Was Kristine Mihelich a victim of the Oakland County Child Killer? In the winter of 1977, a quiet ten-year-old girl named Kristine Mihelich, a white female, vanished from her Berkley, Michigan neighborhood, sparking a mystery that would haunt the community for decades. On the afternoon of January 2nd, she walked the short distance from her home to a local 7-Eleven to buy a magazine. When she didn't return, her mother reported her missing, setting off a desperate search that lasted for nineteen agonizing days.
Her family and neighbors held onto hope, even raising money for a potential ransom that was never demanded.
The community's hope turned to grief on January 21, 1977. A mail carrier on his route in the nearby, snow-covered Franklin Village noticed something out of place at the end of a dead-end street. There, in a snowbank, he discovered Kristine's fully clothed body. Investigators determined that she had been held captive for the entire nineteen days she was missing and had been killed by suffocation less than 24 hours before being found. In a disturbing detail that would become a signature of the killer, Kristine had been bathed and her clothes were clean. She was carefully placed in the snow, a detail that suggested a chilling level of control and planning by her murderer.
Kristine's death was the third in a string of child abductions and murders that terrorized Oakland County between 1976 and 1977, attributed to a figure the media dubbed the 'Babysitter Killer' or the 'Oakland County Child Killer.' The similarities in the cases, including the care taken with the victims' bodies after death, led investigators to form a massive task force. Despite thousands of tips, the investigation was fraught with frustration and dead ends for years, and the task force was eventually disbanded without a conclusive resolution.
Over the decades, several individuals have come under suspicion. One prime suspect was Christopher Busch, a convicted pedophile from a wealthy family who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978, though questions have been raised about the circumstances of his death. Years later, a significant break appeared to come when mitochondrial DNA testing linked a hair found on Kristine's body to James Vincent Gunnels. Gunnels, who was a teenager at the time of the murders, had been an associate of Busch. When questioned, Gunnels denied any involvement in the killing and has never been charged. He failed a polygraph examination regarding his potential participation in Kristine's death. Other names, including a man named David Norberg, whose own family members implicated him, have surfaced, but no one has ever been arrested or convicted for the murder of Kristine Mihelich, leaving her case officially unsolved.
