The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (23 page)

A witness who worked in the same business complex as the person who found Stebbins’s body provided investigators with evidence that Stebbins’s body was placed at the scene after 9:30
A.M.
on the day it was discovered. The witness stated that he had walked his dog in the same area at about 9:30 that morning, and the body had not been there. That information led investigators to believe that Stebbins’s body was held at another location for a period of days and was not immediately dumped in the parking lot after his disappearance. A major question was, why would the killer not conceal the body to prevent it from being found? The Stebbins murder was the first of four related killings of children in the Woodward Corridor.

Ten months after the murder of Mark Stebbins, the bloody shot-gun slaying of Jill Robinson was discovered. There was such a disparity
from the Stebbins murder in murder weapon used and victim profile that no one related the Stebbins and the Robinson cases to each other. At that time, male and female victims were not linked routinely in the same series of murders unless there was a preexisting relationship between the victims.

It was late in the afternoon of December 22, 1976, when 12-year-old Jill Robinson had an argument with her mother over household chores she had not done. In the heat of the dispute, Jill’s mother ordered her out of the house. Jill packed some clothes and a blue-and-green plaid blanket into her denim backpack. She walked out the door of her home in Royal Oak, Michigan, wearing blue jeans, a shirt, snow boots, a bright orange winter jacket, and a blue knit cap with a yellow design on its border. Jill was not seen alive again.

The day after Christmas her body was found dumped alongside Interstate 75, just north of Sixteen Mile Road in Troy, Michigan. Astonishingly, her killer had placed her on her back on the snowy shoulder of the road in plain sight of anyone driving by. Bloodstain evidence revealed that the top of her head was blown off by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun while she was lying supine in the very position in which she was found. The following day, a neighborhood boy found Jill’s bicycle behind an office building in Royal Oak. It was a mystery whether Jill rode the bicycle there on December 22 or it was placed there sometime later.

Captain Robertson freely admitted that the Stebbins and Robinson murders were not immediately connected by police authorities because the gender and cause of death for each victim were different. The police did not consider the fact that they were both held as living captives for a period of time and then dumped in plain sight where they would be discovered enough cause to attribute both deaths to the same killer. A disturbing similarity between the cases was that police investigators had no viable suspects in either murder.

However, within one month another child was found dead and detectives in Oakland County realized that they were dealing with
a serial killer. On January 2, 1977, 10-year-old Kristine Mihelich left her home at three
P.M.
to go to a nearby 7-Eleven store. Her mother reported her missing at six
P.M.
that same day. By noon the following day, all police departments in the area were alerted to her disappearance and were given photographs of Kristine to distribute. Investigators believed that she was seen at the 7-Eleven store because the clerk remembered that a girl who tentatively matched the description of Kristine had purchased a teenage movie magazine. The Detroit-area radio and television stations broadcasted information about Kristine’s disappearance. Over the next two weeks, police investigators chased many tips from the public, all to no avail. A temporary red herring in the investigation was calls from a 14-year-old girl pretending to be Kristine Mihelich. Fortunately, the impostor was quickly exposed.

Blatantly challenging the investigators as if to say “catch me if you can,” the killer discarded the body of Kristine Mihelich in plain view in the snow-filled ditch alongside a dead-end road in Franklin Village on January 20. At about 11:45
A.M.
on January 21, a mail carrier discovered her half-frozen body. The police investigators determined from body temperature that she had been there less than 24 hours. Forensics also concluded that she had been smothered, just like Mark Stebbins. According to Robertson, the autopsy physician did not find any evidence of sexual molestation, but claimed to have found sperm in her vagina and rectum. However, state police laboratory technicians had examined the doctor’s tissue slides and were unable to detect any sperm. The doctor tried to account for his finding by a theory based on the forcefulness of ejaculation. The police lab technicians concluded that the doctor’s determination was incorrect and that, like Jill Robinson, Kristine had not been penetrated.

Also, upon inspection of Kristine’s body, investigators decided that Kristine’s killer had redressed her. She was found with her blouse tied in front and not in back, the way her parents said she usually tied it. Her pants were tucked into her boots, something her parents said she never did, but something her killer might have frequently done with his other victims, police believed. This might have been part of a signature, as if the killer were wrapping up his victims for discovery. Even though Kristine had been away from home for over 19 days, her clothes were neat and clean, which meant that she had been physically cared for by her captor.

The police response to the three child murders was to organize a meeting of officers among the local and state police agencies to consider setting up a task force. This was an unprecedented move by the Oakland County Homicide Department, but was necessary since the frightened community was up in arms. At this meeting, the problem of handling duplicate leads was discussed and resolved by a then-revolutionary plan to track those leads by computer. It was only 1977 and the use of personal computers had not yet become a common practice.

By now, as he was telling me his story, Captain Robertson’s voice was quivering with emotion. His frustration at not catching the child killer really affected him, drawing him closer to the line that divides the stone-cold resolution of a professional from the burning desire for personal revenge. Captain Robertson continued his story. He told me next of the disappearance of the fourth victim in the series, Timothy King, a slender and attractive 11-year-old boy who lived in Birmingham, Michigan, who was last seen on March 16, 1977. It was almost as though the killer
wanted
to tangle directly with the investigators, Robertson said, because the child was abducted in the face of the police dragnet for the killer of Kristine Mihelich. Most killers would have laid low until the intensity of the police search subsided. But this killer wanted to show the police that even while they were fully mobilized, he could snatch a child right off the street. King was last seen by his older sister at

7:40
P.M.
when she gave him 30 cents to spend on candy at a nearby store. When he went out, Tim asked his sister to leave the front door ajar so he could get back in, since she was leaving to see a show with her friends. When his parents returned home at nine
P.M.,
they found the door ajar and the house empty.

The family’s search for Tim was fruitless. His parents canvassed the neighborhood, telephoned friends, and then reported Tim’s disappearance to the Birmingham Police Department. By 9:15 the next morning, the small task force working the three previous murders knew that Tim King was missing’the Birmingham police chief requested their help in pursuing many incoming leads. They obliged and had set up their headquarters in Birmingham by the afternoon of March 17.

A saleswoman at the drugstore where Tim was supposed to buy candy described to the detectives a boy who resembled Tim. She had seen him the night he disappeared. However, the most important break for Michigan police was the account of a witness who had seen Tim at about 8:30
P.M.
on the night he disappeared. A woman who had been loading her groceries into her car in the parking lot also used by patrons of the drugstore observed a small boy talking to a man standing by a car about two car lengths away from her car. The boy was wearing a red jacket with emblems on it, which resembled Tim’s red nylon Birmingham Hockey Association jacket. The woman was able to provide enough details about the man’s face so that a police artist could produce a composite sketch of him. She described his car as well. It was a dark blue Gremlin with a white, sweeping stripe, called a “hockey stick” stripe, along its side. This woman’s description of the man and his car was a valuable set of leads for the police. It became their central focus. For the first time, the police had a possible suspect, and they immediately covered the neighborhood, trying to locate someone who could recognize the description and name the man.

Again, however, in a move of sick bravado, the killer openly displayed Timothy King’s body in a ditch in Livonia, Michigan, six days after his disappearance. A person passing by saw the body and reported it to the police. At the time of his discovery, Timothy was wearing his red nylon jacket with a Birmingham Hockey Association crest, a denim shirt, green trousers, and white tennis shoes with blue and red stripes. This was the same clothing he had been wearing when he left for the store. Timothy’s orange skateboard was found about 10 feet from his body. Police concluded that Timothy King had been smothered to death about six to eight hours before his body was found, and investigators determined that the boy was placed in the ditch about three hours before discovery. This would mean, as with the other children, that the killer had kept King’s body at another location for several hours before dumping it. The autopsy revealed that King had eaten a meal that included fowl about an hour before death. His body was very clean, including his usually dirty fingernails and toenails. Although the bindings were not present, Timothy’s wrists were marked as if he had been bound for a period of time. There was evidence of sexual assault in the form of a distended and penetrated anus.

The four murders were similar in nature, which suggested to Robertson that they might have been committed by a single killer or small group of killers who operated like a predatory wolf pack. The reasons for his belief were clear and simple. First of all, the victims were all alone when abducted from or near parking lots adjacent to business areas where they were last seen. Two victims were abducted on a Sunday afternoon and two on Wednesday evening. These were clean, almost seamless abductions with none of the signals of turbulence or violence that might alert anyone passing by that a child was being taken against his or her will. Each child was held captive for from 3 to 19 days before death. They were well nourished, well cared for, and kept clean during the days preceding their deaths. Their bodies were not subjected to extreme weather or exposure before or after death. Authorities concluded that the children had adequate toilet facilities because there was no evidence that they had fouled themselves with urine or excrement. The children seemed to have been cleansed after their death, and Tim King’s body appeared to be clinically sterile. The killer’s ritual included neatly dressing the children just before or after death. All of their remains were found alongside roadways, openly displayed to ensure discovery. There was no evidence of sexual assault on either one of the girls, but both boys showed obvious anal assault.

However, there were some clear differences in the murders that disturbed the investigators and made them doubt they were firmly connected. For example, a shotgun was used to kill Jill Robinson. The killer risked attracting attention with a noisy shotgun blast. The shotgun was not used on the other three, who were smothered, possibly by holding something over their mouths and noses. Therefore, one widely promoted theory was that the Robinson murder was not related to the other three murders. I took this to be a premature assumption because it relied on a belief in “the exact modus operandi” theory that police often use to connect cases. This is a wrongheaded theory because, as Ted Bundy and Wayne Williams so clearly demonstrated, serial killers often change their modi operandi during a skein of killings for a variety of reasons, one of which is to throw investigators off the track. When the most obvious elements of a signature are present—similar victim profile, similar handling of the bodies before and after death, similar or identical patterns of body discovery—police should assume that they are looking at the signature
of the same killer. In other words, police have to be inclusive when they look for evidence of a serial killer, not exclusive.

Many investigators believed that the timing was inconsistent and that there were too many unexplainable gaps between murders for the children to have been killed by one person. The Stebbins boy was killed in February 1976, the next suspected victim was murdered 10 months later at the end of December 1976, and another child was found dead 3 months later, in March 1977. Also, the time the killer kept the children in captivity exhibited a lack of consistency, ranging from 3½ to 4 to 6 and then to 19 days. But Robertson reasoned that maybe the killer’s inconsistency was a premeditated effort to not form a definite pattern that could be detected by authorities. The clever killer didn’t want the police waiting for him when he dumped his next victim. But there could have been other reasons that had more to do with what the killer used the children for than with the killer’s plan to outsmart authorities. What if the children were used to pose for pornographic photos or films? What if the killer took them out of the area and then returned to kill them? What if these murders were part of a national pattern that was so broad, no one noticed it back in the 1970s? If these were some of the killer’s ploys, they were successful, because the murderer was never caught and whatever larger conspiracies might have existed are still unknown.