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
