason in writing.

In 2012, prosecutors said Busch’s DNA did not match the evidence they relied on. They never released the lab report that says so. If that statement is right, a full genome clears him for good and ends fifty years of argument. If it is wrong, the public deserves to know that too. Either way, the answer is one test away, and nobody seems in a hurry to find out. And notice the timing. Prosecutors said Busch did not match in 2012. The partial male profile from Kristine’s swab was not developed until around 2018. Whatever they compared him to, it could not have been that. So has anyone run the 2018 profile against Busch’s father’s line? If they have, say so. If they have not, why not?

His father, H. Lee Busch, is dead. Keenan has reported that he posted his son’s bonds and helped arrange the plea deals that kept him out of prison. Nobody is protecting that man’s reputation anymore. A confirmed match would not be about the Busch family. It would land on everyone else.

It would land on the people who had Busch’s name in early 1977 and let him walk out on a $1,000 bond. On the people who signed off on a polygraph that did not hold up. On whoever let the ropes leave the evidence locker and never fingerprinted the drawing. On the people who called his death a suicide without a gunshot residue finding to back it, closed the task force, and kept his name from the families for nearly three decades. On anyone who knew what Busch was doing to children before 1976 and did not report it. A name in a genealogy database would turn every one of those choices into the moment four children could have been saved, or a killer could have been stopped. That is a lot of people who would have to live with it.

And it goes further than the people who dropped the ball. It means dealing with the part nobody in Michigan’s legal establishment wants to say out loud. This is my belief, and I am not backing off it. I will happily go toe-to-toe with anyone who wants to fight me on it: silence in this case was rewarded. It was rewarded with fancy Christmas cards, judges smiling next to families whose kids would grow up to be lawyers, when Mark, Jill, Kristine, and Tim never got to grow up at all. I believe some judges and prosecutors were paid in promotions, appointments, and long comfortable careers to keep their mouths shut about what they knew. A confirmed answer would not just reopen a file. It would rewrite legacies. The portraits in the courthouse hallways, the retirement speeches, the names on the buildings. All of it would come with an asterisk, and every one of those careers would have to be looked at again with the four children’s names next to it. Good. Nobody deserves a dynasty built on the backs of hiding who killed four children.

What Should Happen This Week

And let’s be real about what that one request would actually cost them. Not money. Doing this means prosecutors and law enforcement would have to cut the political crap. No more fighting over whose case it is. No more guarding reputations that have been on the line since 1977. No more podium, press release, and disappearing act every anniversary. It means putting four murdered children ahead of the agencies that failed them, and owning whatever the lab sends back. It is high time that finally happens.

It Has to Be an Independent Lab

And no, the answer is not to hand the hairs back to the Michigan State Police lab and call it a day. Let’s be honest about that lab’s track record, because it is not great.

Start with the last time a famous Michigan cold case went to the MSP lab for DNA. In 2002, the State Police cold case unit sent evidence from the 1969 Jane Mixer murder to its own forensic lab. The results put two men on that evidence. One was Gary Leiterman, who was convicted in 2005 and died in prison in 2019 still saying he was innocent. The other was John Ruelas, whose blood turned up on Mixer’s hand. Ruelas was four years old and living in Detroit in 1969. A four-year-old did not commit that murder. Three scientists later published a statistical analysis concluding that contamination in the lab was the most probable explanation for both profiles. The lab fought releasing its raw data to outside analysts, and a deputy director called outside review “tantamount to evidence tampering.”

Then there is mixed DNA, the hard stuff, where more than one person’s cells are tangled together. In 2019, a federal judge in Grand Rapids threw out MSP’s analysis of a three-person touch DNA mixture in United States v. Gissantaner, finding the lab had not adequately validated its software for that low a quantity of DNA and had given analysts little guidance for samples that complex. The Sixth Circuit reversed in 2021 and let the evidence in. Even so, a federal judge looked hard at how the MSP lab handles mixtures and did not trust it. Old OCCK evidence, handled for fifty years by who knows how many people, is going to be a mixture.

And the misses are not limited to DNA. In 2016, MSP told prosecutors that 4,001 blood alcohol results had been run on an incorrect calibration model. In 2022, it halted marijuana blood testing after the tests could not tell THC from CBD, putting roughly 3,250 cases in question. Every one of those problems got caught eventually. That is not the bar for the most important cold case in state history.

There is also the simple problem of grading your own homework. OCCK researcher Catherine Broad has reported that the lab refused to use third-party labs for reanalysis and refused to upgrade the DNA work on the OCCK evidence. The agency that has sat on this evidence for decades should not be the only one allowed to read it. Send it to an accredited outside lab, keep the chain of custody clean, and let somebody with no reputation riding on the answer tell us what is there.

Clutch Is Taking Up a Collection

If money is the excuse, let’s take the excuse off the table. Clutch Justice is starting a collection to pay for outside DNA work on the OCCK evidence, through Othram or another accredited forensic lab that can handle old, rootless hair.

And no, this is not some wild idea. It is how a lot of cold cases get solved now. Othram, a forensic sequencing lab in The Woodlands, Texas, runs a crowdfunding platform called DNASolves. Law enforcement agencies submit cases, and the public helps pay for the testing and genealogy work. In a 2022 Virginia case, Othram priced the whole job, start to finish, at $7,500. Agencies all over the country have closed cases this way. Michigan’s biggest child murder case can be one of them.

I am reaching out to Othram directly to ask how to get this case in front of them, and not only this one. Clutch has spent this year documenting Michigan cold cases with evidence on a shelf and families still waiting: the OCCK children, and others I have written about and will keep writing about. Othram works through law enforcement, but its own team has said it is common for advocates to bring cases to its attention. I want to know what Othram needs from an advocate, what a feasibility review costs, and how a case can move from a suggestion to a lab bench when the agency holding the evidence has gone quiet. Whatever they tell me, I will tell you.

Now the fine print, because I do not run sketchy fundraisers. The evidence belongs in law enforcement custody, and only the agency holding it can send it to a lab. Clutch cannot take a hair out of an evidence room, and nobody should want it to. So the collection starts as a pledge drive. Clutch will ask Othram for a feasibility review and a price for the Stebbins, King, Mihelich, and Sloan-car hairs. Clutch will then send Michigan State Police and the Oakland County Sheriff a written offer to cover the full cost. Once an agency agrees, pledges become donations that go to the lab for this case, and the public will see what was raised, what was spent, and on what.

If no agency will accept free testing paid for by the public, that refusal becomes the story. Every pledge will be released, nobody will be charged, and I will publish the letters, the dates, and whoever said no.

Why This Matters Now

Barry King spent the rest of his life asking for answers about his son, and he died in 2020 without them. The men who have been named in this case are dead or dying. Sloan died in June. Every Michigan cold case solved this year came with the same footnote: the suspect died first. The hairs are still here. The families are still here. That window does not stay open.

Let’s be honest. This was not bad luck, and it was not the limits of 1970s science. There were very real, intentional, systemic failures here. Mark, Jill, Kristine, and Tim were not failed by a lack of evidence. They were failed by what happened to it after it was collected, and they are still being failed every month those hairs sit in a box instead of a sequencer. The OCCK case could have a name by Christmas. It will not get one from another press conference about someday.