He was kind of a Jekyll and Hyde type.
—Reverend Harvey Peters
No one, police decided, would murder the whole Robison family over something one of the kids did. Or over some domestic transgression of Shirley’s. Within days after the crime was discovered, two seasoned detectives from the Michigan State Police were assigned to the case; Detective Lloyd Stearns and Detective John Flis. The rest of their caseload was divvied up among other officers, and their sole concern became finding the killer of the Robisons.
After an early look at the available evidence and collating their initial interviews with the Robisons’ family, friends, and Good Hart neighbors, the detectives determined that the chronology of the crime had progressed like this:
Stearns and Flis speculated that the murders were either a meaningless rampage by a crazed killer or that the initial target of the murderer was Dick Robison, with the others tragic collateral damage. If it was Dick, the detectives were determined to find out why he was targeted. What set of circumstances had placed him in front of a gunman or gunmen hiding out in the woods? Something had infuriated, panicked, or alienated this anonymous shooter or shooters enough that, according to the autopsy report, two rounds were fired into Dick’s head and one into his chest. When they found out the why they might also find out the who, and so Stearns and Flis started to untangle the knotted strands in the intricate life of Dick Carl Robison.
Dick had earned his family’s upper class lifestyle through hard work. More than a decade earlier, he had founded R. C. Robison and Associates, the detectives learned. The company formulated advertising campaigns for successful Detroit-area businesses and even decided in which outlets the ads would be run and for how long. Dick also published an arts magazine, Impresario, that detailed the cultural scene in Detroit and beyond.
“It doesn’t look like he had a single enemy,” Stearns said when the crime was still fresh. “We just can’t get a handle on this guy.”
It would certainly be understandable if Stearns later on regretted making that comment. Dick had enemies, and Stearns and his fellow state troopers, as well as a whole lineup of Emmet County sheriff’s detectives, would eventually track down and question them.
Yet on the surface and at the beginning of the investigation, Dick Robison looked pretty clean—a devout Lutheran, a strict father, an attentive husband. He painted watercolors and supported the civic opera. How many enemies could a man like that really have? Robison’s kind of clean turned out to be not the squeaky kind, but the slippery.
Dick, the detectives soon learned, was a man who inspired corruption and loyalty in almost equal measure in the men he worked and socialized with. He was a human enigma, one man with his family, another with his business associates, and still another when he was alone and looking at the world through his artist’s eyes. The detectives knew full well that most people behave differently in different situations, of course, but as they researched Dick’s background, detectives found not just shades of the same man, reasonably adjusting to whatever circumstances he encountered, but three totally different men.
Here was a man who knew how to stand at an artist’s easel and hold a camel’s hair paintbrush. Who knew how to say “No” to his children without regret or second-guessing. Who carried himself as if he was born in his three-piece suit, and who wore all of his clothes neatly starched and pressed, even when on vacation at his summer cottage.
Dick didn’t smoke cigarettes and he didn’t have a thirst for liquor. He didn’t gamble and he didn’t care for guns. What he did like was art and money and the prestige they brought him. From his actions and from the opinions the detectives coaxed out of those willing to talk, they learned that Dick wanted as much of both art and money as he could get, and woe to anyone who stood in his way.
“He was either a person that liked you and would do anything for you or a person that didn’t and would do anything against you,” was one former employee’s characterization. The employee’s name was Richard Stockwell, and he had quit working for Dick Robison because he didn’t like being bullied. A year later, Dick wooed him back with a lucrative salary offer and promises of good behavior. After a week on the job, Dick called him into his office and summarily fired him. “Nobody quits Dick Robison,” he told the stunned Stockwell. “Nobody.”
Others acquainted with Dick told detectives he was a “tyrant,” a “schizophrenic,” acted “paranoid and secretive,” and held “dogmatic” opinions. Then again, he was “brilliant,” “a genius,” with a “magnetic” personality and a “sincere” religious faith. Sometimes these conflicting appraisals were volunteered by the same person.
He was a secretive man, but on the last day of his life Dick still left enough of a trail for detectives to follow, and they were reasonably sure that he and his family were, as Monnie had said, preparing to leave on a lengthy trip when they were killed. It was to be a venture in buying real estate, the police learned from interviewing family and friends, with the family traveling via a private jet that would take the six of them to Lexington, Kentucky, and Naples, Florida. Shirley had told her best friend and neighbor, Margaret Smith, and Dick had told his father, Ross Robison, that a man would be coming to stay with them in Good Hart for a few days and then the family and this man would make the trip south together. Margaret told detectives that she phoned Shirley in mid-June, right before the family left for Summerset, to wish her a good trip. Shirley told Margaret that she was worried that everything at the cottage wouldn’t be presentable for their guest.
Her fears were eased slightly when Dick called her from the road during one of his many business trips and said their future visitor wanted to talk with her directly. He put the man on the line. “Don’t make any fuss, I’m just coming up to relax,” the man told her. “Maybe you could make me some of the pasties Dick tells me is a local specialty up there.”
Margaret Smith couldn’t remember the man’s name, but Dick’s father did. It was unusual—“Roebert”—and it was his private jet that would bear the family south. Dick’s right-hand man at the office, a young guy by the name of Joe Scolaro, would know of the rendezvous as well, Margaret Smith said. A few scant details at least, even if he didn’t know everything.
When detectives talked to Joe for the first time, scant details were indeed all he knew about the trip, though he had been left in charge of Robison’s business while Dick was away.
“Some man by the name of Mr. Roberts was supposed to go up there and visit them,” Joe told Detective Stearns.
“Who is Mr. Roberts?” Stearns asked.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Joe said. “Dick used the name a couple of times and then would say, ‘Forget it.’ Roberts might be . . . a fictitious name, I really don’t know. He never linked it directly with anything and when I would ask him who the man was, he wouldn’t tell me.”
Were Roebert and Mr. Roberts the same man? Was he a business associate of Dick’s? Could he be the killer? The detectives didn’t know, but continued their search for answers.
They grilled another of Dick’s business associates, Walter Muellenhagen. “This is the thing the police were so insistent I ought to know. Who he is and they kept coming back to the same question,” Muellenhagen told a reporter. “They would come in here a couple times a week, drop by unexpectedly, call up, anything, and they’d stop by and they’d always bring up this question of Mr. Roberts. So, ah, finally they asked me to come down to the police station. . . . [W]e talked for several hours, we went out to lunch, we talked some more, we came back and I said, ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ And they said, ‘Well, really there’s some questions here we feel you should know the answers to that you say you don’t.’ And I said, ‘Fine do you have a polygraph here?’”
Walter Muellenhagen passed his polygraph test, and from then on the polygraph was a tool detectives used freely. That same week Monnie Bliss also agreed to be polygraphed. Just like Muellenhagen, he passed.
Next the detectives took a closer look at Dick.
***
On the last afternoon of his life, Dick was dressed for travel. He was wearing a beige safari jacket over a white short-sleeved knit shirt. In the pocket of his black trousers police found a plastic comb, a white handkerchief, a jackknife, and eighty-three cents. On his feet were a pair of ankle-high doeskin dress boots, brand name After Hours. As for jewelry, he wore his gold wedding band on his left hand and a Masonic ring set with a gem-cut blue stone on his right.
Dick was wearing exactly what a man of leisure, ready for a trip, should be. Nothing telling, nothing out of the ordinary. Except for one little item that didn’t attract attention until long after the autopsy, when the Robisons’ extended family asked that Dick’s personal effects be released and returned to them. Suspended on a thin chain around Dick’s neck, invisible until the medical examiner removed the dead man’s shirt and jacket, had been a round gold disk. The disk was a St. Christopher medal with this perplexing inscription in an uneven scrawl scratched on the back: “Richard to my chosen son and heir—God bless you. Roebert.”
The name Christopher means “Christ carrier” in Greek, and Catholics revere St. Christopher as the patron saint of travelers. He is also sometimes invoked, the New Catholic Dictionary says, to ward off “sudden death.”
Still, detectives didn’t know what to make of Dick’s religious necklace. St. Christopher medals were popular in the 1960s; mothers would give them to their children as a protective talisman, and boys would give them to their sweethearts to show that they were going steady. Dick was a devout Lutheran, though, not a Catholic, and this was no gift from a silly crush. As far as his lineage was concerned, detectives knew he was the son of Ross Robison, and not of a man named Roebert. Police wondered who this mystery man was, what his relationship with Dick was, and why he would give Robison something as intimate as a piece of jewelry—religious jewelry at that.
It surprised some family members, too.
“We were shocked . . . when we heard about it,” Shirley’s mother, Aileen Fulton, told a reporter. “That Richard would be carrying that medal with that writing or inscription or whatever behind it. We never knew anything about that. We still can’t figure it out.”
In their search of Dick’s office at R. C. Robison and Associates, Stearns and Flis found a clue. It was a weirdly rambling, six-page letter addressed to “Roebert (My Father),” dated May 17, 1968, handwritten on Impresario magazine stationery and signed by Dick.
“I’m most honored and pleased with the message given me by ‘Steamboat Joe’ this morning,” the letter begins.
I have it where we decided and have instructed Joe not to allow me to “drop my wallet.” Also, if something (how?) should happen to me to take the entire wallet and pass it “up” to where the Moter [sic] people would know what to do with it.
The letter goes on to mention the car allowances Dick has given two members of his staff, Impresario executive editor Ted Seemeyer and managing editor Ernest Gilbert, as part of their newly increased salary packages, and names their choices in automobiles. The letter continues:
Now . . . a favorite story of mine was the one where a fellow arrived at work excited about the “Tremendous” collision that must have taken place on the company’s corner earlier. No one was aware of it . . . but he insisted a Mustang and a Thunderbird had to have hit head on ’cause there were feathers and horse [manure] all over the place. Now . . . it should prove, in the future, most interesting to see whether we have a similar mess strewn about the halls of “Ole Impresario” via Ted the Mustang and Ernie the Thunderbird. It will be interesting to see if wonderful “Steamboat” has a keen sense of smell.
Dick closes the letter, “I thank God for you, father. Your son always, Richard.” Then in a postscript he writes, “Incidentally, ‘Ole Joe’ really had a ‘full head o steam’ this time. He was most controlled!” Then he finally concludes, “I’m looking forward with great anticipation and love to the day when we finally meet—soon I hope. Always—your son Richard.”
A state police handwriting expert and document examiner confirmed that the letter was not a forgery but had indeed been written by Dick. With that, detectives began to have doubts about the man’s sanity—doubts inspired by this bizarre letter, but also by the divergent opinions about Dick’s character expressed by those closest to him, as well as the first hints of a multi-million-dollar business enterprise Dick was supposedly hatching with no documentation to back it up. Detectives were further perplexed by the words of Dick’s own Lutheran minister.
“Dick was a strict parent, a brilliant and determined individual, but he had a split personality,” Pastor Harvey Peters of the Calvary Lutheran Church in Southfield told the detectives. Peters had known Dick since the Robison family joined his congregation. Peters admired Dick’s intelligence and his faith, but said that he had an abrasive personality and was “kind of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type.”
Reverend Peters had presided at the Robison family’s funeral and was forthcoming with his opinions. Though Peters was an admirer of Dick, he said he was an abrasive person who “couldn’t even win an election to the church council of the congregation he helped form in 1958.”
Dick didn’t work well as part of a team, and so Reverend Peters gave him solo projects, saying he was inwardly warm but guarded his emotions in front of others. Though the family never missed attending services when they were in town, Dick would often avoid the traditional after-service handshake.
“He would sometimes scoot out the side door and not shake hands,” Reverend Peters said. “But then he might call me later in the week to say hello or to take me to lunch.”
With the assistance of Emmet County sheriff’s deputies, local police officers, and state troopers normally assigned to patrol highways, detectives planned to check out a number of men with varied psychiatric histories, some violent and some just pitiable, in the event that a homicidal madman was roaming the north country, seeking out his next victim randomly. First though, there was one man whose mental health detectives needed to check the status of. That man was Dick Robison himself.
On October 7, 1968, Detectives Stearns and Flis contacted the head man at the Ypsilanti State Hospital, Dr. Alexander Dukay, and requested his help. From 1931 until it was demolished to make way for a Toyota automotive plant in 2005, the Ypsilanti State Hospital was not only a cavernous brick campus that housed four thousand mentally ill patients, but was also home to one of the state’s Centers for Forensic Psychiatry. A small area out back, called the “back ward” by staff and the “snake pit” by patients, was circled with barbed wire and contained some of the state’s most twisted criminals, deemed, because of the depravity of their crimes, to be criminally insane.
These patients and the motives for their crimes were studied by staff psychiatrists, and any valuable information gleaned was regularly passed on to law enforcement personnel. Detectives Stearns and Flis approached Dr. Dukay with a folder of material on Dick Robison, in the event that the doctor might be able to categorize their increasingly mysterious victim. They gave the doctor copies of the editorials Dick wrote for Impresario, other miscellaneous writings they found in his home and office, and brought him up to date on the investigation.
The text of one of Dick’s editorials in the April 1967 issue of the magazine did sound a bit angry. The “hoax-art” being criticized was works of greatness by such painters as Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, and Paul Klee.
Although it’s difficult, at times, to turn our cheek when being hit in the face by some of the obvious hoax-art that has been given credence of late by those who either know and don’t care or those who don’t know and care less, we take comfort in the fact that in the light of cold objectivity, art of nothingness remains . . . nothingness.
Another, in February 1968 stated, “A fact of great significance that should interest you as a reader of Impresario is the finding that more acclaim has been attached to Impresario Readers as the thought-provoking leaders of our fair country. You earn more, spend more, know more and read Impresario better than any other magazine reader in the land.”
Dick would end each of these missives with his signature tagline: “Until next time remember . . . think a little . . . it’s a free man’s responsibility. RCR.”
After reviewing all of the material given to him by detectives, Dr. Dukay told the men that in his professional opinion, Dick Robison was a “brilliant intellectual” but also “mentally disturbed.”
“Mentally disturbed” was not a diagnosis that doctors who worked at the Ypsilanti State Hospital were strangers to. Before psychiatric drugs became widely available, those who treated the mentally ill resorted to extreme measures in an attempt to find something that would help their patients. Ypsilanti patients were subjected to warm baths and then wrapped in cold wet sheets as part of something called “hydrotherapy.” Some were exposed to various spectrums of light, or physiotherapy, and even purposely infected with malaria. Patients who didn’t respond to this treatment were candidates for lobotomies and electroshock therapy. With such extreme treatment at his legal disposal, Dr. Dukay certainly had an opportunity to view all types of mental disturbances, and it was doubtful he gave the diagnosis of Dick Robison lightly.
According to their August 6, 1968, report, someone else told Stearns and Flis that Dick had mental problems, though the detectives didn’t reveal their source. “During this investigation information was received that Mr. Robison may have been treated by a member of the psychiatric staff of the Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn,” officers wrote. “This information found that he was mentally ill and recommendations were made to the family to have him committed. . . . [A]s of this date, no information has been found to substantiate this rumor.”
Dr. Dukay is one likely source of this rumor. The report of the detectives’ interview with Dr. Dukay and the report of the rumor were documented consecutively in the official police report filed by Stearns and Flis and logged on the same day. However, the detectives were unable to substantiate the rumor. Oakwood Hospital, the Dearborn facility that supposedly employed the psychiatrist who recommended the commitment, had no record of treating a Dick Robison as either an inpatient or an outpatient.
While looking to the mental health community for a clear picture of the man, detectives instead came face to face with the duplicitous nature of Dick Robison. He was either prudently careful or paranoid, rude or a man of high principles, a visionary or a nutcase. Detectives had been untangling this dead man’s life and following each thread to its frayed conclusion yet they still hadn’t figured Dick out. The motive for his murder, and that of his wife and children, remained somewhere in the knot of this brilliant but possibly disturbed husband, father, and businessman they still couldn’t get a handle on.