Mardi Link

Books Mardi Link Can Bookworms
Solve a Crime?

By Mardi Link

That’s the question participants at the Petoskey Public Library will consider at an upcoming forum addressing Northern Michigan’s most notorious unsolved mass murder.
In June of 1968 all five members of the Detroit-based Richard Robison family were ambushed inside their Good Hart cottage. After more than four decades the crime remains officially unsolved, despite an exhaustive investigation by both the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office and the Michigan State Police. Law enforcement’s chief suspect committed suicide in 1973, just days before a rumored indictment and arrest.
How do you activate interest in a cold case when the crime scene is gone, the suspect is dead, the murder weapons were never found, and the evidence is ancient? You rally the bookworms.
First among those is Petoskey high school English teacher, Rick Wiles. At the time of the murder Wiles had been receiving a subscription to Impresario, the monthly arts magazine that Richard Robison’s company published. Wiles began keeping a scrapbook of newspaper articles on the case and eventually wrote a lengthy, unpublished research paper detailing the investigation and delving into the possible psychology of the named suspect, Joseph R. Scolaro, III.
Wiles’ research led him not to the police but rather to other literary types like himself. Namely Royal Oak psychologist and author Eleanor Payson, whose book The Wizard of OZ and Other Narcissists dissects the personality type Wiles attributes to the Robison family killer; and to Indiana writer and criminal attorney Frank S. Perri, who writes in forensic periodicals about the new idea that white collar criminals (theft) can become red collar criminals (murder) when they believe they are in danger of being exposed.

Books Mardi Link Share this scenario with just about any woman and you’re sure to get a shudder: A nine-year-old girl from a big city in the Midwest is orphaned after her mother is committed to a psychiatric hospital and her father is killed in a traffic accident. The country is facing economic strife, her parents were Polish immigrants and no relatives come forward to claim her. Her two teenage brothers are left to fend for themselves. They manage to make their way in life, barely, but are not equipped to care for their sister. It was as if bad luck and doom crossed paths one day and she was standing at the intersection, all alone in the world, even before her 10th birthday.
These circumstances would be dire today, but imagine now that the year is 1883. Options for women are few–for girls even fewer–and for orphaned girls like this one, there are none at all except for this: the convent.
This hypothetical lost little girl was a real person. In the end, the Catholic Church in Detroit took her in, and the Felician Sisters there –many of them Polish–fed her, clothed her, educated and even loved her. Not surprisingly, she became a nun.

Features Mardi Link I am suspicious of authority and afraid of handguns. As far as the criminal justice system goes, I think we have too many laws, too many lawyers and too many lawmakers. Plus, I’m really not into uniforms – in second grade I quit Girl Scouts because the knee
socks itched. So, you can imagine it was with some trepidation that I completed the enrollment form for the annual Traverse City Citizen’s Law Enforcement Academy.
For the past decade the Traverse City Police Department has been running a 10-week course every spring so that interested locals can learn more about what it takes to be a cop in TC. As a new author of true crime books, I thought it would be a good idea for me to learn about investigation techniques, police terminology, and guns from the people who fight crime, and not just from the criminals I was busy researching. I must have passed the background check because I was admitted.

Features Mardi Link Sightings of the unexplainable always seem to happen way out in the middle of nowhere. That scenario certainly fits the legend of Northern Michigan’s “Dogman,” a mythical seven-foot canine with wolf-like eyes who stalks people and walks upright. The upshot of this creepy story, however, can be found in some very populated areas. For example, bookstores, gift shops, radio station studios, and even on the Internet.
For a few creative people like WTCM radio producer Steve Cook and authors Linda Godfrey, Frank Holes, Jr., and David Walks-As-Bear, the Dogman has become something of a cottage industry. For $29.99 you can even get a Dogman hoodie.