Between February 1976 and March 1977 four children were taken from towns in Oakland County, Michigan: Mark Stebbins, twelve, Jill Robinson, twelve, Kristine Mihelich, ten, and Timothy King, eleven. Each was held for between four and nineteen days and then left in the open, in a car park, beside a road, in a ditch, positioned neatly and in plain view.
What made the case what it is was the condition of the bodies. They had been washed. Their clothing had been laundered and in some cases pressed. They had been fed. Timothy King's mother made a public appeal saying he wanted a chicken dinner, and the post-mortem found he had been given one shortly before he died. Mark Stebbins and Timothy King were suffocated; Jill Robinson was shot; Kristine Mihelich was smothered.
Metropolitan Detroit went into a state of alarm that older residents still describe. A task force of some two hundred officers was assembled and ran for more than a year on tens of thousands of tips.
It has never been solved. Suspects have been advanced and dropped over five decades, including men connected to a paedophile ring in the area that was under investigation at the time, and there has been persistent criticism from the victims' families about the handling and disclosure of the file, including material and evidence that went missing. The case is open, and hairs and fibres retained from the bodies have been retested more than once.