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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
host journalist and author Dan Zupanski. Good Evening. Ever wondered who murdered John Bennet Ramsey, or who terrorized San Francisco as the Zodiac Killer, puzzled over the notorious Black Valia murder or the mysterious Long Island serial killer case. This true crime book makes you the detective investigating some of the most infamous unsolved cases of the twentieth and twenty
first centuries. Crime scenes, crucial evidence, witnesses, and persons of interest are clearly and concisely presented, along with essential details and clues, so you can judge for yourself who could have done it. Unsolved Murders also profiles the psychology of the killer, discusses the background and life of the unfortunate victim or victims, and explores how these horrific crimes impacted the victim's family and friends. From domestic tragedies to serial killers.
With a love for the macabre, this book will have you returning to the cases again and again. Can you unlock the secrets of these unsolved crimes where others have failed? The book that we're featuring the seating is Unsolved Murders, True Crime Cases Uncovered with my special guest, journalist and author Amber Hunt. Welcome back to the program. Thank you very much for Greens's interview. Amber Hunt.
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Thank you very much for joining me. For joining us once again. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of this project. This is a book co written with Emily Thompson. Tell us a little bit about the book itself and how it came to be.
You know, it's funny. I'm a journalist by trade. I work for the Cincinnati Inquirer, and sometimes you get a story assignment. Sometimes you come up with the idea yourself. This one was more the former. The publishing company reached out, said they had an idea and asked if I wanted to be part of it, and I thought it sounded really interesting and said sure. And my co author is Emily G. Thompson. She's Irish, so we've never met. She's on the other side of the pond. And what impressed
me the most. First off, it's been fun to get to know her through you know, the project, because she and I are very we're kind of similar souls. But what's amazing to me is that when you read the book, I don't think you'd be able to tell who wrote what. Our writing styles really mesh.
Absolutely, yes, very similar. I couldn't tell, certainly.
Sorry. What intrigued me about it was just this idea that you would have, you know, all of these cases in one place, and and while there are short sections on each, we really researched the hell out of it. I mean, they're they're very detailed, so you get a lot of information in some of the cases I knew nothing about, and you know I cover crimes for a living.
Right, Absolutely, Yes, there's an incredible amount of detail, just compressed in fewer pages than if you explored them fully completely. That would be a volume of work. Absolutely, tell us some of the cases as you do, what are the famous cases, infamous cases that people might know of, but tell us the overview of the cases that are covered and the stories that are covered in this book. I'm solve murders.
There's a huge array of them. One that I learned a lot about that I knew nothing about, with the Voliska Axe murders. This is in the early nineteen hundreds, nineteen twelve, and it's in Iowa, which is where I graduated high school. So I was a little surprised. I had never heard of it. But this was basically a farm family slain in their house. There was a high profile Hollywood murder, William Desmond Taylor. I had heard the name, but didn't know the details of the case. And then
of course there's a black Dahlia. There's Zodiac that I added to the list myself with the Oakland County child killings because I used to I covered crime in Detroit for nearly eight years and that case always bothered and resonated with me. So that was one that I added. But there's a huge array, and some of them are, you know, over on the other side of the pond too.
Absolutely, it is a very very interesting collection from all over the world. Let's get to one of the most famous cases, and that's the back Dalia case in nineteen forty seven. You call it death of a dreamer. Tell us a little bit about you've talked open this at January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven, and la housewife Betty Berzinger is out for a shoe repair with a three year old daughter. An tell us what happens on that walk to go to the shoe repair that day.
Well, Betty notice something in this vacant lot, because they're walking along these like you know, brushy vacant areas, and she spot something white and she kind of squints and looks at it and realizes that it's in the form of a person. But she thinks that the mannequin and one that's just been discarded because it's been two pieces, And then she suddenly realizes with horror that it is a human, and so she runs to the nearest house
with a phone and calls police. And that is how that's how the body was discovered.
Along with some of the other things that we're going to cover in terms of uniqueness. What is the uniqueness in terms of the state of the body found at that crime scene by that woman. But later, of course she runs away, But what the police find.
This was.
This made all the headlines because in part Elizabeth Shore. The black value was gorgeous, but also because the death was particularly gruesome. I mean, she was cut in half, her face was disfigured, as in the sides of her mouth were split in this gruesome, exaggerated smile.
It was.
It was just incredibly violent.
Was there any indication that this was possibly surgically done? How precise was this or was this was, like I say, a butcher job.
There was always some suspicion that whoever did this had some kind of medical training because of where the the bisection occurred. So it didn't I mean it was a butcher job and that it's a human being who's in half, but they did think that there was some skill behind it.
You also include that she was again very unique is drained of her blood and then as you mentioned, but posing a very bizarre spread eagle display and rope marks on her ankles, wrists, and throat. And you say that police had determined or believed that she was hung upside down by her feet and tortured for hours before her death.
Yes, it seems, and it's it's hard to fathom what on earth anyone could do to warrant somebody treating you that way, but certainly not. You know, some young beautiful want to be actress. You know, it's they never did find anything in her path. I quite pointed to that kind of death being warranted or yes, so she was hung upside down, she was, she was strained of blood. They're thinking, is that you know, she was tortured for a very long time before she it was finally killed.
It was. It was just as brutal as I've seen. And it's for me. One of the really interesting things about not just this case, but a couple of the others too, is how much the police had to fight rumors because you know, people complain about the media today, but back then rumors made it into print a lot more than they do now. And also false confessions. It is amazing the number of people who step forward to take claim when something horrific like this happened.
That was absolutely shocking. The stats and we'll go over those stats, but it was that was very, very shocking. Tell us tell our audience how she this Elizabeth Short gets the nickname the Black Dallian. What is this? And what is this? Reference too?
There was a movie called The Blue Dahlia so which was popular at the time so it was kind of pulled from that, and it was changed to black because she had, you know, this raven dark hair and she liked to wear black clothing. So really it was sort of a pulled from the headlines kind of moniker.
We talked about Elizabeth Short, this beautiful wanna be actress. She had done some film extra work and auditioned for jobs. She was again actively trying to be an actress. But tell us what the media did after this murder and team in terms of its importance. How did they present this case and how much of an impact did it have with the media and then with the public.
It's funny. I just did an interview yesterday where somebody was talking to me about the They're asking about the increase in interest in true crime. You know, it's really it's not an increase because there's always been a strange fascination with true crime. And in this era where that came out was largely in the newspaper. So there were all of these stories. I mean, every single quarter turn that you could report on this case was front page news.
So for an example, a friend of Elizabeth said that Elizabeth had bragged about being friends with an actress who was famous at the time named and Todd and so UPI, which is a wire service. They announced that the police would question this and Todd, who was a who is British. So Todd then tells them that she'd never met her. But this was all instead of reporting it out first and it being debunked and therefore not worthy of a story. The whole thing, like every turn of it, was front
page news. And there were a lot of potential suspects. I have to say, you know, for this being an unsolved case, it does look like police were pretty thorough. They interviewed more than one hundred and fifty suspects, But every time a name was leaked, it was that person was guilty at least for a day, and it was just, you know, the headlines were absolutely merciless.
You talk about all kinds of suspects one after another being arrested and getting a guilty man's treatment for one day. And they had other suspects that maybe they were investigating for a week or so before they could clear them. And again, like you say, the papers would run with
any kind of rumor that was leaked to them. What was the idea that police did have or did they have anything concrete in terms of whether it was a man, whether it was a woman, and what was their theory on terms of what had happened.
They did contemplate whether it could have been a woman, but there was also I mean, it would have been difficult. While Elizabeth was petite, it's still physically tough to imagine another woman lifting her up, getting her upside down and doing all of that by herself at least, So they always were leaning toward mail and then you know, it turns out we have the benefit of hindsight, and it turns out that they had some pretty strong front runners,
but they never could quite make the case. And one of them was a doctor who is still largely on you know, most Officionado's you know list of favorites.
And why is that you talk about that person's effort, Stephen Hodell. Talk about Stephen Hodell and how it becomes his book. But as you write, his father, this doctor was a suspect at that time, right.
Steve Hodell wrote a book about his dad, and I found it one of the fun things researching the book. I'm really big on going through newspaper archives. I found all these stories written at the time but Steve Hodell were he was interviewed in two thousand and three by the AP and he had said that he saw some photos in his doctor father, George Hodell's wallet. That man looked to him an awful lot like tough to tell. There are some people who've done, you know, analyzes of
the photos and they're not convinced. But bolstering that is that Hodell was actually a suspect in her murder. And we know that because some of the case files were released fifty years after she was killed, and he's lifted in there, and in fact, there were this George Hodell
had been tried for committing incest with his daughter. He was acquitted, but when they were investigating that, when officials were investigating him, they were taping his conversations and some of them included Hodels saying things like suppose and I did kill her. They couldn't prove it now, so those are kind of a suspicious comments for an innocent person to make. So Steve Rodell ended up being absolutely convinced
that his father was the killer. And lending credence to Odell is that he's he worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for quite a while. It's not like he was just somebody off the street with no law enforcement instincts.
Black Dalua too is the case of one of those cases that seems eerily like what could happen today with the letter created from words and letters cut from magazines and papers and sent to police or the media. And what do experts today think about that letter and who might have sent that? What was the investigation at that time surrounding that.
Oh yeah, pretty soon after Abe died there were there was this letter made out of these strange like clippings, and it was sent to the examiner and it said something like, uh, I will give up uh in Dalia killing if I get ten years. But it's so they were basically like trying to say hint at that whoever the killer was was interested in giving himself up, But then he I believe he's sent a follow up saying
basically never mind. There has always been some skepticism whether that was one of the crazy red herring, you know type situations where somebody's trying to insert themselves into the case, or whether it's real now now one of them. A letter came out that included Elizabeth this birth certificate, her address book, some of her personal papers, and then and that one. Obviously they were pretty comfortable with being legitimate.
There were other theories as well, and people endeavored to write books up based on those theories. You talk about British author pu eat Well, what was the theory that he put forward regarding this Black Value murder?
You know what, I have to remind myself which one that was, because there are so many freaking.
He thought that that the Black Value murder was with his friend Connors and Mark Hanson, a local nightclub and movie theater owner.
Thank you, go ahead, I'm sorry.
No, I'm just I'm saying, I'm just reminding you of.
Yeah, thank you, So yeah there. So Eatwell was a British author and his theory centered around Leslie Dylan, who was a bell hop. So the bell hop had in nineteen forty nine reached out to a doctor a saying he wanted to talk about the book for or the murder for a book he wanted to write, and the
doctor got suspicious. And the bell hop had previously worked for mortician, and so that notion that her blood had been drained stood out because that is something that a person working to assist a mortician would know how to do.
So.
The Eatwell book proposed that Dylan had orchestrated the murder and he had worked with a friend of his named j Justic Connors, who had also been interviewed but released and then and Connors had also worked with Mark Hanson, a local nightclub a movie theater owner, and that's sort of where the Elizabeth connection comes in. Hanson was known
to seduce women like Elizabeth. So the thought was that that the three of them actually were able to work together and because there was this trio, that they were able to get away with it. It is difficult, though, because each of these these theories, uh, there are pros and cons and some people are fervently you know, in the column of one theory or another. But for me, there there's nothing that is wrapped up in a bow. I mean, for me, the the the strongest one I
think is is the Hodel theory. But it's a little I mean, they didn't have enough evidence, so.
Who knows, right, right, And as you're right too, they put him under surveillance for three weeks in nineteen fifty, you're right, so they you would imagine that they did do some kind of thorough, thorough look at this person as a suspect, right, But then.
You know, there's probably a three week span you could have watched Ted Bundy and not been tipped off to anything too.
So sure, certainly it is.
Hard to know.
Yeah, yeah, certainly. Let's talk about another case. And like you say that when you worked in Detroit for eight years, this was a case that really impacted you. The Oakland County child killings. You call it stranger danger. This chapter four terrifying kidnappings and murders, two male victims and two females. Tell us, right, as you do write in the book, what is the interesting or unusual aspect a both the victims and sexual assault?
With these four victims, what's interesting for the time is that they were very thoroughly cleaned, which kind of.
Means the killer was a bit ahead of his time because in nineteen seventy six there was no DNA yet. Two of the victims, the two boys, investigators thought they looked like they had been sexually assaulted, but the girls had not. This one did resonate a lot with me, first off, because it still haunts the area. So if you've lived in Michigan for any amount of time in the Metro Detroit area, you've at least heard of this case. But it also resonates because I'm a mom and there's
a story of one of the kids. In particular, his parents had even once the murder started, His parents had said to him, you know, okay, so what do you do?
You?
You know, somebody ask you to get in their car, and the kid knows the answer is to run away, but he ends up in a car. And what's haunted the dad is that you know that because they had gone over this at some point, surely it had to flash through the kid's mind. He had to know what was going to happen because he had been warned specifically. So that's always stuck with me.
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Absolutely. There was confusion in terms of tying all these victims together because one of the victims had died of a shotgun blast of the head.
Yeah, and that's always tricky too. The three of them were stopped, one was shot, so at first it didn't look as though that that fourth one the shooting was connected, but they ended up being pretty comfortable that it was all It was all done, not necessarily by the same person, because they're not convinced that it was a single perpetrator, but by the same group of people at least.
Very interesting. You talk about the first victim, twelve year old Mark Stebbens, and he was hanging out with his older brother Mike at Allegiant Hall about a mile away from their home in Ferndale, Michigan, February nineteen seventy six. And so they went to play pool and after a while, Mark city wanted to walk home, walked to watch TV, went down the normal path he would take, and then he didn't make it home. What was the well, how was the media attention to this and what did the well?
First off, what did the mother do when he didn't come home? Tell us what unfolded there? Because this is the first victim. They have no idea of these other three victims. What happens after this? Tell us as you do, as you're write in a book.
Well, back then, you know, when when somebody called and reported disappearance, they really didn't take it seriously right away. And you know, Mark walked this path home that he had walked home. You know, countless times before I happened to know that area. I mean nine mile in Woodward is it's a it's a busy area. It's not someplace where I've walked it alone at night many times, and I never would have looked over my shoulder and a child. I wouldn't have looked twice at a child walking by
himself either. So but so when he didn't come home, his mom called police. But and the people who knew him got worried because this was unlike him. But media didn't really jump on it. It's, you know, it's at first looking like another case where the kid's likely going to turn up within you know, a day or so, because that's typically what does happen with kids who are are gone quickly. But then four days later it's an officer spotted the body abandoned in a parking lot. Then
the media attention came. So it's hard to know what kind of what kind of if there would have been any difference in the police's ability to nail this down if media attention had been what it is today with amber alerts and such. But at the time, they just didn't take it very seriously. In those early days and those.
Too, it was still a more innocent time mark. The Steppens was found with rope burns on his wrist. He wasn't bound, but he had been strangled or suffocated, and they determined it. It was at least a day earlier. And you talk about Ferndale Police Chief Donald Geary, he had said, again, this is very unusual, say much like you say, way ahead of his time. Not only was the body scrubs, but the boy's fingernails had been scraped even you're.
Right, right, yeah, that's that to me. I mean, my first thought is, jeez, I wonder if this person knows law enforcement. But even at the time, the scraping of the fingernails, the best you could do at the time is maybe you could get enough for blood type you know, DNA. The first trial with DNA evidence was nineteen eighty six, so this is ten years earlier than that. This killer where the killers were amazingly ahead of their time.
And we'll talk about that too. I want to discuss something with you about that in terms of what really hit me when I noticed a couple of things with all these victims and what they had in common. You fast forward to December twenty sixth day after Christmas nineteen seventy six, a motorist finds a body of Jill Robinson, who's again twelve years old, in Troy, Michigan. She had left home four days earlier after an argument with her mother.
What is the state of her body as opposed to twelve year old boy just before that?
Yeah, this was Jill with someone who had been shot with a shotgun, which, of course, I mean that is immediately different and you would have trouble connecting those killings straight away. But investigators did notice. I mean, first off, just two kids killed in such within a year, I mean that's unnerving. So they're going to look at them and see what similarities they have, and they're were them. Jill's parents had been divorced, which was the same as
Mark seven. Their personalities were similar. They both were described as like hanging out by themselves a lot, being loner prone. And then the big kicker was that it also appeared she had been kidnapped and held for several days, the same as Mark. She'd been fed in that time, which was the case with Mark, and as with Mark, her body was dumped on a day that it had snowed, which was a hindrance for police gathering at evidence. So again it seemed like whoever was doing this was thinking ahead.
Now you're right, just now. Just a week later, January two, nineteen seventy seven, Christine Milovich Mahelich left the party store about four blocks from her house in nearby Berkeley, Michigan, and then she vanished. What was the what was her disappearance now, after Mark and after Jill was How was her disappearance treated by police?
It definitely got faster attention at this point, especially because it was so soon after Jill's body was discovered. It seemed as though the killer was speeding things up, which is you know, I mean, profiling wasn't widespread at this point either, but there was still an understanding amongst the law enforcement community that when somebody gets comfortable, when a killer gets comfortable, they might start up being the pace.
And that is definitely what it seemed like here. So with with Christine, sorry, she had just been buying a magazine. All of these you know, we talk about it being like a simpler time. It's safer today than it was back then. But it's all because these cases, these in the Atlanta disappearance cases, they were the ones that woke a lot of parents. So that's like, oh, maybe my
kids shouldn't be walking alone anymore, you know. So a week after Christine vanished, police were certain that these were connected. And they were particularly unnerved by this because in Christine's case, it was three o'clock in the afternoon and it was a busy street. And there's a quote from one of the sergeants that I found in a newspaper at the time. If someone can be snatched off a busy street at three pm on a Sunday afternoon, how can you protect anyone?
So things were definitely starting to feel tense in all of Oakland County. And I should mention too that these are all you know, when you're talking about Metro Detroit, it's hard to know about the you know, which areas are affluent and which are struggling. More. Oakland County is pretty affluent. Berkeley is a high you know, upper middle class for the most part. Ferndale, that area was maybe a little uh less affluent, but not much. So all of this was really shocking for that place.
Yes, again disturbing being held in captivity nineteen days after Korean's Christrian's Christine's disappearance, a mail carrier, Jerry Wosney, discovers her body in a ditch in Franklin, Michigan. Not in Oakland County, No, that is Oakland County, Yes, Franklin.
Yeah, it's a bit of a drive. And it also speaks to this, I mean, where are these kids being held? How could this be going unnoticed? The whole county is on high alert, that the whole region is. So how can somebody manage to pick a human being up off the street, hold them captive and nobody notices? But this mail carrier ends up. He saw the hand first, and then he saw the rest of the body, and same
with the other two. Christine had been dropped during a snow a snowfall, and it looked to him as though whoever dropped her a like sort of done this half asked attempt to cover her with snow.
Yeah, we talk about you mentioned the conversation that mister King had with his son, eleven year old son Tim after Christine was found, and of course this case that captivated everyone's imagination and probably obviously all these parents as well. So this is less than two months later, mister King has had this conversation with Tim warning him if you ever have anybody come up to you, just run, scream and run. This is March sixteenth, nineteen seventy seven, less
than two months later. What happens with Tim King, Well.
He skateboards to a local store, a drug store, to pick up some candy, and it's literally three blocks from his house. And he got to the store. The clerk said that he bought his candy and he left and he never got home. So that one, you know, again, when his body was found, it was totally cleaned. And then this extra like disturbing detail that always stayed with me was that his body was tossed like it was nothing,
and then his skateboard was just tossed alongside it. It's just like, you know, this kid was picked up, used for whatever he was going to be used for, and then just tossed like trash.
Let's talk about another more horrifying aspect of this. His favorite meal was fried chicken in particular KFC. And so after he was missing, there was some outreach through the media, talked about if you come home, we got your KFC. Now he's missing, and of course the police know that they have this psychopath on the loose child killer. Everyone's alerted, tell us about when he's found, and then with this fried chicken in mind, what they find in terms of from the autopsy regarding chicken.
Well, he was missing for a week. His body was then found, so like the other ones, though he clearly hadn't been killed immediately, he'd been kept alive for most of the time he'd been missing. And in fact, police believes that when they found the body, Kim had been suffocated within the hour, and when they did the autopsy they found that him had eaten just before he was killed. Fried chicken.
Wow.
Yeah, it was a last meal offered or something.
What I want to ask you was I've alluded to this before, was that when we said that this killer was way ahead in potential DNA intelligence, well that couldn't be that he couldn't have that foresight to know of a DNA innovation years and years later. However, it also was a time of developing profiles on killers, and there weren't too many child killers in which to get examples from.
What I thought was particularly interesting was the detail that you wrote about how they were washed and then carefully dressed. The fingernails were scraped, but this fried chicken thing that maybe the killer saw the plea by the parents or and or the kid said this is my favorite meal. It seems eerily coincidental that he would pay this much attention.
And I just think that he's ahead in terms of the insane psychopathic killer that pays attention to the details of the kids, like he loves them and cherishes them and treats them good and then of course has to kill them.
Right right, Yeah, Well, it paints an incredibly disturbing picture. It's one thing when you are thinking about I mean, none of it is pleasant, but it's one thing when you're thinking about somebody who is evil and he is out to hurt. It is another thing when you are thinking of the culprit is thinking of himself as benevolent and that maybe you know, he's doing something kind for these children. That's a special kind of crazy.
Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah, the bone chilling stuff.
Absolutely, it really is. Now you're right, there's enough witnesses come forward so that a sketch artist at the time creates a sketch white man, dark hair, prominent nose, thick lips, mutton chop, sideburns, and then even a psychological profile was created at that time. What is the result of all of that sketches and witness eyewitness reports.
Well, I mean they so from the psychological profile, they what they told people they were looking for is somebody twenty to thirty five years old, somebody who's well educated, white, colored job and obviously like must either live.
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Alone, or live with enough freedom that he can pull this off, because this is pretty time intensive. So the police chief at the time urged people in the medical and legal professions to come forward because they he thought that maybe the killer might be seeing a psychiatrist. And then they also started to try to appeal to people who might know something, but we're covering for this person, you know, a mom or a buddy or something like that.
So one of the things that happened now was that family members of the victims ended up being left out
of the loop. So they wanted information from investigators, and investigators were so concerned about trying to keep this close to the vest I mean, they did, of course legitimately want to solve these murders, but it was it was upsetting to the family that they were not given enough information, and so they they ended up kind of at odds with the cops in the case, which is pretty I mean, it's pretty unusual for that time period, and actually the family,
I'm not sure if this is something that you were wanting to get into, but that the family. For me, one of the more interesting parts of the case in terms of legal aspects that have developed, is that the family has had to fight for investigating material to be released. So these murders were in seventy six, seventy seven, and it was just twenty twelve. It was actually right after I left the Detroit Free Press when I was working there,
they finally released about six thousand pages. And so, you know, typically a police department doesn't have to release information that is part of an ongoing investigation, but if you haven't solved it in decades, maybe it's time you release it so somebody else can have a chance at looking at it before the killers or killers have died, make some progress on it. But they really had to fight for that.
Now, from those six thousand pages of case documents, there is suspect speculation. You talk about a mysterious man named John. Maybe it was a priest or someone posing as a police officer. But you say few actual names were publicly tied to the case, except there was a name, David Norberg, an auto worker who drove a car similar to the one who was described nar Kim's King's abduction. Tell us about why he was a suspect.
He stood out because he did have a violent pass. So he had been suspected of killing two little girls in the late nineteen seventies, so you know, obviously he wasn't he didn't jump out in seventy six because he wasn't on anybody's radar yet, but pretty soon he was, and he wasn't evicted, and then he died in a
car crash soon after these. So it was nineteen eighty one and his wife found in his belongings this silver cross and it was inscribed with the name Christine and it was even spelled the same way Christine the ka, so she remembered. The wife remembered that that Christine had been the name of the Oakland County child killer's third victim. So she reached out to Christine's aunt and the aunt said, oh, that's identical to a cross that Christine had worn soon
before her death. So police, yeah, so they had long been looking at her, but then they finally did exume his or him, I'm sorry, but they finally did exhume his body in ninety nine because as careful as this killer was, they did manage to pull a little DNA and they stored it. But Norberg DNA did not match what they had retrieved from one of the bodies. Of course, it could be that that was, you know, DNA from
something else. Entirely, you never entirely know how this stuff plays out, but they had nothing conclusive to tie him to it, as suspicious as he seemed.
Now there's another suspect, was convicted pedophile Christopher Bush, and he was just on a short list of suspects. Why is he a suspect and what happens at looking at him as a suspect.
Well, the pedophile part helped. I mean, they were definitely investigators were absolutely zeroing in on people who they knew to have those kinds of proclivities. But he also drove a car that looked like the one spotted I believe in Tim's abduction, so investigator. So he ended up being questioned and he straight up like knowledged that he's a pedophile. So I guess that's useful for investigators. He this It gets a little complicated because there are politics involved, but basically,
investigators wanted to keep him in jail. They liked him for this, and they wanted to learn more from him. But the head prosecutor, who's still a big player in Oakland County today, released him as part of a plea deal, and then in seventy eight he killed himself.
Now, what about the allegation or mention that you have about a drawing of a screaming boy that resembled Mark Stebbens reportedly pinned to the wall when they found.
Right, Yeah, yeah, and that's one of those you know, the cross with Norburg. It seems like a and obvious, like, oh, okay, so he must have done it. But then the screaming drawing, it's the piece that people point to a lot for Christopher Bush. So this drawing was pinned to the wall and it was this screaming child and young boy, and people who saw it felt like it resembled the first victim.
Mark. Incredible. Now, yet another suspect did you write about? Is this James Gunnell's fifty six year old person and you say he's connected to Kristen's murder through DNA?
Yes, tell us the strongest connection that we've got. Yeah, And that wasn't until twenty twelve that investigators said they let people know that a strand of hair had been found on Christine and then they tested it against this fifty six year old man, James Gunnals, and found they had to use mitochondrial DNA. It's a little less precise, but it's awfully good. So they found that it was a match for Gunnals, or at least they couldn't exclude
him based on it. The interesting part with him is he would have only been sixteen and he had been one of Christopher Bush's victims. So that does make you wonder if he had been victimized and maybe one of his hairs landed on Christine through some kind of transfer or if he had been recruited to you know, assault other people who were picked up by somebody like Bush.
You talk about the test producing another suspect, Art Sloan. Tell us about Arch Sloan. Why he's a suspect.
He's another one who's serving a life sentence for the rape of a ten year old boy, so known pedophile, and a hair found in his car matched hair at both Mark and Tim's crime scenes. So now the hair wasn't Sloane, but there's a hair in his car and separate hairs on these two boys and they all match. So investigators are thinking, okay, well maybe it belongs to
an acquaintance of Sloans. And this is this all feeds into one of the most prevalent theories that I heard while working in Detroit, which was that it was some kind of pedophile ring, so that there might have been more people involved, and that certainly, you know, would explain how it could how somebody could be kept in captivity for an amount of time and nobody report it.
Now this story getting stranger. Now you talk about Mark Stebbens's family through this whole thing, is trying to fight for information from the police to release the files. But they also file a wrongful death suit in two thousand and seven against a man named Theodore Lamborghine, a man also in prison for life on assault convictions. Why does Stebens do this? And as a result of their efforts, what happens.
They did this not so much because they fought for sure they would get a conviction. They did it because they wanted more information. And when you file a lawsuit, there's a called discovery, and sometimes it's a clever backdoor way to get more information released from an investigation than you might otherwise get. So Steven's lawyer was one of the people who didn't think that any one, single person did this. He he thought that one what's the word
I'm looking for? He thought that one angle that should be pursued was that Lamborghine refused to take a polygraph even though he was offered a plea deal. So even when they told him, hey, you'll serve much less time if you do this, he said no. And so the lawyer's like, well, if you're not the Oakland County child killer, wouldn't you say so, wouldn't you try to prove that the fact that he refused was very suspicious to him.
But the suit ended up being dismissed in two thousand and eight, then a year after it was filed, because because they didn't they didn't feel there was enough evidence, but the judge did leave room for it to be refiled if they did find more evidence that pointed directly at Lamborghine.
What was the end result in terms of any more suspects that they seriously investigated after that?
Yeah, they I don't think that they have They're not short on suspects, and they do have some DNA evidence, but unfortunately it's really limited. They have basically a few strands of hair. And there is something a little strange to me, just personally, as you know, a reporter who's
done some cold case investigating. It's a little strange to me that they still hold on to the evidence so tightly, because come on, it's not like it's not like anybody can script the investigation at this point, you know, I mean, this case happened before I was born, So I think, though, my gut is that if more were released, we'd have a better sense at least of why some of these people were not arrested when it looked pretty strong, you know, or I'd love to know how much more they did
on say, Gunnals and Sloan, the ones where they did have DNA ties. You really can't tell how far they went because you don't have the files.
You write. Then, in twenty twelve, an identified unidentified investigator named Bob claimed there were eleven to sixteen victims and killings connected to Satanic rituals, and of course those claims were dismissed due to lack of evidence. But I always find it odd that there is never ever And according to the FBI, there's pretty strict criteria what a Satanic ritual is classified as. But I find it odd that
there's never any connection to Satanic rituals. Ever. What do you think about what this investigator said about Satanic rituals any credibility.
I am always suspicious of somebody who's not willing to put their full name out there. That's just the cynical journalist in me. But that doesn't mean the eleven to sixteen victims. I buy that pretty quickly. I don't know about Satanic rituals. To me, it feels like a I mean, we haven't seen any evidence of that, but what we have seen is clear evidence of some kind of maybe pedophilia,
possibly ring. That's where my suspicion leans one thing. That But when you have a case, so when you have a case that happened and the political players remain in positions of power, it can get really frustrating because those people have decided they either know what happened or they know what they can't find out, so they're not going
to release this information. Basically, what I would love to see is all of this stuff come to light, but it's probably not going to happen until after after the then prosecutor retires from county politics altogether.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a fascinating case. It certainly has no answers, but again, like not short on suspects, no, And.
That was one of the interesting things about researching all of these cases. They all seem to have an interesting array of suspects. Some were clearly people raising their hand when they had nothing to do with it and were just mentally unstable enough to want that kind of attention, but a lot of them are really strong possible suspects.
And you can see how frustrating it must be for the family for all of these families to be like, you know, how can we know this much but not be able to get any one of these people in court? How can we not reach that finish line? You know?
Absolutely we have time to talk about one more case in this Unsolved Murders. Can we talk about the Town Law murders of nineteen eighty two, because this is again a fascinating case that you've covered. Mary Kellerman September eighty two in Chicago is under the weather and takes a
couple extra strength towle noow from our parents' bathroom. Tell us about this case and why you decided to cover this in particular, and some of the more fascinating aspects of this that we might not have known about.
I thought this one was especially interesting because when we think of unsolved murders, we don't automatically think of something like this. So what happened was you had the opening of the chapter is you could see it cinematically because in one part of town, you've got Mary who goes and pops a couple of tailanol and then her dad hears this thump and he runs in and he finds her, and you know, she's twelve years old, and she's pronounced
dead by ten am. And then across town. Somebody completely unrelated, twenty seven years old. He's a postal worker. He wakes up and he calls in sick to work because he's not feeling great. He picks up his kids from preschool, he goes to the pharmacy to get some medicine, and then he decided he should take some chilanol in an app and then within minutes he drops in the kitchen. So this is happening across town. This is a Chicago area. All of these these people just suddenly fall ill and
they are They're mostly dead within minutes. It's frightening. And then they the investigators pretty like impressively quickly. I mean it's especially considering the time pieced together that all, you know, the connection between them is that they had taken tail and all. And then they they start to realize that somebody's tampered with them. And this is one of those cases that for me, I had heard of, but it
sounded more like urban legend. Then I didn't really fully grasp how many victims there were and exactly what had happened. But this is the case that caused, you know, standards to change, and now we have feels on top of our medicine that we buy at the stores. It's because somebody had gone in and put in these tainted pills into these bottles and then slipped them right back on the shelves and straight up killed people.
What you write is so moviesque though in terms of the facts, is that the second victim, Adam, takes the towel Nolls and then his brother Stanley, after they rush him to the emerged, he takes the paying killer for the stress, and his wife has a headache, so they both take him. And now, luckily the doctor that was on duty, this doctor Kim, who had treated I just seen Stanley in fine shape, now gets this call that other people from Adam's family are coming in, so he
realizes quickly. Like you say, they miraculously figured this out quickly, especially for the time, and that was partly just timing, is that he had met Stanley and then figured, well, Jesus must be much more than just a heart at attack.
Here, right. I mean, nobody had seen I mean, aside from the family members. Obviously nobody knew what condition Mary the twelve year old had been before she took her tail, and al same thing with Adam. But a doctor had just chatted with Stanley, telling him about his brother's situation, and he saw somebody healthy, and so when he comes in and his wife comes in, it triggered something quickly in him. So that probably kept more people from being killed.
Well, you also write about two suburban firefighters who had been monitoring chatter on their fire radios, radios that they kept at home, and they were comparing notes, and they were the person's people that contacted doctor Kim and realized that that was the shared menality between all these people, was the inconspicuous talentol exactly.
Yeah, these two and you know, they they weren't doctors, but they had this hunch. They you know, when somebody collapses, uh, firefighters, they're paying attention to the chat around the radios, and and they knew that the uh, the brother and his wife had both taken tylanol. So they they placed a phone call and said, you know, stab in the dark here, but could it be the tilnyl. So that gave that doctor the you know, it's one thing to know that,
oh goodness, they seem to be related. It's another thing to be given sort of a shortcut into figuring out okay, this is what I need to test to see if this is the culprit, and that's what he was able to do. So inside of those bottles, like basically they had they had capsules with those little pellets. I'm not sure what you call them, but the little tiny pellets and the capsules have been emptied and refilled with cyanide.
So between five and seven micrograms is fatal, and these capsules had up to sixty five miligrams, so they were micrograms, so they were in several thousand times more than a fatal dose. And so that's why the people who took them, because you can have cyanide poison that last for months and they check in your hair and all that stuff. But the floored them in minutes and there was no recourse.
You write of the incredible panic in Chicago, And what I found interesting in your book is that you write about national report sorts of other victims falling ill from various poisons like rat poison and hydrochloric acid. So was investigation found opportunistic copycats? Yeah?
Yeah, And in fact, I think one of the reasons I had heard of this sort it was kind of niggling in the back of my mind. I believe there's a forensic file where they figured out that one of the copycats had tried to kill her husband. You know, So it was pretty It became a in intriguing potentiality for people who were upset with others in their lives because it was so random, and you know, all you had to do was tamper one of those pills and say, well,
I bought it this way. Of course, there are some more scientific tells that people maybe weren't thinking of, like, you know, they knew that, they knew the way that the originals had been pulled apart and put back together and all that. But yeah, there were there were not just copycats, but then also this this panic that just swept the area and not just Chicago, I mean it swept the country.
Yeah.
Now we talk about suspects in this case, and an early suspect was somebody named Roger Arnold who had worked alongside one of the victims in a food warehouse. He's forty eight years old, and he was arrested after a tip off that he had cyanide in his house, and
he was interrogated for three days. What happened in terms of that, you know, that looked for cyanide in his home, and what about the interrogation for three days and tell us about the unofficial I guess, as you write, the eighth victim, because there were seven victims of the town, now murderer the eighth victim as a result of Roger Arnold and his actions.
Yeah, this was I always talk about crime, as you know, being this never ending disaster. You know, the ripple effects never end, and this is very clearly indicative of that.
So the situation was that we don't know who which coworker reported Arnold as having cyanide in his home, But what we do know is that Arnold was heavily interrogated for three days, and then it was sort of I think that the most recent scenario I can relate it to is Richard Jewel from the ninety sixth Olympic bombing, where you know, the name splashed all over the place. He's looking guilty because that's how it's presented. And then three days later, please say, you know, we can't find
a link. So he's released, but he feels like his whole life is ruined, and you know, it kind of probably is. So he started to believe that a coworker named John. I'm not sure if it's the niche or spanisha, but John was the one who tipped police off. He was this forty six year old computer consultant and he had kids. He was the father of three. So he decides that John is the one who ruined his life.
So he shoots him and kills him, and then learns after that that police say, no, he wasn't our informant, and so Arnold said years later, I killed a man, perfectly innocent person. So he's considered the unofficial eighth victim of this wave of killings.
You talk about. The most likely break in the case was two weeks after and the manufacturer of the product, Johnson and Johnson, received a letter promising to stop the killings for one million dollars. You talk about that letter was given to the FBI and was traced. Who was it traced to and what happens as a result of this turn in the investigation.
His name was James W. Lewis. There are a lot of James Lewis's in New York City, so made appoint to include the w At first it was dismissed. You know that he was being opportunistic. But when you talk to people who know this case inside and out, he's still on the top of their suspect list. But that's partly because nobody else has you know, Arisen as a more likely suspect. So, but there are there are some things that are interesting about him. So sure, he and
his wife had pillmaking machines. They had imported some from India when they first moved to Chicago. They had lived under false names. That's not usually what people do, so why would you do that. That's a little suspicious. He also had some violence in his past. He had been charged with beating and dismembering a man. The charges were dismissed, but it still is something that investigators look at when they're trying to figure out somebody's character and then but
they've never found anything concrete that connected him. I mean, he was convicted of trying to extort, so he's the only one who's been charged in connection at all with this crime. But they've never found anything definitive connecting him to the actual poisonings. But I did find that as recently as two thousand and nine, federal investigators had searched
his home. Nothing was found, but they're still you know, as recently as a decade ago, they were still trying to figure out if they could, if they could nail him for it.
Yeah, you write an interesting stating.
Oh, I'm sorry, But the next year he actually wrote a novel called poison The Doctor's Dilemma, and it's about people who were annoyingly poisoned.
Incredible you write about the FDA with reports that more than two hundred and seventy different incidents of copycat tampering afterwards.
Yeah, it was an insane wave of opportunism and Jeeves, if you ever want to feel terrible about your fellow man, just think of that.
Absolutely, we didn't talk about all the stories that are in this book itself, but when we talked about the Vasilia Basilica axe murders also in this book, we didn't get to William Desmond Taylor Hollywood, who done it? The Bodies in the Barn, the hinter KFK murders of nineteen twenty two, The Impossible Murder, very very interesting, the William Walla Wallace case of nineteen thirty one, the Deep Waters, which is a shark arm case in nineteen thirty five,
the Cleveland Torso killer scandal in Shangri La. You have the Zodiac Killer which is covered, the murder of Marilyn Shepherd, did Sam Shepherd do it? And who put Bella in the witch Elm The Skelton in the Wood you have we just talked about, and the murder of John Benney Ramsay is also included in this book too, and the Lake Bodham murders of nineteen sixty and story about the Long Island serial killer which you call the Bodies in
the Marshland. Also you cover Staircase of Death, the murder of Kathleen Peterson from two thousand and one, the murder of Jill Dando, and the drive by shootings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Small's. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about this book. For those that might want to look at other work. Do you have a website Facebook page? How might they take a look at that?
I do. I'm at reporter Amber dot com. Twitter is the same Reporter Amber, and I think I'm Facebook. I'm author Amber Hunt. You can find me there.
Absolutely. Thank you very much. Amber. Unsolved Murders, True Crime Cases Uncovered. It's been a fascinating interview. Thank you very much, you have a great evening
You two, thanks so much, thank you, good night, good night.