I couldn’t wait to grow up and move to the city! Then, when I went away to college, I was surprised to find that I missed the lake. You don’t think of that when you’re next to it all the time.
—Bonnie Bliss Weitzel, Monnie’s daughter, who retired back to Good Hart
The first three weeks of July 1968 had been torturous for Aileen Fulton. Her brother had suffered a painful death from cancer on July 7, and she could not get in touch with her daughter, Shirley, or, for that matter, any of the Robisons. The night before Shirley and Dick and the kids had left to spend the summer at the cottage, Shirley had invited her mother to go along, but Aileen declined. The last time she had spoken with her daughter was on Sunday, the twenty-third of June.
After her brother died, Aileen called up to Summerset several times, day and night, for the next two weeks. She wanted to hear the comforting voice of her daughter. The operator put her calls through, but there was no answer. She tried calling Elaine, Dick’s sister, and she tried calling Monnie Bliss.
“I was worrying myself sick. I was imagining everything then, all kinds of things like they might have been gassed, the furnace might have been on the blink or something in their sleep, or maybe there was a plane crash, ’cause like I said, she was the type to keep in touch with me all the time about different things, and we were very close. She was the only daughter I had.”
Finally, she called Joe Scolaro and he told her not to worry, everything was fine, the family was on a trip and would be back around July 20. But of course, everything wasn’t fine, and the news came on the morning of July 26, when Aileen heard her neighbor calling to her, urgently, through her open kitchen window.
“Come over here and have a cup of coffee with me!”
Aileen thought that offer rather unusual and went to the window, answering that she had already had her coffee for the day.
“Well, come on over anyway!”
Being a good neighbor, Aileen did, and in a few minutes her son Marvin and his wife, Barbara, showed up and broke the news.
“You don’t have to tell me about it, I know. Something’s happened to the whole family.”
Between three weeks of anxiety and the vivid dream she had the week before, Shirley’s mother knew her daughter was dead, even if she hadn’t yet admitted it to herself. Aileen’s husband, Shirley’s father, had died three years before, and in her recent dream he and the Robison family were together. People might not believe in the dreams of old people, Aileen said, but that was neither here nor there. Her dream was real, and it didn’t matter whether anyone believed her or not.
I dreamt that my dead husband was in the back bedroom, laughing and talking, and Shirley and Richard’s whole family was in that bedroom, but they wouldn’t let me come in there. I was standing in the hallway, and they’re all laughing and talking and giggling. I started telling people about this dream and they said, “Oh dreams are dreams and that’s all.” I figured I had worried so much about it that it was just a dream, you know? It was just that they were all standing in the room laughing and talking . . . and I can almost picture everyone, but they wouldn’t let me come into the room, and I stood in the hallway.
It wasn’t a dream exactly, but something like a vibration, and it seems to have temporarily inhabited another woman, whose own ethereal powers were brought to bear on the crime many months later. In August 1969, when they had begun to exhaust all the initial and obvious routes of investigation, Sheriff Zink and Undersheriff Fosmore brought a local woman, a girl, really, and a “mystic,” to Summerset. Reporter Bob Clock was invited to accompany the odd little group.
B. Anne Gehman was born in Petoskey, the youngest of eight children, into a Mennonite and Amish family. When she was twelve years old, the family moved to Florida so that Anne’s father could find year-round work as a surveyor. Such a large family required a year-round income to sustain, something northern Michigan had not provided. It took three years for all ten family members to make their way south, and in subsequent years Anne continued to return to northern Michigan for summer visits with relatives.
Today Gehman lives with her husband, a former Jesuit priest, outside Langley, Virginia, so she can be close to most of her current clients, who are primarily members of Congress and government officials. She stops short of actually mentioning the FBI and is irritated that her work with former First Lady Nancy Reagan has been made public on the Internet. “I don’t know how that ever got out. I protect the privacy of my clients and I don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
From the time she was very young, though, Gehman was aware of her psychic and spiritual skills. Her inclination has always been to use them to help people, first her immediate family, later neighbors, and finally the public.
“I started my first public work when I was young—just 15,” Gehman says. “I started out helping to find people who had gone missing. Lost children usually, and sometimes even pets.”
In 1968 she helped find Jean Yeaggers, a missing Florida teen. Police gave her a cigarette lighter to hold to see if she could divine any conclusions. She handled the lighter for a few minutes and soon “received images that gave me a pretty good idea of what happened.” The resulting media attention made Gehman an instant celebrity in some circles, and garnered her an official invitation to consider the Robison case the next time she was in northern Michigan.
According to Clock, when she visited the site, Gehman “walked about the grounds attempting to generate so-called ‘vibrations.’” At the end of her excursion she reported “that a riding stable, a church and yacht harbor are involved in the murders.” Later the three men brought Gehman to Monnie Bliss’s house and waited for him to come out into the front yard. They wanted to see if the mystic would receive any “vibrations” from him. She said she felt nothing.
Today, Gehman vaguely remembers the case. When asked if she has any further images that would unveil the identity of the murderer or the motive for the crime, she is silent for several minutes.
“That was so very long ago. All I can get is the money. It had something to do with the father’s business and with his money. I’m afraid that’s all I can do.”
Up the hill from the site where her father built the Robisons a cottage, where she played as a child, where B. Anne Gehman walked, and where Aileen Fulton was on the other end of an eerily unanswered but endlessly ringing telephone, another woman has been touched by the case, too.
The fortuitously named Bonnie Bliss is the oldest of Monnie and Dorothy’s three children and she is happy that she and her husband have retired to Blisswood. Bonnie grew up here, watching her father plane logs and helping her mother serve chicken dinners to resort guests at the Wigwam Restaurant in the evening and selling Odawa-made trinkets in the gift shop in the afternoon. She washed the resort’s endless laundry baskets of sheets and towels and blankets with a wringer washer and listened to the explosions from the woods as her dad dispatched stubborn tree stumps. She helped her grandfather Chauncey care for his gladiolas and arranged bouquets in the cottages for visiting guests. In a word, she worked.
“I couldn’t wait to grow up and move to the city!” she laughs. “Then, when I went away to college, I was surprised to find that I missed the lake. You don’t think of that, when you’re next to it all the time. Then suddenly, it was gone.”
Bonnie’s mother and father were the kind of people that northern Michigan is proud of producing, even if today their sort has grown increasingly rare. They were resourceful, tough, and happy. Pioneers when pioneering had long gone out of fashion in the rest of the state.
Bonnie’s mother Dorothy was a petite redhead with a natural talent for music. She played the piano and sang so well that she could have been a professional musician. Instead, she married into a farming and woodworking family, lived in the woods, and relished her role as mother.
Bonnie’s father was artistic, funny, and eccentric and knew everything about the natural world surrounding Good Hart. He didn’t mind being thought of as the resort area’s errand boy—as a matter of fact, he was a little proud of his ability to supply everything the township needed. Ice to keep their perishables cold, a guide to the best fishing spots, repair service for anything that was broken, and even, on the occasions that it was required, political leadership. For a dozen years, Monnie had served as township supervisor.
The only stain on her life in Good Hart is the suspicion that still comes back occasionally to remind her of the days when her father was a suspect. Her husband, Dell, has heard the whispers, though Bonnie says she has not.
“They won’t say it to a direct relative,” she says, showing that toughness and compassion remain in the Bliss family.
In her own way, with her own quiet strength, she has bested it. Instead of dwelling on ugly rumor, she has made Good Hart her own again. Bonnie volunteers at the Good Hart Mini Fair’s bake sale every year and works at the historical museum in Cross Village. A retired pharmacist, she volunteers a couple times a month at the free clinic in Petoskey and plays host to her children, grandchildren, and their accompanying dogs as often as they will visit.
She has made a life in Good Hart in a cottage that her father and her grandfather built, a cottage across the gravel drive from the Blisswood resort and all the satisfying memories that still keep residence there. Like the one she holds onto of her father first meeting her mother, even though it happened, of course, years before she was born.
Dorothy Mange was on vacation with her parents, happy to escape an irritating boyfriend who had been in pursuit of her as a wife. She had come into marrying age and had intended to marry the boy after she returned home from a summer up north with friends. Monnie was twenty-eight years old and reaching that age when parents ask whether there will ever be a marriage. The two drove south on an errand together, and Dorothy wondered aloud how she was going to extricate herself from her engagement.
According to Bonnie, her father looked at her mother and said, “You won’t have to marry him if you marry me.” What happened next is a mystery, but the pair came back to Good Hart husband and wife. Bonnie laughs just thinking about the looks that must have appeared on their parents’ faces when they heard the news.
“That’s my favorite memory I have of my father. I’ve heard that story so many times that it’s almost like I was there. Like it’s not a story I heard someone else tell but a memory I remember.”
A memory strong enough to replace anything anyone else in Good Hart thinks that they remember. Let people speculate; Bonnie is surrounded by her family, her memories, and bliss. And she has the lake again, too.