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.
During a search, police also found a 1982 gold Monte Carlo similar to one seen leaving the Hilton Airport Inn near Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on 18 February 1991. Inside the car, police found luggage similar to that used by Northwest Airlines employees. And on 11 February he was charged with the murder of Nancy Ludwig. He was arraigned in Romulus District Court on five felony counts of murder and criminal sexual conduct. Convicted in the Ludwig case, he pleaded no contest to the rape and murder of Margarette Eby.
Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Cox promised that detectives would be doing a thorough follow-up.
“There are a lot of things here that are very disturbing that we’ve uncovered,” Cox says.
Homicide investigators in Orange County, Florida, contacted Michigan authorities about the disappearance of a 14-year-old Vickey Willis in April 1983, when Gorton was living nearby in Orlando.
The investigation goes much wider than that. A total of 800 pairs of women’s panties labelled with dates and places were found in Gorton’s house. But that takes investigators no closer to the killer of the seven African- American women in Flint.
The Florida Lady Killer
On 17 February 1981, the body of a young African-American woman was found in a vacant lot on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale’s ghetto area. She could not be identified and the medical examiner could not determine the cause of death, describing it as a “homicide committed by unspecified means”.
On 1 June 1981, the skeletal remains of a black girl were found on the same patch of rough ground. She was roughly 13 years old, but she was carrying no form of ID. Again she could not be identified and a post mortem revealed no cause of death.
A third victim was identified. She was 30-year-old Eloise Coleman, a resident of the neighbourhood. Her corpse was found in the same lot on 10 June 1981, roughly 100 yards from where the first body was found. She had last been seen alive three days before when she left home on the evening of 7 June. This time the medical examiner could also determine the cause of death. It was described as blunt trauma to the victim’s head, caused by a powerful blow.
Despite the fact that all the bodies had been dumped on the same patch of waste ground, the police were reluctant to call the murders the work of a serial killer and the killer, or killers, remain at large.
The Fort Lauderdale Lacerater
Florida police found themselves investigating another series of unsolved murders in the Fort Lauderdale area, after the mutilated body of Delia Lorna Mendez was found in a dumpster on Federal Highway in nearby Hollywood
