Child killer hunt heats up
Decades later, cops work to solve Oakland Co. mystery
February 18, 2005
BY FRANK WITSIL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
In a room filled with three-ring binders, cardboard boxes and metal file cabinets overflowing with manila envelopes, two Michigan State Police detectives hope to find clues to a mystery that has eluded investigators for nearly three decades: Who was the Oakland County child killer?
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The victims
THE LEADS
For nearly three decades, police have been investigating the slayings of four abducted Oakland County children whose bodies were discovered on roadsides. Police had several clues, including a pubic hair that was found on one of the victims, jewelry linked to one of the victims and sketches of a man seen talking to one of the victims.
But every lead turned out to be a dead end. Here are some of them:
Early in the investigation, police suspected the killer was a professional, said Berkley Sgt.or is he a detective? Ray Anger, a police detective who has spent most of his career investigating the case. The thinking was that it would have to be someone that a child would find trustworthy, Anger said. Suspects included police officers, firefighters, doctors and priests.
Anger said that one suspect, whose name he did not release, was a priest who moved to Sweden. Anger said he worked with Interpol and the Swedish police to link the man to the killings but "couldn’t come up with anything." The man, he said, "was just a suspect."
One of the strongest leads emerged in the late 1990s. In 1999, the body of David Norberg, a Warren autoworker at the time of the killings, was exhumed in Recluse, Wyo., for DNA testing. Police wanted to know whether Norberg’s DNA would link him to a pubic hair found on one of the victims, 11-year-old Timothy King. Norberg moved to Wyoming in 1980 and died a year later in an auto accident.
Police suspected Norberg because they said he had a history of making sexual advances toward children and was fingered by tipsters. After his death, but other box said he was questioned by police before he moved to Wyoming, so it was something else that led police to Norberg. What was it? a silver cross inscribed with "Kristine" was found among his belongings. A relative of Kristine Mihelich, one of the four slain children, identified the cross as having belonged to her.
A DNA test in 2000, however, indicated that the hair was not Norberg's.
Without more evidence, police could not conclude that Norberg was the killer, and the case remained open.
Today, Sgt. Garry Gray and Sgt. David Robertson plan to announce that they -- and detectives from nine suburban law enforcement agencies -- are investigating the slayings of four Oakland County children with renewed vigor.
They said they have an obligation to the victims' families to keep looking for the killer.
In 1976 and 1977, two girls and two boys were abducted, held for several days and then killed and left on roadsides. Two of them were suffocated; one was strangled, and one died from a shotgun blast to the face. The killer meticulously cleaned their bodies, including their fingernails and toenails, but left a pubic hair on one of the victims.
The slayings struck fear into residents and brought forth thousands of tips. A reward of $100,000 was offered for information leading to an arrest. However, no witnesses of the crimes ever came forward or were identified, and the reward is no longer available. And the killer, if there was just one, slipped away.
Gray and Robertson hope that today's technology -- such as extensive criminal databases and advances in DNA testing -- and possibly new leads will help them bring closure to the case and provide relief for the victims' families.
"You can't rule out any possibilities," Gray said.
But, solving the case will be a challenge. Over time, memories have faded, records may have been lost, people have moved and others who might have been able to provide key information -- including some parents of the victims -- have died.
Investigators are uncertain whether the killer is even alive.
They also are not certain that the four victims -- Timothy King, 11, of Birmingham; Kristine Mihelich, 10, of Berkley; Jill Robinson, 12, of Royal Oak, and Mark Stebbins, 12, of Ferndale -- were killed by the same person.
Police said they have evidence that could help them solve the case: a pubic hair, fibers and other forensic clues. They said they know that in each case the killer was a man -- but won't say how they can confirm that. And shortly after the crimes, detectives put together a sketch of a white man with an athletic build, who was seen in or near a blue AMC Gremlin talking to Timothy King in a Birmingham parking lot.
Several variations of the sketch were made and widely circulated.
"It probably was one of the most horrific times in Oakland County," said Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, who was the Oakland County prosecutor at the time. "There was a cloud of terror over this county. It changed the way we live."
Recently, thousands of pages of reports in dusty manila folders, along with composite drawings of the suspect's face and notebooks filled with reports, were transferred from the State Police Northville Post to the Oak Park Post, where they fill a small room earmarked for this investigation.
One of the 29 file drawers has a sign on it that says: "Tips too large for file."
Gray, who was assigned to the case about three years ago, said he will seek federal grants to catalog all the information that has been compiled so far in a computer database. He said he does not yet know how much that will cost or how long it will take.
But sorting out what information is useful and what is not also will be a challenge.
To illustrate his point Wednesday, Gray opened a drawer at random and pulled out a file: Tip No. 13127.
It was from a caller in Westland who reported that he saw someone who resembled the man in the sketch. According to the file, police investigated, but there wasn't enough information for the tip to be useful.
Gray said he recently decided to pursue the case with renewed intensity because he read an e-mail from a father of one of the victims who implied that the police had given up on finding the killer. The note, Gray said, troubled him deeply.
Robertson, the son of retired State Police Lt. Robert Robertson who headed a multiagency task force initially set up to investigate the killings, said that his dad reflected on the case over the years.
Investigators have had different theories about the killer. Some believed he might have been a priest or police officer -- someone a child would trust. Others believe that he is in prison or left the state -- or that there was more than one killer.
Perhaps the closest police came to solving the mystery was in 2000.
Berkley Sgt. Ray Anger, a police detective who took the first report from Kristine Mihelich's mother the day the girl disappeared and has been investigating the case nearly his entire career, thought that he might have solved it in 1999, when he tracked David Norberg, a former Warren autoworker, to his grave in Wyoming.
Norberg had moved in 1980 and died in a car crash a year later.
Anger suspected that Norberg might have been the killer because after he died, a silver cross inscribed with "Kristine" was found among his belongings. The cross, a relative of Kristine Mihelich said, belonged to the 10-year-old girl. Anger had Norberg's body exhumed so he could get a sample of his DNA.
If it matched the DNA of a hair taken from another victim, Timothy King, Anger would know he had his man.
The 2000 DNA test, however, did not find a match -- and Anger has continued to investigate.
He said he believes that if Norberg was not the killer -- and the killer is still alive -- someone will come forward with information that will allow police to close the case. He promised Ruth Stebbins, the mother of the first victim, the day before she died that he would never quit searching for the killer.
"I don't know if I'll ever be able to solve this case," he recalls telling her, "but I'll keep trying."
Police are asking anyone with new information to call a hotline at 248-584-5755 anytime.
Contact FRANK WITSIL at 248-351-3690 or
witsil@freepress.com.
Detroit Free Press