The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (19 page)

Detroit’s Babysitter Killer

There was a spate of child-killings in the Oakland County area of suburban Detroit, Michigan in 1976 and 1977, but the authorities are not sure that they are the work of one man. However, they are certain that there was a connection between four of the victims.

The first was 12-year-old Mark Stebbins, who was abducted while walking home from the American Legion Hall in Ferndale on 13 February 1976. His body was found six days later in a parking lot behind an office building nine miles away in South-field. He had died approximately 36 hours before his body was discovered. The child had been sexually assaulted with an object and smothered to death, but his corpse was meticulously cleaned and laid out where it would be discovered easily.

On 22 December, 12-year-old Jill Robinson disappeared from her home in Royal Oak after having an argument with her mother and threatening to run away. Her body was found four days later six miles away in Troy on the other side of the I–75. She had been killed by a shotgun blast to the face. There was no evidence of sexual assault. Again, her body had been scrubbed clean and redressed in her own clothes – even her backpack was replaced – before being laid out neatly on a roadside snow bank. The care he lavished on the corpses of his young victim earned the killer the sardonic nickname “The Babysitter”.

The next victim was 10-year-old Kristine Mihelich, who disappeared on her way to a 7-Eleven in Berkley on 2 January 1977. Her body was found days later seven miles away at the roadside in Franklin Village. She had been smothered. Her body had been cleaned, like the others, and laid out in the funerary position.

The last certain victim was 11-year-old Timothy King, who went missing on 16 March 1977 in Birmingham after skateboarding to a local drug store. His mother made a TV appeal, promising him his favourite meal – a chicken dinner – if he returned home safely.

A woman said she had seen a boy with a skateboard talking to a man in a parking lot of the store that Timmy had told his parents he was going to. A composite drawing of the suspect was released. He was thought to have been driving a blue AMC Gremlin with a white side stripe.

A week after he went missing, Timothy King was found dead in a ditch 12 miles away near Livonia. He been sexually assaulted with an object before being smothered, but his body had been scoured clean, his nails manicured and his clothes freshly washed and ironed. The post mortem revealed that he had eaten chicken before he died.

It was clear that these killings were related. All victims were snatched off the street in seemingly safe areas and held captive for several days before being murdered. They showed signs of being well cared for and bathed. All the victims were re-dressed in their own clothing with most of their belongings intact. And there was evidence of sexual trauma on both boys, none on the girls. But there was no obvious connection between the kids, other than that they lived relatively close together in a small area of the same county.

Other killings that occurred in that part of Michigan around the same time may have been tentatively linked. On 15 January 1976, 16-year-old Cynthia Cadieux was abducted from Roseville. Her naked body was found 15 miles away lying on a rural road in Bloomfield Township the following day. She had been raped. Her corpse had apparently been dragged over a snow-covered pavement and her clothes were left in a pile 15 feet from the body. However, she was a little older than previous victims, the only one found naked and the killer had not paid the meticulous attention to the body exhibited in the other cases.

Just five days after Cadieux’s disappearance, Sheila Shrock was raped and shot dead at her home in Birmingham. All the other victims had been abducted before they were killed.

Thirteen-year-old Jane Allen was murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning after hitching a ride in Royal Oak on 8 August 1976. Her body was found three days later 200 miles away in Miamisburg, Ohio. None of the others had been killed in this manner and all their bodies had been dumped locally.

The 1972 slaying of teenager Donna Serra in Ray Township has also been mentioned as possibly being connected to the string of slayings. However, that took place nearly a hundred miles from the other murders.

Though the body count is disputed, at least one serial killer was at work in Oakland County and Detroit psychiatrist Dr Bruce Danto wrote an open letter to the Babysitter. After it was published, a caller told Danto: “The article was wrong. You better hope it doesn’t snow any more.” However, when it snowed the following winter, there were no more killings.

A task force of over 300 officers and support personnel was formed and appeals for information made in the media. This brought in some 100,000 calls and over 20,000 were investigated seriously. At one point a priest with a dubious reputation became a serious suspect. It was noted that the children had gone unprotestingly with their murderer and it was thought that a dog collar would have lulled them into a false sense of security. After a thorough investigation, the priest was cleared. Schools started a “Nay Nay, Stranger Stay Away” program, featuring a little pony who warned children of the danger of strangers.

As, in the original four murders, both the boys had been sodomized after death, while the girls had been left unmolested, the police began putting proactive ads in gay magazines and frequenting gay hangouts. This too drew a blank.

Suspicion fell on autoworker David Norberg. He had driven a blue Opal, which looked very similar to a blue Gremlin like that seen in the parking lot when Timothy King had disappeared. Soon after he had stopped driving it. Then he moved from southeast Michigan to Wyoming where he resumed driving it. He was apparently a violent man who physically and sexually assaulted both his wife and his sister. There was speculation he had killed two girls other than the two known victims of the Oakland County Child Killer, as the Babysitter has become known in the literature. He died in a car accident not long after moving.

After he died, his widow said she found a silver cross inscribed “Kristine” among his belongings. Kristine Mihelich had owned such a cross, according to her aunt. Mrs Norberg also said she had found a St Christopher’s medal – Timmy King wore one that was never recovered – and a green worm pin like the one Jill Robinson wore. But Mrs Norberg said she had given these away after her husband died and could not remember who she gave them to. However, when Norberg’s DNA was compared to genetic material found the hair of one of the suffocated children, he was cleared. The case then went on the back burner.

Then, following the 2005 arrest of Dennis Rader for the BTK – Bind, Torture, Kill – murders in the 1970s, Michigan police revived the investigation into the unsolved Oakland County killings, using the advanced computer databases and forensic techniques now available. As part of this, they announced that they were to open a new hotline for information on the Oakland County Child Killer. In the first two weeks, there were more than 200 calls.

“We’re inundated,” said Detective Sergeant Garry Gray, head of the new task force. Calls, he said, came from psychics and profilers, ex-wives and relatives who said their cousin was “acting strange”. Some callers were in prison, others mentally ill.

A man in his late 30s called in to say the renewed interest in the case had rekindled memories of when he was 11. He said he and a friend were on Evergreen when a reddish van passed them, turned around, passed again and suddenly stopped. Another man, now in his 40s, recalled hitch-hiking in the 1970s and being picked up by a “weird person” whose “car smelled horrible, like maybe a dead person was in the trunk”. And a woman called in to say that her old boyfriend would joke about being the Oakland County Child Killer. He had an AMC Gremlin and moved to Wisconsin, might have since married, and “was just very creepy”.

Michigan police zeroed in on a man named Todd Warzecha, who had moved to Texas. Warzecha had long been suspected in the unsolved murder of two boys in Bay County, Michigan. In June 2005, Michigan police flew to Texas, but when they arrived at 53-year-old Warzecha’s home, they found him hanging in a storage shed on his property. He had committed suicide. However, DNA samples sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, cleared him. At the same time, the lab also tested another sample from 71-year-old John McRae, who had died recently in Jackson Prison, where he was serving a life sentence for killing a 15-year-old from Harrison, Michigan.

Then in December 2006, the police in Parma Heights, Ohio, arrested 65-year-old Ted Lamborgine, a retired autoworker who had left Detroit for Ohio in 1978, in connection with the Oakland Country murders. He was also thought to be a “person of interest” in the unsolved abduction and murder of 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic, in Bay Village, Ohio, in 1989. Like the children from Oakland County, Amy was abducted in a supposedly safe district – the Bay Square Shopping Center in Bay Village, Ohio – and seems to have gone willingly with her kidnapper. And, like the children from Oakland County, Amy’s body was left just a few feet from a country road, in a place it would be found easily.

Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy said that the arrest and conviction of Lamborgine’s friend, Richard Lawson, had drawn attention to him as a suspect. Lawson was found guilty of first-degree murder and armed robbery in March 2006, He had shot and killed 67-year-old Exavor Giller, the owner of a cab company where Lawson once worked, outside his Livonia home in 1989.

Lawson and Lamborgine have been charged with assaulting 12 juveniles between the ages of 10 and 15 during the 1970s and 1980s in Detroit’s downtown Cass Corridor. They were running a child-porn ring. However, the charges were unrelated to the deaths of the four Oakland County children.

The two men had worked together as sexual predators, Worthy said, but were charged separately. The two men allegedly lured the victims to motels, hotels and homes with soft drinks, drugs, food and cash.

“These suspects knew that there were a lot of poor kids living in that area,” said Livonia police Detective Sergeant Cory Williams. “It didn’t take too much for them, the suspects, to figure out they could take the kids a case of pop, some drugs or cash.”

Lawson and Lamborgine face maximum penalties of life in prison if convicted of the sexual assaults.

While Lawson was not a suspect in the Oakland County Child killings, he had provided authorities with information about Lamborgine related to the Oakland County case, said Garry Gray, the head of the Oakland County Child Killer Task Force.

However, the testimony of a convicted killer might not stand in court. Indeed, Lawson may have fingered Lamborgine in an effort to save his own skin. There had been false leads before. That would mean that the Oakland County Killer is still at large.

The Fiend of Flint, Michigan

On 24 October 1999, a task force was set up in Flint, Michigan to try to determine if a serial killer was at work. The bodies of seven African-American women – all involved with drugs and prostitution – had been found in or near abandoned houses, a situation disturbingly similar to the Chicago crack-head killings that were going on at the time.

However, the police stressed that there were no similarities between the girls, nor were the murders confined to a specific area of the city. A man convicted of kidnap and rape who lived in Grand Blanc Township outside the city was listed as a suspect in three of the killings, but no charges were brought.

Another serial killer was at work at the time, though. On 9 November the body of Margarette Eby was found in her home in Flint. The 55-year-old music professor was a former provost at the University of Michigan-Flint. She had been raped and murdered. For a year, detectives made little progress with the case.

Then on 18 February 1991, 41-year-old Northwest Airline stewardess Nancy Jean Ludwig was found with her throat slashed in a room at the Hilton Airport Inn near Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, Michigan. She had been bound, gagged and raped. Ludwig, from Minnetonka, Minnesota, had flown into Detroit from Las Vegas the previous night and had checked into room 354 of the Hilton. That night the killer entered her room and attacked her with a knife. The injuries to her body show she resisted, but her attacker slashed her throat with such force that he nearly decapitated her.

Nancy Ludwig was tied up and raped during this horrific attack, police said. The killer cleaned up the room and left, taking her clothes and personal property with him.

A witness saw a man loading burgundy airline luggage into a bronze or brown Monte Carlo outside the hotel in the middle of the night.

Romulus police collected DNA from the scene of the killing, but Michigan did not have a database to compare samples against at that time.

Police Lieutenant Dan Snyder and his team continued their dogged search, hoping that other evidence would bring them to a suspect.

In the summer of 2000, Lynne Helton, a forensic specialist for the Michigan State Police, who was building the DNA database, retested the sample from the Ludwig murder at the Northville crime lab and entered it. It sat there for about a year until DNA from the Eby case was entered.

“Within a matter of a few minutes it matched the evidence on the Ludwig case,” Helton said. “It was just an incredible day.”

On 15 August 2001, the police investigators announced evidence linked the murders of Ludwig and Eby. From then on, Romulus, Flint and the Michigan State Police worked together closely, merging their investigations. A latent fingerprint found at the scene of Eby’s murder matched from a case in Florida. In May 1983, 20-year-old Jeffrey Wayne Gorton broke into a house near Orlando and stole a woman’s underwear. He was convicted and imprisoned. In 1985, he was released and headed to Michigan.

The police tracked him down to Clio, Genesee County, five miles north of Flint, where he worked as a sprinkling-service employee. Then in February 2002, they began trailing him. On 7 February, Romulus Police Officer Mike St Andre picked up a cup Gorton left behind. DNA taken from the cup matched semen found in both the Ludwig and Eby cases. Two days later, Gorton was arrested. The following day he was charged with the murder of Margarette Eby in Genesee County.