RedHanded - The Oakland County Child Killer | #434

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Behind the façade of the white-picket-fence dream and adventurous childhoods of suburban, late-70s Michigan, lay a web of depravity that law enforcement was not remotely prepared for. Over the course of just one tragic year, the town of Oakland was terrorised: four children vanished, only to turn up dead. Chillingly, one had even been fed his favourite food, just before his murder.Was this the work of a lone killer? Or an organised, murderous child abuse operation involving a network of predators, stretching all the way to the top? After thousands of leads and countless hours of investigation, not one single arrest has ever been made. So what’s the truth? We open up the coldest case in Michigan: the Oakland County Child Killer.Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/-y8qK_BkeAw--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com

I'm Suruti. I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Handed. It's getting weird today. Are we prepared for some... Just rage about how everyone is a paedophile. Oh, good. That's the moral of this story.

Everyone is a pitiful. In 1977, I dare you to say anything else when we get to the end of the script. Oh, no. I mean, I'm already of the opinion that literally everyone... everyone is a paedophile and I'm really happy to be proved right. If you will be. In 1977, in the suburbs around Michigan, families who had left Detroit due to fears of rising crime now began locking the doors of their white picket fence houses.

For the first time, the children of Oakland County were told to stay inside, not talk to strangers and not to trust even those they knew. A serial killer was on the loose. Over the course of a year, four children had vanished and then turned up dead. Their frozen bodies found dumped in the snow. At first, the murders weren't connected. After all, the victims were a mix of boys and girls. They didn't look alike.

They weren't even all killed in the same way. But eventually, the murders culminated in the largest and most expensive task force in the US at the time. But despite this, after thousands of leads, hundreds of suspects and countless hours of investigation, not one single arrest has ever been made. Leading some to wonder if this really was the work of a lone killer, or an organized child abuse and murder operation involving a network of predators, stretching all the way to the top. Our story begins in Ferndale, a city in Oakland, Michigan, just east of 8 Mile.

The 8 Mile Road, which, thanks to M&M, all of us have heard of, is a major road in Detroit that serves as a dividing line between the city of Detroit and its northern suburbs, like those in Oakland County. And this line is more than just a physical one. It's deeply cultural and economic, too. After the 1967 Detroit riots, there was a period of significant, white flight. With a mixture of working class, middle class and more affluent people, all leaving the city in droves to set up home in the surrounding areas, which had up until

then essentially just been farmland. But soon the suburbs were thriving, and Oakland County was the wealthiest county in the area. But our first victim was definitely not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. On the 15th of February, 1970s, 12-year-old Mark Stebbins was hanging out at the American Legion Hall in Furndale. There was a pool tournament on, and his mum was working as a barmate. But Mark was getting bored, and he asked his mum if he could please just go home because he wanted to watch the afternoon TV special 30 seconds over Tokyo. Mark was obsessed with war films, and this was the 70s.

If he didn't get home in time to watch it, he wasn't watching it. I kind of missed that. It was a nice time in that sense, wasn't it? I kind of like... Not that we are from the 70s. Sometimes I don't want to have to choose. Sometimes I just want there to be something that's on. Exactly.

That's what happens when I stay in hotel rooms. And then I'm like, I end up watching things like Queen Victoria's secret lover. And you know what? She definitely had some. That's what I learned. She was a top shagger. Like all of her diaries are like, yeah, loved it. Absolutely loved it.

and then her kids went through and got rid of all the evidence after she died. Ugh, what a ball. Anyway, eventually, Mark's mum Ruth relented. After all, their house, 429 Saratoga Street, was just a mile away, and it was basically a straight line. But later that afternoon, when his brother got home, Mark wasn't there. By the time Ruth finished work, Mark was still nowhere to be seen. So she called the police.

Now at first the police, in their classic 70s way, did not take the case of the missing boy very seriously, telling the family to call again in 24 hours if he still hadn't shown up. And so, a day later was still no word for a mark, the police asked for a picture of the 12-year-old to circulate. Tragically, and this bit of the story just made me feel really sad, Ruth hadn't been able to afford Mark's school photos for the past few years.

So she actually didn't have any pictures of her son. So all the police could do was bring in a sketch artist. That is sad. Four days later, at around 10.30 in the morning, an office worker arrived at New Orleans Plaza in Southfield, Michigan to pop into a pharmacy. But in the car park, he spotted something. It looked like someone had dumped a mannequin near the bins.

It was not. I think we've had one case where it has been. When is it ever a mannequin? And I wonder, I would love to know the stats on the number of people that come across discarded mannequins versus the number of people who come across dead bodies every single year. Wow, yeah. I'm sure we did one recently where it was actually a mannequin. Oh, I can believe there was one.

How many have we done where they think it's a mannequin and it's a dead kid? Ah, 17. Yes. It was not a mannequin. It was the body of 12-year-old Mark Stebbins. and an autopsy soon revealed the horrors that he had endured. There were rope burns on Mark's wrists, throat and ankles, and he had a serious circular wound to the back of his head.

This hadn't killed him, however. In fact, the gash had started to heal. Mark had actually died of suffocation. It was theorised that the head injury may have been caused by the lock on a car door being slammed down onto him, perhaps during the initial abduction, or that it could have been caused by some form of blunt force trauma, like the butt of a shotgun.

What was really interesting, though, was that Mark was still wearing the same clothes that he'd had on when he vanished. But there was absolutely no blood on him, or on the clothes. How had he sustained such an individual, injury and come out clean. Well, as it turned out, Mark's clothes had been freshly washed, and so had his body. Even his nails had been scrubbed and trimmed. Horrifically, the autopsy also

revealed that Mark had been repeatedly sexually assaulted, including with a foreign object. How long he'd been held for was less clear. As we said, the wound his head had started to scab over, so he'd been kept alive long enough for that to happen. And Rigamortis seemed to indicate that he had died between 12 to 36 hours before he was found. It's a pretty big window. It is a big window because he was only missing for four days. Great. Yeah, it's really, they have no idea.

The police were also able to narrow down the window of the body dump significantly because another person had walked their dog through the same car park at 9.5. 30 a.m. that same morning and he had not seen Mark's body. So Mark was dumped probably less than an hour before he was discovered. But despite finding the body so quickly, the crime scene soon became an absolute Argos catalog of errors, Christmas edition. It's laminated to catch the tears of joy. Yes. Because the police made quite a few mistakes. Firstly, they used a dirty blanket to cover Mark's body at the scene, immediately contaminating any potential evidence.

And yes, look, back then DNA testing wasn't even a sparkle in someone's eye, but fibers, hairs, fingerprints, they could work with all of those. And there was so much that they potentially messed up immediately. The police also moved Mark to the police station themselves. and bagged up his clothes instead of waiting for the medical examiner. There will be plenty of time later on for speculation as to cover-ups and conspiracies.

But here, the police were just not used to dealing with homicides and they were trying to act fast rather than follow proper procedure. And I can understand, it's not the right thing to do, but I can understand the feeling of like, we've got to get this dead child

out of public sight. Yeah, I agree. And Oakland County was, such a safe place. They really did not have homicides, let alone like a 12 year old body turning up. Like, I am going to go on to contradict that later because there's a lot of dead kids that happen within this year. But up until that point, it had been a very safe place. So the police make these mistakes. And the reason I do think that they are trying is that they even bring in a psychologist, Dr. Danto. They bring him in to help with the investigation. Why? It sounds like a

magician. Yes. I had accidentally been writing his name down as Dr. Dento, which made him sound like a terrible dentist, but then I corrected it. It's Dr. Danto. And I think the reason they bring him in, because it was about five years before this that the FBI's behavioral analysis unit had been set up in Quantico. So no doubt that kind of like criminal minds aspect to crime fighting would have been all the rage. So I do think they are trying everything. They just don't really on what they're doing. And the police follow Dr. Danto's advice and actually planted a mannequin at the scene to wait and see if the killer came back. But no such luck. As the snow melted away and winter turned to spring, the police had made basically no progress.

And the trail leading to Mark Stebbin's killer went cold. Speculation at the time was that this was most likely the work of some transient criminal passing through the county. They love that one. No one could believe that the killer could have been from Oakland itself, living amongst them. And who can blame them? Crime rates in Oakland County were some of the lowest in the entire country, and they still are. But ten months later, another case would smash any hope that this had been a one-off nightmare. In Royal Oak, another city in Oakland, on the 22nd of December, 12-year-old Jill Robinson got into an argument with her mum Carol. Jill packed her bag and secretly stormed off on her bike. She had always been a good kid, but after the recent divorce of her parents, she had become

rebellious and defiant at home. And it's believed that on that day she vanished, she was most likely heading to Birmingham, four miles away to see her father. And I know they say Birmingham, but I just can't say her. Birmingham? No, Birmingham. She was heading to Birmingham to see her dad, but Jill never made it. She was last seen at 7.30 that evening at a tiny Tim's hobby shop near 13 Mile and Woodward, not far from her home. When her mum realised Jill was gone

and that she wasn't with her dad, she called 911. This time, they told her to wait 48 hours because Jill had run away before. And her parents tried to hold on to hope that she had just gone. gone off somewhere to punish them. But when Jill didn't turn up for Christmas day, they knew something was seriously wrong. Jill had spent all year saving up enough money to buy her sister's

presents and she had been so excited for Christmas to come. Her family knew there was no way she would stay away willingly. And tragically, they were correct. The very next day Jill's body was found. A. 4.30 a.m., a man driving home after the holidays, spotted something on the side of busy Interstate 75, near the 16-mile exit. Jill's body had been placed in the snow, on her back, still wearing her rucksack. Like Mark, Jill was also dressed in the same clothes she had on when she went missing, except hers were covered in blood.

And that's because Jill had been. shot in the face at close range with a shotgun. Seemingly, right before she was dumped. And so, at first, the police didn't connect Jill's murder with that of Mark's. They were different sexes, Jill's body showed no signs of sexual abuse and the method of killing was so different. Mark had been smothered. Jill had been shot in the face.

But there was also striking similarities between the two. to, Jill and Mark were both found four days after they first went missing, and Jill, like Mark, had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. And while her clothes were covered in blood, her body had also been thoroughly washed. And it gets even weirder. Because the year before Jill was murdered, her mom had sent her to a therapist because Jill was having a reoccurring nightmare of being shot in the face by an unknown man. No. Yes.

When the public found out about this, it caused an absolute uproar and added a whole other, now seemingly potentially supernatural element to this case for some people. Maybe we all dream about how we're going to die. We just don't know. Oh, God. Mine's being fucking chased to death by maniacs. Oh, mine's tied away. Now, while some people will point out that Jill's mum did release via a radio show the tapes of her daughter describing her fears, and so that's maybe how the killer knew about it, the thing is that didn't happen until after Jill's body was found.

So the police have basically three theories about what happened here, once they connected the murders, of course. One is that maybe Jill told her killer about her nightmares and he had sadistically enjoyed the drama of making it a reality. Or two, Jill's killer could have smothered her like he did with Mark and then dumped her, but maybe he wasn't convinced that she was dead, so maybe he shot her at the scene to be certain. Or three, Jill may have bitten the killer and he shot her in the jaw to destroy her teeth to get rid of the evidence.

I don't know about the last one. Like we said, DNA was nowhere near forensics use at this time. Like, I don't know that the killer would have been that, like, savvy. Maybe he thought something about if he had a bite mark and he got caught, like maybe with dental records, if he blows her teeth out. Maybe, maybe that's as far as I could give it. But I don't know. I think it's more I could see it's an attempt to stop her being identified.

rather than a like... Possibly. Bundy bite mark situation. Possibly. I guess then it's like if it's the same killer, why not take any precautions to cover up Mark's identity? He just leaves Mark there, cleans Jill, washes her clothes,

but then shoots her in the face at the scene. I don't know. I also think to this killer, cleaning the victims seems like a really important part of the ritual. If you want to strip away evidence, and that's assuming that he's thinking forensically, put aside DNA, but like fibres, skin, etc.

Fibers, you know, material, whatever. There's easier ways to strip away evidence, like burning the bodies, for example. Cleaning them takes time. He washes them, washes their hair, washes their clothes, redresses them, clips their nails. I think the shotgun to the face

is such a deviation from the other victims because we never see this again with the other two victims that are yet to come. So I don't know. think it speaks either to the idea that there was more than one killer, one to whom the washing ritual was very important and one to whom maybe he wanted to shoot her in the face. But I think it maybe lends itself more to something happened at the scene that freaked him out. Yeah. Like maybe

he drops her body and Jill is actually already dead. But we also know that if he had just strangled her or suffocated her, there could still have been air escaping from her body. She may have gasped or something, and he shoots her. Whatever the truth was, this obviously sent the community into a total panic. And just a week later, the situation would escalate again. In Berkeley, yet another city in Oakland County, on the 2nd of January, 1977, 10-year-old Christine Mihalik disappeared. Christine's mom had let her go to the local 7-Eleven on her own,

on the strict condition that she promised to come back quickly, and that she used the proper crossing point. Christine agreed, and she did, as she was told. She got to the shop, and according to the shopkeeper, Christine excitedly bought some sweets and a comic book and then left. But she was never seen again. Christine's mum reported her daughter missing three hours later, following a frantic search of her own.

Police didn't wait the usual 24 hours this time. But they still found no leads regarding to Christine's disappearance, even though she had vanished from such a busy road. Her body was discovered by a postman on the 22nd of January 1977, 20 days after she'd vanished. Whoever had taken her had spent much longer with Christine than any of the other victims. Heartbreakingly, Christine's mum said that she thought they had kept her alive for so long, because they must have enjoyed spending time with Christine. as she was such a great kid.

But she had still met the same fate. Like Mark, Christine had been smothered. She also had a faint bruise under her left cheek, which suggested that the killer maybe used his forefinger and thumb to close her nose. And Christine, just like Mark and Jill, had also been cleaned. And her body had once again been discovered in a snowbank. The police could no longer ignore the connections, And on the day Christine's body was found, the Oakland County Task Force was finally activated.

And soon, the killer got the nickname, the Oakland County Child Killer, OCCK, or the babysitter killer, because of how he fed, cleaned, and almost tucked his victims in on these snow banks. And soon, in a clear sign of rapid escalation, the killer struck again. On the 16th of March, 1977, in Birmingham, Oakland County, 11-year-old Tim King vanished. He had managed to talk his older sister into giving him some money, and he grabbed his skateboard and headed over to the Hunter Maple Pharmacy, not far from his home.

There he brought some sweets from the woman behind the counter, and then seemingly vanished into thin air. This time, the alarm was raised immediately. Tim fit the male victim profile and there was another pattern that was also starting to emerge. Both Tim and Jill had vanished on Wednesday evenings

while Mark and Christine had been taken on Sunday afternoons. Investigators started making appeals with Tim's dad, Barry, front and centre. Tim's mother Marion was always beside him, but she often looks almost too shocked to speak. She would later give a newspaper interview

in which she said she couldn't wait for Tim to come home so that she could give him his favourite meal. Kentucky Fried Chicken, nine Oreos and a glass of milk. And soon the tips started pouring in. The most notable was from a woman who'd been in the car park of the pharmacy the evening Tim had vanished. She said that she had seen him complete with skateboard, talking to a man.

He was reported as a young man in his mid-twenties to a 30s with shaggy brown hair and thick mutton-trop sideburns, with a fair complexion and a husky build. The problem was that described a lot of men in the area at that time. However, the woman also said that the mystery man had been standing by a blue AMC Gremlin car with a white stripe on it as he spoke to Tim.

Finally, the police believed they had a lead that could get them somewhere. But before they could begin their planned searches on such cars, Tim's body was found. He had been held for six days and was discovered on the night at the 22nd of March, in a ditch off the side of a quiet road in Lavonia, Michigan, only about 20 miles away from Birmingham, where Tim had been taken from. But interestingly, Livonia was in the neighbouring Wayne County, not Oakland. And this is crucial, because now the killer had two jurisdictions looking for him.

It feels like a bad error on the part of the murderer. And I wonder if the hasty kill and disposal was because the police had announced their plan to carry out random searches on AMC Blue Gremlins. Maybe. But we'll come back to the issue of cars later. Why would you call it Gremlin? I don't know. I'm going to look up what it looks like.

It's not like the prettiest car. No. Anatomy of a Gremlin. Weird. Let's stick with Tim for now. Just like Mike and Christine, Tim had also been washed, cleaned, fed and smothered. Chillingly,

autopsy report showed that Tim had been fed. A meal of fried chicken, just hours before he was killed. I think that if you have heard of this case at all, that's the bit you remember. Yeah. Leading many, including the police to believe that the killer was following the investigation and how it was playing out in the media. After Tim's killing, the investigation now had four dead kids on their hands. So they ramped up the car searches.

AMC Gremlins up and down the county were being stopped and searched at random, often more than once. The Michigan State Police Assistant District Commander Robert Robertson even decided to suspend the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by police, by the government, saying that he was like, I'll basically take the heat on that, search everyone with a Gremlin. And mainly people at first went along with it. They wanted this killer court. And it kind of became like a joke. There's so many interviews you can see with people from the time and they're just like,

I've had my car search 17 times. I asked if I could get like a badge to put in my window to be like, I've been searched. Like, don't stop me again. And there was one woman who was stopped taken to the police station to have her car search. She was let go. She drives out the police station. She stopped and brought right back in. Like it was just chaos.

People were like, you couldn't go anywhere if you had this car. And it was a really, really popular car at the time. But even so, just like the countless other tips and searches, this led to nothing. And look, I think little has to be said about this guy Robert Robertson. He's a very, like, infamous character in this case. His name is so funny, obviously, like, I was going to make a joke about it, but I was like, it's just a grandiose term for pointing out that it is his same name twice. But when I was reading the book on this case, the snow killings, there's another detail.

in this, who I thought I read the entire book thinking his name was Gary Gary. And I actually made a joke about it. But again, grandiose term for just pointing out that his name was the same thing twice. And I'm so glad I took all of that out because I got to the end. The last time his name came up, I was like, oh no, it's Gary Gray. So, never mind. That's happened to me before with I thought it was Detective Reddy for Eddie Lee Sexton. It's reedy. Yeah. But if I hadn't have listened to the. audiobook. I never would have got it. Many people have criticised this move as a total waste of

police time and resources because the woman who saw the gremlin only ever said the mutton-chopped man was standing next to it. And then weeks later, a woman came forward saying that it was in fact her blue gremlin that the witness had seen. She hadn't wanted to come forward before because she was in the area for adulterous reasons and she was scared to. of getting found out. But presumably after watching all of the fed up blue gremlin drivers start to lose their patience after being stopped for the 17th time, she came clean. I love that it took people being annoyed for her to come forward and not with several dead children. Yeah. Like it was heavily publicised that the police were like, we are absolutely

convinced that the man was driving a blue AMC gremlin. That is like all of our hopes on catching this multiple child killer is on that. And she's just like, um, maybe something. something else will turn up. God. So yes, this was a major blow for the police when this woman came forward. Especially when another eyewitness also came forward and reported seeing an older overweight male in the car park on that same day watching the younger mutton-chopped man talking to Tim. This man was apparently sitting in a dark blue Pontiacla mask watching the interaction.

The same type of car was a young. even seen on Interstate 75 on the night Jill's body was dumped. Witnesses spotted it pulled over on the side of the road near where Jill's body would later be discovered. This mystery man was never tracked down, but thousands of other suspects were looked into. And then in 1977, our police psychologist and dentist magician Dr. Danto got a letter. It was from a person claiming to be the roommate of the Oakland County Chief. child killer. Across the bottom of the envelope, the sender had written from hell. No, they

hadn't. Most very important, most urgent, most urgent, please. The letter inside was also odd and riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. The man who wrote it called himself Alan and referred to the killer as Frank. Alan claimed to have met Frank in Vietnam, saying at first Frank was pretty normal, but that the war had made him a, quote, monster. According to Alan over in Vietnam, Frank had killed lots of little kids, and now he wants the rich people of Birmingham to suffer like all of us suffered to get nothing back for what we did for our country. And he clarifies further in the letter. He's not doing it because he hates children,

but doing it because he hates everyone else out there, and this is his way to get even and get back at everybody. Even ending the letter with, I am desperate, you must help me, as I have no one else to turn to, I am his slave. On the 10th of April 1977, Dr. Danto got a call from a terrified sounding Alan. They planned to meet in a bar the next day.

Alan said that he would bring photographic evidence of the killings. In exchange, he wanted immunity. Scared that because he had been in the house when the kids were tied up, he would be arrested for not saving them, which, yes. Dr. Danto went to the bar as agreed, but Alan never showed up. Who knows if this was a genuine tip-off or a random time-waster? We do know that the motive Alan claimed, of Frank wanting to punish the wealthy doesn't quite track.

Some of the kids came from middle-class families, but most of them weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination. Mark's mum couldn't even afford his school photo. And also, if you're just killing these kids, you don't hate the kids, you just want to punish these wealthy families. Why are you sexually abusing them? Mm-hmm. So, I don't know.

Now, before we get on with the investigation, we should take a little depressing side step into what else was going on at the time in Oakland County in the late 70s. Not a traumatized Vietnam vet, so that's what? Yeah. And leaded petrol. It was all in there. Because there were many other children who also vanished or were murdered during this time period. And I know this doesn't like square with what I was saying earlier about low crime rates,

but it really felt like a sudden emergence in the late 70s. that this kind of thing was happening. And we can't go into all of the kids that went missing or turned up dead. I literally had two pages of notes of what happened to children. We're just going to talk about the most notable ones. And this was three girls,

age between 14 and 16. Cynthia Cadoux, Sheila Shrock, and Jane Allen, who were all killed in the same timeframe and same location as the Oakland County child killings. And so obviously people were like saying that they were connected for a very long time. If you watch a lot of like older content on this, they do conflate the murders. But they were very, very different. The girls were a lot older.

They were also taken from their houses sometimes. It didn't feel like a natural fit. And eventually actually Cynthia and Sheila's murders were solved and are now officially deemed to be unrelated. So while I don't believe that they are connected to our story today, the fact that these three girls were also killed in the suburbs of Oakland County in the same year as the OCCK deaths were piling up. Like, remember, this all happens in one year. Like, if you add these girls' deaths with our four, that's seven deaths of children in a year in one area. I think it helps paint the picture of the fear that people were living with. Especially, I think, given that Bundy and

Berkowitz were on their rampages at the same time, and that the The Zodiac and the Charles Manson's murders of the late 60s were still definitely front of everybody's minds. Not to mention that behind the scenes, a certain undetected clown in the shape of John Wayne Gacy was also getting going in Chicago. It was the time of the serial killer. To not be alive. To be unalived. Yeah. Trust had been absolutely shattered within these communities and the situation had gone from

stranger danger to keep an eye on neighbours. And just in case you were in any doubt about the sheer number of wrongens kicking around in the 70s in Michigan, over the next year the OCCK Task Force would uncover several active paedophile rings and a web of predators hiding in plain sight around the idyllic family homes of Oakland County. It really makes me understand why people believed in the satanic panic. Hmm. They were everywhere.

you've left Detroit, you think you're safe. You think you're safe in this nice community that's like literally been built out of farmland and everybody's like happy, shiny faces. Yes, not everybody's rich, but like it's fine. And then the police are just like, there's paedophiles everywhere. Back to my point at the start of the show. Investigators discovered that long before Jeffrey Epstein, another millionaire businessman and philanthropist called Frank Sheldon, had turned North Fox Island on Lake Michigan into a paedophile's dream. He had purchased the tiny 820 acre island in 1959 for $20,000 and had gone on to build cabins, an airfield and even a dock on the land before setting up a summer camp for boys called Brother Paul's Children's Mission.

He would fly the boys out to North Fox on his private jet, promising them the trip of a lifetime. Once there, the children were told to strip naked because that was the way people on islands lived. And again, he absolutely targets very, very working class children that are like, oh my God, I'm going to summer camp and I'm going there on a private jet. Yeah. Shelton would then fly over men who would sexually abuse the trapped boys and film the assault to be sold as child abuse material via their network of predators. Eventually, over two dozen people were arrested in connection to North Fox Island and Brother Ball.

And I would highly recommend the documentary The Children of the Snow, where they interview some of the victims of North Fox Island. and it is harrowing stuff. I choose not to. No. Especially when you discover that the government was actually subsidising the summer camp. And that Shelton himself escaped prosecution by fleeing to the Netherlands. And it might seem crazy to think about how these men were able to get away

with so openly making and distributing child sexual abuse material without the authorities, having a clue. They literally didn't have a fucking clue that it. of this was going on. And I wrote that, but then I was like, to be honest, it's not that hard to believe, given everything else, that still goes on today. But just to put this particular situation into 70s context, the US Congress only passed the protection of children against sexual exploitation act in 1977. That's the same year that both Christine and Tim were murdered. So, okay, I'm not saying it's an excuse. I'm saying there was just like,

not even something in the like mental understanding of people at that time. So I really don't know what excuse we've got these days for why this continues to happen. But at the time, it just wasn't in people's minds that this could be a possibility. It goes some way to explaining why there were seemingly so many child abusers who weren't even on the police's radar at the time. And the investigation into the Oakland County child killer just kept uncovering offender after offender after offender. So it was a shock to everyone when at the end of 1978 after 18 months of intensive investigation. The task force, which had received a whopping 18,000 tips, screened 10,000 sexual deviance and brought to light multiple sex abuse rings. Disbanded. People couldn't believe it. They hadn't made a single arrest in the OCCK case.

The murders had stopped, but someone had killed four children, and every day the police seemed to be finding more and more predators. Why would they stop? They're like, oh, we just uncovered this massive fucking paedophile ring on North Fox Island. We haven't caught who did this, but we're just going to stop now. It made literally no sense. It was the task force that found out about North Fox Island. It's because they're all paedophiles too. Investigators simply said that funding has.

had dried up, but that the case wasn't closed and if any new information became available, they would act on it. I can't, I understand why. They do work on it for 18 months and they leave one, they leave one solitary detective on it. There is a lot of criticism and I didn't write about this in this case because I would rather talk about all of the suspects and all of the investigation more than get side-trap by this.

But there is a lot of criticism from people in Michigan at the time and now to this day, about how a lot of resources were being spent on the Jimmy Hoffer investigation. Does that name ring a bell? Yes. Yes. So again, I haven't got notes on this, but basically Jimmy Hoffer was this guy. He was like, I think he was like a labor union activist guy. He was a gangster is what he was.

And he was number one enemy of Bobby Kennedy. Okay. And he goes missing, presumably murdered. There's lots of connections with him being like taken out by the Iceman, etc. And yes, obviously investigate his disappearance. But the FBI and the police spent so much money trying to find his remains. They were sure he was dead. Instead of investigating.

And people basically felt like those resources could have been spent finding out who had murdered these children. That was the argument, right? So I get it. They've got to investigate a lot of crimes, but people felt disproportionately that the Jimmy Hoffa case got a lot of media coverage and a lot of money that they felt should have gone towards protecting ordinary people's children. That is fair enough.

Jimmy Hoffer was the first person that Jack Ruby called after Kennedy was shot. Yes, I remember now actually. He's also a very good crossword clue. H-O-F-A. They use them a lot in the New York Times. Oh, me. There you go. Nice. So yeah, I understand that argument, but ultimately do I think the Jimmy Hoffer investigation is the reason the OCCK case has never been solved?

No. I can completely understand how... But I understand the resentment. Yes. Like, Jimmy Hoffa fucked off to Cuba, who cares? Like, the end. I see, I can understand why. Exactly.

They were never going to find Jimmy Hoffer. So, one of those people who was in total shock about the decision for the task force to disband was Tim King's father, Barry. Barry was a lawyer, and he had actually spent years gathering all of the newspaper articles on this case, filing news. numerous freedom of information requests and trying to piece together the evidence himself. He had trusted the police to seek justice for his son. But when there were no arrests and eventually all contact from the police stopped, Barry decided to take matters into his own hands. He and the King family actually made a six-hour-long documentary

outlining everything they discovered about this investigation called Decades of Deception. We will come back to this later, but let's just say, for now that the police were not exactly transparent with the families about their findings during that initial investigation. Some of what they found out that they didn't tell the families about will blow your mind. But I, okay. Yes, I'm sorry. And while the police seemingly cleared an impressive 7,400 people during the investigation, the problem is they were largely clearing people using polygraphs.

Oh, good. Yes. For a long time, nothing moved on the OCCK case, but then, in the 90s, with DNA testing now possible, it looked like there could be renewed hope. At the time of the initial investigation, several hairs had been found on the bodies of Mark and Tim. Now they needed suspects to compare the hairs with.

Enter Helen Dagner. In September 1991, Helen Dagner told police that she had met a man named John Hastings who had confessed to being the Oakland County child killer. Hastings' DNA wasn't a match to the hairs and the police brushed Helen off, but she refused to go quietly and kept a detailed log of her own investigation on helendagna.com. Remember John Hastings, you will need him later on. Jumping ahead now to 1999, the police had a new lead on a man named David Norberg, who had died some years before.

His wife had found a piece of jewelry amongst his belongings with the name Christine engraved on it. It made her think of the OCCK victim, Christine Mihalek. And given that before he had died, Norberg had sexually abused his own daughter and the fact that they had previously lived not far from where the victims had vanished, his wife called the police. Norberg's body was exhumed, but the hairs on the boys were not to match to his DNA. Then in 2005, Detective Corey Williams of the LaVonia Police Department and Michigan State Police Detective Sergeant David Robertson, who is, yes, the son of Robert Robertson who had led the original task force, now took lead of the Oakland County Child

Killer Investigation. And I am so glad that Robert Robertson did not name his son Robert Robertson Jr. Robert Robertson the second. Stop. And these two men, mainly Corey Williams, brought in the first real lead in decades. Detective Williams had previously worked a cold case homicide where he'd put away a man called Richard Lawson for murdering his boss in 1989. Lawson now claimed that he had information on the OCCK case and he would give up the goods in exchange for a reduced sentence.

You would be excused for thinking that this makes him unbelievably unreliable, which it does, but he did have a lot of information that had never been made public in regards to the sex ring that the task force had discovered operating in the Cass Corridor, a neighbourhood in Detroit back in the 70s. At the time no connection was made between this ring and the OCCK, murders even though the Cass Corridor was just a few miles from the epicenter of the killings. Eventually, Lawson gave the police the rather flamboyant name of Theodore Lambagene. Lawson claimed that he had seen a picture of Tim King in Lambegene's flat.

The police tracked Lamborghine down in Ohio. Which is where all of the incest happens. That's not me, being horrible, it's a fact. The most incest in the whole of the United States happens in Ohio. I can't go back down that rabbit hole of when I looked at all the incest laws in various different states. I can't remember what episode that was for. Stephen Playdell? Maybe. Yeah, it will have been. Gross. So yes, they track him down in Ohio and he's been living there for the best part of three decades. But they discovered that he had actually worked in an auto

factory in Detroit at the time of the murders. And he had been called. court paying young boys for sex. He had also requested a transfer from Detroit to a factory in Cleveland in 1978, less than a year after Tim King's murders, who was, of course, the last known victim of the OCCK. Lambegene was also fanatically obsessed with cleanliness, a possible link to the victims being washed and their clothes being cleaned, perhaps. But Lambegene flat out denied the accusations. even when Wayne County charged him with 12 unrelated sexual conduct charges

and prosecutors offered him a new identity and a reduced sentence if he confessed so many issues he refused he refused he did he said absolutely not he refused refused to take the plea deal and there are a lot of people who say and we'll come on to this later that it's because he was scared he was scared of like bigger more powerful people he would rather just go to prison because he's just living his life in Ohio. Once he gets sucked into this, they discover about all of the things he had done with like paying minus for sex back in the 70s. That's what they charge him on. And then they're like, but we'll let you off if you just give us information on OCCK or admit to it. Like we just need

to know who did it. And he refuses. I don't know. It could be because he was scared of somebody. But Lamborghine always says that it's because he was a born again Christian by this point. And he said, I'll admit to the things I did do, which he does in his defense. but I will not confess to something I did not do. So I don't know. I don't know what the real reason is. And Lawson's attempt to reduce his sentence also backfired. And thanks to his new sex ring confessions,

he actually had additional charges added to his rap sheet. Both men were given live sentences. But both of them continued to deny any connection with the Oakland County child killer. By 2007, while victims' families, still hoped that one day the killer would be caught. It seemed like a fading dream. But Kathy King, Tim's sister, who was now also a lawyer like her dad had been, wasn't about to drop it. And in a frankly unbelievable series of events, she got a lead that finally looked like it would blow this case wide open.

This honestly is like a scene from a movie. Back in the 70s, a boy named Patrick Coffey had lived across the street from the Kings. Tim King's murder had obviously had a deep impact on Patrick. And when he grew up, he went into law enforcement as a result. Eventually, Patrick became a polygraph examiner. And in 2006, he went to a conference in Las Vegas, where he met another polygraph examiner named Lawrence Wasser. When Patrick discovered that he and Wassa were both from Michigan,

Patrick told him that he had chosen his particular career path because his friend Tim had been a victim of the infamous Oakland County child killer. What happened next is up for debate. According to Patrick, Wasser told him that he knew the identity of the killer claiming to have tested a man in a private polygraph in an unrelated case. I'm never like I feel like if you're a polygraph operator

I don't believe anything you say you might as well read tea leaves I mean he's right about this though well so's a stop clock twice a day during this test the man had told Wasser that he was the Oakland County child killer Wasser didn't tell Patrick the suspect's name

only that the man and his attorney were now both conveniently quite dead. When Wassa was later questioned about this interaction, he said that it wasn't true and that he'd never shared this information with Patrick. But we don't believe him. Where else would Patrick have got that information from? Perhaps Wassar lied because he realised

that even though he didn't name the suspect sharing that information was highly unethical, legally speaking. So regardless of what happened here, Patrick somehow has this information that some man somewhere at some point had confessed to being the OCCK. So he immediately calls Kathy King, who took it to Detective Corey Williams. With the only clue they have that they are basically looking for a one-time OCCC suspect who is now dead and whose attorney at the time is also now dead, they basically start going through all of the possible leads. And they finally found a name.

Christopher Bush. Bush was a known paedophile because everyone's a paedophile. And Bush had been arrested on a string of sexual charges against minors back in the 70s. But each time he had been released, thanks to the very expensive attorney, his very wealthy family had on retainer for their noncy son. Bush's dad was a General Motors Financial Officer, a very big dog in Paso, Detroit. And his son, Christopher Bush, after spending years evading prison, had actually died in November 1978, soon after which the OCCK murders stopped. And just two weeks after he died, the original task force was disbanded with absolutely no explanation.

Now, I just want to make a point on Christopher Bush, just so people have something to visualize in their heads. When you think the son of a very wealthy man, you're probably imagining somebody who, who's quite like put together, maybe. You know, he's an aunt, he's like a child rapist for sure. Like, for sure, there's so many charges. No convictions. So many charges. But you may be imagining that.

Put that out of your mind. Christopher Bush looks like the man that that woman who got the AMC Gremlin car wrong describes talking to Tim King the day he disappeared. Big husky, shaggy, shagging. Beard mutton chops, kind of just like a big hairy guy. That's what Christopher Bush looks like. Like a bush. Like a bush.

Like a big walking noncy bush. This is going to fucking steal your kids. So Detective Williams and Kathy King are like, this is something. This is something. But when they bring it up with higher-ups, they're just told the Bush was no longer considered a suspect. But Kathy, again, was not about to take this lying down, and she managed to get her hands on Bush's files, the ones that had survived anyway. From the document, she discovered that in early 1977, 26-year-old Bush and his friend, 27-year-old Gregory Green, were charged

with molesting a boy in Flint, Michigan. They both already had many such charges, but during this interrogation, Green told officers that Bush had murdered Mark Stebbins, the first OCCK victim. Bush himself also admitted that he and Green had plans to kidnap and molest young boys, even specifically naming the three abduction sites in aught of the OCCK's first victims. But no further action was taken. Gregory Green eventually died in prison in the mid-90s. Information on Bush was far more scarce, but Detective Williams did discover that a few weeks prior to Tim King's abduction,

Flint Police arrested Bush for another criminal sexual conduct charge with a minor. When the police pulled him into the station, he had on him roles and rolls of film, all full of child sexual abuse material. And guess what? These photos were related to good old brother Paul's boys' camp on North Fox Island. This charge was still pending on Bush's file when he died. It seems that his family paid off the victim's parents to stop them from testifying.

as had happened multiple times before. Now let's talk about Bush's death. On the 20th of November, 1978, 27-year-old Christopher Bush apparently shot and killed himself at his family home in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. He was found in his bedroom, in his bed, with a 22-caliber rifle blast to the head.

And there is so much that is so weird about this. Firstly, the suicide rumours. report was destroyed soon after. But from the accounts we do have, it doesn't make any sense. Firstly, when I say that Christopher Bush was in bed, I mean he was in bed under his covers, like tucked in like he was about to go to sleep. Secondly, Christopher Bush was shot between the eyes. A very unusual place to shoot in a suicide.

It seems hard to believe that his arms would have reached the guns trigger in the position he was found. If he didn't lie down and shoot himself in that position, it seems even more unlikely that he would have been in another position and then fallen into bed under his covers after he had died. And most people, like, I watched a lot of, like, interviews with pathologists and forensic scientists who talk about this and they were saying that most people who use rifles to off themselves tend to kneel with their heads pushed up against the gun.

So they'll put the butt of the gun on, like, a bed or on the floor or on a chair or whatever. and then they will kneel with their head on the butt of the gun. Yeah, how else are you going to reach? And typically they would rest it on their forehead, so yes, you could put it between your eyes, but that's very unusual. Typically people put it under their chin or in their mouths. And even if you are like, yes, he was doing it between the eyes,

how is he fucking in bed under the covers? Some suspect that the bushes themselves did away with the black sheep of the family to prevent any further disgrace to their name. And maybe we could believe that. Yeah, because the trials and the prosecutions for North Fox Island case were pending. And yes, they were like paying off these victims. But even if just one of them had said, no, we don't want the money. We're going to testify against your son.

Then that is a huge scandal that would have marred their name very, very publicly. And so maybe I could believe him. Yeah. If I take one lesson from all of the time I spend reading about Scientology, it is so easy to get an entire police force on your side. You just have to donate enough money. But in this case, maybe it wasn't the Bush's, maybe it was one specific Bush. By the time this lead resurfaced, Bush's parents were dead, as were two of his siblings.

Only one brother remained. Charles had found Christopher's body and called the police back in 1978 The police questioned Charles and Charles's two boys who were now men and both of these now men told police that when they were children their uncle Christopher had molested them

Did Charles find out that his brother had touched his own kids and killed him? I think yes. I think so. I think when you have sort of like general discussions about like vigilante justice with people and then you have to explain why. That's the one that everyone always says, isn't it? Well, if I found out that someone had molested my child, I would kill them. Yeah.

Like it's the go-to. And I think he knew. He knew. Everyone seems to have known. So when the police come and speak to him, Charles did cooperate. He even provided a cheek swab so that they could compare it with the hairs found on the victims so they could try to do some sort of sibling match,

see if the hairs match Christopher because he's obviously dead. He had also been cremated, so they can't exume him or do anything like that. It's convenient. But there was no match. But I don't think that makes Christopher Bush not guilty because what we also know is that the police lost several of the hairs that they had originally found on the victims. So they're working with an incumbent.

complete sample of hairs anyway. So I don't know. It's not enough for me to think it's not Christopher Bush. I guess what else the police found and then? Lost. My faith in humanity? Yes. And also, a set of bloody ligatures had been discovered in Christopher Bush's bedroom wardrobe when his body had been found after apparent suicide. The police even took pictures of these ligatures so we know they existed and we can see that there is something like blood on them. But they were lost. Slash destroyed. Make up your own mind. In Bush's bedroom, investigators also discovered a sketch of a boy screaming in pain. And he does look an awful lot like Marks-debens. And as if all of that wasn't enough. Let's get back to John Hastings, the man that Helen Dagner told police about. He lives.

just three and a half blocks from Bush's house. Kathy asked Helen if John Hastings had ever mentioned Christopher Bush to her. Helen said that John had a good friend, who he always referred to by his initials, BB. BB had killed himself on the 20th of November, 1978. Bush's full name was Christopher Bain Bush. So does that make him B.B. and does that make John Hastings? His accomplice, just like Helen Dagnar said.

And look, I don't think you can take everything Helen Dagna says. It's totally legit. Too late. I've done a polygraph and everything. Because, you know, there's other ways she could have found out about, like, Christopher Bush's suicide. Suicide was public knowledge. She would have known the date of it. Like, I don't know.

I don't know. There's just a lot of information. And she does go on to dedicate her life to this obsessive. like thing of like it is John Hastings and just again because his hairs didn't match it's not enough for me that they weren't involved like if they were abducting these kids raping these kids and then allowing other men to sexually abuse these children to film it to sell like as part of like the North Fox predator ring just because there's other hairs on them that don't match the two of them it doesn't mean it's not them I don't know it's also

fucking fucked up. But you can't deny the connections here. And unbelievably, it was only now, all those years later, that Cathy discovered that John Hastings

had actually been questioned by the task force at the time of the killings long before Helen Dagnar. And he had been cleared thanks to a polygraph. And it only gets worse, because the police

had also questioned, and Bush back in 77 about the OCCK case. But they had released him. After you guessed it, he passed a polygraph. Even though his fucking pedo mate Gregory Green had told the police that Bush had killed Mark Stebbins.

They're just like, oh, okay, he says you did it. Can you do this polygraph? Oh, the polygraph says you didn't do it. Okay, off you go. Oh, and they let him go even after they'd, discovered that he had a blue car, very similar in appearance, to the fucking gremlin that they had hunted high and low. And look, we know that that other woman, the one having the affair, came forward and said it was her gremlin. But like, the fact is they didn't know that at the time.

But they let him go because the polygraph told him he wasn't guilty. And now the police wrote Christopher Bush off again because there was no match between his brother Charles and the hairs found on the victims. even though they know that these men were taking part in organized rape gangs where multiple men were involved. And like, I am in the same room as you once, maybe twice a week. My hair is in your house. 100%. Yeah. Like it's just not the smoking gun that everyone thinks it is.

Sometimes it is, but not all the time. Of course. And so could also the hair of somebody you brushed past in a car park then gets on me. It doesn't mean that you and I have never met. Yes, yeah. Because they don't find your hair on me, but they find that mouth hair on me. It's such nonsense. And there's even more.

In 2010, an anonymous tipster came forward and claimed that in 1977, he had been taken to a satanic ritual by the Oakland County child killer. The police interviewed this man, and he gave a long, rambly testimony all about devil worship and child sacrifice, etc., etc. and the task force dismissed him. But this man continued to insert himself into the case, even speaking to the press and victims' families, saying that he was an investigator.

And in 2012, Christine Mahalek's mum, Debbie, filed a federal lawsuit against the state police, the county sheriff and the Michigan state prosecutor, for not listening to this man, accusing them of covering up vital information and not being honest with the victim's family. The police denied all of that, of course. But this lawsuit did seem to light a fire under the investigation again.

Because that same year, Michigan State Prosecutor Jessica Cooper made an announcement. There was new evidence. Hooray! Law enforcement had sent a number of items to the FBI for testing, including three of the hairs found on Mark Stebbins and Tim King. But due to deterioration of DNA material, forensic scientists had used mitochondrial DNA testing. This is a much less reliable form of DNA testing

as it only identifies the DNA strain passed on by the mother. And a mitochondrial match cannot narrow it down to a single suspect. All it does is show that a person shares a direct maternal ancestor with another individual. Using this form of testing, the FBI found mitochondrial DNA matches for the OCCK hairs. Two hairs collected from a 1966 Pontiac Bonneville owned by Archibald Ed Sloan.

Sloan, who was 70 by the time the DNA match came in, was serving life in prison. After, you guessed it, convictions on two counts of first-degree sexual assault against male minors. And he had previously, worked as a mechanic in Farmington Hills in Oakland County, Michigan. It could literally be anyone and it could literally be all of them.

Just to be clear, Sloan's DNA does not match the samples. The hairs found in his car were a mitochondrial DNA match for hairs found on the male OCCK victims. So someone had been in that car who was either the killer or the killer or or a relative of the killer on the mother's side. Which is like obviously like Sloan's, I don't know who it is. I let my car to people all the time. But you're like, you're a convicted piece file. So obviously one of your friends who you've let in this car,

who's left their hairs in here, their hairs have been found on two murder victims. Like, it's somebody he obviously knows. But again, all they can do is narrow it down to, it's like somebody with a maternal relative. Like all they could do is narrow it down to people with maternal relatives. They couldn't pinpoint a single suspect using this type of DNA. We do have to assume, of course, that those hairs weren't contaminated from poor crime scene management, but fucking I don't care.

What is interesting is that Sloan absolutely refused to open up or talk at all about what he might know about the killings. even when the police had offered him a deal to reduce his jail time. So again, this line of inquiry led to nothing. And so today, as we sit here in 2025, we really don't know much more. In 2020, the documentary The Snow Killings came out, the one that I would recommend that you guys check out. And in that, they accuse Oakland County,

of obstructing the case, suggesting that there had been a cover-up at every level of the investigation. And this is quite possible. There were certainly some very high-profile people involved in the child sex abuse rings that were running rampant in Detroit in the 70s, from North Fox Island to Cass Corridor and the OCCK. A lot of evidence was also lost, and suspects like Christopher Bush were quietly let go, while other suspects like Sloan and Lambegin refused to give any information even when offered reduced sentences and new identities. Does this point, as we have said, to some sort of powerful sex abuse ring whose leaders these men were more afraid of than a life behind bars? Possibly.

It does seem like there were authorities who knew exactly who had carried out these heinous crimes. Because what other explanation could there be for why the task force and the killings stopped after both? Bush died. They closed the task force literally like two weeks after Bush is dead. It feels to me, and I, you know, I'm not even going to say, oh, maybe I sound too conspiratorial. This whole thing is a fucking conspiracy. Like, it really feels to me like the police knew it was Bush, who was the ringleader on the OCCK. I don't think OCCK is one person. I think it was Bush plus maybe Gregory plus maybe Hastings, plus maybe fucking everybody, you know. And he is linked Cass Corridor and he is also linked to North Fox Island. And I think the police were like,

to his family, his lawyer, like, we've got so much. We're coming down on him. Even though he passed the fucking polygraph. And I think his turn he told his dad, or Charles, or some combination. And they were like, we will take care of this. Leave it to us. Your problem will be solved. They shoot him in the head. Bang, done. And then the police are like, all's well that ends well. We caught the North Fox Island pedos. Let's just shut this task force down. I forget about this. I get that that sounds quite conspiratorial.

And I can't really square it with how there were other police officers who worked very hard. Like Corey Williams never wants to give up on this case. There are also other police officers who really worked diligently on this case. So I don't think everyone was in on it. But you only need a few people in at the top to sort of take away funding, to put pressure on lower downs to like close the case, to mandate that the task force is being shut down. So I don't know. It just all seems too convenient. But yeah, it really does seem that while some detectives were working very hard, that somebody or some somebody's were working very hard to stop their progress.

And sadly now, nearly 50 years later, any hope of justice feels impossible. I mean, the DNA they've got is completely deteriorated anyway. And even if it wasn't, there's still going to be some bushes knocking around. Like, this stuff is impossible. Like, it just, there is no who. No. And even if we think that the man who did this, if we really believe there was one OCCK or something like that, then let's say he was in his, even if he was in his mid-20s, he'd been knocking on for like nearly his 80s by now. How the game's played.

So I think it's too late. I don't think we'll ever see a resolution to this case. No, I don't think so either. And I don't think anyone's going to try. So yeah. Very sad story. That's it. That is the case of the OCCK,

the very, very infamous Oakland County child killings, and a very wholly unsatisfactory and terrifying case all round. Yeah. Sorry about that, guys. But we will see you next week for another episode of Red Handed. Goodbye. Bye.