10 Horrific Facts About the Oakland County Child Killer

Between 1976 and 1977, the sleepy suburbs of Oakland County, Michigan, were invaded by a demonic presence. This demon would eventually be known as the Oakland County Child Killer. Despite a massive manhunt and hours upon hours burned by Oakland County investigators, the killer remains at large to this day.

Was the Oakland County Child Killer a Vietnam War veteran angry at the rich? Was he a well-known local pedophile? Was he another infamous serial killer who preyed on the children and young men of Chicago? Or was the Oakland County Child Killer a known rapist who allegedly committed suicide a year after his last crime?

10 The Murder of Mark Stebbins

Twelve-year-old Mark Stebbins would become the first official victim of the Oakland County Child Killer. The Ferndale, Michigan, resident was last seen alive leaving an American Legion Hall on Sunday afternoon, February 15, 1976. Stebbins reportedly told his mother that he planned on going home to watch a movie on television. When Mark failed to turn up at home by 11:00 pm, his panicked mother called the police and reported her son missing. While on the phone with dispatch, Stebbins’s mother described her child as wearing a blue hooded parka, a pair of blue jeans, black rubber boots, and a red sweatshirt.

Four days later, on February 19, Stebbins’s body was found at approximately 11:45 am by a businessman in Southfield, Michigan. The man at first thought that the body was a mannequin but, upon closer inspection, saw that it was the murdered corpse of a child. A forensic team would later declare that Stebbins’s killer had sexually assaulted the boy and bound him before strangling him to death.^[1] An eyewitness provided police with information that detailed how Stebbins’s body had been placed in the parking lot sometime before 9:30 am that morning.

9 The Murder of Jill Robinson

Jill Robinson, like Mark Stebbins, was also just 12 when she died. However, unlike Mark, Jill went missing after she ran away from home. Following an argument with her mother on Wednesday, December 22, 1976, Jill packed a backpack and ran away. It would later be revealed that Jill and Karol Robinson had quarreled over mundane household chores.

The day after Jill ran away, her bicycle was discovered behind a store located on Main Street in Royal Oak, Michigan. On the day after Christmas, Jill’s snow-covered corpse was found along Interstate 75 in Troy, Michigan. Investigators located Jill’s backpack and noted that it still contained her personal items. Whatever had caused the murder; robbery was not the motive.

The killer had blown off half of Jill’s face with a 12-gauge shotgun. Jill’s resting place turned out to be within sight of a Troy Police Department station. An eyewitness would also come forward to report that a blue Pontiac LeMans had been parked near the victim at around 4:30 am that morning.^[2] Surprisingly, this lead was never really followed up on by police.

8 The Murder of Kristine Mihelich

Kristine Mihelich has the unenviable distinction of being the Oakland County Child Killer’s youngest victim. When she went missing on January 2, 1977, Mihelich, a resident of Berkley, Michigan, was only ten years old. Witnesses last saw Mihelich alive at 3:00 pm on January 2nd at a 7-Eleven store located on Twelve Mile Road in Berkley. Mihelich reportedly bought a magazine and then left the store. Her mother would not report her missing until 6:00 pm that night.

Between 3:00 and 6:00 pm, Kristine was abducted while walking home from the 7-Eleven. During the 19 days that Kristine was missing, her mother, Deborah Ashcroft, went on local television and begged Kristine’s captor to let her daughter go. The family’s neighbors also raised $17,000, hoping that this money could be used as a ransom payment for Kristine’s release.

Tragically, Kristine would never be seen alive again. On January 21st, her body was found in the snow on Bruce Lane in Franklin Village, Michigan. U.S. Postal Service letter carrier Jerome Wozny found the body.^[3] Kristine had been smothered to death and left fully clothed in the winter snow. Her killer had also placed Kristine’s hands on her chest in a disgusting mockery of the typical funeral pose. An official autopsy would reveal the shocking truth that Kristine’s captor had only killed her less than 24 hours before her corpse was discovered.

7 The Murder of Timothy King

The last official victim of the Oakland County Child Killer was 11-year-old Timothy King of Birmingham, Michigan. King was the youngest in a family of four (three boys and one girl). On March 16, 1977, Timothy was home alone because his sister was on a date, his older brothers were busy, and his parents were out to dinner with one of his father’s clients. Mother Marion King later told the press that Timothy was sometimes left home alone, and on March 16th, his parents only planned to be gone for a short time.

At around 7:30 pm, Timothy left his house carrying his skateboard. He planned on grabbing some candy at a drug store located on Maple Road and then heading somewhere to skateboard. An hour later, two eyewitnesses saw Timothy leave the drug store and walk out into a parking lot that abutted a supermarket. There, the witnesses said a man with long, shaggy hair approached Timothy. The pair entered the man’s car, which one eyewitness said looked like a blue AMC Gremlin with a white racing stripe on the side.

During the night of Timothy’s abduction, his older brother Christopher walked through their neighborhood with a baseball bat, hoping to catch and throttle his younger brother’s kidnapper. Timothy’s body was finally discovered six days later on a side road in the town of Livonia. An autopsy revealed that Timothy had been sexually assaulted and suffocated just six hours before his body was discovered in the snow. The killer had neatly washed and pressed Timothy’s clothes before killing him and had fed him fried chicken. This latter fact revealed that the killer kept track of the news coverage of his crimes, for Timothy’s parents had pleaded with the kidnapper in a newspaper letter to feed him Kentucky Fried Chicken.^[4]

6 The Murder of Jane Allen

While the Oakland County Child Killer has only been officially linked to four murders, many investigators, both professional and amateur, have linked him to other cases in the Oakland County area. One of those cases is the murder of Jane Allen.

Fourteen-year-old (some sources say that she was 13) Jane Allen was kidnapped on August 8, 1976, while she was hitchhiking between Pontiac and Royal Oak, Michigan. Her body was found three days later floating in the Miami River in Miamisburg, Ohio. Allen’s wrists had been bound behind her back with torn strips taken from a white T-shirt. The decomposition of Jane’s body made it impossible to tell whether or not she had been sexually assaulted. Still, Ohio investigators did deduce that Jane was already dead by the time that she had been thrown into the river. Investigators also suspected that Jane had died due to carbon monoxide poisoning.^[5]

5 The Disappearance Of Kimberly King

Like the other victims, Kimberly King (no relation to Timothy King) came from the suburbs of the Greater Detroit area. Also, like many of the victims, Kimberly was just 12 years old when she went missing on September 16, 1979. Kimberly was last seen alive walking in her neighborhood in Warren, Michigan.

The last person to see Kimberly alive was her friend, Annie. Annie told police that Kimberly had slipped out of Annie’s window on September 16th sometime before midnight. Kimberly then called her sister Konnie, who lived in Pontiac. Kimberly claimed to be calling from a payphone near a Gary Mart on Nine Mile Road. Konnie told Kimberly to go back to Annie’s house.

Despite a 1983 letter to the Roseville Police Department in Roseville, Michigan, Kimberly King’s body was never found. This letter reportedly told investigators where Kimberly’s corpse could be found. Another tantalizing clue is the fact that Kimberly’s father was close friends with two of the primary suspects in the Oakland County case, Archibald Sloan and David Norberg.^[6]

4 The Murder Of Cynthia Cadieux

On the night of January 15, 1976, 16-year-old Cynthia Cadieux left a friend’s home at around 8:30 PM to return to her Roseville, Michigan, home. Over five hours later, a passing motorist on Franklin Road in Oakland County spotted Cynthia’s corpse. She was nude and had clearly died after sustaining blows to her head from a blunt object. Cynthia’s killer had also raped her.

A postmortem examination revealed that Cynthia’s body had been dragged over snow-covered pavement for an unstated period of time. Also, police investigators found Cynthia’s clothes 4.6 meters (15 ft) from her corpse.^[7] Four days later, 14-year-old Sheila Shrock was shot to death inside her home in Birmingham, Michigan. This latter murder would be solved when Oliver Rhodes Andrews confessed to the crime and was sentenced to life in prison. The murder of Cynthia Cadieux remains unsolved.

3 The Profile and the Investigation

As of July 2021, the murders remain unsolved. Recent interest in these murders stems from a book and docuseries about the events in Michigan from 1977 to 1978. Over the years, dozens of suspects have emerged. Evidence has been re-examined, DNA has been analyzed, but still, the murders remain unsolved, and no arrests have been made. The task force formed in 1977 provided a profile of the likely killer and some general information about all of the crimes. They reported that all related killings happened on days that it snowed. All the children were last seen within a mile of Woodward Avenue between 9 Mile and 15 Mile roads. Also, all children were fed and cared for. The killer(s) either bathed them or made them bathe. Both male victims had rope burns on their wrists and ankles.

A psychological profile created by police described the killer as fanatically clean, intelligent, and sexually abnormal. The big lead police had—even as of March 24, 1977 — was the witness who saw Timothy King speaking with a man inside a blue AMC Gremlin. On March 16, 1977, the task force released the following profile about the suspect. Male, 20-30 years old, Caucasian, and homosexual. He was believed to have an above-average education and above-average intelligence. They predicted he also had mental problems, with a compulsive need for cleanliness. This trait likely meant he kept a clean house and clean car and was able to hold down a regular job (although one that allowed for vacation time in December and January). As he needed to ability and capacity to store a child for up to 18 days, he probably owned his home, somewhere in the area of southern Oakland County.^[8]

There is a list of other theories and claims that investigators have spent the decades sorting through.

2 Major Suspects, Part One

On May 7, 1976, Christopher Busch sexually violated teenager Vincent Gunnels. This assault took place at a cabin located near Ess Lake. Busch would later be accused of systematically grooming and raping Gunnels.

Christopher was the son of Harold Lee Busch, a top executive at General Motors. Christopher was also known to traffick in child pornography. Busch’s bad reputation was so widely known that Barry and Chris King, the father and uncle of murder victim Timothy King, asked the Michigan State Police to tell the public about Busch. His life would end in a very bizarre way two years later. In November 1978, Busch was found dead in his apartment. Investigators ruled the death a suicide from a gunshot wound, even though there was no gunshot residue on his hands, nor was there any books spatter at the scene. A search of Busch’s house revealed a horrifying sketch of a screaming child that resembled victim Mark Stebbins.

Decades later, in 2011, Michigan police revealed that hairs from a white dog had been found on all four of the Oakland County Child Killer’s victims. Also, in that year, homicide investigators told the media that they believed that more than one person was involved in the murders. This information suggested that Busch and Gunnels worked together, since Gunnels’s hair was found on the body of victim Kristine Mihelich.^[9]

1 Major Suspects, Part Two

Other major suspects in the case include the convicted pedophile Archibald Edward Sloan. Sloan became a primary suspect when hair samples uncovered in his 1966 Pontiac Bonneville matched hair samples found on the bodies of Timothy King and Mark Stebbins. Despite this, police could not tie Sloan to the other murders, and they ultimately released the suspect after he confessed that he often let his friends, who also happened to be pedophiles, use his car. He was charged with two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for events unrelated to the Oakland County child murders that took place in October 1983. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 1985. Sloan was interviewed by detectives from the Oakland County Child Killer Task Force in 2010 and 2012, and investigators have now confirmed Sloan failed a polygraph test about the murders.

Weeks after the death of Timothy King, psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Danto received a handwritten confession from a man named “Allen.” The letter claimed that Allen was the unwilling accomplice of his roommate, a man named “Frank.”^[10] Allen claimed that he and Frank drove around in Frank’s AMC Gremlin looking for child victims in the affluent neighborhoods of Oakland County. Allen said that Frank was motivated to kill wealthy children because he wanted their parents to suffer for sending him to Vietnam. Dr. Danto was convinced by this letter and arranged to meet Allen at a bar. Allen never showed, and he never wrote to Dr. Danto again.

For a time, some investigators wondered whether infamous American serial killer John Wayne Gacy was involved in the Michigan murders. Gacy was in Michigan between 1976 and 1977, and one eyewitness to the abduction of Timothy King described a suspect who bore an eerie resemblance to Gacy. However, DNA tests carried out in 2013 ruled out Gacy as a suspect.

The last major suspect in the Oakland County case, Theodore Lamborgine, was actually taken to court by the Stebbins family in October 2007. The family accused Lamborgine of kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and murdering Mark Stebbins. The family sought a wrongful death conviction and $25,000 in damages. The year before, Lamborgine admitted to being involved in a child pornography ring and sexually assaulting several young boys. Lamborgine refused to take a polygraph concerning the Oakland County murders, and in 2012, DNA testing ruled out Lamborgine as the man responsible for killing King and Stebbins. Lamborgine’s partner in the pedophile ring, Richard Lawson—also in prison for life—claimed that the Oakland County Child Killer was another member of their 5-person group. Lawson named Bobby Moore, but Moore was already dead when Lawson provided this information.