The Staged Scene: Why the Forensic Evidence Does Not Support the Suicide Ruling in Christopher Busch’s Death

Forensic Record Status · Christopher Busch Death Scene · November 1978
Lab Report	Oakland County Sheriff’s Crime Detection Laboratory, Lab No. 78-1855 — received November 20, 1978; reported December 6, 1978
Nature of Exam	Atomic Absorption — GSR testing, both hands, both surfaces
GSR Results	Antimony levels on all four swabs (right back, right palm, left back, left palm) insufficient to indicate gunshot residue. Barium testing not conducted. No conclusion possible as to whether subject handled or discharged a firearm.
Muzzle Markings	Absent — inconsistent with contact or near-contact self-inflicted gunshot wound
Blood Spatter	Minimal blood; no spatter — inconsistent with wound mechanism
Body Staging	Body found covered with a blanket — recognized homicide staging indicator
Blood Alcohol Content	0.40 — coma/respiratory failure threshold. Surgical anesthesia threshold is 0.35. Fine motor function consistent with deliberate firearm discharge not possible at this level.
Weapon Selected	.22 rifle — despite handgun and shotgun present in home. .22 is quieter. Consistent with not alerting neighbors. Inconsistent with a person choosing their own method of suicide when more effective weapons are available.
Wound Location / Hand	Shot between the eyes. Busch was right-handed. Right arm found tucked under body. Shot allegedly fired with non-dominant left hand.
Weapon Disposition	Rifle returned to H. Lee Busch — Christopher’s father. Signed receipt documented. The alleged murder weapon handed back to the victim’s next of kin.
Scene Documentation	Basement never entered, searched, or photographed. H. Lee and Elsie Busch — who owned the home — were in Europe and were never interviewed. Two cups found next to box of shells. Drawing of screaming boy on bedroom wall never tested for fingerprints. Ropes and ligatures on closet floor taken as evidence — later disappeared from chain of custody.
Psychiatric Geography	Northville Psychiatric Hospital and Hawthorn Center (children/adolescents) — state psychiatric campus, outpatient services, ~12 miles from Busch home. Tim King’s body found near this campus March 22, 1977. Kristine Mihelich found on Bruce Lane — named for Bruce Danto. Gregory Greene discharged from Patton State Hospital, California, January 7, 1976 — five weeks before first OCCK murder.
Danto Consultation	Bruce Danto — OCCK task force psychiatrist, published expert on suicide in sex offenders, possible Busch treating clinician — does not appear in post-death investigative record. Not consulted as evaluator, witness, or consultant when primary suspect died under forensically ambiguous circumstances.
GM Overseas Division executive. H. Lee Busch’s neighbor at 151 Overhill Road — three houses south. Listed in Bloomfield Township PD Crime Scene Investigation Report as present at scene when police arrived. H. Lee Busch was in Europe. How Aitken came to be there, who called him, and whether a formal statement was ever taken has not been established in the public record.
Task Force Action	Disbanded December 1978 — one month after Busch’s death. No arrests. No charges. Four murders unsolved.
Family Notification	Victims’ families not informed of Busch as a suspect until 2006 — 28 years after his death
How Families Found Out	Polygrapher Larry Wasser disclosed casually at APA convention in Las Vegas, July 2006, to a stranger who happened to be Tim King’s former neighbor — not through any official disclosure
Prosecutor Cooper	Fought King family FOIA requests through multiple rounds of litigation; transferred OCCK files to Sheriff Bouchard’s office to shield from future disclosure; redirected investigation to Arch Sloan going into 2012 reelection; documents shredded from her office week she lost her primary; lost reelection by 31 points, 2020
OCCK Case Status	Officially unsolved — no charges ever filed in four murders

The Eight Anomalies

Christopher Busch was found dead on November 20, 1978, at his family’s home in Bloomfield Township. The ruling was suicide. The evidence does not support that ruling. It does not refute it outright — laboratory language is careful by design — but it does not support it. And when you stack what the scene actually showed, the careful language becomes its own problem.

Take any one of these alone and a case can be made for innocent explanation. But all eight, in the same scene, on the same body, in a case involving the primary suspect in four child murders — that is not a collection of anomalies. That is a conclusion. And the conclusion the evidence points toward is not suicide.

The BAC, the Weapon, and the Hand

The GSR lab report is a primary source document. It says what it says. But three additional facts from the autopsy report and crime scene documentation — published by Cathy Broad at catherinebroad.blog — move the forensic picture from troubling to physiologically incoherent as a suicide narrative.

Christopher Busch’s blood alcohol content at the time of his death was 0.40. Not 0.14. Not 0.25. Not even 0.30, which is the level at which most people lose consciousness. The clinical threshold for fatal alcohol poisoning is 0.30 to 0.40. Surgical anesthesia is achieved at 0.35. At 0.40, a person is not sitting upright with sufficient motor control to locate a firearm, raise it to their head, aim, and fire. At 0.40, a person is unconscious, actively dying from alcohol poisoning, or already dead from it. The question the suicide ruling requires us to ignore is a basic physiological one: how does a person with a BAC of 0.40 execute a deliberate self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head?

The answer, applied to the actual human body at that blood alcohol level, is that they almost certainly do not.

The weapon compounds this. Christopher Busch had a handgun and a shotgun in the home. The weapon used was a .22 caliber rifle. Nobody planning their own death selects a .22 rifle when a shotgun and handgun are within reach. The .22 is less reliable for the stated purpose, harder to maneuver against one’s own head, and less commonly associated with suicide by gunshot in the forensic literature. There is, however, one characteristic of a .22 that distinguishes it from the other two weapons available: it is quieter. That characteristic is irrelevant to the person allegedly dying. It is very relevant to someone who does not want to alert neighbors.

Then there is the hand. Busch was right-handed. His right arm was found tucked under his body. The shot — between the eyes — was allegedly fired with his left hand. With a rifle. At a blood alcohol level of 0.40. The suicide narrative requires us to accept that a man who could not physiologically maintain fine motor function aimed a rifle between his own eyes with his non-dominant hand while his dominant hand was pinned beneath him and his blood alcohol was at a level that renders deliberate action essentially impossible.

That is not a suicide. That is a description of a man who was already incapacitated when someone else fired the weapon.

The Rifle, the Receipt, and H. Lee Busch

After Christopher Busch’s death was ruled a suicide, the .22 rifle — the weapon used — was returned to H. Lee Busch. Christopher’s father signed a receipt for it. This is documented on Cathy Broad’s site from the Bloomfield Township Police Department records obtained through FOIA.

H. Lee Busch was the Executive Financial Director for General Motors in Europe and the United States. He was the man who had paid a private attorney to fly across Michigan in the family plane to arrange plea deals in all four of his son’s criminal sexual conduct cases. He had personally posted bond each time. His son had been convicted four times of criminal sexual conduct with minors and served zero days in custody.

When his son died in a scene that the state’s own forensic lab could not confirm as a suicide — no GSR, no muzzle markings, no blood spatter, a staged body, a weapon choice that made no sense for the person dying, a blood alcohol level that precluded voluntary action, a non-dominant hand, a pinned dominant arm — H. Lee Busch was not interviewed by police. He and his wife Elsie were in Europe at the time of Christopher’s death. The Bloomfield Township Police Department’s Crime Scene Investigation Report documents the people present at the scene: the maid, a neighbor, a family friend, Christopher’s older brother Charles, Bloomfield Township PD officers, the medical examiner, ambulance attendants, and — notably — two members of the OCCK task force, Detectives John Davis and Ron Pierce. H. Lee and Elsie Busch, who owned the home, were never interviewed. Their son’s alleged suicide weapon was returned to them.

William L. Aitken: The GM Executive at the Death Scene

When Bloomfield Township police arrived at 3310 Morningview Terrace on November 20, 1978, William L. Aitken was already there. The Bloomfield Township Police Department’s Crime Scene Investigation Report — published by Cathy Broad on her blog — lists him among the people present at the scene. His presence has never been explained publicly and was never pursued in the available investigative record.

William L. Aitken was not a stranger to H. Lee Busch. He was his neighbor and family friend — and a fellow General Motors Overseas Division executive. He lived three houses south of the Busch residence at 151 Overhill Road in Bloomfield Village. The neighborhood itself was, as Cathy Broad documented in March 2025, well-represented by GM’s Overseas Division: H. Lee Busch’s professional world and his residential world were the same street.

H. Lee and Elsie Busch were in Europe when their son died. The man who shows up at the scene before or simultaneous with police is a GM Overseas Division executive who lives three houses away. The parents of the deceased were never interviewed. The neighbor-colleague at the scene — the one person present who had a direct professional connection to H. Lee Busch, whose name appears in the Crime Scene Investigation Report — appears to have been treated as a witness rather than a subject of inquiry. Whether he was ever formally interviewed, what he told investigators, and how he came to be at the scene before police completed their arrival is not established in the documents currently in the public record.

Cathy Broad has noted a third GM Overseas Division figure in the immediate Bloomfield Village geography: John W. A. Holmes Jr., who lived at 3135 Morningview Terrace and was appointed director of personnel of the GM Overseas Operations Division in 1966. H. Lee Busch retired from the GM Overseas Division around the time Mark Stebbins — the first OCCK victim — was abducted in February 1976. The concentration of GM Overseas Division executives on and around Morningview Terrace is a documented geographic fact. Its significance to the OCCK investigation, if any, has never been formally examined.

Broad has stated directly that she has long been convinced GM Legal was well aware of H. Lee Busch and his son Christopher, and that Birmingham Police and Bloomfield Township Police — the departments that responded to the Busch death scene and had jurisdiction in areas connected to the OCCK murders — knew who Christopher Busch and his father were. Bloomfield Township Police responded to the death scene. Bloomfield Township Police filed the Crime Scene Investigation Report that lists William Aitken’s presence. Bloomfield Township Police processed the return of the rifle to H. Lee Busch and took a signed receipt. The question of what Bloomfield Township Police knew about the Busch family, and when they knew it, is one the available investigative record has never fully answered.

The Bloomfield Township PD’s Crime Scene Investigation Report documents photographs of the bedroom, the closet, the kitchen, and the entryway. There are no photographs of the basement. No indication in the police report that the basement was entered or searched. When Busch’s former home on Morningview Terrace was searched in October 2008 — thirty years after his death — shelves were removed from a walled-over storage room described as a fruit cellar and taken as evidence. FOIA documents indicate the evidence was eventually filed by a state lab worker. According to Cathy Broad, none of it has ever been evaluated or tested.

The drawing of a screaming boy on Busch’s bedroom wall was taken as evidence on November 20, 1978. It was never tested for fingerprints. Its chain of custody after 1978 is, at best, unclear. The ropes and ligatures from the closet floor were also taken as evidence. Their current status is similarly unaccounted for.

Two cups were found next to the box of .22 shells in the crime scene photographs. Busch may have had company shortly before his death. This was not pursued.

The Oakland County Sheriff’s Crime Detection Laboratory issued Lab Report No. 78-1855 on December 6, 1978. The nature of the examination was atomic absorption — the standard method for GSR detection at the time, testing for the presence of antimony and barium from primer residue. The evidence received was a sealed plastic box containing six test tubes: a control, right back hand swab, right palm swab, left back hand swab, left palm swab, and a cartridge case swab.

The results, in the words of Lawrence A. Presley, Crime Laboratory Scientist: antimony levels on items two through five — all four hand swabs — were insufficient to indicate the presence of gunshot residue. Barium testing was not conducted because the antimony threshold was not met. And then the sentence that carries the weight of the entire ruling: “From these findings no conclusion can be made as to whether the subject did or did not handle or discharge a firearm.”

That conclusion is scientifically accurate and institutionally useless. It says: we cannot tell from this evidence whether this man fired a gun. In a case where the ruling is suicide-by-gunshot, that is not a neutral finding. That is a finding that the physical evidence on his hands does not support the stated cause of death. The ruling was entered anyway. Nobody told the families. The task force closed thirty days later.

Larry Wasser and 28 Years of Silence

Larry Wasser is a polygrapher from Southfield, Michigan. At some point before Tim King was murdered on March 16, 1977, Wasser conducted a private polygraph examination. During that examination, his subject — a man later identified as Christopher Busch — made statements connecting himself to the OCCK murders. Wasser knew. He sat on it.

He sat on it through the murder of Tim King. Through the disbanding of the task force. Through the death of Christopher Busch. Through Barry King’s years of FOIA litigation. Through three lawsuits the King family lost. Through the death of Barry King himself in 2020.

In July 2006 — 28 years after Busch died, 29 years after Tim King was murdered — Wasser attended the American Polygraph Association convention in Las Vegas. He happened to fall into conversation with a San Francisco polygrapher named Patrick Coffey. Coffey mentioned that he had become interested in polygraph work as a child when his neighbor, Tim King, was murdered by the Oakland County Child Killer. Wasser’s response, according to the account that has since been documented by Cathy Broad and reported by Marney Keenan: “Oh, I know who killed your neighbor boy.”

Not a formal disclosure. Not a call to law enforcement. Not a letter to the families. A casual aside, in Las Vegas, to a stranger, at a professional conference.

Patrick Coffey contacted Cathy Broad. Broad contacted investigators. Nearly a year later, in November 2007, the name Christopher Busch surfaced officially. Busch’s former home on Morningview Terrace was searched in October 2008 — thirty years after his death.

The Task Force Timeline

What the Timeline Means

The OCCK task force did not disband because the investigation was complete. It disbanded because the money ran out and the momentum was gone. The official account says the task force could not crack the case. What the official account does not explain is why it folded within thirty days of the death of its primary suspect — a death the forensic evidence cannot confirm as a suicide — and why the families of four murdered children were never told that suspect’s name.

If Busch died by suicide, the task force’s disbanding is still troubling. Four children were murdered. The primary suspect is dead. The case is unsolved. Closing up shop rather than continuing to pursue the network surrounding Busch — the network that the assistant Genesee County prosecutor had described in February 1977 as involving potentially 100 boys and men who “knew each other and traded boys” — is an institutional failure on its own terms.

If Busch did not die by suicide — if the scene was staged, if he was silenced — then the disbanding takes on a very different character entirely. Because you can’t call it institutional failure at that point. It becomes institutional conclusion. Someone decided the case was over. The physical evidence suggests Busch did not make that decision himself.

Not only the scene of death, but the investigation itself leaves a lot on the table. As an investigator, there are key pieces of evidence I would have instantly asked for that are either being held back from FOIA requests, or were flat-out never asked for: phone records, flight logs, airline logs, business records. Something as rudimentary as fingerprints on the shotgun. Yet another missed opportunity because Law Enforcement returned it to H. Lee Busch in short order.

The flight logs question is not abstract. Christopher Busch’s body was found on Monday, November 20, 1978. He had lost his job at the Franklin Club Apartments on November 4 — sixteen days earlier. H. Lee told police Christopher was set to start a new job on November 27. In the intervening period, Christopher was unemployed, living in his parents’ home, unsupervised, on probation as a four-time convicted sex offender and a questioned suspect in four child murders. His parents were in Europe. Nobody in the investigative record ever established when H. Lee and Elsie Busch left. What flight. What airline. When the trip was booked — before or after November 4 when Christopher lost his job. Whether the booking was planned or sudden.

Christopher’s body was found on a Monday. If H. Lee and Elsie left for Europe on the preceding Friday, they were gone approximately 72 hours before discovery. Long enough to establish an alibi. Short enough that the timing is worth examining. Nobody examined it. The parents of the primary suspect in four child murders were never interviewed. Their travel records were never obtained. The question of when exactly they left — and whether the timing of that departure has any relationship to the timing of their son’s death — has never been asked by anyone with the authority to compel an answer.

And then there is Bruce Danto.

Dr. Bruce Danto was a Detroit psychiatrist affiliated with the Detroit Psychiatric Institute and the Department of Psychiatry at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He was embedded in the OCCK task force throughout the investigation — present enough that when a letter arrived from a man calling himself “Allen” claiming to know the killer’s identity, it came to Danto’s office. He attempted to broker a meeting with Allen at a bar near Palmer Woods. Allen never showed up. Danto had a close professional relationship with L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County prosecutor. He described himself as “like Dirty Harry.” He held a dual career as both psychiatrist and police officer — something Cathy Broad has described as virtually unheard of.

Cathy Broad has stated directly that police records show Christopher Busch was living at Morningview Terrace in Bloomfield Village specifically to be close to his probation officer and psychiatrist — and that for all she knows, Danto was that psychiatrist. The name of Busch’s treating psychiatrist has never appeared in the publicly available investigative record. That name — whoever it belongs to — represents a clinician who had professional contact with the primary suspect in four child murders, who may have known what Busch disclosed in a therapeutic relationship, and who has never been identified or interviewed in any document produced through FOIA.

The geography compounds this. Northville Psychiatric Hospital — a major state-operated psychiatric facility serving the Metro Detroit area since 1948, offering both inpatient and outpatient services — sits approximately twelve miles from the Busch home on Morningview Terrace. Adjacent to it on the same campus, Hawthorn Center opened in 1956 as a dedicated children’s and adolescent psychiatric facility — one of the Midwest’s largest, serving children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. These two facilities, operating side by side in Northville, were the institutional backbone of state psychiatric care in southeastern Michigan throughout the 1970s. They were squarely within the catchment area for outpatient referrals from Oakland County courts. And Tim King’s body was found near Northville State Hospital — the same campus, the same institutional complex — on March 22, 1977.

The body of the fourth OCCK victim was dumped near the region’s largest psychiatric campus. The primary suspect in his murder was living in Bloomfield Village specifically to be near his psychiatrist. The task force’s embedded psychiatrist may have been that treating clinician. And when Busch died under circumstances the state’s own lab could not confirm as suicide, the task force psychiatrist’s name appears nowhere in the investigative response.

What Danto was, without question, was a nationally recognized expert on a very specific subject: suicide among sex offenders. His published academic work addressed suicide risk in individuals convicted of sexual offenses — including the role of shame, loss of social standing, and anxiety following arrest for sexually-based crimes as precipitating factors. He co-authored books on suicide in correctional settings. He ran the Detroit Suicide Prevention and Drug Information Center. He was, in 1978, one of the foremost authorities in the country on exactly the question the Bloomfield Township Police Department was supposedly answering when they ruled Christopher Busch’s death a suicide.

His name does not appear in the post-death investigative record produced through FOIA requests. Not as a consultant. Not as a witness. Not as someone asked to evaluate whether the scene and circumstances were consistent with the psychological profile of a suicidal sex offender. The task force’s own embedded psychiatrist — a published expert on suicide among people in exactly Busch’s situation — was apparently never consulted about whether Busch’s death was consistent with suicide.

And for all of that, I can’t help but be confused, angry, and wonder, WHY? The OCCK Task Force was one of the highest and best funded task forces in its heyday. So was it poor investigation? Embezzlement as was happening in the Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office? Or was it that Law Enforcement already knew the answer?

If there is anything I have learned in my time as an investigator, it’s that Law Enforcement protects its own and will desperately cover up its mistakes. I suspect this case is no exception.

Now Retired Livonia Detective Cory Williams, cited as the lone helpful Law Enforcement officer, did the best he could despite the time that had passed. What he couldn’t possibly fix was the outright abysmal response from Oakland County Law Enforcement and Michigan State Police.

What Larry Wasser Still Owes

Larry Wasser knew before Tim King was abducted that Christopher Busch had made statements connecting himself to the OCCK murders. He knew during the task force investigation. He knew when Busch died. He knew when the task force disbanded. He knew when Barry King started filing FOIA requests. He knew when Barry King lost his lawsuits. He knew when Barry King died in 2020.

He said nothing — until a conference in Las Vegas, in July 2006, where he mentioned it to a stranger in passing.

Cathy Broad has documented, in her own words, the legal maneuvering Wasser engaged in to avoid fully disclosing what he knew. She has described him as having manipulated professional legislation to protect the kind of decision he and Busch’s attorney Jane Burgess made in the wake of the OCCK murders. She has described the FBI arguing with her brother Mark that the families were wrong because Wasser never technically gave up Busch’s name — even after someone in the FOIA response missed redacting a “Larry” that confirmed who the polygrapher was.

The families found out by accident. Patrick Coffey happened to sit next to Larry Wasser at a convention. Coffey happened to mention Tim King. Wasser happened to say what he knew.

If he had disclosed what he knew before March 16, 1977, Tim King might have come home from that pharmacy.

That is not a charge. It is a question. And it is a question Larry Wasser has never fully answered.

Jessica Cooper: The Prosecutor Who Looked Away

When Christopher Busch’s name finally surfaced officially in November 2007 — thirty years after Tim King’s murder, twenty-nine years after the staged death scene that the Oakland County Sheriff’s own lab could not confirm as a suicide — the Oakland County Prosecutor was Jessica Cooper. She held that office from 2008 through 2020. What she did with the Busch lead, and what she did with the documents surrounding it, is a matter of documented public record.

She looked away. And then she moved the files so no one could prove it.

Cooper’s office fought Barry King’s FOIA requests through multiple rounds of litigation. When King sought records related to the October 2008 search of Busch’s former home on Morningview Terrace, and confirmation of whether Busch had passed or failed his 1977 polygraph, Cooper’s office denied the requests. Those denials were upheld at the Court of Appeals in 2014. The man whose son was murdered — who had spent years trying to understand why Christopher Busch walked free four times across four counties — was told he could not see the records of the search of the primary suspect’s former home.

While Cooper’s office stonewalled the King family, Wayne County was pursuing the Busch lead independently. Oakland County — the jurisdiction where three of the four children were abducted, where the task force had operated, where the prosecutor’s office held the relevant files — was not leading that pursuit. It was being dragged into it by the work being done elsewhere and by the families’ own investigation.

In July 2012, Cooper held a press conference announcing a new lead in the OCCK case — hair evidence linking two victims to an associate of convicted pedophile Arch Sloan. Cathy Broad has noted the timing directly: the press conference came as Cooper was heading into her reelection campaign, and it redirected public attention away from Busch and Greene onto a new suspect. Whether that redirection was strategic or incidental is a question the record cannot definitively answer. What the record can answer is what Cooper did with the Busch files after that press conference.

It did not end there. On November 5, 2020 — the week after the general election in which Cooper lost her primary to Karen McDonald by nearly two to one — a Cooper office employee reported that documents were being shredded. It was suspected these were OCCK case documents. A cease and desist order was issued to Oakland County IT to stop the destruction of electronic files. That order came from Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office. According to Broad’s documented account, it was never followed up. No one was held accountable. The shredding that may or may not have occurred in the days after Cooper lost her office has never been fully investigated.

Cooper’s public posture toward the King family throughout her tenure was dismissive. When Barry King presented evidence pointing to Busch’s involvement in Tim’s murder, Cooper told a reporter that the evidence was either “too general” or excluded Busch altogether. Her response to King’s persistence: “He doesn’t like the answer. If it were me, I wouldn’t like the answer either.”

Barry King was the father of a murdered eleven-year-old boy. He had spent years obtaining over 3,400 pages of investigative documents through FOIA. He had lost three lawsuits. He had read the lab report showing no GSR on his son’s suspected killer’s hands. He had seen the death scene photographs. And Jessica Cooper told a reporter that he didn’t like the answer.

He died in 2020 without the answer. Cooper lost her office that same year. The files she had walked to the Sheriff’s office were eventually retrieved by the incoming prosecutor. What was left of them.

The Oakland County Child Killer, March 10, 2025. Primary source for William L. Aitken as GM Overseas Division executive, neighbor at 151 Overhill Road, present at Busch death scene per Crime Scene Investigation Report; John W. A. Holmes Jr. at 3135 Morningview Terrace, GM Overseas Operations Division director of personnel; H. Lee Busch’s retirement from GM Overseas Division circa time of first OCCK murder; Bloomfield Village concentration of GM Overseas Division executives; GM Legal awareness of H. Lee and Christopher Busch; Bloomfield Township and Birmingham Police knowledge of Busch family; Frank Shelden connection as open investigative question. catherinebroad.blog/2025/03/10/lets-do-this/