Law enforcement is an essential service for a free civil society. Simply living under a system of laws with no enforcement apparatus is not reasonable. The honor system may work when the stakes are low, but ultimately human nature makes it necessary to protect us from ourselves. We need accountability. We need to entrust members of our society to keep us in line to save us from falling into chaos. I know that this chapter will be at least as boring for you to read as it was for me to write, but it provides some important context to understand what happened in this case.
At the time of this writing, we are witnesses to eroded trust between the police and some of the communities—particularly the black community—for which they are responsible to protect and serve. The reasons for the eroded trust are beyond the scope of this book except that they are a natural consequence of living under a system that measures success by the number of arrests and convictions secured by police and prosecutors, respectively. It is not an inherently racist system as much as a system that incentivizes racism. That last sentence is actually part of the problem where we lay the blame on an abstract “system” and separate it from the people who operate within it.
It is easy to capitalize on the present negative perception of law enforcement and read this work with the mindset that the police who investigated the OCCK case in the late 1970s were corrupt and/or incompetent. That they are responsible for failing to prevent the murders of children. That they are responsible for not capturing the killers. While there are a few exceptions, nothing can be further from the truth.
A detailed review of all publicly available documents on the OCCK case reflects how nearly all members of several police departments put their hearts and souls into solving this case. There were the dozens who were part of the dedicated Oakland County Task Force (OCTF) created with the sole purpose of catching the killers. There were the countless officers who volunteered their time to assist with the investigation. These police were not pursuing personal glory. They were not gathering information for a book deal. They were simply trying to do their jobs and protect a terrified community. The law enforcement function, however, is not borne by the police alone.
You do not have to be a fan of the TV program, “Law and Order,” to be familiar with the opening line:
“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented
Opening narration to the TV Show “Law and Order”
by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”
In Michigan, district attorneys are elected by the citizens of the county they serve. They are also referred to as county prosecutors. The police and prosecutors must work effectively together for the system to function as it was intended. A dysfunctional relationship between these roles can have dangerous consequences and leave the citizens unprotected. Our criminal justice system has the potential to function well provided that the individuals occupying key roles are qualified, take their jobs seriously and give fair treatment to suspects. To say the system is “broken” is a cop‐out implying that people are operating within an inherently flawed system. It removes responsibility from the individuals who fail to do their jobs. It removes accountability.
Because they are elected, the role of prosecutor is always, to some extent, political. Some prosecutors play more politics than others, but all must keep an eye on the optics of the cases they handle if they want to win reelection or attain a higher office. This political sensitivity can get in the way of the prosecutor’s relationship with the police. It can get in the way of a prosecutor’s decision process of whether a case is worthy of pursuing or if a case should be dropped. Police are sometimes frustrated when they go through the trouble of investigating and a criminal defendant only to have the prosecutor refuse to go to authorize an arrest warrant because pursuing the case could hurt the prosecutor politically. Prosecutors have broad discretion to determine which cases to pursue and which to drop. If they pursue a case, they have discretion as to how hard they will push or how severe a sentence they recommend. They have discretion to offer a deal in exchange for a guilty plea to quickly clear cases from their docket. The police also exercise discretion in their roles when they determine whether to arrest a suspect or look the other way and let the suspect go. It is in this space of individual discretion that the flaws in the system truly reveal themselves.
That is not to say that police and prosecutors exercising discretion is always a problem. Often it can serve as the system’s greatest virtue. For example, a grief‐stricken father whose daughter died of a drug overdose buys an unregistered gun to get some street justice against the dealer who got her hooked. His wife is afraid that she will lose her husband too and contacts the police. The police find the father in possession of the unregistered weapon and see that the serial number is filed off. The father has no criminal record, is dealing with the loss of his daughter and is the primary breadwinner with a wife and three young kids at home. The police could put the father in the system on the gun charge, but they decide instead to talk him down, assure him that they will get the dealer off the street and remind him that his living family members need him. They feel the father got the message and let him go. Technically, the system did not operate how it was intended, but would justice have been served if the distraught father was hit with 10 years in prison?
Same facts as above except this time the police arrive just as the father is closing in on the dealer. His hand is on the weapon when the police grab him and the gun accidentally discharges. Several witnesses hear it. The police, while sympathetic to the father, can no longer exercise discretion to help him. The father is arrested and processed and is now in the hands of the prosecutor. The prosecutor is sensitive to the facts and recommends that the judge give the father probation. The father has a record, but he can be with his family. Again,
In Michigan, district attorneys are elected by the citizens of the county they serve. They are also referred to as county prosecutors. The police and prosecutors must work effectively together for the system to function as it was intended. A dysfunctional relationship between these roles can have dangerous consequences and leave the citizens unprotected. Our criminal justice system has the potential to function well provided that the individuals occupying key roles are qualified, take their jobs seriously and give fair treatment to suspects. To say the system is “broken” is a cop‐out implying that people are operating within an inherently flawed system. It removes responsibility from the individuals who fail to do their jobs. It removes accountability.
Because they are elected, the role of prosecutor is always, to some extent, political. Some prosecutors play more politics than others, but all must keep an eye on the optics of the cases they handle if they want to win reelection or attain a higher office. This political sensitivity can get in the way of the prosecutor’s relationship with the police. It can get in the way of a prosecutor’s decision process of whether a case is worthy of pursuing or if a case should be dropped. Police are sometimes frustrated when they go through the trouble of investigating and a criminal defendant only to have the prosecutor refuse to go to authorize an arrest warrant because pursuing the case could hurt the prosecutor politically. Prosecutors have broad discretion to determine which cases to pursue and which to drop. If they pursue a case, they have discretion as to how hard they will push or how severe a sentence they recommend. They have discretion to offer a deal in exchange for a guilty plea to quickly clear cases from their docket. The police also exercise discretion in their roles when they determine whether to arrest a suspect or look the other way and let the suspect go. It is in this space of individual discretion that the flaws in the system truly reveal themselves.
That is not to say that police and prosecutors exercising discretion is always a problem. Often it can serve as the system’s greatest virtue. For example, a grief‐stricken father whose daughter died of a drug overdose buys an unregistered gun to get some street justice against the dealer who got her hooked. His wife is afraid that she will lose her husband too and contacts the police. The police find the father in possession of the unregistered weapon and see that the serial number is filed off. The father has no criminal record, is dealing with the loss of his daughter and is the primary breadwinner with a wife and three young kids at home. The police could put the father in the system on the gun charge, but they decide instead to talk him down, assure him that they will get the dealer off the street and remind him that his living family members need him. They feel the father got the message and let him go. Technically, the system did not operate how it was intended, but would justice have been served if the distraught father was hit with 10 years in prison?
Same facts as above except this time the police arrive just as the father is closing in on the dealer. His hand is on the weapon when the police grab him and the gun accidentally discharges. Several witnesses hear it. The police, while sympathetic to the father, can no longer exercise discretion to help him. The father is arrested and processed and is now in the hands of the prosecutor. The prosecutor is sensitive to the facts and recommends that the judge give the father probation. The father has a record, but he can be with his family. Again, justice is served by those entrusted with law enforcement understanding when and how to exercise discretion.
Examples of police and prosecutors using discretion in a positive way happens more often than we realize. No one has an interest in publicizing such stories. Then there are the common negative abuses of discretion that we all hear about and see. The beneficiaries of this discretion are usually the privileged whom we are too quick to accept as being allowed to live under a separate system of laws.
The privileged have resources to afford expensive attorneys. Fighting these expensive attorneys in court takes time and drains the limited budget of the prosecutor’s office. Why engage in a protracted criminal trial that you might lose when you can spend the same amount of time securing convictions of a dozen indigent criminal defendants relying on public defenders? Come election season, you want those dozen convictions to shield yourself against candidates seeking to unseat you.
The privileged can also manipulate our criminal justice system only because some of our officials entrusted with law enforcement allow themselves to be manipulated. It should shake the faith of those who are expected to play be the rules, but it is so common that we simply shrug with jaded indifference. Our outrage is tempered in part because we cling to the belief that there is almost always a limit to how far police and prosecutors allow the manipulation to go before they draw a line.
The son of a wealthy U.S. senator gets pulled over for a D.U.I. The senator makes a call to the prosecutor and the charges against the boy are dropped. The cops don’t like it. If the public finds out they definitely won’t like it. But we know how politics and privilege work and let it go. If that same kid crossed the median on the highway and crashed head on into a minivan killing a family of five, the prosecutor is more likely to tell the senator asking for leniency to go screw himself. That is the line the prosecutor will not cross. His holding that line is what maintains our faith in the system. We know that he has to play politics to some extent, but when the chips are down, he has our back. It is what helps us feel safe.
But what if the senator’s son had a series of D.U.I.s and the prosecutor kept letting him go until he eventually has that head on collision killing the family of five? What if the prosecutor instead of taking responsibility shreds the evidence of the previous D.U.I.s? What if the prosecutor leans on the cops who arrested the kid in the previous D.U.I.s by promising favors or threatening their careers? What started out as a favor can quickly snowball into a career and character‐defining investment. The matrix of that tangled web can become overwhelming.
The OCCK case is a tragic example of public officials who never found that line past which they should not exercise discretion. For them, it was not a question of an ethical bar too high to hurdle. It was not a question of a line of morality they knew they could not cross. These measures have no meaning to narcissists who only understand wealth and power. There was no conscience to weigh them down. There was no point at which they asked themselves, “Should we be doing this?” What makes matters worse, anyone with knowledge of the public officials’ crimes had nowhere to turn. They had no one to tell. All they could expect for exposing the crimes of their superiors was devastating retaliation.
At its heart, the OCCK case may seem like just another story of another elite demanding protection to maintain his reputation by covering up the crimes of his son. But the son was not a shoplifter, a drunk driver or a drug dealer. The son was an admitted kidnapper, rapist and murderer of young children. The prosecutor knew this about him.
It is tempting to view this as a conspiracy where the prosecutor did not act alone and had assistance from the police in protecting the child raping son of an elite. A conspiracy requires that the co‐conspirators have knowledge of the crime. This analysis demonstrates how the prosecutor’s requirement for absolute loyalty and secrecy makes it unlikely that anyone beyond his small trusted inner circle were aware that the primary objective was to protect the wealthy elite. Including too many in this plan would make it impossible to control. There would be too high a risk that someone might talk. The prosecutor utilized other means to make the police agree with commands that made absolutely no sense. Among the means used was generating fraudulent polygraph results.
In the late 1970s polygraph tests carried far more weight than they do today. The OCCK case demonstrates how manipulative criminals masquerading as public officials leveraged law enforcement’s heavy reliance on polygraphs. They exploited this reliance to direct the police investigation away from treating the admitted child raping son of an elite as a suspect. The did so by destroying genuine polygraph tests and replacing them with fraudulent ones. The police were not aware of the manufactured evidence and it left them confused. The chapters that follow describe how in a single day, the police collected stronger evidence that that two admitted child rapists were involved in the OCCK murders than at any point during the investigation. They were forced to clear them as suspects after they passed bogus polygraph tests.
We live in a particularly dangerous time where too many of our political leaders lack a moral compass and do not even pretend to share the morals of their supporters. Because today’s society embraces the cult of personality where we give our unconditional support to the leaders we favor no matter what they do. This is not limited to any political party nor is it limited to politics. We give our unconditional support to our favorite entertainers and religious leaders, blinding ourselves to their unspeakable crimes.
The principal public figure in this case, L. Brooks Patterson, was a Republican icon. There will undoubtedly be those who will try to dismiss this book as a political hit job. Since when is protecting child‐raping murderers part of the Republican platform? The moral depravity of elites is agnostic to political affiliation. Harvey Weinstein was a darling among Democratic power brokers. They took his money, attended his parties and likely witnessed his predatory behavior. They were among the chorus who normalized his sexual abuse by repeating the
idiotic mantra: “That’s just Harvey being Harvey,” until public pressure forced them to treat their former friend and benefactor as the unhinged predatory lunatic he always was. Then there is Jeffrey Epstein. A picture is worth a thousand unreported sex crimes.
Far closer to home and closer to this case, Genesee County Prosecutor, Robert F. Leonard, the attorney who handled Chris Busch’s Criminal Sexual Conduct (CSC) case in that jurisdiction, was a liberal Democrat and a rising star in the party. But in March of 1979, he was charged with embezzlement. He spent almost 4 years in prison for his crimes and had his law license revoked.1 He also faced allegations of trading favorable sentences for personal favors.2 Was allowing an admitted rapist of children to get away with a sentence of five years’ probation one of these favors?
Brooks Patterson was known for his unapologetic bigotry. Like Weinstein’s friends, Patterson’s supporters brushed off his racist rhetoric as “that’s just Brooks being Brooks.” They never had to make excuses for his greatest crimes because they didn’t know about them. No doubt his most staunch supporters will continue to worship at Patterson’s altar despite the crimes described in this book because these are the times in which we live.
This is not about politics. It is about drawing the line that we allowed ourselves to forget—to remind ourselves that it still exists. It is about showing how a public official knowingly and actively protected a child‐raping murderer during the largest manhunt in the United States. A manhunt for the people responsible for kidnapping, raping and murdering children in the public official’s jurisdiction. This is not speaking ill of the dead. It is speaking the truth that the dead tried to kill and bury. It is about reminding ourselves that there must be accountability.
Footnotes:
1 Detroit Free Press, March 14, 1979, 1‐A.
2 Detroit Free Press, March 2, 1979, 2‐A.
Guarded By Jackals 