There is just something about this case. Once you know a little bit about it, you want to know more. No, you don’t just want to know more, you have to know more. It’s like it’s contagious, and what you catch from it is obsession.
—Emmet County detective J. L. Sumpter, in an interview, October 4, 2007
Aldred Koski is a yeller. An operation that removed part of his lung years ago has given the eighty-year-old man an angry wheeze. Lugging around an anchor of a briefcase, boxes of files and cassette tapes of interviews, a camera, a tape recorder, and a laptop—elements of his “roving office of incrimination” according to another reporter—probably hasn’t helped his respiration any, either. These materials, though, are both the treasure and detritus of nearly four decades of meticulous investigative reporting, and they have traveled with him in his van as he’s tracked the killer of the Robisons over umpteen Michigan miles.
Ask questions about the investigation of any number of people with a stake in its outcome—Sheriff Wallin, Detective Sumpter, author Judith Guest, Petoskey newspaper editor Kendall Stanley, for example, and they’ll eventually steer you to Koski. Former Emmet County detective Bobra Johnston credits him with keeping the case alive. Retired state police detective John Flis kept a scrapbook of Koski’s articles and once told him, “You really dogged it good.” High praise from a cop to a reporter. Koski, they say, has compiled more information on the crime than anyone else, possibly even law enforcement. The man said as much himself in a September 18, 2007, e-mail:
I spent $1,000 on converting 10,000 feet of Robisons’ home movies into DVDs. From that I know the mannerisms of the kids. . . How tall Richard Craig was. What they visited in San Francisco. What were the views they had from the Delta air coach as the family came in view of the Hawaiian Islands? I can describe perfect sunsets and kids splashing in the water. These same kids opening up gifts at Christmas and the frosting on birthday cakes. It only took me 38 years to reach this point. What I’ve put down on paper here barely scratches the surface.
Shirley Robison’s brother, Marvin Fulton, gave Koski the Robison family home movies once he’d established his interest in helping to solve the case. Other gems in his stash include some of Dick Robison’s financial records that Koski found inside a file cabinet he picked up for ten dollars at an IRS tax sale; photographs of the inside of the Robison cottage just days before it was torn down and burned; and tape recordings of interviews with people once close to the case but now long dead, such as Monnie Bliss, his parents, Chauncey and May Bliss, and even the state police’s chief suspect, the enigmatic Joe Scolaro.
Koski is also the consummate beat reporter and can turn down the volume and the vitriol and just listen when it’s needed to get a story. In his files are clips bearing his byline from the Dearborn Press, Dearborn Guide, Detroit Times, Detroit Free Press, Oakland Press, Petoskey News-Review, Reuters, and United Press International. His name appears in the Michigan State Police files on the case, and he turned over some of his records and notes to the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office in the event some nugget of information buried inside could help solve the case.
He is quoted in many anniversary-themed articles that have appeared on schedule in Michigan newspapers as the unsolved crime has passed the twenty, twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five-year mark. Koski’s now-raspy voice also brought news of the investigation to radio listeners in the 1960s, most notably in his two part series, The Six Who Died, which aired on WKNR in 1969.
“You know when I hear those voices . . . [they] ring clear and in listening anew it sends chills up and down my spine almost as if I was resurrecting the dead,” Koski wrote in another e-mail.
When the crime was discovered in July 1968, Detroit was in the throes of a newspaper strike. Trade unions at the city’s two biggest dailies, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, had banded together and called a strike in late November 1967, and neither paper published again until early August 1968. By then, the Robison crime had been known for two weeks, and readers around the state were starved for in-depth news of the investigation. Working at a small weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Guide, Koski recognized the news value in the case and tried to fill the void with as many articles as his superiors would publish. After the dailies started up again and his newspaper wouldn’t fund him on a trip to the scene of the crime, Koski quit his job and headed north on his own dime.
“Eight months into the thing I heard the cabin was being torn down,” Koski says. “What the hell? How are you going to bring a jury up there and get yourself a conviction?”
As early as the last week of August 1968, both the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office and the Michigan State Police had informed the staff at the National Bank of Detroit that they had no more use for the property. “I spoke with Detective Stearns yesterday, who advised that neither he nor the State Crime Lab have any further investigative need for the property,” Dean R. Luedders of the Real Estate Division of the National Bank of Detroit wrote to Undersheriff Clifford Fosmore on August 27, 1968. “Since Sheriff Zink advised last Friday that your office also wants no further responsibility specifically in connection with the property, we will assume responsibility for its supervision henceforth.”
Perhaps it was the way evidence was collected in 1968 or how crime scenes were managed, or perhaps it was pressure from the neighbors who had said in no uncertain terms that they wanted the cottage torn down. Whatever the reason, as early as five weeks after the bodies were discovered, there were plans afoot to be rid of the log and stone structure that had encased the Robison family. Official plans were under way by February 1969.
Koski didn’t have any idea exactly where the remote cottage was, but he felt compelled to at least try to see the inside of the place before a wrecking crew demolished it forever. And so, in the winter of 1969, he and his father drove the three hundred miles north and sought out Summerset. It wasn’t an easy place for him to find, underscoring the early assertion of Sheriff Richard Zink that the killer must have been to the cottage at least once before. Tucked between Lake Michigan and a wooded bluff, well out of sight from the closest strip of asphalt, the spot is even more remote in the middle of winter. Before he finally found it, Koski, a small man, had trudged through snow as deep as his waist and was soaked through his gray suit and long black topcoat. Later, according to Koski, when he knocked on the front door of what turned out to be Chauncey Bliss’s house, the elder Bliss would take one look at the reporter and say he looked like he had “arrived on a sled pulled by a dog team.”
The weather conditions and Koski’s impractical city duds didn’t deter him from squeezing through an open bathroom window at the Robison cottage some previous visitor had left ajar. Once inside the main room, what he saw when he looked down was still horrific months after the crime.
[I] glimpsed the jagged outline of Shirley Robison’s corpse embedded in . . . the grain of the wood. In the photograph I took you can make out that the image is headless, cutoff at the knees, legs spread, pubic hair showing as a black smudge. Clear as well is her raised fist, which I viewed as her dying declaration of being utterly helpless to save her family and herself from the marauding son-of-a-bitch gunning them down in cold blood.
For nearly forty years the image in that photograph has fueled Koski’s investigative engine, powering it still as he works on his own book about the case that, he says, is “a classic in the making.” He has his own theory about the identity of the murderer and ridicules someone who would dare deviate from that idea, even novelists writing fiction. Mention fictionalized versions of the Robison story, and that’s when the yelling starts again—these kinds of writers are just “muddying the waters!”
Despite Koski’s fury, two novels have been inspired by the case: the self-published Dead End by James Pecora and The Tarnished Eye by widely acclaimed author Judith Guest (who also wrote the best-selling book, Ordinary People, which was later made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton, and Elizabeth McGovern).
Guest, who says she’s still intrigued by Sheriff Hugh DeWitt, the fictional main character she created for The Tarnished Eye, is working on a sequel to the mystery because as a writer she “really liked her sheriff and just couldn’t let him go yet.” The unpublished sequel, White in the Moon, takes its title from an A. E. Housman poem and opens seven years after DeWitt solves the murder of the Norbois family. The surname Norbois is a rearrangement of the letters in Robison, a diversion Guest unknowingly has in common with Dick Robison. Robison himself played around with the letters in his name, and on the masthead of several issues of Impresario listed the imaginary Carl R. Nosibor as art director.
“The murders had been on my mind for years and years,” says Guest, a native of Detroit and graduate of the University of Michigan. “When I decided to write about it, I decided I didn’t just want to write a novel, I wanted to solve the case.”
As part of her research, Guest met with Koski. By coincidence, each was spending a few weeks one summer in their respective cottages not too far from Lake Huron in the northeastern part of the state. Guest was in Harrisville and Koski in Oscoda. He invited her over for a visit, she accepted, and was flabbergasted by the amount of research material he had brought along on vacation. Videotapes of news programs, audiotapes of radio programs, police files, transcribed interviews, personal letters and photographs, all pertaining to the case.
“It’s fiction, Al,” she told him several times when he wanted to discuss the minutia of the case and how her book deviated from his own research. “Al, it’s fiction.”
The Tarnished Eye was inspired not just by the Robison case, but also by another famous Michigan crime, the Co-Ed Murders. For two years, from July 1967 through July 1969, seven young women were murdered in Washtenaw County. The youngest was thirteen, the oldest twenty-three. Some were students at the University of Michigan, some at Eastern Michigan University, some still in junior high or high school. John Norman Collins, a sometime EMU student, was suspected in the murders and ultimately convicted, in 1970, of killing an eighteen-year-old EMU freshman named Karen Sue Beineman. He was sentenced to life in prison, has since changed his name to John Chapman, and is currently incarcerated behind razor wire, an electronic detection system, and eight gun towers in the Marquette Branch Prison, on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
What caught Guest’s writer’s eye was that John Norman Collins, aka John Chapman, was an acquaintance of Richard Craig Robison; the two met in 1967 when they both attended Eastern Michigan University and may have either roomed together during orientation for freshmen and new students (Collins had transferred as a sophomore from Central Michigan University) or been members of the same fraternity.
To add to the coincidence, although police had had their sights on him for weeks, Collins was finally arrested after housesitting for his uncle, David Leik, a Michigan state trooper. Leik was not involved in the Co-Ed Murders investigation, but he and his family had been on vacation and had enlisted Collins to feed their dog and check on their house while they were gone. When they returned, they found certain things amiss in their basement; drops of a dark liquid had dried on the floor and a can of paint, a box of laundry detergent, and a bottle of ammonia were missing. A crime lab crew found hair clippings and bloodstains in Leik’s basement that tied Collins to Beineman, and he was arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime.
Years later, Leik was promoted to lieutenant and then was made commander of the Petoskey post. When he retired from the police force, he moved further north and served for a time as interim township supervisor for West Traverse Township, which borders on, of all possible places, Friendship Township and the village of Good Hart.
“What are the chances that this family knew this guy and he was not their killer?” Guest asks.
“Irrelevant,” Koski would probably answer.
The state police did check into a possible link with Collins but could find nothing that would tie him to the Robison murders. A handwritten note from the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office records reads, “Phone call with Stearns and Flis. They advise they can find no connection between Collins and the Robison boy, other than they went to the same school.” Acquaintances of both told the police the boys knew each other but differed in recounting details of their introduction.
Koski covered Collins’ preliminary court exam and observed nothing in common in the two crimes. Sheriff Zink and Lloyd Stearns conferred on the matter, comparing notes to see if the two investigations had turned up any names in common or if Collins had ever visited Summerset. Nothing was found and Collins has said little to the media or to police since his sentencing hearing in August 1970, when he maintained his innocence. At both his sentencing and in his only public interview since that time, Collins said that not only didn’t he kill the young woman, he didn’t even know anyone named Karen Sue Beineman.
Another sleuth in the case, known also to Guest and Koski, is a curious man by the name of Tom Mair. Guest and Mair share the belief that Collins could very well be the killer, or at least that the theory should be more thoroughly investigated by police. “If I was in front of a bunch of judges, I could make a case that he did it,” Mair says. “You at least talk to him. You don’t ignore him.”
A former waiter and the manager of a movie theater in Traverse City, Mair was a neighbor of the Robisons on Dolores Street in Lathrup Village, and he was a childhood friend of Randy Robison, the youngest Robison boy. Randy was just twelve years old when he was murdered, a small boy for his age, shy and “cautious” according to the family’s minister, Reverend Peters. “He was not as open in class and was withdrawn and a loner,” Peters would later tell investigators. “He was very courteous—extremely courteous—and very quiet.”
Close in age to Randy, Mair was devastated by the crime. He still has clear memories of the two boys riding their bikes and working on their stamp collections together. Adding to his shock, he says, was the sentiment, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Mair says he had been invited to accompany the Robison family on their June trip to Summerset but went on vacation with his own family instead.
The unlikely alliance between the movie theater manager and the best-selling author came about in a Traverse City restaurant when Guest was visiting on a book tour for The Tarnished Eye. Koski, meanwhile, fumes over the idea and has called Mair’s involvement in the case “fakery.”
“Mair, trying to be ever so suave, tagged John Norman Collins as the killer,” Koski wrote in an August 16, 2007 e-mail. “He cashed in during a regretful lull of our trusted news media; tired by then of the story and gave it scant coverage in the passing years. Mair was able to plant his own version of the whodunit . . . that the cops got it wrong in preaching that JRSIII (Joseph R. Scolaro) killed them all.”
Mair’s father was either a union carpenter or steelworker (both stories have circulated). His union was on strike that summer, and so the Mair family decided to go camping together, sparing Tom the awful fate that befell the Robisons. It is curious, however, that the Robisons would have invited an extra person along if they were planning to go to Kentucky and Florida.
As a child, Mair felt powerless to do anything but express frustration over the fact that no one had been punished for the crime. As a teenager, he continued to think about it and finally went to see a Southfield, Michigan, judge for advice on how he could help, though the visit ultimately led him nowhere.
Still, the unsolved case would not leave him. In 1991, when Mair was an adult, he contacted the Emmet County sheriff’s office, and then in 1994 the Michigan State Attorney General’s office, requesting that they take another look at Collins. Mair even found out where Dick Robison’s sister, Elaine Fox, lived and wrote her a letter. “I’m writing to you so that I may have an opportunity to speak to a member of the Robison Family,” he said. “I would like to meet you at your convenience. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on what happened to Shirley and her family. Perhaps you would share your thoughts with me. If you prefer not to speak with me then could you please refer me to another family member. Please take your time in deciding your response.”
Elaine Fox not only declined to meet with Mair, she called Detective Stearns about the letter and then mailed a copy of it, along with her own correspondence on a sheet of hearts and flowers stationery, to then Emmet County sheriff, Jeffrey Bodzick.
“A week ago I received this letter,” she wrote to Bodzick. “It was a little upsetting. After 26 years, why now? I will not be contacting Mr. Mair.”
By 1996, though, Mair had retained the services of a Birmingham attorney to push his cause with the attorney general. Frank Kelley’s office took the tip seriously and assigned it to the Criminal Division for follow-up, but nothing was found in Mair’s research to move the investigation forward.
“This is in reply to your recent letter requesting that this office investigate the Robison family murders which occurred in Good Hart in 1968,” an attorney working in the Criminal Division wrote to Mair’s attorney in March 1996. “You base your request on the fact that your client, Thomas Mair, has found evidence which indicates a possible connection between these homicides and John Norman Collins. Based on my review of the materials you provided, it appears that this connection was known at least back in 1970. Your letter does not contain any new evidence which would warrant any investigation by this office.”
Still, Mair carried on. He contacted Grand Rapids Silent Observer, one of the Michigan branches of a national citizen’s crime fighting group, and in 1998 convinced the organization to offer a $2,500 reward for any information that would lead to an arrest in the case. News of the reward generated about a dozen new anonymous tips pointing the finger at everyone from “an important hostess” in Detroit to one of Jimmy Hoffa’s bodyguards, but none of the tips panned out. That same year, Mair helped initiate a meeting between the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office, Emmet County Prosecutor’s Office, Michigan Attorney General’s Office, and the Michigan State Police.
A local weekly in Mair’s adopted town of Traverse City, the Northern Express, got wind of his involvement in the investigation and interviewed him for an article that appeared in the paper’s September 15, 1998, edition. He laid out his theory on the killer. “[I]t would have taken somebody with a mindset different than the caretaker and the business partner. My theory is that it was somebody with more of a criminal history—someone who is the worst example of a human being. Someone who doesn’t just kill one person, but kills six and could be particularly violent towards a young girl.”
According to the article, Mair feared for his own safety because of what he knew about the crime, but was nevertheless still gratified to see that his work had kept the case alive. In August 2004, he wrote his own first-person piece for the Northern Express, touting Guest’s book and again naming John Norman Collins as his prime suspect in the Robison murders.
Mair and Guest had, in different times and for different reasons, come to the same conclusion before they had ever met at that Traverse City book-signing; despite whatever evidence the police had that pointed to Scolaro, they both agreed that convicted murderer John Norman Collins could not be ignored.
“I believe that in cases of this type the largest problem for law enforcement may be getting over the possibility that the original theory and prime suspect are wrong,” Mair wrote in his piece in the Northern Express, titled “On the Trail of a Killer.”
Guest’s novel, Mair said in his article, might be just the thing to initiate a new look at the old case, and maybe even focus on a new suspect. There was a flush of media attention about the case that appeared in newspapers around Michigan coinciding with the release of Guest’s book and the thirty-fifth anniversary of the crime. Mair said he expects the same thing when the fortieth anniversary rolls around.
“I plan on stirring up stuff,” he said. “Stirring up tips.”