I have the information and know the killer of the Richard C. Robison Family in Good Hart--Michigan in June of 1968. . . . There is a time to talk and now is the time Sir.
—Letter from a Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary inmate to the Michigan State Police, January 12, 1970
Imaginary airport cultural centers, homegrown schizophrenics, missing murder weapons, and furtive locals. Each of these fruits of the crime and more had been been dealt with by state police detectives Lloyd Stearns and John Flis and now Patrick Lyons. By the beginning of 1970, the crime had gone unsolved for more than a year and a half. It is hard to imagine the men were surprised when a letter from an inmate at a maximum-security federal prison a thousand miles away was added to the mix.
Through an unrelenting series of bad luck, bad choices, and bad deeds, Alexander Bloxom, a black man from Alabama born on Halloween Day in 1930, ended up in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary by his fortieth birthday, wearing prison-issue duds and inmate number 85712. Years of weightlifting inside prison had well muscled him, and he was now a wire- wrapped brick of a man at five feet five and two hundred pounds. Small scars marked the center of his forehead, and his prisoner card described his eye color as “maroon.”
Bloxom’s path to Leavenworth was neither straight nor narrow. Instead, it wound through Kilby Prison in Birmingham, Alabama, for eight incidents of grand larceny in fifteen months; the U.S. Army’s Sand Hill detention barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the provost marshal there dishonorably discharged him for “undesirable character”; Jackson Prison in Jackson, Michigan, for murder, robbery, breaking and entering, and leaving the scene of an accident; Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for escaping from Jackson Prison; and finally, back down to Jackson in September 1957 for escaping from Marquette.
The State of Michigan had a hard time keeping its hands on Alexander Bloxom, but by April 1968, those in charge still had to parole him for time served, and so he was assigned to a parole officer and set loose in Detroit. Bloxom moved into a halfway house on Second Avenue, where he met all manner of ex-convicts and parolees, at least one of whom would be his future rap buddy.
By his own admission, Bloxom spent this first razor-blade-sized bit of freedom in more than two decades in the company of thugs more wanton even than him. The timing of his four months on the outside, and the letter he wrote and mailed from Leavenworth to the Michigan State Police, are what created an intersection between the lifeline of this black career criminal from the South, and the deaths of a white suburban family from the North. Part of his letter has been quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Here is more of what he wrote:
I have the information and know the killer of the Richard C. Robison Family in Good Hart—Michigan in 1968. Also of four Robbery in Detroit and Belleview Michigan. I Can Not keep this inside of me any longer Knowing that I am in Prison For 25 years on a Bank Robbery that I had no Part of. There is a time to talk and now is the time Sir.
Bloxom’s letter found its way into the hands of Daniel C. Myre of the Michigan State Police in East Lansing. A quick check found that Alexander Bloxom had been out on parole from April 3, 1968, until he was arrested for parole violation and bank robbery on July 25, 1968. Myre saw that in the previous twenty-one years the man had enjoyed not even four full months under an unbarred sky, and yet the timing of the Robison murders fell just about smack dab in the middle of those few precious free days. Though his motives for writing were questionable, Bloxom’s letter interested Myre enough that the captain set to work on his own correspondence about the matter on the very next day.
“Because inmates often try to help themselves by furnishing the police false information, and in an attempt to determine if this is being done in the case of Bloxom, we respectfully request that Alexander Bloxom be interviewed,” Myre wrote to special agent Jack H. Williams, care of the Topeka office of the Kansas FBI. Myre wasn’t going to let a convict pull his chain, but he wasn’t going to pass up a possible lead in an unsolved Michigan homicide, either. Professional courtesy was honored, and Special Agent Williams paid a visit to prisoner 85712.
By February, Myre had received Williams’s official report of the FBI agent’s interview with the prisoner. Yes, Bloxom was trying to get loose of a bank robbery conviction. Yes, he had been in prison since his teens. And yes, he was ratting out his rap buddies, but there was still something about Bloxom’s far-fetched account of the Robison murders that could not be filed away in a drawer marked “False Confessions” and then forgotten. Not yet, anyway.
Michigan State Police detectives Lloyd Stearns and Patrick Lyons were headed for the plains of eastern Kansas.
***
By February 1970, Alexander Bloxom had fully experienced the “punishment, deterrence and incapacitation” that was the cornerstone of daily life for those unlucky, uncontrolled, or just plain bad enough to have ended up at Leavenworth. Inside “The Big Top,” as the prison was nicknamed, in deference to the architecturally odd concrete dome crowning the massive facility, there was certainly no circus-type atmosphere to be found. And Bloxom wasn’t going anywhere now unless he could talk his way out, despite his two short-lived but successful escapes from other prisons. Here, the rebar-and-concrete walls were not only forty feet high, but went down forty feet deep underground.
When his visitors from Michigan arrived, chaperoned by Agent Williams, Bloxom told them he did not need an attorney, he just needed to talk. Stearns, Lyons, and the FBI man sat across from Bloxom in one of Leavenworth’s interview rooms and listened to him do nothing but that for two days. His story went something like this.
In Room 26 at the Detroit halfway house where he lived after being paroled, Bloxom became reacquainted with an old, skinny white man named Mark Warren Brock. Brock, whom Bloxom first met in Jackson Prison, was sixty-six years old and, like Bloxom, had been inside since his youth. The two became confidants, and though Bloxom was testing out the idea of going straight and had a steady job, he still began following whatever instructions, no matter how risky or wrongheaded, the older man gave him.
When Brock gave him money and an assignment to buy a car, Bloxom went to Motor City Dodge and picked out a 1963 black sedan. When Brock told him to come home from his orderly job at Grace Hospital so that he could drive Brock an hour north to Flint for an appointment, he drove him. When Brock told him to let him out at a Colonel Sanders and wait for him in the parking lot, he did it. When Brock came out of the fried chicken restaurant with a tall, bookish-looking stranger, and held a finger to his lips, Bloxom kept his mouth shut. On Friday, June 21, 1968, when Brock told him that he was headed up north on a job and that Bloxom couldn’t come along because “there weren’t no colored men up in Good Hart,” he obliged him. And finally, when Brock told him to hand over the keys to the Dodge, right now, and don’t forget the title and the registration, he did that, too.
“I saw that other man in the parking lot. I saw him real good,” is what Bloxom told the officers. “He was white, fifty years or thereabouts. And big. Six foot, maybe two hundred, two twenty. He came up to our car, leaned his head in and said that if Mr. Brock does his job well, Joseph Scollata or Scolaro, something like that, will make sure that Mr. Brock is taken care of well.”
Brock then got back in their car and the other man got into a 1967 or 1968 “robin’s egg blue” Ford Thunderbird.
Brock went to Toledo to buy some guns before he went up north. Maybe he, Bloxom, went along, maybe not. The following Thursday, June 27, Brock returned to the halfway house with no explanation for his six-day absence and gave Bloxom back the keys to the Dodge. “Take it over to your people’s house and put it up on jacks because I want it out of circulation.” Again, Bloxom did as he was told.
“He came up to my room late, after supper but that day, and he brought in a briefcase. A smooth leather one. Brown leather. It had a zipper running all the way around and maybe some gold initials, I’m not sure. He opened it up and showed me a paper where he’d written out what I should do just in case he came up dead. I should read what was wrote, and do what it said.”
Inside the briefcase, according to Bloxom, were investment bonds, eight or ten canceled checks with a rubber band around them and the words “Richard Robison Company” printed in the upper left-hand corner, three rolls of tape for a Dictaphone machine, and a photograph of a man, a woman, and four children standing on a boat. Brock took all these things out of the briefcase and put them in a manila envelope and taped up all four sides and hid it in Bloxom’s closet. Then Brock pulled out a bread knife and cut up the briefcase and the two men went outside and burned the pieces of leather in the alley behind the halfway house.
By late July 1968, Bloxom was getting homesick for the South, and told Brock that he wanted to go visit his parents and his brothers and any other kin still alive in his native Alabama. Brock gave him not only his blessing but enough cash to buy a new Pontiac Bonneville for the trip, the manila envelope, a heavy black suitcase, and another assignment: get rid of the suitcase and get rid of it for good. Yes, it was heavy as hell, and no, he couldn’t look inside because it was locked up tight and there wasn’t going to be no key. Bloxom told the officers that he never did look inside; the only thing he could fathom that heavy, that size, and that hot were guns.
“I took my Aunt Mary and my cousin and we drove down to Birmingham in that Bonneville and stayed at my mother and daddy’s place near the foundry,” Bloxom said. “One day I went over to there, to the foundry, and I heaved that case into one a the rusted out boxcars bound for the furnace.”
With his relatives now sufficiently visited and his disposal task complete, Bloxom needed to get back to Detroit if he was going to report to Brock, keep his job, and stay right with the parole board. Before he left Birmingham, though, he told his younger brother, Roosevelt Bloxom, about the secret envelope and showed him the spot in their parents’ bedroom where he had hidden it. If anything happened to him, Bloxom said, echoing Brock’s words of a month earlier, Roosevelt should open the envelope and follow the instructions inside. Bloxom returned to Detroit on July 23, but not before he heard his little brother say that he knew of a much better place to hide a secret than in a cubbyhole, underneath a pressboard chifforobe, on Twenty-eighth Avenue in Birmingham. Roosevelt was headed for Chicago and so was that envelope.
The day Bloxom arrived back in Detroit, he, Brock, and three other men were arrested for bank robbery and held over for trial at the Wayne County Jail. All five were found guilty of robbing the National Bank of Detroit at Fourteenth Street and Grand River. Bloxom was bound for Leavenworth, Brock for a federal prison in Atlanta, and the other three criminals for prisons unnamed. Before they parted ways, Bloxom says that Brock confessed to killing the Robison family—he and an accomplice named Robert Matthews did the now notorious deed.
The hearsay officers heard then went like this: “We went to the cottage and knocked on the door and I faked a heart attack,” Bloxom said Brock told him through the bars of their jail cells. “While I was lying on the floor and Mr. Robison was trying to help me, Matthews came in and started shooting. The wife was the first one down and then one of the kids tried to run so we took him down too. Then, we just kilt ’em all.”
While Bloxom said again he didn’t rob any bank, he did tell officers that while he lived in the halfway house, he drove the getaway car while Brock and two other men robbed two gas stations, a drug store, and a liquor store. When Bloxom finished his story, the officers showed him some photographs. Do you see the man Brock met with in the Colonel Sanders? they asked him. Bloxom pointed to a photograph of Joe Scolaro. Then, considering his choice, he changed his mind and said he didn’t think it was the same man.
“Go and talk to Brock if you want. Or hook me up to your machine,” Bloxom challenged Lyons, Stearns, and Williams. “I’ll take your liar’s test.”
Lyons and Stearns made arrangements to get a polygraph man to Leavenworth, then headed south to Atlanta.
***
With the help of the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Atlanta, the detectives secured an interview with Mark Warren Brock on February 11, 1970, at the federal prison in Atlanta. “It should be noted at this time that this subject is sixty-seven years old and has spent forty-seven years of his life in prison,” they stated in their report.
Yes, Brock knew Bloxom. Knew him well, in fact. Yes, he gave him money to buy a Dodge and a Bonneville. Yes, they cut up and burned a briefcase together, and yes, they did a few small-time robberies together too. Yes, he went to Toledo to buy guns. Yes, Brock knew his way around northern Michigan, and yes he took a trip up there in June 1968. Yes, he and Bloxom spent time at the same halfway house and yes, one time Bloxom did drive him from the halfway house to a fried chicken restaurant in Flint.
Troopers: Did you have an appointment to meet with anyone inside that restaurant?
Brock: I could have.
Troopers: Did you keep that appointment?
Brock: I could have met someone there on a business deal.
Troopers: Have you ever been approached to be a trigger man?
Brock: Yes, about three times.
Troopers: When was the last time?
Brock: June of ’68.
Troopers: Would you have ever considered taking on this kind of job?
Brock: If the price was right, sure I would. Say, five grand at least.
Troopers: Mr. Brock, did you kill the Robison family?
Brock: No.
Brock told Lyons and Stearns that on each and every one of his many past criminal convictions, including this most recent one for bank robbery, he’d pleaded not guilty but been “fingered by a rap buddy.” Despite such poor treatment by the men of his own circle, this type of selfish behavior still went against his own code of ethics. He had never fingered anyone, and he wasn’t about to start now, even knowing as he did that with the current time levied against him, he was destined to die in prison. Brock then told the officers that he wasn’t about to be subjected to a lie detector test, either, so don’t even ask about something like that.
“I’m not going to tell you anything I might know about the murder of that family. If I ever change my mind, I’ll let my parole officer know, but it ain’t too likely you’ll be hearing from me.”
***
Police did not know quite what to make of the boulder of transgressions and truth that had solidified inside this man named Alexander Bloxom. Some of what he told them checked out. For example, his details about the robberies in Detroit of the drug store, the gas stations and the liquor store, including the dates, times, and items stolen, corresponded exactly to the police reports. His account of his time at the halfway house, his hookup with Mark Warren Brock, and, perhaps most inexplicably, his description of Richard Robison’s brown leather briefcase, were dead accurate, too: Three secretaries, a janitor, and one of Robison’s advertising colleagues separately confirmed that Robison had a briefcase exactly like the one Bloxom described. A potential investor in Robison’s cultural centers plan, Ellis Jeffers, would tell the Detroit Free Press that during one meeting, Robison pulled a sheaf of drawings and notes about the centers out of a tan, cowhide briefcase.
“Strangely, police have never found the plans or the briefcase,” the Detroit Free Press reported in an article published on November 8, 1970. “And [Joe] Scolaro said [he] didn’t remember Robison having such a briefcase.”
However, police were also convinced that Bloxom was lying when he said that he wasn’t involved in the robbery of the National Bank of Detroit. Here was a prisoner in a maximum-security prison, looking at twenty-five years under the Big Top with no route to freedom but his mouth. He was almost thirty years younger than Brock, so time shaved off his sentence would mean something to him. Prisoners’ stories about guilt and innocence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just the hapless victim of another man’s grudge needed nothing more than a mix of time and desperation to develop legs and run wild, and that, Lyons and Stearns would have surmised, could easily be the case here.
“It may be noted that officers feel there is little doubt but what Bloxom participated in the bank robbery after reviewing the case with the F.B.I. agents,” the detectives wrote in their report of the interviews.
Still, they decided to check up on the two pieces of physical evidence that could tie Brock to the Robison murder—the black suitcase of guns and the manila envelope—and so they headed south again, this time to Alabama.
Upon their arrival in Birmingham, officers paid a visit to the U.S. Pipe and Steel Foundry Co. where they met with the conglomerate’s lone security guard and saw the industrial site Bloxom had described. Rusted out boxcars, mechanical cranes, scrap metal crushers, and a junkyard surrounding a steel plant. Just about anyone could ditch just about anything here and it would never be seen again, nor viewed by human eyes on its way to the ravenous furnace. If Bloxom had been on assignment for Brock, and if he had carried in his hand a suitcase of guns used for a killing, and if he had swung that suitcase into one of the condemned boxcars, Brock could be satisfied that his orders had been well carried out. So much for finding the missing murder weapons in Alabama.
As for the envelope, Lloyd and Stearns paid a visit to what remained of Bloxom’s family at their home on Twenty-eighth Avenue. One of Alexander Bloxom’s three brothers, Roosevelt, last had possession of the envelope, if this whole convoluted story was to be believed. Officers already knew from their prison interview with Bloxom that Roosevelt had been murdered by a gang in Chicago on January 9, 1970, just a month before they visited Leavenworth. They also knew, from their own sources, that Roosevelt’s apartment had been searched by Chicago police following his murder and that no envelope was found. Still, they wanted to find out what the family had done with Roosevelt’s effects.
With one son dead and one in prison, Walter and Bessie Bloxom told the detectives that they had sent their two remaining sons, Walter Jr. and Willie, to Chicago to collect Roosevelt’s possessions and see about the burial of their youngest. When the boys returned to Birmingham, they had with them all of Roosevelt’s clothes and other belongings.
Of this meager estate, police wrote this in their report: “There were numerous papers and items that did not appear to have any value that they placed in a brown paper sack and left in the room. They stated that in these papers were some reels of tape and a sheet of paper with some phone numbers and instructions on it. They did not recall any specific names; however, they appeared to be Italian. These things were in an envelope at the time they looked at them.” An aunt to the Bloxom boys said she might have thrown some papers in the garbage while she was doing her regular cleaning. From there, neither the papers, nor the reels of tape, nor the paper sack were ever seen again.
***
On March 2, 1970, Lyons and Stearns went to Michigan’s Jackson Prison and interviewed Robert Matthews, the man Bloxom had said could have been Brock’s accomplice in the Robison murders. Matthews was serving five to fourteen years on a conviction for uttering and publishing. That’s a formal-sounding term for plain stealing but using fancy tactics. Yes, Matthews knew both Bloxom and Brock and yes, he was with them when the gas stations were robbed. No, he didn’t kill the Robisons; he’d never been north of Flint in his life. He also volunteered his opinion of the character of both Brock and Bloxom: The former was ruthless enough to do such a crime and proud enough to brag about it; the latter wasn’t smart enough to make up the kind of story the officers were now in the process of checking out. Yes, he’d take a polygraph.
***
On March 12, 1970, Robert Louis Matthews passed his polygraph test.
On March 16, 1970, officers Lyons and Stearns interviewed Ernest Gilbert, a former employee of Richard Robison, and learned that he owned a platinum silver 1965 Ford Thunderbird that he loaned to Joseph Scolaro on several occasions in June 1968.
On March 20, 1970, Detective Stearns interviewed Dave Miller, an inmate of Marquette Prison, serving time for parole violation. He stated that on June 24, 1968, he purchased a five-shot revolver in Toledo and that Mark Warren Brock couldn’t have killed the Robisons because he was with Miller when he bought it.
On April 13, 1970, Alexander Bloxom failed his polygraph test.
The matter of the hapless bank robbers, the locked suitcase, the mysterious taped-up envelope, the secretive meeting at the fried chicken restaurant, and the Toledo gun-buying trip would probably have been put to rest when Alexander Bloxom failed his polygraph test—were it not for a nondescript dark blue Chevy later found abandoned on the side of a southern Michigan county road. The crime Bloxom professed to have knowledge of was submitted to the Kansas polygraph examiner as a case study, stated like this:
The above person examined had submitted information to the effect that he knew who killed the Robison family. He indicated that one Robert Lewis Matthews and a Mark Brock had told him that they had been paid by a subject by the name of Scolaro or Scolatta. He further advised that the subject, Brock, had given him some checks with the name Richard C. Robison Co. printed on them. He was told to hold the checks for a possible extortion plot. He states he took the checks in question to his mother’s home in Alabama.
With that, polygraph examiner Richard L. North went to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, hooked Bloxom up to his machine, and questioned him. Following the test, he had the option of grading Bloxom with a T for telling the truth, a D for deception, an I for indefinite results, an R for refusing to cooperate, or an O for other relating circumstances or for an incomplete test. Bloxom got a D. Deception.
“A post-test interview was conducted with negative results,” North reported. “During the purpose portion of the interview there were discrepancies noted in his story.”
Without any further cooperation from Brock or Matthews and with Bloxom’s likely half-truths, inconsistencies, and even outright lies, there were no more tangents for police to follow on the Leavenworth letter theory, and that should have been the end of it. And it was, for more than four years. Then in late summer of 1973, a blue 1965 Chevy coach with Ohio license plates and something unexpected in the glove box was found abandoned by the side of M-14, a county road in southern Michigan.
The owners of the car could not be immediately located, and so it was towed to a local auto repair shop, where it sat unmolested for more than six months. By February 1974, enough time had gone by for the repair shop to assume ownership of the unclaimed vehicle, but not before a state trooper checked through it and added the vehicle identification number to his official report. That task fell to a Trooper Maxwell of the Romeo police post, and when he searched the car, he found a luggage tag bearing the name “Shirley L. Robison” and the address “18790 Dolores, Lathrup Village, Michigan” in the glove box. Recognizing the name as that of a now infamous murder victim, Maxwell called for backup and Detective Flis responded. The two searched the vehicle thoroughly, but no other evidence related to the murders was found.
Back at the Romeo post, police researched the Chevy’s genealogy. Owned by a seemingly random series of blue-collar men and their uncles and sons and assorted hangers-on, the car had been originally purchased from Jim White Chevrolet in Toledo, on June 9, 1966.
It was the car’s infancy in the city of Toledo that put officers in mind of the Leavenworth letter theory. The car was sold new off the lot in Toledo in 1966; Brock, possibly Bloxom, and Matthews had gone to Toledo in 1968 to buy guns; the Robisons were murdered a few weeks later; and then Shirley Robison’s luggage tag was found in the car in 1974. A connection about as reliable as the mechanicals on the abandoned car itself, but enough, again, to set officers to the task of looking into the matter further.
Trooper Flis found that the car’s title history included a Toledo trucking dispatcher and his uncle; a foreman for a glass company and his two teenagers, also from Toledo; a Toledo Ford dealership; a restaurant owner from Tawas, Michigan, his son, a blur of this son’s “hippie type” friends; and finally a joy ride from Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio across the border to Michigan, where something like a cracked radiator took it down.
In the ensuing months, the trucking dispatcher and his relatives, the glass company foreman and his teenagers, the restaurant owner, his son, and the hodgepodge of hippies that could be located were all interviewed, and shown the luggage tag. Separately, each one said they had never seen the tag before and had no idea how or when it had been put in the Chevy’s glove box. One of the hippie friends had stolen the car from Cedar Point and driven it until it broke down 120 miles later. He was found, interviewed, and, just like his comrades, could offer nothing further.
By this point the car was nine years old, the “new” piece of evidence was six years old, and by adding up relatives, friends, neighbors and car shoppers, a hundred people or more had probably driven the Chevy between the time it appeared on the new-car lot in Toledo and the time it broke down on the side of the county road in Michigan. Officers had no choice but to turn their attention elsewhere.
“To John Flis, the lead detective on the case, the luggage tag was a more vexing oddity than a breakthrough clue,” stated a July 22, 1998, article in the Oakland Press.
The status of the once promising Leavenworth letter theory was the same now as the status of the case itself. Every lead had been followed down dusty southern roads, to the doorstep of a Chicago gang, over scrap metal yards, and inside the gloomy afternoon hours of jails and prisons, until those leads could be followed no further. The official police term for such a status was, Complaint Remains Open.