On the evening of March 16, 1977, Timothy John King, eleven, left his home in Birmingham, Michigan, with his skateboard and walked to a pharmacy. He did not come back, and for six days the whole Detroit metropolitan area searched for him. On the evening of March 22 two teenagers found him in a shallow ditch beside Gill Road in Livonia. He had been sexually assaulted with an object and suffocated about six hours earlier. He had been cleaned and groomed, and the autopsy found he had eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken shortly before he died. A woman told police she had seen a boy with a skateboard talking to a man in the pharmacy parking lot beside a blue AMC Gremlin. Police released a composite of the man and the car and questioned every Gremlin owner in Oakland County.
He was the fourth. Mark Douglas Stebbins, twelve, of Ferndale, did not come home from an American Legion hall on February 15, 1976. Four days later he was found in the clothes he had last been seen in, lying on a pile of wood and dirt in an office parking lot in Southfield, strangled and sexually abused with an object, with rope marks on his wrists and ankles. Jill Robinson, twelve, of Royal Oak, left home on December 22, 1976, after an argument with her mother over dinner. Her bicycle was found behind a hobby store the next day, and on the morning of December 26 she was found beside Interstate 75 in Troy, within sight of the Troy police station, fully clothed and still wearing her backpack. She had been shot in the face with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and the autopsy found she had been fed and cared for for at least three days. Kristine Marie Mihelich, ten, of Berkley, went to a 7-Eleven on 12 Mile Road on January 2, 1977, and did not come back. Nineteen days later a mail carrier found her fully clothed body beside a rural road in Franklin Village, within view of houses. She had been smothered less than a day before.
After Mihelich was found, the Michigan State Police led a task force drawn from thirteen communities. From witnesses it profiled a white man between twenty-five and thirty-five with a dark complexion, shaggy hair and sideburns, familiar with the area, with a job that let him move around freely and made him look trustworthy to children, and a place where he could keep a child for days without neighbors noticing. The case was then the largest murder investigation in American history, and WXYT radio's program Winter's Fear won a Peabody Award in 1977. The task force checked more than 18,000 tips, which led to about two dozen arrests on unrelated charges and to the discovery of a multistate child pornography ring on North Fox Island in Lake Michigan. It disbanded in December 1978, and the case passed to the State Police.
A few weeks after King's death a psychiatrist working with the task force received a letter from a man calling himself Allen, who said he was the slave of the killer, Frank, a Vietnam veteran taking revenge on affluent suburbs such as Birmingham. Allen asked for a coded message in the Detroit Free Press and agreed to meet at a bar, and never came. David Norberg, who died in 1981, was a suspect until his body was exhumed in 1999 and DNA ruled him out. Hair found in the car of Archibald Edward Sloan, a convicted child molester, matched hair on the bodies of King and Stebbins but was not Sloan's own. John Wayne Gacy's DNA did not match. Ted Lamborgine, a retired auto worker from a 1970s sex ring that preyed on boys in Detroit's Cass Corridor, was named the top suspect in 2007; he pleaded guilty to fifteen sex offenses rather than take a polygraph on the killings.
Other cases have been considered: Donna Serra, seventeen, strangled in Macomb County in 1972 after being held and drugged; Jane Allan, thirteen, found in a river in Ohio in 1976 with her wrists tied; and Kimberly King, twelve, who disappeared from Warren in 1979 and has never been found. DNA testing has indirectly implicated two suspects, one since dead and one serving life for sex crimes against children. A DNA profile of the main perpetrator, built from samples taken from the victims, matches no one named in the case, and the killer's identity is unknown.