Crime Junkie - CONSPIRACY: North Fox Island & The Oakland County Child Killer Part 1

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

In the 1970s the affluent neighborhoods around Detroit Michigan were terrorized by a child killer but were the four murders connected to a bigger conspiracy across the state and possible across the nation? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/conspiracy-north-fox-island-the-oakland-county-child-killer-part-1/    

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and for the next couple of weeks, it's just me. Britt is going to be taking an extended vacation from recording. She gets to relax and soak up time with her kids. But I knew if I didn't come back, I would have an army of riding Crime Junkies on my hands. So I put together a story for you, a really big story that's going to take me two weeks to tell. Now, I started with requests from listeners to cover the Oakland County child killer in Michigan. But the more I dug, I realized it was a much bigger conspiracy. And just a warning for those who want to proceed with this episode, it deals almost exclusively with crimes against children. I would caution you before moving forward.

But if you can handle it, and I won't be going into any gruesome detail, I encourage you to listen because the families and law enforcement believe that someone listening could hold the key to break this case wide open. In the late 1970s, a very wealthy and prominent Michigan man named Francis Sheldon bought a small island off the northwest coast of Michigan, a tiny piece of land you would miss on a map if you weren't looking for it. When he originally bought the property, he told people that he was going to renovate it and add vacation homes. But when all was said and done, paperwork signed, the deed handed over, plans changed. Francis, whose friends called him Frank, held off on

the luxury homes for a while. Instead, he wanted to connect with his friend, Gerald. There might be something else they could do with the property, something I think Frank intended to do from the time that he bought it. You see, Gerald was a gym teacher, but not just a gym teacher. He was also a magician, a naturopath, an armchair photographer, and he actually learned his photography skills by helping to take mug shots at the police station where his father was employed as an officer. When he was an adult and married with kids of his own, he took up a job at a pornography store to make some extra money. But he kept it a secret that even after his time there ended, he continued in the business. He had learned a lot about the customer's distributor lists and he knew there

was a demand. He wanted to make films of his own and he began to venture into a seedier side of pornography, an illegal side, pornography involving children. I believe that it was more than just Gerald's client demands that got him into this business. He began assaulting one of his 12-year-old neighbors and Gerald believed that they were in love as someone with the sick mind of a predator might. This boy, along with a handful of others, would be the victims Gerald would use to produce his pictures and his films. He ran this entire operation off of a mailing list that was incredibly secretive and as he got deeper and deeper into this depraved world, he found there were communities for people like him. Before the internet, these people were still finding each other. There was

a publication back in the 70s called Better Life Monthly that was run out of California. It was a publication supporting what they call man-boy love and this is an idea that grown men should be able to sexualize and assault young boys of any age because they say they're in love and it should be accepted. And if you think this is crazy, this is still going on today in 2019 and there's an organization who actually advocates for these pedophiles. But in the 70s, Better Life Monthly was one of the top publications for this group of people and they had classified ads where men from all over the country, maybe even the world could connect, share information and trade materials. Gerald was looking for a business partner. His operation was growing so he placed an ad and

he got a reply from a man he'd screened for four months. A man who had a small isolated island, away from law enforcement and away from prying eyes. And this is how two monsters found each other. Together they decided to open a camp for troubled boys. Only five to six boys each session so they could really focus on their reform, air quotes, reform. They were praised by the community and they even received government subsidies and grants for their work. But what the government was really funding was a child sex and pornography ring. Parents would drop their kids off on the Michigan beach line or sometimes they would be taken away with permission right from the school where Gerald worked. Then Frank would take them away in his private plane to an island where no one could

get them even if they wanted to. Past victims state that these two men along with other conspirators would bring the boys up there and there was no camp, no organized activities, no reform. The boys were able to roam free until it was what they called picture time where they were forced to pose for pictures or be sexually assaulted on film. In addition to the film prominent men were brought into the island and whatever they wanted the boys had to give them. They knew they didn't have a choice. Some of them were allegedly doctors, executives, even politicians, powerful men who all knew about and participated in these crimes against children. Many of the boys who would later talk about the unspeakable crimes perpetrated against them blame themselves for not speaking up. They

hold shame and guilt that should not be their shame or guilt. They were children who were scared, confused and manipulated by older people in power. They were the victims. The attacks continued on these boys until in Port Huron, Michigan where Gerald lived. An eight-year-old victim was so brutally violated that he had to go to the hospital and when he was able to talk to police he identified his attacker as Gerald Richards and his partner Frank. He told them everything about Gerald, about Frank, about the camp and another victim also came forward to name them both as his attacker and police began to uncover not just a pedophile or two but a larger nightmare. By the time they realized the connection to Fox Island and Frank, Frank has cleared out of his

Ann Arbor home and fled the country in his private plane. The other men connected to the camp fled as well. However, it would seem like very little effort was put into tracking them down. Gerald was arrested in July of 1976 and in August there's a report that the prosecutor wanted to wait to arrest Frank until the investigation was complete. So little time goes by then in September there's another report and the prosecutor's office is contacted basically as a request to like put out an arrest warrant for the other accomplices and the prosecutor's office says oh we haven't gone around to it because of workload and now to me I don't know what your workload is I get like all cases are important but a giant prostitution ring pornography ring with children you would think

should take a priority but it's still not when in October someone tries to follow up and see what's going on with the arrests and they're told that it seems that in air the request for arrest records or like a warrant for their arrest had been completely closed and it had to be reopened so no one was following up on it it had never been issued in the first place and it seems like it's just getting buried by the time they got their warrant for Frank and his accomplice they were long gone as well as anything they might have had in their possession any incriminating evidence and more importantly the client list or who might he have been working for. Now I bet there were names on that client list that could buy protection or maybe even buy a stall in the investigation

time for Frank to get away because what reporters and investigators uncovered is that the camp on North Fox Island wasn't the only of its kind and it wasn't a standalone operation it was connected to a network of other camps or houses for wayward boys across the country even a boy scout troop in New Orleans that was busted after accusations of nearly 20 sexual assaults but what they did find just scratched the surface people close to this case believe this was connected to something so much bigger there are groups like this being busted all of the time back then and now just look at the Franklin scandal that happened in the 10 years after this Fox Island bust and it was very similar to this now while the major client list was gone with Frank they were able to track

other men to the camp who were you know air quotes sponsors of the program one was a principal of an elementary school a social services employee university employees and of course all of these men claimed to not know what they were really donating to but that's not how it worked according to Gerald according to him for charitable donations you had full access to the island and the children there like they are only going to take money from men who are in on their scheme now despite having proof that this was a child sex trafficking and pornography ring Gerald was out of prison in less than 10 years Frank was thought to be living somewhere in the Netherlands but never brought back for prosecution and the other men involved were never located and the

story just went away like I had never heard about this and it seems absolutely crazy that I had never heard about this but the bigger papers didn't pick up this story it stayed mostly local mostly covered up possibly because there were people making sure it didn't get out but also because there was another big story breaking closer to Michigan's metropolitan city of Detroit the Oakland County child killings now at the time right when the Fox Island story broke again only in the small local papers down in bustling Detroit in the surrounding neighborhoods they were more focused on the murder of a young child earlier that year on February 15th 1976 a 12-year old boy named Mark Stebbins had been visiting his mom at a local american lesion hall where

she worked as a bartender now she worked just a couple of blocks from their home so after a while mark said he was ready to go home there was a war movie coming on that he did not want to miss he was a little marine in the making and he was obsessed with his toy soldiers and anything on tv that fed into this fantasy of one day serving in the military his mom had no problem with him walking the three blocks to his home without his brother it was daylight and he made the trip many times before an hour or so later mark's brother followed his path and made his own way home but when he arrived mark wasn't there and that's exactly what he told his mom when she phoned to follow up and make sure they were both home safe his mom immediately worried about mark and phones

911 the operator of course is trying to keep her calm it's probably nothing it's a really good area there hasn't been a kidnapping here in like 10 years she says it will be fine but it wasn't fine police eventually do a door-to-door search with no sign of mark like he disappeared into thin air but four days later mark reappeared in a different city than he'd gone missing it but not too far away his little body was found in a snowbank near a short brick wall behind a shopping center a man walking his dog had come across it initially thinking that it was a mannequin now mark was fully clothed in the exact same outfit that he went missing in and evident just from looking at him were rope burns on his neck wrists and ankles but in autopsy revealed something interesting

now it showed that mark had been sodomized and suffocated but it appeared that whoever took him in their own sick way tried to take care of him he was fed and before being placed in the snowbank his body had been bathed cleaned and redressed now when i say this this person was like taking care of him i don't mean this person actually cared for mark i think whoever it was maybe fed mark out of necessity and likely used the bath as a way to remove evidence but this was something police and the public hadn't seen before back in the 70s and i don't think they knew what to make of it back then now almost right away detectives looking into mark's murder get a tip from a local parole officer he says hey take a look at this guy named archibald slone he got in trouble back in pennsylvania

for sodomy and now he's living here in michigan working as a tow truck driver so they go talk to this guy but there isn't a whole lot that he gives them there's nothing really to connect into the scene so they can't arrest him but they do take some tape samples from the inside of his car which literally just means they take pieces of tape strategically dab areas of his car like seats and floorboards to hopefully pick up fibers or hairs or whatever and then they put those samples into evidence and just keep going with their investigation but even though they try and move forward there wasn't a whole lot to move along to before long mark's case went as cold as the snow he was found in then in july of that same year the fox island case broke now truthfully i

don't think anyone on mark's case made any kind of connection if they even knew about it at all because again remember it was really not getting a lot of press especially in the bigger cities but something significant happened after the camp was shut down suddenly the murders of children around the affluent neighborhoods of detroit started to happen more frequently on december 22 of 1976 a 12 year old girl named jill robinson had gotten into a fight with her mother about setting the dining room table or like getting ready for dinner and her mom was just fed up with the constant back talking and bickering and she finally told her daughter if you don't like being here then put on your coat sit outside and come back when you're ready to be here and jill said fine but

she had other plans she wasn't going to sit outside in the cold she was going to ride her bike to her dad's house just a few miles away so she got on her coat packed a little bag and took off on her bike but she never made it to her dad's and wherever she did end up that night i bet she did wish she was back at home helping her mom with dinner her bike was found the next day in town but it would take a few more days before anyone could find jill her sisters left all the presents unopened under their tree when christmas morning came and then went they wanted to wait for jill to open them too the day after christmas though her body was found along interstate 75 in another town the scene was a lot more gruesome than marx jill had actually been shot in the face

with a shotgun while lying face up in the snow now no one can figure out how someone could have shot a little girl on the side of the road like that without being seen but no one saw a thing she had been washed clothed and fed just like marcat but i don't think police were making any kind of connection to mark at the time not only because the killings at least seemed so different at first glance but because there were four law enforcement agencies involved at this point the police were mark went missing the ones where he was found the ones where jill went missing and the ones where she was found all four different places and all four different agencies now additionally from the autopsy findings jill had not been sexually assaulted and in their minds

these killings were different and almost a year apart horrible tragic cases but not the work of one man but it didn't take another year for another kid to go missing on sunday january 2nd 1977 just a week after jill's body was found a 10-year-old girl in a neighboring town named chris moholik had been helping her mom take down the christmas decorations that afternoon and when they finished around three o'clock she asked her mom if she could go down to the 7-eleven store to buy a magazine and her mom wasn't super into this idea she would have to cross a major road to get there and it just didn't feel really safe not for a 10-year-old but chris laid into her mom with the guilt trip the same way i used to try and do to get what i

wanted but mom i helped you all day with the decorations i did you a favor i deserve to go and after some prodding and i'm sure a little lining chris's mom relents fine she says you can go if you promise to cross the street at the light i promise i promise i promise so chris walks out the door money in hand to buy her magazine and after about 30 minutes her mom starts to wonder where she is she expected her to be back by now but you know maybe it's taking a little bit longer and then an hour goes by and she thinks well maybe her dad saw her and picked her up like i would have thought he would have called but maybe not who knows she'll be home soon but then more time passes but after that first hour time begins to pass even more slowly by hour

three she couldn't take it anymore she called police to report her daughter missing and she was kind of shocked at the response they said that they were going to put her daughter's information on the news that very night and you know she wanted the police to care she wanted the police to look for but the news like that seemed a little premature i mean surely this is all a misunderstanding right but when chris wasn't home the next day she knew it was more than that police learned that chris did make it to the 7-11 the clerk remembered selling her the magazine she left alone and someone who knew her even said they remembered seeing her walking back in that direction of home but something happened before she could get there chris's family would have the longest wait 19

days of agony and questioning 19 days of imagining the absolute worst before a mailman spotted something off the road it was young chris lying dead partially covered in snow now when law enforcement officers and a minister came knocking on chris's home door her mother knew right away that it was the worst possible news when they did her autopsy it revealed that she'd been suffocated but not sexually assaulted she died less than 24 hours after being discovered and she'd been fed and washed just like the other kids and at this point now if we're counting this is six law enforcement agencies involved but despite any confusion they can all see the pattern and they come together to form a task force that included all of the involved agencies and even some who

didn't have a victim in the case but wanted to make sure that whoever was doing this never made it to their city the task force wasn't the only one who are piecing this together the public was taking notice the media was taking notice and there was almost a full-blown hysteria that there was a serial killer now on the loose the task force has a tip line that was publicized with many of the news reports and tips start coming in left and right everyone is suspecting people in their lives people that they know but there is one tip that stands out a man named greg green was a pedophile who'd been arrested for assaulting a boy in flint michigan and he said he never worked alone he often had a partner and his partner had been responsible for killing the first victim

mark his partner's name was chris bush not a squeaky clean guy when they check chris out in his house they find a suitcase full of magazine cutouts all pictures of young children eight millimeter film reels depicting child pornography along with ropes and shotguns both things suspected of being used in the different cases when police questioned chris he admits to being obsessed with young children and being a pedophile he even admits to picking up victims in and around the same areas that these kids went missing he would work with green to do this and the two used to fantasize about like the perfect way to do this where they would each work different shifts one day one night so somebody was always with their victim but he says that they didn't kill anyone

police asked him and green to each take a polygraph now back in a time before dna the polygraph was heavily relied upon as an investigative tool like the end all be all if someone passed they'd move on if they didn't maybe there was more there and they had to keep investigating and we all know now that polygraphs can be deceptive in both ways sometimes guilty men pass and sometimes innocent men don't but it was what it was back then so they give the two guys both exams and they're told by the person who administered the exam and read the results that both men passed so without any more investigation into either men they're marked as cleared now they're cleared for the murders but not these other charges they had both been arrested for

multiple counts of child molestation and while greg green was unable to post bail and was eventually sentenced to life in prison chris came from a very wealthy and prominent family in town his dad was like really high up in gm which is kind of a big deal in detroit and a little bit runs the city so chris was able to post bail and somehow even though they were accused and charged with the exact same thing chris gets off with parole and just a fine but a week after chris gets paroled another young child in the area goes missing at about 8 30 p.m on march 16th 1997 11 year old tim king borrowed 30 cents from his older sister to go buy some candy at a local drug store he hopped on his skateboard made it to the store and left through the rear entrance never to be seen again

when his parents reported him missing that very night the entire city was in a panic they knew what was happening around town and everyone knew that they had a limited amount of time to find tim before he ended up on the side of the road like the other kids before him the search was massive for tim people on foot helicopters swarming overhead the state police are called in to coordinate the now seven law enforcement agencies that have a stake in this case and there is a lead that pops up in the search for tim that would later become almost synonymous with this case someone said they saw tim with a man who had sideburns who was driving a blue gremlin car and they said he was like talking to them around the store that he had went to that like drug store

and a sketch in the picture of the car is almost immediately posted to flyers and posted up all over town thousands and thousands of flyers but decades later seemingly the only thing people from all sides can agree on is that the blue gremlin was a red herring and meant absolutely nothing in this case at all all of the other physical evidence they had from the scene which was few and far between pointed to another car entirely now tim's parents tried to talk to him through the media they told him to stay strong they were looking for him and when they did finally find him they'd bring him home and serve him his favorite meal Kentucky fried chicken his family begged whoever had him to treat him like he was their own kid or brother be good to him and please

let him come home but that wouldn't happen on march 22nd police announced that they were going to be stopping cars in Oakland County and neighboring Wayne County to try and find him but just hours before that was scheduled at about 10 30 p.m tim's body was discovered in Wayne County just like mark he'd been sexually assaulted with an object before his death and then was suffocated and just like the others he had been cleaned and his clothes were even freshly washed and pressed it looked like whoever had had him also might have been watching the news because in tim's stomach they found fried chicken that had been fed to him shortly before his death as the task force tried to investigate they're now fourth case they were hitting wall after wall and they were pretty

sure that all the cases were connected but there were differences Jill had been shot after all and neither of the girls were sexually assaulted but there were more similarities than dissimilarities the feeding and the washing and none of them seemed to fight back one detective theorized that perhaps the killer would bathe them luring them into a sense that you know it was calm they were getting cleaned up to go home and then when they got out of the bath that's when he would strangle them from behind so that they never saw it coming and as for Jill he wonders if maybe she wasn't smothered or strangled too according to him sometimes the lung can hold in air after someone is strangled or suffocated and he thinks maybe when the perpetrator was moving the body she

expelled some air making like a moaning noise and this scared him into thinking that maybe she was alive and he had to shoot her on scene which is why he thinks it was possibly so different now this was only a theory though and they could theorize themselves to death going in circles and circles back and forth nothing was really moving forward though but then something happened that changed the trajectory of the task force in november of 1978 chris bush was found deceased in his home now within 24 hours his case was ruled a suicide but those who look at his death critically have a hard time figuring out exactly how authorities came to that conclusion there was one singular bullet hole between his eyes and a shotgun laying next to him now most statistics would

say if someone were to use a shotgun on themselves they tend to put the barrel either in their mouth or under their chin but for the sake of argument let's say he did put it to his forehead he would have probably needed to steady the gun between his knees but he was tucked tightly under a blanket and though he only had one gunshot wound there were four casings found in his bedroom and no blood spatter like do you hear me no blood spatter from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and if that weren't enough the toxicology report said that his blood alcohol level was 0.41 which is off the chart and nobody can really even understand how he would have been functioning at that point and there's more beyond that he had no gunshot residue on his hands so you tell me

does that sound like a suicide in his house hanging above his bed like where you'd probably imagine you'd see blood in the place of blood spatter police find a pencil drawing of a young boy wearing a hood and screaming out in pain it's a horrifying image that nobody can explain except maybe the Steppen's family they think the picture looks a lot like their murdered son and brother mark in addition to the drawing they also find ropes in his closet the same kind of ropes that they think at least three of the four kids would have been tied up with now even though their names in the file were marked cleared cleared cleared everywhere cleared someone called out the oakland county child killer task force for this scene so clearly despite official documents there was still

some suspicion surrounding chris bush so they take in the scene and that's when 24 hours later an official report comes out about a bang by the boom suicide then within 25 days the oakland county child killer task force is completely disbanded you guys if brit were here i know this is what she would say wait what because this is crazy a guy who you say is cleared and isn't a suspect air quote takes his own life and you no longer need your task force like what am i missing i mean clearly there had to be suspicion of involvement but why not go public because of who his dad was like i pray to god the lives of four little kids and likely many more were worth more than protecting a pedophile son of a rich man but even more concerning to me is i don't think this was a

suicide it doesn't fit if this was murder then who killed chris who was worried about him talking because chris was coming up against some new charges and maybe he was willing to make a deal and if he was what would he have said you see chris's involvement might have been pushed under the rug though no one will ever say it out loud maybe the police considered it unofficially solved a horrible guy off the streets i mean after all the killings did stop after he died but this isn't a straight line and this wasn't the end of the story chris's name would keep coming up and it would turn out that this was just one string in a very complicated web of secrets and lies a web i will have to unravel next week

if this episode hits close to home and you are someone you know we're victims of assault there are resources to help check out rain.org that's r a i n n dot o r g or call 800 565 hope and if you can't wait a week you can hear part two right now by joining our fan club just go to crimejunkiepodcast.com and click the fan club tab if you need a true crime fix before next monday make sure you're following us on social at crime junkie pod on twitter and at crime junkie podcast on instagram and i'll be back next week with your brand new episode and part two of this crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve