Randall Raar spoke to me again from his home in the Robert A Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan where he is likely to spend the rest of his life.
He’s there after being convicted in 2006 of child molestation related charges.
His conviction is dubious because the victim was twenty-one when she testified, but she was only five and six when the alleged events occurred.
A tantalizing part of Raar’s story is his belief that an investigation he was conducting into the Oakland County child killer was what set off the investigation into him.
He had just completed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to the investigation when his home was raided, he told me.
The cop who confronted him asked first what he knew about the Oakland County child killer, and he told me the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) visited him in 2016, he told me, about this case as well.
Raar had developed little more than speculation and conjecture when he was arrested.
He told me that his investigation grew out of an investigation into police corruption, and he believes that a law enforcement official is responsible.
He told me he did not even remember what the FOIA request was for.
Still, he is forever linked to this serial killing spree because in 2006, he was accused of being the serial killer.
A new tip in the Oakland County child killer case has police investigating.
Michigan State Police raided a Lincoln Park home last week after receiving a tip from a federal inmate.
A task force is working to bring evidence against the owner of the home, Randall Raar, 59, who they said may be linked to the Oakland County child killer case.
Inside the home, police found letters written to serial killers, child pornography, 8 mm film dating back to the 1970s, computer files and a sex slave dungeon equipped with shackles and a jail-like door that locked from the outside, Local 4 reported.
Raar is considered a link in the case, and a task force is currently collecting evidence to eliminate him as a suspect in the slaying of four area children.
The Oakland County Child Killer
Starting on February 15, 1976, and ending on March 16, 1977, four children were abducted, sexually violated, killed and had their bodies dumped in Oakland County, Michigan.
There were several aspects of this case which are more curious than other serial killings.
The killings halted with the fourth one and each child was killed in a different Detroit suburb. There are other killings which are suspected to be done by the same killer. Part of the Wikipedia page is below.
They remain unsolved.
There has been much written and said about these killings. Most prominently is a book The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation by Mary Rich Keenan of the Detroit News.
Investigation Discovery has also done several documentaries on it as well as a podcast called Stranger Danger, which I listened to.
Raar said he believes that law enforcement has engaged in a cover-up, because one of their own did it.
He is not the only one who has criticized law enforcement. The book, the podcast, and especially Catherine King, the sister of the last victim, Timothy King, all have criticized law enforcement.
King left his home to go to a pharmacy in Birmingham, Michigan and was never seen alive again.
Here is part of what Catherine said on her blog, “Some people know who abducted and killed kids in Oakland County, Michigan in 1976 and 1977. More energy has been expended in keeping a lid on these ‘cold cases’ over the past 36 years than has been spent trying to solve these crimes. It is only one shocking facet of this case that when the truth finally bubbles to the surface, I believe it will be shown that a remarkable number of people knew at the time and know now who was involved in the abduction and killing of these kids. Law enforcement agencies in Oakland County are not above re-victimizing family members who dare to ask questions about the investigation and have been quick to dismiss people who have come forward with information. It has been obvious to me since early 2006 that this thing reeks.”
The other victims were Mark Stebbins, who was 12 and died returning home from the American Legion in Ferndale, Michigan: Jill Robinson, who was also 12 and died after leaving her home in Royal Oak, Michigan: Kristine Mihelich, who was ten and died after not returning home from the 7/11.
The Suspects
As the podcast noted, the task force setup to catch the killer was disbanded in 1978 due to a lack of funding.
Suspects have still developed.
One is Arch Sloan. Sloan failed a polygraph test, but also, DNA found on two of the victims was found in another child molestation he participated in.
The kicker: the DNA was not his. Here is more from WXYZ.
He says he was molested by Arch Sloan—the man now called a person of interest in connection to the Oakland County Child Killer investigation.
His name is David Barney and he says back in 1976, he lived across the street from the Sloan family in Southfield. Barney says he was just 7 years old when he first met Sloan. He says Sloan knew exactly how to lure little boys.
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David says his parents let him go with Sloan on fishing trips, and he says Sloan loved to drive around with him in his 1966 Bonneville.
That’s the car we now know contained hair that has the same mitochondrial DNA profile as the hair found on Oakland County Child Killer victims Tim King and Mark Stebbins.
“When I saw the picture of the Bonneville, it was almost like a horrible flashback,” Barney says.
Here is more from another Detroit area station.
In July 2012, Prosecutor Cooper discussed Archibald Edward Sloan and his 1966 Pontiac Bonneville. A hair found in the car is a DNA match to evidence at two of the crime scenes -- Mark Stebbins’ and Timothy King’s. The hair is not his but police believe it belongs to an acquaintance.
Sloan is reportedly the owner of the car where the hair was found. Prosecutors were considering him an accomplice to the suspect. He could be a direct link to whoever the killer is, prosecutors said.
It is believed Sloan worked at a garage or gas station near 10 Mile and Middlebelt roads during the time of the Oakland County Child Killer murders. Seven years after the death of Timothy King, Sloan was arrested again. He was charged with two counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. The offense took place in October 1983. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 1985.
Sloan, 77, is serving his life sentence at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian, Mich.
Another suspect is Jeff Gunnels, who did have a DNA match. From the same station’s story, Gunnels insisted he was not the killer and even met with the King family.
Barry King said Gunnels’ story wasn’t off-the-wall, but not exactly promising.
“I believe that the story he told Chris and I was believable,” Barry King said. “But it was contradicted by previous stories that he has told other people.”
Gunnels told the Kings that Bush was a child predator who lived in Oakland County at the time.
“It seems clear that he must have had at least some knowledge of the crimes,” Chris King said.
However, Gunnels denied knowing anything about the Oakland County Child Killings.
“I say right now I have no idea what that man did to anyone else,” Gunnels said.
Chris King asked him about two polygraph tests.
“My questions for him were, you know it’s hard to understand you tried to cheat on one polygraph exam and failed a second polygraph exam,” Chris King said. “So, if you had absolutely no involvement or knowledge of these crimes, why would you feel that you had to cheat in the first place and then why would you fail the second one? It doesn’t make sense.”
Another theory is that the abductions were carried out by an elite pedophile ring. This is the subject of the ID podcast. It was largely developed by a detective named Cory Williams, who was investigating an unrelated case when a suspect, Richard Lawson, gave him information which led him down the rabbit hole of this elite child trafficking ring.
The ring included prominent politicians, GM executives, and other pillars of the community.
Here is more from ID.
Appelman has long been haunted by a childhood memory of a man following him out of a store and ordering him into a car. Fortunately, the future journalist managed to run away, and, since 2005, he has been digging deeper into this horrific real-life mystery.
In exploring old files and documents, Appelman has come to believe that the police may have had the killer in the grip, but that a coalition of wealthy, powerful figures made sure he walked free. It’s a conspiracy that points to a child-sex network and severe mistakes — accidental, or perhaps not — on the part of the original investigators.
Through interviews with Detective Cory Williams and family members of the victims, Children of the Snow examines a potential connection between the Oakland County Child Killer murders and a sick pedophile ring that produced child pornography and operated out of Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission on North Fox Island at the same time.
After a boy escaped that circle of abusers, he pointed authorities in the direction of Francis Sheldon, the multimillionaire philanthropist who owned North Fox Island. Sheldon fled overseas and was never caught, but investigators uncovered the nightmarish underground connected to Brother Paul’s — a web of child rape and exploitation with outposts that reached across Michigan and the United States.
Two potential members of this ring are: Chris Busch and Ted Lamborgine.
Both were featured in the story from above as suspects; here is what the story said about Lamborgine.
Theodore Lamborgine and his partner in crime, Richard Lawson, were part of a 1970s sex ring that preyed on young boys in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. Out of the five men involved, Lamborgine and Lawson were the only two living members of that ring when they were charged in 2006. Lamborgine faced 19 counts of sexually assaulting children, while Lawson faced 28 similar charges.
Lawson, who was already serving a life sentence for murder, told WDIV in 2006 that he knows who the Oakland County Child Killer is. WDIV later obtained documents detailing molestations of many children in the 70s and 80s. Three new names of suspects in the investigation were listed and one of those names matched the one Lawson gave as the Oakland County Child Killer. The name Lawson gave was Bobby Moore, one of the deceased members of the sex ring. Investigators said they were looking into all of those people.
Investigators also said they did not believe Lamborgine or Lawson to be the killer, but they did think the men had valuable information that could help solve the case.
Lamborgine is serving a life sentence at Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Williams, in the podcast, provided some startling detail. He interviewed Lamborgine; the prosecutor offered him immunity for information on the Oakland County Child Killer. Lamborgine not only rejected the offer, but he pled guilty to all seventeen charges against him and is thus serving a life sentence.
Busch comes from a prominent Detroit area family; his father was a GM executive. In 1976, he was a convicted pedophile.
In the podcast, Chris King, Tim’s brother, said that in 2006 he had a conversation with a friend. His friend, who was a polygraph examiner, said he spoke with another polygraph examiner.
That examiner said, “I polygraphed the person who killed your neighbor boy.”
It took two years to track down the person who failed the polygraph test: Chris Busch.
But law enforcement had no appetite for this new lead.
“It appeared to the King family that the Michigan State Police and the Oakland County Prosecutor were not cooperative,” the narrator said in the podcast.
Busch died in 1978; it was ruled a suicide though Williams said in the podcast that he believed he was murdered.
The Law Enforcement Connection
There are more questions than answers in these serial killings.
None of this shows much of a connection between the serial killings and Raar.
Raar’s investigation was just beginning; he believed it was law enforcement who did the killings.
He believes, he told me in the interview, that there is a coverup because they are protecting their own.
Raar’s name is not mentioned in the podcast, in the list of suspects, and there is no connection to law enforcement, besides a bungled and non-transparent investigation, or is there?
Cathy King said she developed a lead in the last few years which may put law enforcement directly involved in the killings.
When Busch died, the first cop on the scene was Richard McNamee.
In the last two years, based on FOIA requests done by Keenan, it has come out that McNamee was himself a serial pedophile; also, he spent nearly thirty minutes in the Busch residence alone before other cops arrived.
Was law enforcement directly involved in this ring? is this the reason Raar was targeted? The investigation continues.
Post-script
This is the fourth article on wrongful convictions. Find the first, second, third article, and fourth article. Find the fundraiser for this project to support more work like this.
Randall Raar and the unsolved serial killings