Pod Insights Criminology The Oakland County Child Killer Part 1 About this episode The Oakland County child killer was responsible for the murders of at least 4 children in Oakland County, MI, in 1976 and 1977. Technically, we don't know whether it's a single killer or multiple killers. What we do know is that these murders shocked that area of Michigan and forever changed the lives of the people there, not just the families of the victims, but the entire community. Join Mike and Morf for the first part of a discussion on the Oakland County child killer. The perpetrator selected both male and female victims and dumped their bodies where they would easily be found. It also seems as though the perpetrator kept the victims for some time, and in some cases even washed their clothes and redressed them. The details of this case have grabbed people's attention for fifty years. You can help support the show through Patreon. We'd love to connect with listeners on social media. We are available on the following platforms: Facebook - Facebook Discussion group - Instagram - Threads - X Formerly Twitter - Blue Sky - Twitch - Tik Tok Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised.
0:37 Speaker 01 Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 400 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson.
0:43 Speaker 02 And this is Mike Morford.
0:44 Speaker 01 Mr. Morford, how you doing this week, buddy?
0:47 Speaker 02 I'm doing pretty good. I'm pretty excited. This is our 400th episode, and it's just such a monumental number that, you know, I was very excited to do this one.
0:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a big milestone. If you think back about how we started, how long it's been, I mean, time flies, there's no doubt about that, but it's been a heck of a journey. I mean, I've had fun doing this with you.
1:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, same. And, you know, if we're doing roughly 50 episodes a year, that's like eight years that we've been doing this. And I don't know, I'm excited about the next eight years.
1:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's kind of funny because I had someone leave a voicemail on true crime all the time, and they were saying, hey, started listening to you as a freshman in high school, and then they were just graduating from college. So that kind of, you know, put it into perspective. And I'm sure that there are people like that with criminology as well, because we have been doing it for eight plus years.
1:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, that kind of makes you feel old when someone says something like that.
1:52 Speaker 01 It does. Hey, let's go ahead and give our Patreon shout outs. We had Davis and Jamie Basil jump out at our highest level. So that's great new support.
2:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, thank you both so much. That really helps us out. And thanks to everyone else that helps the show out. For anyone else that would like to head over to patreon.com/criminology to get started.
2:12 Speaker 01 All right, so let's jump into this 400th episode and for 400, we wanted to cover a really big case, one that we wanted to do for a long time. And we figured episode 400 would be perfect for the first part of a two-part episode on a really big case. We're covering the Oakland County child killer. The Oakland County child killer was responsible for the murders of at least four children in Oakland County, Michigan between 1976 and 1977. Now, technically, we don't know if it's a single killer or more than one. What we do know is
2:52 Speaker 01 that these murders shocked that area of Michigan and forever changed the lives of the people there. And not just the families of the victims, but the entire community. Everyone made sure their doors were locked and parents didn't let their kids out of the house alone for fear that they might be the next victim. It was a time of lost innocence and a breakdown of trust. While there were a few good leads and suspects, here we are almost 50 years later and the case has not been solved.
3:24 Speaker 02 Oakland County is in the southeast portion of the state of Michigan. While the city of Detroit is in neighboring Wayne County, Oakland County is still very populated and it's part of the Detroit metro area. However, the suburbs felt much safer than the city and many families in the 1970s moved from Detroit to other towns nearby, many of them in Oakland County. During the 1975 to 1976 period, there were just under a million residents that called the county home. This was a middle-class neighborhood. And while there was some crime, it didn't reach to the level of what you would expect to see in bigger cities like Detroit. But as the calendar changed to 1976, a shocking murder would begin a full-fledged panic in Oakland County.
4:06 Speaker 01 On January 1st, 1976, the body of 16-year-old Judy Farrah was found at Lola Valley Park in Redford Township, Michigan. She was fully clothed and had been beaten and strangled. Judy was last seen sometime between midnight and 3:00 a.m. at the home where she was babysitting. It was believed that someone had forced her out of the home. The news was shocking to those that heard it, but it seemed like an isolated incident at the time. Police early on became interested in a 19-year-old man named Gary Purwinkler, and he became the prime suspect in her murder. Not due to an eyewitness seeing him with Judy or any
4:49 Speaker 01 physical evidence linking him to the crime, but mainly because he had been acting erratically and left home with a gun and stole his father's car the night before Judy's body was found. Unfortunately, Gary Purwinkler dropped from sight, and police wanted to find him.
5:08 Speaker 02 At around 8:00 p.m. on January 15th, 1976, 16-year-old Cynthia Kadu began walking to her Roseville home from her friend's house. It was only about a 10-minute walk, but she never made it home. Unfortunately, it wasn't immediately clear to anyone that she was actually missing. Her parents thought she would be spending the night at her friend's house, and her friend knew she had headed home. Just after 1:00 in the morning on the 16th, her body was found on the side of Franklin Road in Bloomfield Township, about 26 miles away from her home. She was nude and had been bludgeoned to death with a blunt object. Her killer or killers had sexually assaulted and sodomized her. News of a second young person being murdered within two weeks was hard to avoid. It's unknown how Cynthia's
5:53 Speaker 02 killer got her into a vehicle, but it's possible that it may have been by force, because according to friends of Cynthia's, she preferred to walk over riding in a car. Her friend Rose had offered Cynthia a ride home on the night she was killed, but she refused.
6:07 Speaker 01 The day after Cynthia Kado's body was discovered, there was a terrifying crime on Villa Street in Birmingham, Michigan. At around 8:00 PM, a string of home invasion robberies began. Each one was the same. The intruder would break in, tie up anyone inside the home, steal valuables, and then leave. However, in one of the homes, 14-year-old Sheila Srock was babysitting. For whatever reason, the intruder sexually assaulted her, sodomized her, and used a 38 caliber weapon to shoot her in the stomach, five times killing her. By this point, Oakland County residents had to be asking themselves, what's going on here?
6:51 Speaker 01 Within the span of just a couple of weeks, three young people had been murdered in the county. Residents hoped that Sheila's murder would be the last, and the killer or killers of the three young people would quickly be off the street. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning.
7:09 Speaker 02 On Sunday, February 15th, 1976, exactly a month after Cynthia Kado's murder, 12-year-old Mark Stebbins was with his mom Ruth and his older brother Michael at the local American Legion Hall in Ferndale. Ruth worked there as a bartender, and Mark and Michael were there that day to watch a pool tournament. Just after 1:00 PM, Mark left because he wanted to go home and watch a war movie on TV because he was a war history buff. But Michael wasn't ready to go, so Mark headed out on his own to walk the mile or so back to his house. He'd never make it home. Mark was reported missing around 11:00 PM. Investigators at the time believed that he probably ran away and would show back up soon. For whatever reason, the family was told that if he was still missing in 24 hours,
7:54 Speaker 02 they could begin an investigation. But Mark's family knew that Mark would never run away, but they were helpless and waited anxiously for any news.
8:02 Speaker 01 Mark was missing for four long days. Just before noon on February 19th, his body was found lying up against a brick wall separating the parking lot of an office building and the New Orleans Mall in Southfield, Michigan, just four miles from where he was last seen. The man who worked in the building was walking to a shop in the mall when he thought he saw a mannequin. As he got closer, he could see that this was no mannequin. It was the body of a young boy. Mark was on his back with his hands folded over his chest. He was wearing the same clothes he was wearing four days earlier when he disappeared, but his belt was on the wrong
8:45 Speaker 01 notch. The outer clothes were clean, but his underwear had obviously been worn for multiple days.
8:52 Speaker 02 A closer examination of Mark's body revealed some troubling details. There were discolorations on his wrists and ankles that indicated he'd been tied up at some point after his abduction. There were also rope burns on his neck. According to Oakland County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas J. Patinga, Mark had been suffocated to death. It appeared that someone had put their hand over Mark's mouth and pinched his nose closed with their other hand. There were two small cuts or contusions on the back of his head that could have come from the latch of a trunk or the barrel of a shotgun, among other things. The cuts had bled onto the hood of his jacket. It was determined that Mark's body had been left in the snow just hours before he was found. At 9:30 a.m., about
9:35 Speaker 02 two hours before he was found, someone had walked their dog along the edge of the parking lot and hadn't seen anything, and their dog hadn't acted weird or tried to pull toward that direction either. Someone had dumped his body near businesses in broad daylight.
9:48 Speaker 01 So in the span of just six weeks, four young people had been murdered in Oakland County, but investigators weren't sure if they were looking for one person or more than one, or if the cases were even connected at all. Mark was a 12-year-old boy and had been smothered. The other three victims were all teenage girls. One of them was strangled, another bludgeoned, And one of them was shot to death in a home invasion. While police were on high alert and stepped up patrols in the area, residents in the community kept a watchful eye. But weeks and then months went by with no other young people being murdered.
10:31 Speaker 01 Now Oakland County morph is not a small county. I mean, you mentioned it, there was like a million people in this county, right? But still, four young people being murdered in the span of, you know, six weeks or so, you could see how that would really put the area on edge, right? Put the residents in the area on edge. But one of the things that, you know, I really want to talk about is the timeframe here. We're talking about 1976. So that would have been our bicentennial year. You and I would not have been that old, but we were both alive.
11:14 Speaker 01 It was a much different time. You know, people are not getting this news through text, through social media, through feeds. Right? This is probably all coming from most likely the news, the five o'clock news, the six o'clock news, the 10 o'clock news, whatever it was. And then some word of mouth. I just, I think today, because we have such access to information, it does a couple of things. First of all, we find out a lot of stuff very quickly. But the other thing is, I think we also get more bad information, maybe,
12:00 Speaker 01 than people did back then. And I don't mean bad as in horrible things. I mean, just the information is not correct.
12:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I imagine this was a big water cooler topic, too. People probably are talking about these murders around, you know, their local places that they hang out, maybe in the checkout, at the store, at work. And I imagine that there was probably some level of panic starting to set in, you know, having the knowledge that these different kids were murdered in these various circumstances. And I think everyone was worried, especially if they had kids, because you know, there was someone targeting kids in that, in that area.
12:42 Speaker 01 Well, and we've talked about it before, right? I think in the seventies, by and large, kids had a little bit more freedom. I know we did in the, in the eighties for sure. I know for myself personally, I had much more freedom to ride my bike all over town. Much more freedom than I gave my kids. There's just no doubt about that.
13:06 Speaker 02 And that's the same with me. And it's sort of ironic because you had that freedom, but back then it was probably easier to, you know, if you're going to abduct or harm a child, it would be easier back then. And now it seems like people are more protective. They don't let them out as much, but now there's more safeguards. You have cell phones. You have surveillance cameras on every other person's house. So it seems like it would be safer now to let some, a child out versus back then. But it seems like it's backwards.
13:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, but we also didn't have, you know, podcasts and true crime documentaries and things back then that, you know, not only inform people, but you know, to a certain degree can also scare people sometimes. And at the very least make them, you know, want to safeguard, maybe a little bit more. You know, one thing that jumped out at me about the timing was that Mark left the American Legion because he wanted to go home and watch a movie. I mean, think about that. This movie was on, he knew it was on, he knew what time it was on.
14:19 Speaker 01 And if he didn't get home to watch it, he wouldn't see it because there was no streaming and there was no way to record it. I mean, I'm sure that's shocking to many people, to younger people. But I think the other thing that's important to touch on is there are pretty distinct differences, you know, in these murders. Right? You have three teenage girls. You have a young boy. The method of murder appears to be different in many of them. Some were sexually assaulted, some were not. And when you think about trying to tie the murders together, I can understand why there would
15:03 Speaker 01 be a lot of questions. You know, are these one-off crimes? Or is there one person or a group of people out committing these crimes?
15:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. And, you know, I say it all the time, but it, you know, it comes back to me, that same question. What's more frightening? Is there one maniac going around that county killing all these children? Or is there more than one person? Both are very frightening in their own rights. And I think for police investigations, unless they can definitively link these to each other, they've got to go in several different directions. So it probably didn't help them in the investigative process.
15:44 Speaker 01 Eventually, a year passed. On April 7th, 1976, the body of Gary Previnkler, who was a suspect in the murder of 16-year-old Judy Pharaoh, was found. He had taken his own life by shooting himself in the head. Ballistics determined that the gun found next to him was a match to a casing that was found in the home Judy was babysitting in when she was abducted. For police, this was enough for them to close Judy's case. They believed that Gary Previnkler had killed her and had no reason to suspect him in the other three murders. News of Judy's case being solved was definitely welcome in the
16:27 Speaker 01 community, but people were also still uneasy because there were three other murders still unsolved. They hoped that there wouldn't be another murder. But sadly, that was not to be.
16:40 Speaker 02 On Wednesday, December 22, 1976, 12-year-old Jill Robinson left her home in Royal Oak. She and her mom Carol had been arguing, and she was already in trouble for forging some kind of note at school. And when her mom asked her to make biscuits for dinner, she refused. This was the final straw in the argument. Carol told her that if she didn't want to be part of the family, then she could leave. Tensions were already high in the home. Jill's parents had recently divorced, and she was still adjusting. Jill put some of her belongings in a backpack, and at around 5:30 PM, she headed out on her bicycle, reportedly planning to ride her bike to her dad's house. She'd never return. Some reports say that her dad's house was six miles away, while others say it was just one. Either way, she
17:25 Speaker 02 never arrived, and her dad reported her missing to police at 11:30 PM that night. Police did find a witness who saw a grown-up bike matching Jill's description, riding in the direction of her father's house. Unfortunately, as we've seen all too often, police treated Jill as a runaway. To them, it was a clear case of a teen girl mad at her mom and storming out of the house. They thought she'd come home, but she never would.
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19:09 Speaker 01 Jill's purple bike was located behind Tiny Tim's Hobby Shop on December 23rd, about four blocks away from her mother's home, but there was no sign of Jill. A family friend came forward and said they had actually seen Jill at Tiny Tim's after she left home on the 22nd, but we don't know if she left her bike there or if it was moved there sometime later. Two witnesses claimed to have seen her the next morning between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. at Donut Depot on Maple Avenue. If this was Jill that they saw that morning, we don't know where she stayed overnight. There's also a possibility that this is just a case of mistaken identity.
19:52 Speaker 01 Since police now had Jill's bike and possible sightings of her in the area. They steered away from the runaway angle and began looking for her.
20:03 Speaker 02 Three days after she left home, Jill's body was found in Troy. A driver spotted something red in the snow on the side of Interstate 75 and stopped to investigate. It was Jill's body. She had been shot in the face at close range. Investigators determined that the weapon used was a 12 gauge shotgun. There was no sign of sexual assault. In fact, she was found fully clothed and was even still wearing her backpack she was last seen carrying. Investigators believe that Jill could have been suffocated before her killer put her on the side of the road. Especially because there was only one set of footprints leading to the area where she was found. It's former Birmingham Police Department Detective Jack Cowfleisch's theory that her backpack, which she was lying on top of, expelled air from her lungs
20:48 Speaker 02 and made it sound like she was still alive and that this made the suspect panic and shoot her. This was a unique circumstance to Jill and it didn't happen in the other cases. But again, this was just one detective's theory. We don't know what really happened to Jill along that road. Because Jill's death was so different from the other victims and because it had been so long between her murder and Mark's stabbings, Jill's case wasn't immediately connected to the others.
21:13 Speaker 01 But no doubt, Morph, I mean, these murders that we've talked about so far, very brutal. I mean, we're talking about young people and, you know, in the case of Jill being shot in the face with a shotgun. Now, I get it. They theorize that maybe she was suffocated first and then the killer thought she was still alive and then shot her. But no matter how it went down, I mean, these are really brutal murders to young people. But, you know, the one thing that jumps out at me, and it always does, was that, you know, during this timeframe, as we've seen in
21:54 Speaker 01 many cases, right, authorities initially thought about a lot of these young people that, well, they just ran away. They went somewhere to cool off. They'll be back. We know that, you know, cases like this, reported missing teens or younger people, they were treated so much differently in the seventies than they would be treated today.
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, it seems, you know, if you're a parent in the seventies and your child didn't come home one day, it seems like the reflex knee jerk answer is, oh, they just ran away and they'll be back. And we now now know that that first time period when they're missing is the most crucial when you can do something. And I'm, I'm glad to see that nowadays, they've really, you know, come to a point where they realize that time is crucial and they don't usually treat kids as runaways unless there's something specific that that leaves them to believe that.
22:59 Speaker 01 Well, and to me, it's kind of hard to imagine. I mean, you get it with an adult, right? An adult has the right to go missing, to go off, not missing, but, you know, to go off and not return people's calls or not check in, you know, 14, 15, 16 year old kids don't have that. I mean, does it happen? Yeah, sure. Obviously, it does. But to just automatically assume in many, many cases that that's what happened. I mean, I think it's shocking, I'm sure, to people who didn't live through it. But I also think that
23:39 Speaker 01 You know, how many people, young people who were later found dead, maybe could have been found alive if police had taken a different direction? The other thing that jumped out to me was, you know, obviously there was quite a bit of time that had passed, right? We said it, it was about a year. So all of that kind of panic and hunkering down and maybe not letting your kids go out so much, did parents kind of back off on that? Because so much time had passed and then they, did they start to loosen up a little bit again?
24:23 Speaker 01 That might be the reason why on Sunday, January 2nd, 1977, Christine Mahalik's mother, Deborah, let her walk to the 7-Eleven store in the town of Berkeley by herself, even though she was just 10 years old. The store was closed and it was still daytime. The 7-Eleven was across from Hartfield's Bowling Out where Deborah worked. She had talked with Christine previously about not talking to strangers, so she felt safe in letting Christine go out. Sadly, Christine would never come back. When Christine didn't return home within a reasonable amount of time, Deborah became worried and called police.
25:05 Speaker 01 Thankfully, police immediately responded and didn't treat Christine as a runaway. They spoke to the cashier at the 7-Eleven who confirmed that a teenager matching Christine's description had come in and purchased a magazine, a soda, and a candy bar. People who knew Christine saw her walking east away from the 7-Eleven with a paper bag. So it's thought that she made it to the 7-Eleven and had even been able to finish up her shopping and that she was heading home as instructed the last time she was seen.
25:43 Speaker 02 For 19 long days, Christine's family awaited any news. Just before noon on January 21st, Christine's body was found in a ditch on the side of the road off of Bruce Lane, a dead end street in Franklin Village. This time, a mailman driving his route saw something blue in the snow and decided to investigate. He contacted the police when he realized he could see a hand. Christine was lying on her back with her knees bent up. Her body had frozen in this position. Just like in the case of Jill Robinson. Christine was found fully clothed and there were no signs of sexual assault. She'd been smothered no more than 24 hours before her body was spotted in the snow. This meant that Christine had been alive somewhere for most of the time that she was missing.
26:27 Speaker 02 There were no signs of dehydration or malnutrition, which seemed to indicate that she had been given food and water. It appeared that someone else had redressed her in the clothes that she was wearing when she was last seen. Her pants were tucked into her boots, which is something she didn't normally do. And the tie on her shirt was tied in the front instead of in the back. Her clothing was all clean. It was Dr. Siller's opinion that either someone had cleaned her clothing or she had been held without her clothing the whole time.
26:54 Speaker 01 And more if we've talked about the differences in some of these murders. But one of the similarities that's really jumping out to me, and I think does to a lot of people, is that many of the victims were found fully clothed with no signs of sexual assault. But it seemed as though their clothing had been removed at some point. And, and sometimes even cleaned. And then they had been redressed. And for me, that just, you know, that's an element that is pretty strange. Or at the very least noteworthy.
27:36 Speaker 01 And when you're talking about the facts of, of a case. Okay, what does that mean? Why would someone, you know, go to that link? And what does it say about the perpetrator? If this is one perpetrator?
27:52 Speaker 02 This is where you can really get into somebody's thought process that does this kind of stuff. On one hand, they cold bloodedly kill a child and discard them. But then we also see it seems they've taken care to dress them. They were clean. There was indications that they were fed and given water. So it's, it's almost like a conflict of, of things that we see here. And, and you know, I'd love to hear the thoughts of a profiler about this kind of person. You know, what's going on in their opinion in this person's mind that they can sort of? Do all of these things which sort of conflict with each other?
28:35 Speaker 01 So by now investigators were noticing several similarities in some of the murders. Specifically, the murders of Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, and now Christine. They weren't identical, but they were close enough that they began to investigate the cases as being connected. Each child had been taken from a different city than they were left in. They seemed to have been held alive for multiple days. But also, like we just talked about, right, somewhat cared for during their captivity. There was evidence that the victims clothing and possibly the victims themselves had been washed or cleaned. Despite the fact that only Jill had been shot.
29:20 Speaker 01 Investigators believed that she could have been smothered or suffocated like Christine and Mark had been. And could have already been dead when she was shot. There was no attempt to hide any of the bodies. They were all dumped on the side of the road in plain view. There was a heightened level of carbon monoxide in Christine's blood. According to Dr. Cilery, but it didn't contribute to her death in any way. It was just an unexpected result because she was a child who didn't smoke cigarettes. But this may provide a clue about how she and possibly the other three children were transported.
30:01 Speaker 01 And may even link her to the death of a teenager named Jane Louise Allen.
30:07 Speaker 02 14 year old Jane Allen left her home in Royal Oak, Michigan shortly after noon on August 7, 1976. She and her mom had argued, so Jane decided to go to her boyfriend's house. He lived in Auburn Heights, which was about 17 miles away. So she had a hitchhike. She made it to his place, but he got upset with her for hitchhiking because it wasn't safe. Sometime after this, she left his house. She was last seen trying to catch a ride on University Drive near Interstate 75 in Pontiac. Four days later, Jane's body was found in the Great Miami River in Miami's Burg, Ohio. She was still fully clothed and her hands were bound behind her back with strips of a torn up T-shirt.
30:48 Speaker 02 The medical examiner determined that Jane had died from carbon monoxide poisoning before she was thrown into the river. They were unable to determine whether or not she had been sexually assaulted due to decomposition and the water.
31:00 Speaker 01 And more if we often hear from people about how, you know, cases hit close to home and how that makes the case, you know, a little bit more harrowing than it already is because they're familiar with the town or what happened in their town. You know, this case I have a lot of connections to. First of all, I did live in the Detroit area, specifically in Oakland County. Now, it was in the 90s, the late 90s, but all these areas that we're talking about,
31:39 Speaker 01 I'm very familiar with, and I have lived for the last 25 years in Miami'sburg, Ohio. And Miami'sburg is not a big place, let me tell you. So I live maybe a mile or two from the great Miami River. So that is just, uh, I mean, it's, it is strange when you hear these cases or you research them and you find out things like this.
32:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that really just goes to show that, you know, some people think this can't happen here. It happened someplace else. I think this kind of thing that you're talking about proves that's not the case all the time.
32:22 Speaker 01 Now, the one thing that, that I should point out is that both Miami'sburg, Ohio, and these, most of the towns in Michigan that we're talking about, they are very close to Interstate 75. I live right off of Interstate 75. So that is a, obviously a big highway that many people travel. Still strange though. Investigators believe that Jane may have died in the trunk of a car. This opens up the possibility that her death was accidental. If she hadn't succumbed to the fumes in the trunk, it's possible that her body would have been found fully clothed
33:05 Speaker 01 on the side of the road in the snow after being suffocated with no fabric. Tying her hands, it's possible that throwing her into the river was just part of the suspect panicking and getting rid of her body and potential evidence. To be clear, authorities don't officially believe that Jane is a victim of the Oakland County child killer. And as we'll discuss a bit later, there was no real shortage of criminals operating in the area.
33:34 Speaker 02 Behind the scenes, it was becoming clear to the authorities that they had a serial killer on the loose and they knew it was in the public's best interest to share that news. Authorities finally went public with their belief that there was a serial killer in the area. The serial killer wasn't yet a term. They specified that a suspect was targeting young children in the county. Residents were warned to keep a close eye on their children and to use caution when letting them out of their homes. And as a result, people started to be more alert. People living in the area channeled their anxiety into action and started putting cutouts of a hand in their window to show that their home was a safe place for any child who needed help. The idea was that if someone was, say, trying to get a child into their car, that the child
34:16 Speaker 02 could run to the door and knock instead of trying to make it home with a creep following them. In theory, someone trying to watch out for the children in between point A and point B could be the difference between an easy target and a child that made it home safe.
34:31 Speaker 01 Children were somewhat trusting of these houses and did run to them in different instances when they felt in danger, but it was always in the back of their mind. What if this is the killer's house? What if this is a trap? Sales of bumper stickers that read, don't go with strangers skyrocketed. There were even radio jingles about how children could stay safe. All of this was being done to try and keep Oakland County children safe. But unfortunately, these efforts would not prevent another murder. And I actually had that same exact thought. I get that people are going to try to do things because, hey, first of all, they want to help. They're scared.
35:17 Speaker 01 They want to keep these kids safe. So this idea of putting a hand up to designate a quote unquote, safe place, I get it. I also understand that the person, if it's one person committing these crimes, could very easily do the same thing. Yeah. Could children have that in the back of their mind? Yeah, they should.
35:42 Speaker 02 And especially if that killer wants to blend in and make it look like they're, you know, on board and they're part of the community trying to fight back against this killer. And meanwhile, they're, they're the one doing it. That's, that's a frightening thought.
35:56 Speaker 01 But the other thing you see is what we see all the time, right? In cases like this. Okay, you got bumper stickers being sold, radio jingles. The other thing I'm sure happened was gun sales probably rose. That, that's something that happens quite a bit as well.
36:17 Speaker 02 On Wednesday, March 16th, 1977, 11-year-old Timothy King rode his skateboard to Hunter Maple Pharmacy, which wasn't far from his home in Birmingham. He did this often since it was so close. It was a little after 8:00 PM when he borrowed 30 cents from his big sister and headed to the pharmacy. He was supposed to buy some candy and then go straight home, but he never made it back that evening. It was only about three blocks away and he was on a skateboard. It should have been a pretty quick trip, so quick that his sister felt okay leaving the home's front door unlocked and slightly open for him because she was leaving and their parents and two brothers weren't home. Tim didn't want to get stuck outside of the door locked. Around 9:00 PM, when their parents got back home, the door
37:01 Speaker 02 was still ajar and Tim wasn't there. They immediately called police, who spoke with the cashier at the pharmacy, and this cashier told them that they saw Tim buying candy at about 8:30 before he left out the back door of the pharmacy.
37:14 Speaker 01 For the next week, there was no sign of Tim. Then one week later, his body was found just over the border of Oakland and Wayne Counties on Gil Road in Livonia, Michigan. He was wearing the same clothes that he disappeared in. It was just before midnight when he was found. His red jacket had caught the light from the headlights of a passing car. His skateboard was in the same roadside ditch, just a few feet from his body. Tim had been killed about six hours earlier. Responders actually performed CPR, thinking he could be saved because his body was still warm. There are reports that it looked like he had been placed in the ditch on the side
37:58 Speaker 01 of the road gently. He was laying sort of on his back and also sort of on his side. Once again, it appeared that a victim had been kept alive someplace for an extended period of time before being cleaned and dumped.
38:15 Speaker 02 We mentioned that it looked like someone had taken time to carefully lay Tim's body where it was found and had likely fed him and cared for him in some capacity while he was in captivity. But make no mistake, the person or persons that had taken Tim had tortured and brutalized him. Tim had been sodomized multiple times during his captivity. There were teeth marks on his tongue. There were scrapes in and around his mouth. His cause of death was suffocation, just like in the case of Mark Stebbins. He had been hit on the head after death, possibly when he was tossed into the ditch. There were marks on his wrists and ankles indicating he had been bound. There was no doubt about it in the minds of police. Timothy King was the latest and officially the fourth victim in a string
38:58 Speaker 02 of murders committed by who had now come to be known as the Oakland County Child Killer. But unlike in the first three murders, police had a strong lead in Tim's case.
39:08 Speaker 01 A witness had seen a young boy, she believed to be Tim King, talking to a man in the pharmacy's parking lot. She was able to give a description of the man and of the car that they were standing near. The man was white, somewhere between 25 and 35 years old, and he had dark shaggy hair with thick long sideburns and a dark complexion. The car was a blue 70s model AMC Gremlin with a white stripe down the side and tires with a white sidewall. Investigators began to question people in Oakland County who had a Gremlin registered in their name. And while that lead sounded very specific, the amount of men who matched
39:52 Speaker 01 the description and/or had a similar car was no small number. Pretty much everyone in the area became suspicious of every gremlin they saw. And I imagine more if there was a fair number of gremlins, right? In the, in the late seventies, not a particularly good looking car or even well performing car. I don't believe, but I think they were cheap. They were also probably pretty good on gas. And in the late seventies, you know, gas was a big issue.
40:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that was considered the economy car, you know, those Vegas were popular. I remember Chevets, things like that. And so a lot of people tried to get these cars to save on gas because most of them were those big giant square gas guzzling vehicles. Uh, but one of the downsides is it was not very unique because so many people had them. And I would say stripe on the side of this gremlin does seem a little bit more unique. And I would imagine that anyone that had that kind of car with that stripe on it, most likely would have been on police radar, you know, either because police had identified
41:10 Speaker 02 them as owning that kind of vehicle, or maybe a neighbor or coworker had turned them in. So it always seems interesting when you have a very distinct vehicle, like one with a stripe on it, yep, they've never tie that to anybody officially.
41:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think though, most gremlins had a stripe, but they came in different colors. A lot of them were white. I could be wrong about that, but for some reason I believe the gremlin was, did, most of them did have a stripe down the side. Police believe that the suspect in these killings was likely paying close attention to discussions about the case and news stories covering the murders. One of the biggest potential clues to this is that Tim King's mother, Marion, had been on TV pleading with the kidnapper and trying to humanize. Her son while he was missing. And in one of these moments, she mentioned that Tim's favorite
42:12 Speaker 01 food was Kentucky Fried Chicken. His autopsy would show that shortly before he was killed, he was fed fried chicken and corn. Did that mean the killer had given Tim fried chicken after seeing his mom on TV? However, another possibility is that the killer befriended the children up to a point. Maybe Tim himself mentioned how much he loved KFC or simply asked what he wanted to eat. Maybe the killer was trying to gain their victims' trust or comfort them somehow. Another interesting possible clue is that Jill Robinson reportedly suffered from night terrors about being shot and killed. And she's the only victim to
42:57 Speaker 01 have been shot. The killer could have learned this by talking to Jill, maybe even by comforting her after she had one of the nightmares. But there's also the chance that this could just be a coincidence.
43:10 Speaker 02 Police began to wonder if the killer was thumbing their nose at the investigators. From the spot that Jill Robinson was left on the side of the road in Troy, you could actually see the police station. Is this another sign that the killer was trying to tease and antagonize law enforcement? Or was it a coincidence? A profile of the killer was created by Dr. Nicholas Groth from the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Deranged Persons. He believed that investigators were looking for someone intelligent, but not overly educated, had no authority at their place of employment, was lower in social ranking and economic status, had a violent criminal record, but nothing like murder, and who is choosing victims based on their age and availability and not based on their gender.
43:53 Speaker 01 Police wondered how the victims were secured. Did the person or persons blitz attack the kids and get them into a vehicle? Did they lure them with some kind of prop or reward? Or did the victims know their killer and trust them? This seemed unlikely, though, since all four lived in different towns. I mean, police had to consider all the possibilities. Two of them had been riding bikes or skateboards. So it seems less likely that they would accept rides to their destinations since they weren't on foot. And for Jill, who was riding a bike, she would have to find a ride or walk back.
44:37 Speaker 01 If, you know, she left her bike behind. And most of them were only going a short distance. So they probably wouldn't even need a ride. One disturbing possibility was that perhaps the killer was pretending to be a police officer or some kind of authority figure. Or even more frightening, perhaps they were an actual authority figure, a police officer, a teacher, a coach. And as scary as, you know, all of these things are that we talk about more. This is another one. You know, when you have people in authority, positions of power or positions of trust.
45:21 Speaker 01 So you're talking about police officers, teachers, coaches, things like that. When those people misuse that, that power, authority or trust, somehow it hits even harder. Now, we don't know for sure that the perpetrator was one of these types of individuals, but again, I think if you're the authorities, you can't take that off the table. Right. Because there is this big question. How were these kids lured? Well, would it not be easier if the person was someone that the kids thought they could trust? As opposed to a random stranger?
46:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, there's, I think a couple of different kinds of child abductors. There's the ones that.
46:13 Speaker 02 Do it by force, just pick someone up and grab them and throw them in a car. And then there's the ones that lure them into a car, which I think seems more of the type you see. Cause the last thing they want to do is draw attention, have a kid screaming, have people looking. So I think more often than not, they're probably going to try and lure them in. And you may be showing them a puppy in the car or a badge of some sort to make them think that they're someone they need to listen to. You know, something like that seems like a way that you might be able to draw these children in and not raise a commotion when you're doing it.
46:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, and we have learned about some of these different ruses, right? Puppy. Well, what kid doesn't want to see and pet a puppy? Candy. That's always the one that, you know, a lot of parents warn against.
47:11 Speaker 02 And I think at least in Tim King's case, witnesses saw him calmly talking to who they believe is the suspect. So there was some kind of interaction going on and it wasn't just a case of Tim running away. He didn't seem to be worried about this individual that, you know, makes you wonder, did he know him from someplace? Was there something that this person showed Tim that made him trust him? And you know, there's a lot of different questions and unfortunately just not a lot of answers. Police had their work cut out for them. Fortunately, they were able to officially rule out a couple more of the early murders as being part of the Oakland County child murders.
47:55 Speaker 02 We mentioned earlier that Gary Pervinler was linked to Judy Ferrer's murder via ballistics. In 1978, a man named Oliver Andrews was convicted of the January 1976 abduction and murder of babysitter Sheila Schrock. And in 1979, two men named Robert Anglin and Raymond Heinrich were both convicted of Cynthia Cadu's murder. A third man who's not been named was also reportedly involved, but he died before their arrest. Both men were sentenced to life in prison.
48:26 Speaker 01 We mentioned earlier that 13-year-old Jane Allen was killed in August 1976. She was the victim who died of carbon monoxide poisoning. But for some reason, police don't seem to think she was a victim of this serial killer. But there are others who believe she may be. There are a couple of other names often associated with this case that some people believe may be victims of the killer. One is 17-year-old Donna Sarah, who went missing while hitchhiking in September 1972 in McComb County, about 30 miles from Oakland County. A month later, her body was found there.
49:07 Speaker 01 She had been strangled and it appeared that she had been drugged and kept alive for some time before her death. Some of the MO fits, but it's an entirely different county.
49:19 Speaker 02 Another murder victim we have to mention is 12-year-old Kimberly Alice King. She was at a sleepover at a friend's house in Warren, Michigan on September 15th, 1979, when she reportedly snuck out and called home from a phone booth at around 11:00 PM to talk to her sister. Her sister told her to hang up and go back inside, while Kimberly never returned to the home and was never seen again. Her body was never found. Officially, 12-year-old Mark Stebbins, 12-year-old Jill Robinson, 10-year-old Christine Mahelik, and 11-year-old Timothy King are the four victims universally believed to be the victims of the person or persons dubbed the Oakland County Child Killer. In the next episode of Criminology, in the conclusion of our Oakland County Child Killer
50:03 Speaker 02 coverage, we'll take a deep dive into a literal cesspool of potential suspects and explore a lot of very troubling and twisted details and theories. So don't miss part two.
50:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, part two is going to be a doozy, no doubt about it. So as we wrap this first part up more, you know, it's tough, right? Talking about the murders of so many young people. But this is a case that has gripped people for, you know, 50 years.
50:35 Speaker 01 I think there are a lot of reasons why. First of all, you have a lot of confirmed victims of the serial killer or killers. We don't know that part. But then you have a lot of other individuals who were killed. Now, some they have tied to specific people. And some of those people have even been convicted. But others, you know, there, there's still debate about whether they could potentially be victims of the Oakland County child killer.
51:16 Speaker 01 So I think, you know, the things that are standing out to me is, you know, obviously this perpetrator or perpetrators were targeting young people. Now, there can be a number of reasons for that. Maybe the, there was a sexual attraction to younger kids, which is sick, obviously. But it could also be that, you know, the killer thought that it would be easier, you know, to get people of this age into their car.
51:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I, I think the, usually the younger the age, the more chance or is that a child might get into a car with a stranger because they just don't know about stranger dangers much. What I find interesting is that it was boys and girls that were targeted. Was pretty interesting. I don't know how often that is that one specific gender might be targeted, but here it didn't seem like there's any discrimination. As we talked about earlier, the one profile stated that it was more of convenience and the availability of these victims as opposed to any type of victim.
52:37 Speaker 02 But I find it interesting too, that it seems that both FEMA victims were not sexually assaulted, but the boys were. So I wonder if that tells us anything about the, the suspect in this case. And I wonder if what the authorities think about that, the experts, the profilers, what that might tell us about that, that potential killer.
53:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you have to take all of it into consideration. And then, you know, again, to me, one of the things that really stands out about this case is this idea that the killer or killers in some way took some care of these individuals. I know that's weird to say, but they kept them fed during the period of time that they had them. And then, you know, in the way that they disposed of their bodies, we talked
53:42 Speaker 01 about it, right? It's almost as if they had been redressed after their clothes had been cleaned. So I guess for me, it's like this dichotomy. You have a terrible child predator who ultimately is killing these kids and in some cases sexually assaulting them, but at the same time, almost showing them, you know, some level of care. And I'm really struggling to understand what that means.
54:18 Speaker 02 And that's another interesting thing in itself is that sort of mirror image of, on one hand, they're committing these heinous acts, but on the other hand, they're showing some care and almost showing them dignity by dressing them again. You know, in the one case, his hands were folded neatly across his chest, almost like you might see if they were in a casket. So, you know, I think that would tell, you know, profilers and people that study these kinds of killers, probably would tell them something about this person's background and I'm interested. You know, to to know what's in this person's thinking.
55:01 Speaker 01 Well, and and also you can't forget the fact that it seems as though the killer wanted these children found quickly, right? He wasn't trying to hide them. So does that play into it as well? Right? In one instance, the body was found very close to, I think, the police station. But they they were all found in places where I think the killer knew someone was going to find them very quickly. So you have to take that into account as well.
55:32 Speaker 02 Yeah. And if they simply wanted to discard them, hide their bodies, hide evidence, you'd think they would, you know, put them in a river or bury them or something along those lines. But here it's it's almost like they wanted them to be found. So, you know, interesting. And then one of the things too, that's most interesting about this case is the fact they kept them for so long. You know, that's not an easy thing to do. And that probably tells us a lot about the the suspect in this case, too. They have to have a place to keep them for extended period of times and care for them. I imagine that, you know, this person probably doesn't
56:13 Speaker 02 have a wife and kids at home that they were keeping the kids with because that would be hard to do. So does that mean that they live alone? Does it mean they have family, but maybe they were away on vacation and they had that time where they could keep them there? I think it brings up a lot of interesting possibilities.
56:32 Speaker 01 It also likely means they probably lived in a house versus an apartment or something like that. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, you got to take all of that into consideration. And I'm sure police have. It just didn't help them, right? To identify this person. But that's it for our first episode on the Oakland County Child Killer. As always, if you love the show, but haven't done so yet, you know, take a minute, go out, leave us a rating, leave us a review. Also, keep telling your friends. Word of mouth about the podcast really helps us out.
57:09 Speaker 02 If you want to find us on social media, we're on every major platform. Just search for Criminology Podcast on your favorites. And for news, updates about the show and old episodes, head over to our website, criminologypodcast.com. And if you want to join a discussion group about the podcast and the case as we cover, head over to Facebook and search for Criminology Podcast Discussion and Fans Group.
57:32 Speaker 01 So that's it for another episode of Criminology. But Morph and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night to wrap up this Oakland County Child Killer coverage. So until then, for Mike.
57:46 Speaker 02 And Morph.
57:47 Speaker 01 We'll talk to you next week.
57:48 Speaker 02 Take care, everyone.
Previous Asia and Ashton Brown Next The Oakland County Child Killer Part 2 Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated