If that crime happened today, with the resources we have now, it’d be solved, no question.
—Sheriff Pete Wallin, in an interview in July 2007
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. That and way too much beer are the only explanations Emmet County sheriff Pete A. Wallin can figure for why a local teenager would steal a backhoe at three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday and steer it down the middle of South Lakeshore Drive in Good Hart.
“Yeah, usually they pick something smaller. You know, like a car,” the sheriff deadpanned.
The kid had just been to a party and was walking through the woods when, he told the sheriff, someone jumped him in the dark and then for no reason just beat him bloody. He didn’t mean to steal the backhoe, he said, it was just there, the keys were in it, it was in the right place at the right time, and provided his most convenient means of escaping his assailant. A $2,500 bond and a stay in the Emmet County Jail was all that he escaped to, the sheriff noted.
Wallin grew up in Southfield, Michigan, coincidently the city next door to the Robisons’ sheltered and more privileged Lathrup Village, but the sheriff has spent the entirety of his adult life in law enforcement in Emmet County. Though he’s become accustomed to the shenanigans of intoxicated teenagers and protects what is largely a resort community, he’s no stranger to the more serious crimes of arson, assault, and even first-degree murder.
In the winter of 2006, he and his deputies tracked down another man on the run, this one fully criminal, and not simply misguided by alcohol and drugs. Fugitive Stephen Grant, a wife killer, potentially armed and dangerous, was found by the sheriff and his men cowering under a fallen pine tree in a remote part of Wilderness State Park, about thirty miles north of Good Hart. Grant’s wife had been missing for several days, and her torso had just turned up in an incriminating place—the couple’s garage.
Wilderness State Park covers more than seven thousand acres of hiking paths, cross-country ski trails, campsites, and raw forest. The property is bordered by Big Sucker Creek to the south, Goose Bay to the west, the Straits of Mackinac to the north, and Carp River to the east. On a clear day from a campsite on the beach, you can see the Mackinaw Bridge. Wilderness Park is the single largest tract of undeveloped state land in Michigan’s lower peninsula, hospitable to black bear, bald eagles, and even the endangered piping plover, but in early March no place for a man on the run without jacket, boots, gloves, or shelter.
It was fourteen degrees out and snowing hard when the officers found Grant, who was wearing just a shirt, pants, and socks, and listening to his own chattering teeth. He was shivering uncontrollably, was unarmed, and later confessed to strangling his wife in their Detroit-area home and dismembering her body. Two days earlier, Macomb County deputies had gone to the Grant home, searched it and found Tara Grant’s torso. A teenager stealing a backhoe on a bender could be explained away, but the sheriff could offer no explanations for this crime, nor say why the man thought he could make his escape in the north.
“I don’t care who you are or how bad you are or what you’ve done, you’re still no match for the country up here unless you’re prepared,” Wallin said. “When we found him, he couldn’t have lasted much longer.”
When Wallin was about the same age as the backhoe thief, he enrolled in the criminal justice and law enforcement program at Ferris State University in Big Rapids. As a senior, he signed up for an internship with the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office under then sheriff Richard L. Zink. Zink was in office when the Robisons were murdered, the crime happening during his watch, and Wallin remembers those days clearly. In 1968 the area was less populated, and the department consisted only of a sheriff, an undersheriff, a chief deputy, two jailers, and a secretary.
The Emmet County Sheriff’s Office of today has separate divisions to deal with road patrol, corrections, animal control, and civil process; a dive team; marine and snowmobile patrols; as well as a staff of detectives and evidence technicians.
In the hours before Grant was apprehended, Macomb County Sheriff’s Department detectives from the Detroit area drove north, partly because they questioned the ability of Emmet County to bring Grant in. By the time Grant was apprehended, though, they were giving their northern cohorts high fives, thanking them for a job well done. Wallin and his crew had used tracking dogs, a helicopter, and snowmobiles in the search. A confessed wife-killer roaming the woods is bound to attract media attention, and when all was said and done, it was Wallin the big-time reporters wanted to interview, not just the guys from urban Macomb County. The sheriff was quoted in USA Today, both of the Detroit dailies, on the three major television networks, plus Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.
The operation to apprehend Grant had been flawless; the department was decades away from the days when former undersheriff Clifford Fosmore grabbed a paper towel, wrapped it around the handle of the bloody hammer used on the Robisons, and held it up so that a news reporter could snap a photograph, potentially imperiling any evidence the murderer might have left there.
“Things were pretty simple back then, and we didn’t have the capability of dealing with a case like that,” Sheriff Wallin said. “If that crime happened today, with the resources we have now, it’d be solved, no question.”
Besides a staff well trained in handling evidence, the resources Sheriff Wallin has at his disposal that Sheriff Zink didn’t have in 1968 include a gas chromatograph to perform chemical tests, rape kits to determine a sexual assault, detailed fiber analysis testing, evidence collection standards, crime scene photographing standards, and, of course, the grand tool of forensic science, DNA analysis. The DNA-testing capabilities that crime labs have today were developed in the 1980s, more than a decade after the Robisons were murdered.
“DNA testing revolutionized the field of forensic science practically overnight,” writes criminalist John Houde in his book Crime Lab: A Guide for Nonscientists. “[A] few tiny cells can conclusively identify an individual out of everyone else on the earth. . . . This is bad news for guilty defendants and heaven-sent for innocent ones.”
Though blood DNA was smeared throughout the Robison cottage—in the furniture’s upholstery, on the walls, soaked into the pine plank floors, and on the victims’ clothing—it played no role in the Robison murder investigation until Sheriff Wallin opened a closet door on a July day in 2002. His predecessor, friend, and mentor Jeffrey Bodzick had just died unexpectedly of a heart attack; Wallin was appointed to replace him and was cleaning out the office along with other department employees. There in the back of a closet was a box. When they pulled it out into the light and opened it up, they found hundreds of documents related to the unsolved Robison case.
“Every detective that’s ever been with the department since the crime gets that case,” Wallin said. “Right then I just thought, ‘Well, I guess it’s my turn to assign it.’”
And so one of his first acts as sheriff was to assign the case to Sheriff’s Detective Bobra Johnston, who began a detailed examination of the documents found in the closet, along with the whole file on the case—boxes and boxes and boxes stored in the department vault. She started with the remaining physical evidence, including the clothing of the victims, the autopsy reports, slides of hair and tissue and the shell casings from the murder weapons. Then she got to work on the rest of the case file. Without help, Detective Johnston would need a month or more just to read through everything, so Michigan State Police detective Gwen White was called in to assist. The two detectives, just kids when the murders were committed, came face to face with the same horror that had obsessed countless officers from both the Sheriff’s Office and the Michigan State Police who had worked the case over the years.
“It was putrid,” Detective Johnston told the Petoskey News-Review. “The original officers on the scene said they were met with a wall of flies.”
After the two detectives had organized the file and begun to absorb what was in it, they scheduled a meeting with the heads of the DNA, fingerprint, and ballistics investigation departments at the Michigan State Police crime lab in Grayling. This same evidence that Johnston and White examined had been picked through and considered from all angles by countless detectives, crime scene investigators, lab technicians, and administrators over the years. But this time, there was something else, something overlooked but potentially valuable. Found within the pallet-sized block of documents, folders, reports, taped interviews and catalogued physical evidence were three unidentified pubic hairs taken off the body of Shirley Robison.
Who left microscopic pieces of himself inside the Robison cottage on the day of the murders forty years ago? Officers could not imagine that the killer could wreak the kind of bloody havoc that their long-ago colleagues found waiting for them inside that log-built retreat without leaving at least some small bit of his own biology behind. Sheriff Wallin said he was convinced that there was DNA at the crime scene left by at least seven people, one of whom was not named Robison. This seventh person did not die in the cabin but instead left unscathed, and under his own evil power, to walk free.
On that July day in 2002, as he was just getting acclimated to his new title of duly appointed sheriff, Wallin thought that maybe, just maybe, the case could finally be closed, the manhunt that had gone on for decades, ever since he was a green college intern, could finally be over, and on his watch, no less.
At issue were the three pubic hairs, labeled evidence 2-D, found on Shirley’s body that, upon visual inspection, had not looked to investigators like they came from any member of the Robison family. 2-D had been stored for more than thirty-four years in an ancient glass screw-top evidence collection jar sealed with cellophane tape. Johnston wanted the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division to check the hairs against those collected from Shirley’s family and to check for DNA evidence. The Robisons’ blood-stained clothes were also to be checked. If DNA were found, its particular characteristics could be entered into a national database to look for a match—and the killer.
“Compare hair samples collected from victims to 3 pubic hairs (2-D) removed from Shirley Robison,” Johnston wrote in her official request. “We sent down all of the hair evidence and Shirley’s clothing. Gook luck and thanks.”
Before the lab work was started, money, and a lot of it, happened to become available for tests on old DNA evidence. In March 2003, the Forensic Science Division received a $1.4 million federal grant to conduct DNA testing on cold cases. The grant allowed the Grayling laboratory to select 175 cases from around the state in which there were “existing biological samples” and to test them. The idea behind the grant was that these biological samples would be entered into CODIS (Combined DNA Indexing System), the national crime-fighting DNA database, and checked against existing records. Adding 175 new cases would also expand the scope of the database itself.
Johnston recontacted the state police and requested that the evidence she had submitted for analysis along with Shirley’s clothing be included in the DNA analysis that the new grant was funding.
With this physical evidence now safely in the hands of a state police forensic scientist, Johnston turned her attention to the rest of the file. Among the most recent items in it were a series of letters written by a Davison, Michigan, woman to the sheriff’s office, the office of the prosecuting attorney, and the state attorney general’s office. A letter with a similar story had been received by Davison City Police and Flint Area Crime Stoppers.
The correspondent’s bizarre story went like this: As an unwilling and hypnotized victim, she had been forced to witness the murders of the Robisons. The killers were two women sharpshooters from Traverse City, Michigan, who the woman believed were her friends. Her father, a Detroit-area psychiatrist, had helped orchestrate the crime and was waiting in a nearby cabin when it happened. A wide assortment of people connected to the case, including the Bliss family, various detectives, and the shooters themselves had been her father’s patients. A police cover-up had kept the case from being solved for the past thirty-five years and now supported the harassment the correspondent was subjected to by unknown enemies. Her car and apartment were bugged, she said, and two frightening men had moved into her apartment building.
“Can you help me in spite of corrupt police who will try to convince you I’m crazy?” the woman wrote in one of her letters. “I receive Social Security Disability for anxiety disorder, which is not a psychosis. It’s the result of extreme abuse, but I’ve earned, with hard work, a lot of healing with God’s help. If you don’t help me, I will not survive much longer. They want me dead, and they work at it.”
Bobra Johnston hardly knew how to respond to this correspondent, who turned out to be just one in a very long line of people with outlandish theories on the crime. She was obviously disturbed; in twenty-one pages of correspondence she had reiterated the same preposterous story. And yet she was also obviously suffering and in need of the help she was requesting. Ultimately, Johnston referred the woman to her local police chief, William Brandon, and after the end of May received no more letters from her.
Johnston then turned her attention to a reexamination of the murder weapons, and found good news and bad news. The good news was that another division of the same state police forensic science lab that was looking for DNA confirmed the long-ago ballistics report. The shell casings at the cottage did match the shell casings found at a downstate firing range. The bad news was that there was no record of the gun ever being used again in the intervening three-plus decades.
In June 2003 the DNA forensic work on the three mysterious hairs and Shirley’s disintegrating clothing had been completed. The news was not what the Sheriff’s Office had been hoping to hear. The hairs did not have enough material attached for DNA analysis and neither did Shirley’s clothing. When the “gross morphological characteristics” of the three hairs were examined under a microscope, they were determined to be similar to the known sample submitted from Shirley. All these years, many had assumed that Shirley had been raped, adding another dimension to the crime, to the investigation, and to the psyche of the person who had committed it. Now that the hair analysis was complete, detectives saw that Shirley may not have been raped, but that the killer had positioned her body to make it look as if she had.
Sheriff Wallin, even five years later, makes no effort to disguise his disappointment in the DNA test. “It was a long shot,” he said, “but at least it was a shot.”