The Snow Killings Page 3

  “It’s not like we had an argument like the newspapers reported,” Karol remembered. “Yes, I was asking her to make the biscuits and she was saying no. But I was trying to get her to talk to me. I kept on asking, why are you acting like this? Did something happen at school? Did something happen with friends? And she just said nothing. So, finally I said: ‘Jill, I want you to go outside and think about your behavior.’ And the minute I said it, I felt it was like an out of body experience. I would never say that to Jill and here I was, saying those words to Jill.”

  With the false bravado of a preteen girl, Jill heeded her mother’s suggestion and stuffed her Levi’s denim backpack with a green and blue plaid blanket, a brush, and two books, one of which was Little House on the Prairie, on loan from the library. “I could see her getting her backpack and I said; ‘Jill, you don’t have to leave. What I really want is for you to talk to me: Tell me what is going on.’”

  But Jill was resolute. “She didn’t say anything. She walked over to the front door, opened it and left.”

  Karol thought sure Jill would sit on the bench on the front porch, pout for a bit and then come back inside. Ten minutes later, Karol asked Alene to call Jill and tell her to come in for dinner. “Mom,” Alene said, “she’s not on the front porch.”

  Now irked, Karol snapped, “Well, of course she’s on the porch!” and went to check herself. No Jill. She’s probably sitting in the car parked in the driveway, Karol thought, so she went and peered in the windows. No Jill. She thought Jill must have run across the street to the babysitter, Nancy’s house. But no, Nancy said, she’s not here. Nancy offered to come by the house and babysit the girls so Karol could go search.

  So, close to 6 p.m., with the snow beginning to fall, Karol drove around the neighborhood, eyes peeled. She had never even considered the possibility that Jill would be on her bike, kept in the shed in the backyard. Karol decided to go to church, thinking surely Jill would come home once she saw her mom’s car was not in the driveway. After the church service ended, Karol called home. No Jill, Nancy said. Karol drove to Tom’s house, but he was not home. She checked the garage, thinking Jill might be hiding there. She called her parents, her sisters, Jill’s friends. By now she was frantic, sick with dread.

  At 11:30 p.m., Karol Robinson reported her daughter missing.

  Initially Karol said police treated Jill as a runaway. “They said she is probably at a friend’s house and will come home soon,” Karol said. “I told them, ‘You don’t understand. She’s not like that. She has never left.’ She just didn’t do things like that.”

  The next day police became concerned. There is nothing on earth quite so terribly surreal as having to describe what your child was wearing the last time you saw her. Karol Robinson’s dazed recitation was no exception. In a monotone, she said Jill was wearing a denim jump suit, snow boots, a bright orange winter parka, and a blue knit cap with a zigzag yellow stripe.

  Both parents believed if Jill was riding her bike anywhere it would be to her father’s house in Birmingham. A witness supported her parents’ theory when she told police she saw Jill on her bike passing Tiny Tim’s Hobby Shop near Thirteen Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, heading north toward Birmingham.

  Tom Robinson would later tell a reporter: “When she never showed up at my house, I became very concerned that something was wrong. I think she was already being held somewhere at that point.”9

  Thursday was agonizing. Friday was like being in a coma. On Christmas Day, 1976, a front-page headline read: “Police seek information on missing suburban girl.” Now the palpable sense of dread was felt by the public. Parents played through their Santa Claus performances, feigning good cheer. Karol Robinson told a reporter, “The last few days I’ve been numb, like I’ve been a statue. I can’t laugh and I can’t cry.”10

  Finally, on December 26, Jill’s body was found in Troy, a few miles north of Royal Oak, on the shoulder of northbound 1-75, a quarter mile north of Big Beaver Road—within sight of the Troy Police Department. A motorist with a CB radio notified police of the location of a girl’s body at around 8:45 a.m. She was still wearing her backpack, which contained the plaid blanket, but not her books.

  Jill had been killed by a single shotgun blast to the face. “According to our evidence, the girl was carried from a car, placed on the ground by the freeway and shot once from a range of six to ten inches,” said Sgt. George Reed of the Troy Police Department.11 Police estimated the crime occurred between 2 and 4 a.m.

  (Later, investigators would hypothesize that Jill may have been suffocated in the same manner as the other victims. But when she was placed on her back on the roadside, the weight of her torso atop the backpack could have forced trapped air from her lungs in a gush of breath, leading the killer(s) to conclude she was still alive and had to be shot.)

  Shotgun pellets were retrieved from the ground, but no shell casings were found, making identification of the make and model of a shotgun next to impossible. All that could be determined was that it was a 12-gauge shotgun. A disparaging headline pierced Karol Robinson’s soul: “Runaway Girl Shotgunned; Victim 12, Left Home Wednesday.”12

  Police examining the site where Jill Robinson’s body was dumped in the early hours of December 26, 1976, on the northbound shoulder of Interstate 75 in Troy. The media’s portrayal of Jill as a “runaway” would pain her mother deeply (photograph by Richard Lee, Detroit Free Press via Newspapers.com).

  Oakland County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Sillery determined there were no signs of sexual abuse. The media reported that Jill was wearing a “lightly stained” tampon, but to this day her mother insists Jill had not yet started her period. Her body was “exceptionally clean” and so were her clothes. When she learned Jill had been shot, Karol told police about her daughter’s premonition.

  A day after Jill’s body was found, The Daily Tribune in Royal Oak described the murders of Sheila Srock, Mark Stebbins, Jane Louise Allan and Jill Robinson as symptomatic of the times. “Several South Oakland police officers say that violence has become a way of life in our society. It was a way of dying for four South Oakland youngsters this year. Three girls and a young boy were murdered. All four cases remain unsolved.”13

  Investigators cautioned any link between all four. “At this point I don’t see any connection between Jill Robinson’s murder and any other crimes,” Royal Oak Police Lt. Earl Ringer said at the time. “We just don’t have any evidence or information to make any connections.”14

  Jill’s purple bike was found by a neighborhood boy around noon the day after her body was discovered, behind a store on North Main Street in Royal Oak, near Euclid Avenue. It is not known how it got there, whether she rode it there when she disappeared or whether it was placed there later.

  Upon hearing the news, Tom Robinson said he had been expecting the worst. “After Jill’s death I was devastated,” he said. “I can’t say I wanted to die because I had two other kids. But it took the spark out of my life … I remember I just could not stop crying.”15

  Schools were closed for the extended Christmas holiday. Still, kids were kept indoors.

  Seven days after Jill’s body was found, Deborah Ascroft, a young mother who worked at the Hartfield Bowling Alley on Twelve Mile Road in Berkley, placed the worst phone call of her life.

  It was 6:30 p.m. Sunday, January 2, 1977. Earlier that afternoon, Ascroft’s daughter, Kristine Mihelich, had begged her mother to allow her to walk up to the 7-Eleven to buy a teen magazine. For Christmas, Kristine had received a portable record player and the album Disco Train by Donny and Marie Osmond, and Kristine was determined to read all about her new obsession. The distance between her one-story home on Gardner Street and the 7-Eleven is only four and a half blocks, and Kristine had promised to be careful crossing the busy road. But as night fell, the distance felt like a million miles.

  The 29-year-old mother of four had to force the words out
of her body: my daughter is missing. Kristine was 10, a “happy, contented” bright-eyed fifth grader and the older sister to eight-year-old Matthew, six-year-old Mark and four-year-old Erica. She was looking forward to returning to school on Monday after the holiday break to tell everyone about her new record player and Donny and Marie. Of the four children abducted in the Oakland County child murders, Kristine would be held the longest—an eternal 19 days.

  Police swarmed like ants, tracing all possible routes likely taken by Kristine between her home and the party store. They searched all parked cars, trash bins, alleys and tool sheds within a half-mile radius of her home. After police showed a photograph of Kristine to the clerk at the 7-Eleven, Kathy Carson said, yes, she had remembered selling a magazine to the same girl. Police stopped at every restaurant along Twelve Mile Road showing the photograph to waitresses and managers. They paid special attention to the drugstore at Northwood Shopping Center at Thirteen Mile Road and Woodward Ave, which had become a popular hangout for teens.

  Days passed—or at least they seemed to. In televised news conferences, a trembling Deborah Ascroft and her ex-husband, Kristine’s father Dan Mihelich, pled for their daughter’s safe return. Dan Mihelich searched for the right words: “Since it’s been four days and she still hasn’t been found,” he paused. “Well, I’m hoping she’s alive, that the person who is holding her will let her go … that he won’t hurt her.”

  Struggling to speak, Deborah Ascroft cried, “Please, just let her go.”16

  Kristine’s stepfather, Tom Ascroft, considered Kristine his own flesh and blood. He drove around day and night in search of Kristine, his loaded pistol at the ready. Kristine’s youngest sister, Erica, could barely digest what was happening around her—her big sister’s face on the television, everyone crying.

  A police helicopter hovered over Berkley neighborhoods, dipping and circling over streets and fields. Police in several cities reported their lines flooded with calls about suspicious persons. There were scores of reported sightings of Kristine, but none were substantiated. Citizen searches on foot were quickly organized. About 70 volunteers searched open fields in frigid 10-degree temperatures. Neighbors and Jaycee chapters went door-to-door collecting donations for reward money, raising $11,000. One parent said: “It’s gotten to the point where I don’t know whether it’s safe to let my kid go play around the block or not. I certainly won’t let her walk the few blocks home from school when she stays after for a Brownie meeting.”17

  Midweek, a “spontaneous” organization of Citizen Band radio enthusiasts (known as CBers) gathered in the parking lot at the Berkley police station, engines idling. Led by the affable Kermit D. Cable of Pleasant Ridge—whose handle was, of course, “Frogman”—their instructions were to cruise shopping center parking lots, freeway ramps and all remote areas within a ten-mile radius of Berkley.

  Cable stood on the floor of his van, signaling to the modern-day posse of vehicles with his finger in the air making a circle. Then he swung himself into the driver’s seat, grabbed the microphone and said: “Breaker fifteen, this here is the Frogman. Let’s see if we can find a little girl.”18

  Staff and PTA members at Pattengill Elementary School in Berkley prepared a handbook on child-safety which was then distributed to parents. Among the pointers:

  • Never take a ride in a strange auto with a person you don’t know, even if the person says your parents want you to.

  • If a stranger stops you to ask directions, don’t go close, and never enter the car.

  • If someone does try to get you or any of your playmates to enter a strange car, write down the license number—scratch it on the ground with a stick if you don’t have a paper and pencil. Then tell a policeman, your teacher or your parents right away.

  • Never take any presents, candy, ice cream—anything—from a stranger.

  • When selling cookies or other things house to house, always take a friend with you. Don’t go alone.

  • Never play in empty buildings, alleys or lonely places.

  • Never go into the house or room of a stranger or casual acquaintance.

  • Never take shortcuts through empty lots with trees or bushes on them.19

  In the weeks that followed, the sight of Kristine’s empty desk in her fifth-grade classroom at Pattengill Elementary was wrenching, but it remained because removing it would send a more dire signal. A classmate of Kristine’s came up to her teacher, Mrs. Bishop, in tears: she’d found Kristine’s shoes in the cloakroom. The agony went on and on.

  According to a 1978 report prepared by the MSP, despite many tips, including several calls from a 14-year-old girl pretending to be Kristine, “nothing of a useful nature” was received by police.20

  Finally, almost three weeks later, on January 21, a mailman, Jerome Wozny of Walled Lake, was cruising his route along Bruce Lane in Franklin Village. At about 11:45 a.m. something caught his eye, “a blue something” sticking out of a snowdrift. At first glance, Wozny thought it was a blanket. But it was Kristine’s blue snow jacket. Then, he saw Kristine’s hand. “It scared the hell out of me,” Wozny told reporters.21

  On January 21, 1977, the body of Kristine Mihelich, the third victim, was removed from a snowbank in the residential community of Franklin Village (photograph by Alan Kamuda, Detroit Free Press).

  Tom Ascroft drove through a blizzard to the police post in Pontiac, summoned to identify his little girl. She was lying on a metal table, gray and partially frozen, a sight Ascroft can never unsee.

  Oakland County Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Sillery found the cause of death was asphyxia by smothering. The body had minimal bruises. According to police reports: “Despite no gross evidence of sexual molestation or penetration in either vagina or anus, Dr. Sillery told a startled group of state crime lab technicians he had found sperm in both vagina and rectum. He could not account for how they had gotten there, offering some unique, if not bizarre, theories about the forcefulness of ejaculation.” Another pathologist and two state police laboratory technicians “were subsequently unable to detect sperm in the tissue slides (Sillery) prepared.” Kristine’s clothes were neat and clean, “including her underwear, although she had been away from home for 19 days.”22

  Sillery’s finding was leaked to the press and the facts got murkier. On January 24, 1977, a Detroit Free Press headline read: “Dead Girl Not Sexually Assaulted.”23 But on February 6, 1977, the Detroit News reported that Kristine had been “sexually assaulted.”24

  Sillery also concluded that Kristine had dressed herself after being naked for a period of time. But her mother, Deborah Ascroft, disagreed. She believed Kris was dressed by someone else, possibly after her death. “Kris would have never tucked her pants in her boots, nor would she have tied her blouse in front,” she said. “The ties went to the back.”25

  By now it was clear: the murders of Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson and Kristine Mihelich showed a pattern that the other three children—Sheila Srock, Cynthia Cadieux and Jane Louise Allan—did not. Stebbins, Robinson and Mihelich had been held for a period of days and died within hours of their bodies being found. They were all younger than the teenage girls. Their bodies and clothes were extraordinarily clean. And the killer(s) placed the bodies in conspicuous places, close to well-travelled roads so they would be easily spotted within a short period of time.

  There was no doubt: a serial child killer and/or killers was on the loose. In newspapers, on TV and the radio, experts warned that if the “maniac” was not apprehended, he will “strike again and again.”

  Michigan State Police First Lieutenant Robert H. Robertson knew he needed to cast a wide net to catch this killer. The day after Kristine’s body was found, Robertson phoned police chiefs from more than a half-dozen jurisdictions in south Oakland County and asked them to send their best detectives to a meeting he was organizing. Then in his mid-forties and raising four sons with his wife, DeEtta, Robert
son had worked his way up the ranks to command the Southeast Criminal Investigation Division of the state police. With his considerable administrative and management abilities, Robertson was also savvy in dealing with an insatiable media. So much so that decades later, when insiders were asked who among police personnel would most likely have spearheaded a possible cover-up of crucial evidence, Chief Robertson was named more than once.

  Robertson died in 2006 at age 72, the same year that marked the 30th anniversary of the unsolved child killings—and the same year the truth would finally escape during a chance conversation between two polygraphers in conference room in Las Vegas. By that time, though, most of the perpetrators could not be held accountable. Like many others who took their secrets to the grave, Robertson could not answer questions about apparently buried evidence, or about the narrative spun by law enforcement when small bodies were found in the snow.

  On a weekday morning in at the end of January 1977, a dozen hand-picked veteran detectives parked their squad cars in the lot at the sprawling municipal office complex in Southfield. Seated in the city council auditorium, Robertson told the detectives they had been reassigned and would now be members of the Oakland County Child Killings Task Force. Robertson appointed MSP Det. Sgt. Joseph Krease to head up day-to-day operations. Krease had been with the state police for 14 years and was by many accounts an excellent investigator. (Sadly, in September 1991, Krease, then 53, went off the rails, killing himself in a jealous rage after murdering his ex-girlfriend in her apartment complex carport.)26

  As a result of that first Task Force meeting, four thousand known sex offenders living in Oakland County were vetted, checked and re-checked. All were cleared. One investigator told a reporter: all I can say for sure was who didn’t kill the little girl.

  In early February, Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson announced the enforcement of news media blackout on all aspects of the investigation. The shroud of secrecy was the source of political infighting within the ranks. While Patterson explained that he did not want to reveal their hand to the murderer, news reporters suspected police were hiding the fact they had nothing.