7 – Oakland County Child Killer
The final case in our list the only one in which the murderer has never been found. The case of the Oakland County Child Killer is still open with police in Michigan, but some 40 years after the last attack, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever be brought to justice for these heinous crimes. They are among the most horrifying on our list too, as they involve the abduction, sexual assault and murder of defenseless children, all between the ages of 10 and 12.
The first killing was in 1976, when Mark Stebbins, a 12-year-old boy from the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, Michigan was last sighted leaving a community hall on a Sunday afternoon. His mother, who was at the hall, had allowed him to leave to go home and watch television, but he was never seen again. The body of Mark Stebbins was found four days later, laid out on display in a snowdrift the neighboring district of Southfield. He had been violated with an object and then asphyxiated with a rope, after having also been tied up – he had rope marks on his ankles and wrists.
The death of Mark Stebbins was followed by that of another 12-year-old, this time a girl named Jill Robinson from Royal Oak, a different area of Oakland County on the outskirts of Detroit. She was a young runaway, who had fled the family home after an argument with her mother in the run-up to Christmas 1976. She disappeared on December 22 and was found on the morning of December 26, having been shot in the face while forced to lie on her back the ground, fully clothed and still carrying the backpack that she had packed when she ran away.
The manner in which the body had been laid out in a snowdrift to be found – it was discovered directly across from a police station – alerted police that the perpetrator might well have been the same killer who murdered Mark Stebbins.
In the following three months, another two bodies of children would be found. Kristine Mihelich, a ten-year-old, was laid out in a snowbank after being smothered – though crucially, she had been abducted 19 days previously and had only died within the 24 hours before her body was found. Timothy King, 11, was similarly found in March 1977, a month and a half after Mihelich’s body was discovered.
He had left his family home to go to buy candy and had disappeared: fresh with the stories of the previous 3 murders, the local Detroit media had broadcast appeals from his parents and advertisements in newspapers calling for his return. When the suffocated, sexually assaulted body of Timothy King was discovered, it neatly laid out in clothes that had been laundered and with the skateboard that he had left home with two weeks before.
The search for the Oakland County Child Killer brought up plenty of suspects: a man wrote a letter to a Detroit psychiatrist associated with the police claiming to know the killer, but was never uncovered, while the son of a General Motors executive was found withdrawn images that closely resembled Mark Stebbins when he committed suicide in late 1978. Even John Wayne Gacy, the Clown Killer, was considered, as he had been in Michigan at the time.
To this day, the case remains open and Oakland County cops are still searching for clues.