He Fed Them, Bathed Them, And Then Killed Them. And Was Never Caught

In 1986, a man named Scott Maclum was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined, the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. Learning English is hard. That's why I make easy stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn. You can listen to stories full of action, romance, and mystery. Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners. And there's a story for every mood, whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed. Easy stories in English is the podcast for you. As a way to show my appreciation, we are giving away several items from our merch shop, including our newest every 10 t-shirt. Plus, one lucky random person will also get a $1,000 gift card sent their way. All you have to do to be entered is be subscribed and hit the like button on this specific video. I will announce the winners next week on our social, so good luck. I love you guys, even though we've never met. Now, onto the episode. Every town has a dark side. Nearly 50 years since the Oakland County Child Killer murdered four children and terrified an entire community. There's a serial killer out there who has never been given a name you'd recognize. There's no catchy moniker that made national news and Netflix hasn't made a documentary that cracked the case wide open. What he did get, though, was a nickname from the investigators who spent years trying to catch him. And they called him the babysitter. And when you hear what he did to four children in the suburbs of Detroit, you'll understand exactly why, and it's morbid. He didn't just take these kids, he kept them, fed them, bade them, and washed their clothes. And after that, he killed them and left their bodies in public places, like he was returning something that no longer belonged to him. Hey guys, it's Andrew and thanks for tuning into every town where today we're chasing down a kid killer who's never been caught. And as you'll find, what investigators uncover will try to find him is somehow even darker than the murders themselves. So, let's head on over to Michigan and dive into the story of the Oakland County Child Killer. There's a specific kind of fear that takes over a place when children start disappearing. At first, there's denial, and people tell themselves there just has to be a logical explanation. A misunderstanding, a runaway, something that makes sense. And so the fear doesn't hit everybody at once, it creeps in slow. By the time people finally accept what they're actually dealing with, it's already inside everything. The way they talk at dinner, the way they look at strangers and parking lots, the walls start to close in, wondering, well who might be next? Oakland County, Michigan, 1976. This was a stretch of suburbs sitting just north of Detroit, and back then these neighborhoods had a particular kind of rhythm to them. I was different than today. There were kids walking to corner stores all by themselves, riding bikes to a friend's house across town or stopping at the pharmacy on the way home just because they felt like it. Parents weren't anywhere around, and they certainly weren't hovering over their every move, because why would they? Everything was good to go. This was the kind of place where you let your 12 year old walk four blocks home. Nobody thought twice about it, that was just life out here. Then one day, La Boyd didn't make it. His name was Mark Stebbins, 12 years old and on the afternoon of February 15, 1976, he been at the American Legion Hall in Ferndale, not because he'd gone there on his own, but because that's where his mother worked. She was behind the bar, and Mark had been hanging around while she finished her shift, the way kids do when there's nowhere else to be. He got bored though and asked his mom for some money to go to the hobby shop down the street. And she said no, because he already had his allowance, but then he asked if he could just walk home and watch TV instead. It was just three quarters of a mile, he'd done it a hundred times before, so she said sure. Mark, he never made it home. His mom called the police that evening when she got back and he was nowhere in sight. And after that, she just waited. She kept setting his place at the table for the next couple of days, just in case. Like I said, denial creeps into these kinds of stories. She kept holding out hope that any minute she'd hear the door open and there he'd be. Any mother would probably do the same. And for four days, she hoped. On that fourth day, police found Mark's body in the parking lot of an office building in Southfield, two and a half miles from home. He was still wearing the same clothes he'd left in. His wrists and ankles showed ligature marks. He'd been bound, he'd been strangled, and he'd been assayed. Another day goes by, you know, where you don't wonder and, you know, worry about it, you know, the wife is nowhere for us. How long he had been dead before his body was found, who it was, where he was, what he had to go through. He hadn't been dead too long, which meant that he'd been held somewhere for four days before he was killed. That last part matters, so remember it, because it's going to matter more and more as the story goes on. For a while, Oakland County treated Mark's death as a tragedy, a horrific crime devastating to his family and everyone who knew him, but still a single event. Almost a year had passed, nothing else happened, so I make sense, and people will never forget what happened. But at the same time, they were eager to get back to the way things were before. So that's what they did, and life tried to get back to normal. And there was really no way to know yet that the person responsible was already out there somewhere else, in those same quiet suburbs, watching the same streets and waiting. But that's exactly what was happening. On December 22, 1976, just four days before Christmas, he claimed his next victim. Jill Robinson from Royal Oak was also 12 years old. That night, she and her mom got into an argument over something stupid and hindsight, and that set off a chain of events that would be devastating and irreversible. And Jill had been asked to make biscuits for dinner and refused. Her mom got frustrated and wanting to instill a little respect into her, told her to leave and come back when she was ready to be part of the family. And Jill, ever defiant, took her to step further. She went to her room and packed a bag, some clothes, a blanket, and she left on her bike. The next morning, her bicycle was found abandoned behind a hobby store on Woodward Ave. Her father called police at 11.30 that night when she still hadn't come home. Then Christmas Eve came and went, and Christmas Day came and went. And then, the day after Christmas, December 26, a driver on Interstate 75 in Troy spotted something on the side of the road. It was Jill. Four days it was the day after Christmas, her body turned up in Troy, she was dead of a shotgun blast to the head. Her body had been left in plain view, visible right from the highway, within sight of a police station, in fact. She still had her backpack on. Her clothes were clean and undisturbed, and she had been shot in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun. But here's the real disturbing part. The odd-topsie showed she had been fed and cared for, for at least three days before she was killed. Whoever took Jill Robinson, kept her alive and kept her somewhere, fed her. Probably told her they'd let her go if she just cooperated, and then a shodder left her body where it would be found, like she was a gift being returned after the holidays. Matt is not a crime of impulse, it's something else, and from there, well things only escalated. Just a week in the January of 1977, 10-year-old Christine Mahalic left her home in Berkeley to walk to a 7-Eleven on 12-mile road. She wanted to copy a teen beat magazine. Her mom, Deb Rudd, said no at first, because 12-mile was a busy road, and Christine would have to cross it alone. But the girl kept bugging her mom, and eventually, she gave in. After all, it was just two blocks away, and it was the middle of the day, so what's the worst that could happen? Well, Christine, she never came back from that store. And for 19 days, her family waited, and Deborah went on TV repeatedly pleading for anyone with information to come forward. Her little sons kept asking when their sister was coming home, and the tips came in, searches were conducted. The entire time, people kept talking about the royal oak girl, and what had happened to her. And then one morning, a male carrier doing his rounds about 8 miles away from that 7-Eleven store, noticed something sticking out of the snow on a dead-end road in Franklin Village. It was a small hand, Christine's hand. Her knees were drawn up, her eyes closed, and her body was clean. She was fully clothed, she almost looked peaceful. Oakland County became concerned, fearing it might be an ugly pattern developing. Residents' worst thoughts seemed to be coming true. When 10-year-old Christine Mahillage never came home from a three-block trip to a party store in Berkeley, within two weeks, she too was found dead. This time in Franklin Village. After the odd tops, he was discovered she had been smothered to death less than 24 hours before she was found, even though she had been missing for nearly three weeks. And so, she had been kept alive and cared for the entire time, longer than any of the other kids, so this killer was getting more confident. After Christine, everything changed. Police from 13 communities came together under Michigan State Police and formed a dedicated task force, because by now there was no longer any question. They were looking for a serial killer who was killing kids. The public was warned, and parents kept kids inside. School sent letters home. The suburbs that had always felt safe stopped filling that way almost overnight. And still, nobody saw it coming again. Raise your hand if you've been putting off a dental cleaning, an annual physical or some nagging thing, you keep googling at 1 a.m. Yep, my hands up too. My doom scrolls symptoms, self-diagnose, vent to my wife, and still don't book a doctor. And this year, I'm doing it differently with ZockDoc. ZockDoc is a free admin website that helps you find and book high quality in-network doctors, so you can find someone you love. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. Whether you're looking for dermatology, dentistry, primary care, eye care, or one of the 200-plus specialties offered on ZockDoc, you can easily search by specialty or symptom to build the care team that's right for you. Want to see your doctor in person? Great. Prefer a video visit? You can do that too. You can view thousands of verified patient reviews to get a real sense of who your doctor is. And when you're ready, you can see their real time of availability and click to book instantly. I use ZockDoc, and if you've been putting this off, you should too. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments, go to ZockDoc.com/everytown to find and instantly book a doctor you love today, but zoc.com/everytown, ZockDoc.com/everytown. Thanks, ZockDoc, for sponsoring this message. On March 16, 1977, 11-year-old Timothy King from Birmingham headed out to the local pharmacy. There was only a few blocks away, so he hopped on his skateboard, cruised on down, and went inside. The store clerk remembered, he bought some candy and then left, and that was the last normal moment of his life. Six days later, on March 22, it happened again. The victim this time, Timothy King, age 11 of Birmingham, last seen at a party store, three blocks from home, found a few weeks later on a dark roadside in LaVonia. All four victims in this case were never dumped close to where they were taken, but never impossibly far either. Always within the same general quarter, always in public, and always arranged. Timothy had been assayed and suffocated approximately six hours before he was found. Like the others, it also been cleaned and groomed. His clothes were washed, and when investigators went through his odd tops of results, they found Timothy at Eaton Kentucky Fried Chicken shortly before he died. One had fed him a final meal, a specific meal from a specific restaurant, within just hours of killing him. So four children, all between 10 and 12 years old, all taken from ordinary moments, a walk home, a bike ride, a trip to the corner store. All held captive for days, sometimes weeks, all had been fed and bathed, and all their clothes had been washed. All of them were left in public places where they'd be found quickly, arranged carefully, as if someone wanted them discovered. It was almost like they felt some sort of emotion for the victims, and didn't want them to be disrespected and death. The boys were assayed, the girls were not, and two were strangled, one was smothered, and one was shot. The forensic picture that emerged from all of this is not of someone acting out of rage or impulse, but deliberate, patient, terrifying control. Whatever this person was doing with these children during the days and weeks they were held, it wasn't random. Every single part of it was planned. Now what followed became the largest murder investigation in US history at that point. When 18,000 tips came in, everyone was checked, composite sketches went out, white male mid-20s to mid-30s with dark complexion, shaggy hair and sideburns. A blue AMC Gremlin had been spotted near Tim King's abduction, and investigators tracked down and questioned every registered Gremlin owner in Oakland County. The profile that emerged was of someone with freedom of movement, and someone who seemed trustworthy to children, and someone who could hold a kid captive for days without a single neighbor noticing. But still, none of that led anywhere. The task force disbanded in December of '78, and from there, the case went to state police. And four families were left to carry questions that have never been answered, and most likely never will be. Here's the Oakland County child killer, has never been caught. And now, here's where this story takes a different turn entirely, because without someone being definitively caught, people were left to speculate. And there were some weird things that happened in the days that followed the murders that made things only more complicated. A few weeks after Tim King's body was found, a task force psychiatrist received an anonymous letter. It was handwritten, riddled with spelling errors, signed only by Alan. Now Alan claimed to be the sadomastic slave of a man named Frank, and he was suggesting that Frank was the killer. He wrote that both of them had served in Vietnam. That Frank had come back from the war deeply damaged, that the murders in wealthy Oakland County were his way of getting revenge, hence the kind of people he believed had sent young men like him to die in Southeast Asia for nothing at all. Alan even said he had been present during the abductions. He said he was losing his mind and then offered something remarkable, photographic evidence in exchange for immunity. He had one condition though, if the psychiatrist wanted to arrange a meeting, he had to print a specific coded message in the Detroit Free Press. The psychiatrist printed the code, he arranged the meeting, and showed up to the bar, Alan though, he never came. That letter has never been fully explained, whoever wrote it either had direct knowledge these crimes or what? was someone deeply disturbed, instructing a fantasy out of what they had read in the papers. And for decades, investigators couldn't rule out either possibility, and in some ways, they still can't. But the leads that gained the most traction over the years didn't point to a lone disturbed individual, but they pointed toward something far more organized and far more sinister. A way up north, from Oakland County, on North Fox Island in Lake Michigan, a wealthy business man named Francis Sheldon was running what he called "Ruther Paul's Nature Center". This place was marketed as a wholesome outdoor experience for young boys. A place where they could learn about how to build a fire, and how to fish. All those wonderful outdoorsy things boys can do at summer camp. Others led by good men wanting to lend a helping hand and teach the next generation about what it takes. But in reality, this place was something else. It was essentially what Epstein Island is accused of being except this was well before that place existed and it only involved young boys. A man came to the island to photograph and do other things with these kids. And photographs, just like Alan had mentioned in his letter. The full scope of victims has never been publicly established. But this place ran for two summers, between 1975 and 1976, before the heat started coming down on them in '77 as a part of the Oakland County Child Killer Case. A former gym teacher named Gerald Richards was the only person ever charged in connection with what happened on that island. Francis Sheldon though left the country before he could be prosecuted, so gone just like that. As to how this island in northern Michigan is connected to four murdered children in the suburbs of Detroit, that all comes through a man named Christopher Bush. A Chris Bush was 26 years old in 1977. His father, Harold Lee Bush, was a senior executive at GM. And Chris had already been convicted of assault crimes against children for separate charges in fact, and yet had never spent a single night in jail, not one. According to journalists, Marnie Keenan, who spent 26 years investigating this case for the Detroit News, Harold had paid a defense attorney to fly around Michigan in a private plane, ranging plea deals for his son every single time he was charged. Every single time then, Chris just got probation. His father always posted bond and Chris Bush walked. So from there, he was free to do whatever he pleased, never learning any hard lessons and never getting reformed, and he just so happened to be good friends with none other than Francis Sheldon. And Chris's name, and appeared in client records, connected to the island operation. In late January of '77, while Christine Mielech was still missing and Timothy King was still alive, Chris Bush was brought in for questioning in connection with the Oakland County killings. A top investigator from the task force went to question him personally, and Chris passed a polygraph and then he was released. Just weeks later, Timothy King disappeared. And there's more. Bush had a close friend named Greg Green, by his own history of being inappropriate with kids and convictions for it in California. During interrogation, Green reportedly told police that Chris had personally murdered Mark Stebans, the first victim. And still though, nothing happened. Nobody was charged. Chris walked away again, and you have to ask yourself why. In November of '78, roughly 20 months after the last Oakland County killing, Chris was found dead in his bedroom from a single gunshot wound to the head, and on a liven. Inside that room, they found blood-stained ligatures, and pinned to the wall, a hand-drawn pencil sketch of a boy screaming. And Mark Stebans' brother looked at that drawing and said it looked exactly like his brother. The families of the victims were never even told about any of this, not the drawing, not the bloody ropes, they didn't find out for decades. When they finally did, while the question started coming fast, why wasn't this treated as significant at the time, and why weren't the families informed, and why did so much of the evidence connected to Bush seem to disappear? Because here's the thing, when investigators eventually weren't looking for those bloodstained ropes, they were gone. Just gone. They were checked into an evidence locker, and then never seen again. In 2012, DNA testing officially cleared Bush as the killer, and his DNA didn't match evidence recovered from the victim, so he didn't do it fine. But, that still leaves a whole lot of questions about what he did know, who he was connected to, and whether he was involved in some capacity, regardless of what the DNA said. And Bush isn't the only name that keeps coming up. Arch Sloan was a man who spent decades targeting young boys in his own neighborhood in Michigan, and he grew up in Southfield, the exact same city where Mark Steppen's body was found. This guy became a serious person of interest when forensic analysis of his 1966 Pontiac Bonneville turned up something very interesting. Hair found in Sloan's 1966 Pontiac Bonneville has the same mitochondrial DNA profile as hairs found on two of the child killer victims. The hairs do not match Sloan, but detectives want to know who else may have used Sloan's vehicle. This is someone whose identity has never been publicly confirmed. Sloan is 84 years old, he's currently serving two life sentences for being inappropriate with a 10-year-old kid. This boy was the son of a co-worker, and Sloan asked if he could take the kid out fishing one day, that's when the crime went down, and it very much so harkens back to the kind of tactics that went down at Brother Paul's nature center. A Sloan failed polygraph tests related to the Oakland County killings in both 2010 and 2012, but has never been charged in connection with the murders. So, by the time you layer all this together, bush, Sloan, green, the North Fox Island operation, that letter from Alan, the blood stain ropes that disappeared, the drawing on the wall, what you have is not the profile of one lone predator working in isolation, what you have looks far more like a network, a group of men connected through shared crimes against children connected through geography, and through a culture of abuse that have been operating in Michigan for years, and somewhere inside that network, four children were killed. And so then where does this all stand 50 years later? Michigan State Police confirms the case is still open, and they say new tips are still coming in and that evidence is being re-evaluated as forensic technology improves. That's all true, but here's what's also true. The families of the victims say MSP hasn't meaningfully contacted them in years, and last real communication was around 2016 or 2017. After that, it's been silence. And DNA should have solved this by now, it really should have. The technology exists, and the evidence exists. That hair recovered from Arch Sloan's car, a hair found on the bodies of two victims, is a DNA profile built from samples taken from the crime scene, so all of it points to one unknown man. Which means, neither he was never arrested for anything else in his entire life, and his entire family is never sent in their DNA to look up family trees, or someone has made sure his name has never ended up where it could be found. In two cases have never been officially connected to the Oakland County series, but have never been fully dismissed either. A 17-year-old named Donna Serra abducted while hitchhiking in McComb County in 1972, elder for days, drugged, strangled, her body found face down in a creek. In a 13-year-old named Jane Allen who vanished in 1976 while hitchhiking between Pontiac and Royal Oak, found four days later in a river in Ohio, she had a wrist bound behind her back, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Both cases share too many characteristics with the confirmed murder. to ignore, neither has been officially included in the series, though, and neither has been solved. If the real scope of what happened here goes beyond four victims, if there were more children, more families, more evidence sitting in files that nobody has fully cross referenced, then what took place in Oakland County between 76 and 77 is even darker than the record currently shows, and the record is already about as dark as it gets. In 50 years have passed, and people who knew what happened are either dead or very old and not talking, evidence has deteriorated, and some of it, like those blood-stained ropes from Bush's apartment, simply vanished. The suburbs north of Detroit look completely different now, the world looks completely different, and still not one person has ever been charged with the killing of Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Christine Mielicz, or Timothy King. The case is still open. If you know anything at all, Michigan State Police can be reached at 1-855-Mish-Tip. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. I appreciate you tuning in. If you enjoyed watching, and please do take a look around at all the other crazy stories we have in store for you, and for the freshest one, or remember to come on back next week for another episode of Every Town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know, maybe your town will be next.