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Childhood’s End: Four Tiny Bodies in the Snow
The Story of the Oakland County Child Killer, Part 1
Mark. Jill. Kristine. Timothy. Between February 1976 and March 1977, four children in the Detroit Metropolitan Area were abducted, held between four and nineteen days before being murdered, each of their bodies dumped in the snow. The killer or killers, never apprehended.
Other children were suspected of being victims of the spree killer known as the Oakland County Child Killer, and thousands of children in Southeast Michigan saw their childhoods destroyed in the aftermath of the shocking crime wave.
I was one of those children.
This is the first of several articles about the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) crimes and the aftermath, told from the perspective of someone who was the same age as the missing and murdered children, and who is still waiting for someone to make things right.
Detroit 1976
The 1970s were a pivotal time in our nation’s history, in the aftermath of the near-revolutionary incidents of the 1960s (the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the rising rates of divorce and drug use, the liberation movements for women and LGBTQ folk, and the merging forces attempting to unite urban and suburban areas). I didn’t understand these issues…
