The police told me I did it. And they said if I didn’t pull the trigger, I know who did.
—Joseph R. Scolaro III, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, November 8, 1970
State police detectives got a weird vibe off Joe Scolaro almost from the very moment they met him, and his presence in their interview room frustrated the detectives right from the start. First, he followed up his overtly friendly handshake with cagey answers to even their most basic questions. He showed an initial bravado about being Robison’s “right-hand man,” trusted to oversee all the day-to-day operations of the firm and to consult with Dick over the telephone when he was away on business. Just recently, Joe said, Dick had gone to San Francisco, and Joe ran everything while he was away. But as they dug deeper, asking about his boss’s business trips and the firm’s nitty-gritty financial details, Joe’s mastery changed into complete ignorance.
According to the state police report, their exchanges went like this:
Detective Lloyd Stearns: What would be the title you would have there?
Joe: Well, Dick told people I was his Executive Vice President . . . and that’s what I was, I was his assistant. He explained it this way. When somebody would say, “You know, gee, what is Joe?” “Well he’s my right arm.”
Stearns: Ok, and what was your salary when you started work for Dick?
Joe: Oh, boy, that’s a hard question because I don’t even remember.
Stearns: Was [Dick] in the office most of the time?
Joe: Oh, he came in two days a week, something like that. . . . He operated out of his house.
Stearns: When did you first know about him going to San Francisco?
Joe: About three days prior he told me he was going out of town.
Stearns: Did you know what the nature of this trip was?
Joe: He just told me business.
Stearns: What do you mean? He apparently had some idea what type of business, whether it was to do with his magazine or . . .
Joe: He said, “business” and I said, “Is this monkey business or business?” And he said, “No, its something to do with the magazine.” And, that was it.
Stearns: About how many times did you figure he called you [from San Francisco]?
Joe: I couldn’t really pin that down.
Stearns: At any time after he came back from that trip, did he tell you what the purpose of it was? Or the nature of the trip?
Joe: Well, he just told me that it was, when he came back, that it had to do with his master plan, all of the things he was involved with. . . . Dick was planning some fantastic growth, Lloyd. I don’t know if you looked into it, but, I mean, it was really fantastic, enough to choke a horse!
Stearns: Where would I check on this at?
Joe: Well, uh, possibly different people would have told you, you know.
Stearns: Would it be on paper or anything?
Scolaro: Oh, I don’t know if it would be on paper.
How could Joe have been given managerial free rein over both an active advertising agency and a bimonthly magazine, so that Dick could spend the summer up north, and still not know what the trip to the West Coast was about or what the plans to dramatically expand the business were, or even how that expansion was going to be financed? The detectives were skeptical, to say the least.
Further questioning by detectives revealed that this planned expansion, “fantastic . . . enough to choke a horse,” included private airport hangars and personal pilots for executives, a centralized purchasing scheme with big warehouses of raw materials to supply area manufacturing companies, a cultural society, a performing arts news service, and television specials all based on the arts magazine Robison published, as well as commercial travel, student scholarships, and residential developments. For his part, Joe started throwing around large sums of money to detectives, saying $50 million or $100 million would be needed to fund such an enterprise, but insisted that he didn’t know who any of Dick’s business partners were, nor where the money was coming from. Detectives weren’t sure if the plans were real and Joe was stonewalling them, or if they were just a strange and narcissistic fantasy of Dick’s. Walter Muellenhagen had the same doubts.
On top of learning what the scheme was, how much it was going to cost, and where the money was coming from, now detectives had to figure out if the money was even real. They were certain Joe knew more than he was saying.
“You had a lot of contacts with this man, more than anybody else had,” Detective Stearns told Joe. “He confides in you, there is no reason for you not to know detail. No reason in the world for you not to know.”
“I’ll try to fill you in on everything I can,” Joe told them. They couldn’t be sure if he was trying to be helpful, or just trying to look like he was.
The young executive told the detectives he found out about the murders while listening to WJR, a Detroit radio station. A round of phone calls ensued, and he, Shirley Robison’s brother, and another business colleague chartered a plane from Detroit to Harbor Springs, where they were met by police and driven north. Despite his haste in making an appearance at the Emmet County sheriff’s office just twenty-four hours after the bodies were discovered, something about the man continued to feel odd.
By now, police had already interviewed dozens of people, including family friends, neighbors, and relatives of the slain, and all had shared the same basic story. The Robisons didn’t smoke or drink. They were active in their church. Their children were model youngsters. They didn’t own handguns, as far as their neighbors knew—as a matter of fact, Dick didn’t even hunt. It was a bit unusual, in fact, for a man who spent so much time up north. In short, the family had no history of gun ownership and no known enemies. Sure, Dick Robison could be dogmatic, even patronizing at times, but he had done nothing to provoke the frenzy of viciousness that had exploded inside the cottage’s log walls. Nothing.
But then police talked to Joe. Although he would say nothing specific about the company’s finances, he revealed other, more titillating details that police found immediately suspicious. Without much prompting, he told them about Dick’s mysterious business trips, his own large expense account and recent bonuses, the blank but signed company checks he had possession of, the obsessive number of phone calls between himself and Dick just before the murders, and even his own alibi. Police hadn’t even asked Joe to provide an alibi, but there it was. He said he had been at a plumbing convention at Cobo Hall in Detroit on June 25, the day police now believed the murders had taken place. And then there was that pair of .25-caliber Beretta pistols. One for Joe, one for Dick.
Guns? Alibis? Big money? The officers must have wondered what the churchgoing father had turned into. Something had happened to the respected businessman and loving husband they had been hearing so much about, almost to the point of disbelief. Something beyond shenanigans with his secretaries. This was a side of Dick that no one else had shared. A side that could be a lot closer to murder, despite the fact that they still didn’t have a motive.
By the end of that first interview, police had Joe firmly pinned under their mental microscope of suspicion, and were about to turn him this way and that, adjust the focus to close up, and scrutinize this cagy specimen with every investigative technique at their disposal. They would dissect all aspects of the crime, and Joe’s background was exactly where they planned to start poking around.
“He always came up with quick answers to questions; however, some of them did not appear logical and were not satisfactory to these officers,” Stearns wrote in his report of that initial formal interview, dated August 7, 1968.
Even though they still didn’t have a clear motive for the crime, detectives now at least had Joe’s flawed alibi.
***
On June 25, 1968, in the city of Detroit, it was raining. Hard. A flash summer downpour that swamped street sewers, collapsed umbrellas, slowed traffic, and flooded basements—including, Joe said, the basement under the well-tended white brick home at 18790 Dolores Street in Lathrup Village, the suburb of Detroit where the Robisons lived. The house was under Joe’s care while the Robisons were up north in Good Hart, and so he said that he got up early that day, drove across town to check on the house, and found water dripping through a window well and into the basement.
Joe called Dick. “I’m here at the house. It’s raining like crazy and I just wanted to let you know that there was water in the basement but I cleaned it right up,” Joe said when he reached Dick by phone up at the cottage. “And don’t worry about anything, everything down here is being taken care of.”
According to Joe, Dick thanked him for cleaning up the mess, and then asked Joe if he had received the package of signed company checks he’d mailed to the office from the Good Hart General Store a week ago. Since April, Joe had been in charge of the day-to-day operation of the business, but even three hundred miles north, Dick still wanted to have the final say about finances and besides Shirley, he was the only signer on the company’s checking account. Joe said he hadn’t received anything, so Dick told him that he would call the bank and stop payment on the checks, just in case they’d been stolen or lost in the mail.
From Dolores Street, Joe told officers, he went to the post office to pick up the mail for R. C. Robison and Associates and found the missing checks in the day’s bundle of letters. He drove to the firm’s offices at 28081 Southfield Road in Southfield and called Dick back to let him know that the checks were safe.
“Okay,” Dick said, “I’ll let the bank know and tell them to remove the stop payment. I’m still planning to be up here for the rest of the summer, so if anyone’s looking for me, tell them I won’t be back in the office until the first of September. You can handle everything until then, right?”
Joe said that he could. “Good,” Dick told him, “because we’re leaving today on that trip south I told you about. First Kentucky, then Florida, and we won’t be back to the cottage for a couple weeks, maybe longer. Don’t expect us until at least the fifteenth or twentieth. I’ll call you when we get back.”
It was to be a real estate buying trip, Joe told the detectives. Dick would be looking at horse farms in Kentucky and oceanfront condos in Florida. The horse farm was to be a family retreat, especially for Susan, who, like most girls her age, was giddy for horses. The Florida condo was to be a surprise gift for his aging father, Ross.
“Are you flying?” Joe asked Dick.
“That hasn’t been established yet. We may drive.”
“Are you going with anyone?”
“That hasn’t been completely established yet, either. If I go with somebody, you don’t know who they are . . . so don’t worry about it, pal.”
That’s where Joe’s alibi began to fall apart. He stayed in his office until about noon, he claimed, then drove to a Montgomery Ward store on 12 Mile and Telegraph to shop for a radio. He browsed for thirty or forty minutes in the store’s electronics department and then left for the plumbing convention. Dick wanted him to go to the convention, Joe said, and check in with some of the company’s biggest clients, Delta Faucet and Peerless, and a few new prospects like the Nile Corporation. He walked around the convention floor and stopped off at a few of the booths. He talked with a man named Norm Abbot, who had just been made sales manager of Nile, and another associate from Peerless named Bob Laidlaw. Laidlaw told Joe he was leaving the convention early because he had a date that evening.
Joe then went across the street to the Pontchartrain Hotel, where he had a couple scotch and sodas at the Salamander Bar. Then, he said, he decided to go shopping again—“I like to shop. It’s relaxing.”—and took a cab to Hudson’s Department Store. He didn’t meet anyone at the bar and didn’t remember the bartender. He didn’t buy anything or talk to anyone at Hudson’s. He didn’t get a receipt for the cab ride and he didn’t get a parking ticket.
The rainstorm continued throughout the day, darkening the sky and soaking Joe through his raincoat and his suit jacket and down to the skin by the time he made it back to his car. It was raining so hard, in fact, that he told the detectives there was water in the trunk of his car and even inside the taillights.
From where he parked on Telegraph, Joe said, he drove to the office to check if the roof there had leaked in the rainstorm. The office had a flat roof, and the downspout that drained it was notorious for getting plugged up with sticks and leaves and other debris. Just as he thought, it was clogged. Joe braved the pelting rain and cleaned out the pipe and called his wife from the office to let her know why he was so late getting home.
Then, Joe said, he decided to check the Robisons’ basement one more time before he went home, and so he drove back to Dolores Street. By now it was almost dark. Just a little bit of water had leaked in since he last checked the house. He cleaned that up and then called the Robisons’ neighbor, Margaret Smith, and talked with her for a while. After they finished their conversation, he tried to reach Dick up at the cottage, let the phone ring and ring, but hung up when there was no answer. Joe then headed for his house in Birmingham, telling the detectives the trip took longer than usual because of the downpour.
“I had my car and I winged my way home. Which was a hell of a job because I couldn’t use Southfield. I ended up using Evergreen to get home and, you know, a lot of cars were jammed and it took me a hell of a long time to get home. But I got home.”
By now, according to Joe, it was sometime between 11:00 p.m. and midnight, maybe even later. His wife, Lora Lee, and his son, little Joey, were sound asleep.
There were big problems with this itinerary. Discrepancies was the detectives’ euphemism for what they could have just called lies. For starters, the plumber’s convention at Cobo Hall was a three-day event, ending on June 25, the day that Joe said he attended and visited with clients. Joe said he left his office at noon, went shopping for a radio, and then went to the convention. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have seen many clients, because by noon that day, according to a number of the attendees detectives interviewed, most exhibitors were breaking down their displays, packing them up to ship home, and getting ready to leave. By one o’clock, about the time Joe says he arrived at the convention, most of the booth spaces were already empty.
Detectives tracked down Bob Laidlaw, the Peerless executive Joe said he’d talked with. Laidlaw told detectives that yes, he had seen Joe at the convention, that they’d gone to a hospitality room at the Ponchartrain Hotel together, had a couple drinks, then walked back over to the convention. “He cannot say which day it was, but does recall that the weather was real nice and the sun was bright,” Detectives Stearns and Flis wrote in their interview report.
The detectives also visited three local manufacturer’s representatives from the Delta Faucet Company who attended the convention. Each placed Joe at the convention on June 24, not June 25.
Detectives inspected the basement of the Robison home, and found no water damage. They sent a police photographer to Dolores Street to document their findings.
The neighbor, Margaret Smith, didn’t recall hearing from Joe on June 25, the night of the storm, and neither did Joe’s wife, Lora Lee, though she did tell detectives that wet clothes and a wet overcoat were waiting for her in the laundry room when she woke up the next morning.
***
When they had shot as many holes in Joe’s alibi as they could, Stearns and Flis again trained their sights on his guns. Though the second .25-caliber Beretta pistol, the one that Joe said he bought for Dick, had still not been found, detectives continued to believe it was one of the murder weapons. No other handgun tested at the state police crime lab on Harrison Road in East Lansing had even come close to exhibiting the characteristics of the murder weapon except Joe’s. Officers were now almost certain that Dick and his family had been initially attacked with a .22 rifle, and then the killer used Dick’s own gun to deliver the coup de grâce. The idea that two guns meant two killers was not absolute, especially where their chief suspect was concerned.
From their research into his background, detectives already knew that Joe served three years in the army. During his military service it was a “straight key,” used for sending and receiving Morse code, and not a gun that was his primary assigned weapon, but Joe still knew how to shoot. He may have harbored an interest in firearms before he enlisted, or maybe he developed it while serving in the Army Security Agency, but whatever the source, the man loved his guns.
Joe competed regularly in state trap-shooting meets sponsored by the Amateur Trapshooting Association, traveling to target ranges around Michigan to test his skills against other shooters. The sport of trap shooting substitutes a clay disk, called a pigeon, shot into the air out of a trap machine, for the live birds that were released from wire cages or traps in the 1800s when the sport got its start. Shooters use a 12-gauge single- or double-barrel shotgun, aiming from five different positions at targets approximately twenty yards away. According to trap shooter Bill O’Connor, vice president of Capital City Rifle Club in Lansing, Michigan, in order to excel at the sport, participants must have shoulder strength, a clear focus, and good hand-eye coordination.
“You’re shooting at a moving target that is traveling away from you at different angles,” O’Connor says. “Sometimes you might hit it and a little chip breaks off, but sometimes you just smoke it. And that’s where the satisfaction comes in. When nothing’s left of the target but a little puff of smoke.”
It was at a trap-shooting meet that Joe met a gun dealer by the name of Bill Herrington. Herrington lived in a house trailer on the property of one of the gun ranges Joe frequented. The two men became friends, and in early 1968 Joe told Herrington that he wanted to buy two pistols, one for his boss and one for himself.
The previous summer, Detroit erupted into a violent and deadly riot after police officers from the vice squad raided an illegal after-hours club. The confrontation escalated into a five-day riot, eleven square miles of the city were in chaos, and President Lyndon Johnson called in both the army and the National Guard to restore order. In the resulting melee, forty-three people were killed, more than seven thousand were arrested, another five thousand were left homeless, and close to two thousand buildings were burned.
Not surprisingly, in the months after the riot, gun sales soared, especially in the suburbs surrounding the city. Doctors, teachers, homemakers, autoworkers, businessmen—it seemed like everyone was buying a handgun. Even Dick Robison’s close friend and neighbor, the peacefully minded Dr. Roger Smith, bought a pistol to use for protection when commuting to Detroit’s Henry Ford hospital.
Dick told Joe that he, too, was on edge over the increased tension in the city, and despite the antigun editorial he had just published in his arts magazine, he wanted to buy a handgun. Joe talked to Herrington, and in February 1968 Herrington placed an order with the Williams Gun Sight Company in Davison, Michigan, for two .25-caliber Beretta six-shot automatics and four boxes (one hundred rounds) of the Sako ammunition.
Herrington told police that Joe picked up the guns in April. Joe’s wife, Lora Lee, confirmed the date, and said she was with her husband at the Birmingham Gun Club when he bought them. Once they got home, Scolaro put one of the guns in her purse drawer and the other in his dresser drawer, along with all of the ammunition. Though Scolaro told the detectives he had given the gun to Dick Robison in February or March, Lora Lee said the gun remained in her purse drawer until mid-June, when her husband took it with him to work. Later he told her he had given it to Dick.
In March 1969 detectives were surprised to learn that Joe bought a .22-caliber rifle at the Montgomery Ward store in Detroit at 12 Mile and Telegraph—the same store where he shopped for a radio on June 25, the day of the murders, according to his story. The date of the purchase was July 1, 1968, after the murders, but before the bodies were discovered. Was he replacing the .22 he disposed of after the murders with this new gun, officers wondered? Was he trying to keep the purchase under wraps by going to a department store instead of to a friend? The gun was a Glenfield model 60 semi-automatic made by Marlin. “It seemed unusual to officers that he would purchase the gun from Wards when he has numerous contacts with the Williams Gun Sight Co. and received discounts on trade name guns,” Stearns and Flis wrote in their report. “All of his other guns are trade name guns and most of them are rather expensive.”
By now, the state police had called in forensic accountants from the private sector and from the Oakland County prosecutor’s office, and while these men followed the money, Stearns and Flis continued to follow the guns. On November 11, 1969, the two trails came together, and detectives got closer to the second murder weapon. The forensic accounting work found that in the months after his boss’s murder, Joe’s creative money management veered from desperation to outright fraud, and he was arrested for obtaining money under false pretenses. When they had him in custody, Joe assumed that he was being arrested for the murders and detectives questioned him again about the crime. Inexplicably, he told detectives that at one time he had owned two AR-7 Armalite .22-caliber semiautomatic rifles that he bought from his brother-in-law. Detectives had heard anecdotal evidence from Joe’s neighbor, Karl Olbrich, that he had owned such a weapon, but the information had just been one more clue in an increasingly complicated case. Now they had Joe admitting freely that he owned not just one but two of the rifles. Not surprisingly however, he could produce neither for police to examine.
Joe said he gave one of the rifles to a friend, and fellow advertising executive, by the name of Hal Smirthwaite. The other rifle he gave back to Johnson.
***
The AR-7 is an interesting weapon with a tarnished reputation. It is the consumer version of an air force survival gun designed for use by pilots in the event they were either shot down or crash-landed and have to survive in the wilderness. It is lightweight—just two and a half pounds—and easily stored in a backpack; when disassembled, it is just sixteen and a half inches long. The AR-7 is also accurate up to distances of one hundred yards and the weapon’s sight is adjustable for elevation and wind speed. Once fired, the shell casing is automatically ejected and the spring inserts another cartridge from its eight-round magazine. Drop the gun in a lake and it will float. According to the Blue Book of Gun Values, the main criticism of the AR-7 is its propensity to jam. However, anecdotal information collected on an AR-7 Internet forum states proudly that jammed guns don’t make a loud sound when fired, allowing for a follow-up attempt before game can escape.
“Long rifle accuracy, hand gun convenience,” the company stated proudly in its marketing materials. “No permits, none of the red tape regularly encountered through purchase and transportation of hand guns. The AR-7 Explorer can be stored in duffel bag, bed roll, larger tackle boxes, even carried in field jacket or mackinaw pocket.” The whole gun could be disassembled or reassembled, the company said, in about forty-five seconds.
Curiously, in 1983 Armalite Inc. was purchased by the Marcos Philippine government, who moved the manufacturing operation from California to Manila two years later. Between its American and foreign owners, the company manufactured about 65,000 weapons. When Joe Scolaro bought his, 18,314 had been manufactured. Though it was not designed to be used with a scope, two companies—one in Plymouth, Michigan, J. B. Holden Company—manufactured retrofitted scopes that could be used with the AR-7.
The AR-7’s dubious reputation, however, was made almost two decades after a rifle of this type was used on the Robison family. In 1983, Paladin Press, an independent publisher in Boulder, Colorado, released the now infamous book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors. Written under the pseudonym Rex Feral, the book has been portrayed in the courts and in news accounts as a how-to manual for contract killers. In 1997 a U.S. appeals court ruled unanimously that the book was not protected by any free speech laws after a triple murderer admitted to using it to plan his crime. The murderer was convicted of killing a mother, her eight-year-old handicapped son, and her son’s nurse in a murder-for-hire case in Maryland in 1993. The gun recommended by Hit Man? The AR-7.
Joe, of course, could have no way of knowing that nearly twenty years after he bought the pair of AR-7 rifles, the very same model would be recommended in a notorious how-to guide for murder. Still, if he had been planning the crime when he bought the weapon, he certainly picked the right gun.
By the time the detectives met Herbert Johnson, Joe’s brother-in-law was out of the gun business. In the fall of 1969, Johnson worked on a commercial construction job in Pontiac. Detectives called him at home and then visited him at work. To his credit, Johnson had kept good records of his sales and special orders while he was a gun dealer and could tell them that yes, he had sold Joe two AR-7s, one on September 30, 1966, and one on November 28, 1966. Yes, he had also been to the target range with Joe, and yes, they had taken turns shooting one of the AR-7s.
Detectives tracked down the advertising colleague of Joe’s, Hal Smirthwaite, who supposedly had possession of one of the AR-7s Joe bought in 1966. Smirthwaite was now living in Chicago. Detectives paid him a visit, took possession of the AR-7 that Joe had indeed given to him, and secured his permission to conduct a ballistics test on the gun. Three days later, the Michigan State Police crime lab in East Lansing came to a dual decision on the weapon, which they promptly communicated to the detectives. The Robisons had indeed been shot with an AR-7, and it was ammunition from an AR-7 that made the bullet holes in the cottage’s window. Just not this AR-7.