Cold Case Investigation – Library Style

By: University of Michigan Press | Date: May 18, 2009
Cold Case Investigation – Library Style

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Can bookworms solve a crime? That’s the question that will be considered at the Petoskey Public Library tonight.

In June of 1968 all five members of the Detroit-based Richard Robison family were ambushed inside their Good Hart cottage. The investigation is chronicled in my book, When Evil Came to Good Hart .

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 and much of it degraded beyond use? You rally the bookworms.

Tonight the Petoskey Public Library is hosting a forum on the case. The speaking panel will feature myself and northern Michigan history researcher Rick Wiles as well as former Emmet County Prosecutor Wayne Richard Smith, now retired. The audience will be made up of retired detectives who worked the case over the years, surviving family members of the Robisons, as well as the general public with an interest in this baffling case.

My own interest sprung from a radio report I heard on WJR when I was seven years old, the day the crime was discovered. I followed the case through journalism school and into adulthood as each decade was marked by an anniversary story in newspapers. After my book was published, I was surprised by the amount of correspondence I received from avid readers like Wiles and Smith, who, like me, had been following the crime for all these many years. Some of those people were bookworms in their private lives, but influential officials in their public ones; I was invited to give a presentation to a book club that included a member of congress, a supreme court judge, a representative from the attorney general’s office, criminal attorneys and a university regent. Even with all of their legal and political experience they, like me, wondered who killed the Robisons, and why.

Yet two more bookworms interested in this case are Petoskey librarians Barbara Cook and Drew Cherven. Cook helped organize the upcoming forum and Cherven has cataloged a collection of research on this case in the library’s reference department. The collection, much of which was donated to the library by myselfand Mr. Wiles, includes seven boxes and several binders of police reports, newspaper articles, research papers and interviews. When asked how many people have accessed the collection, Cherven exhales loudly and just says, “Lots!”

Bookworms no doubt, every last one of them. But can they help solve a murder? Attend the forum tonight, or read this blog in the coming days, and find out.

Summerset: A Forum on the Robison Family Murder Tragedy is sponsored by the Friends at the Carnegie and will be held Monday, May 18 at the Petoskey Public Library 451 E. Mitchell St. beginning at 7 p.m. It will include a panel discussion by local researcher Rick Wiles, and author Mardi Link, followed by a question and answer session. It is free and open to the public.

About the author: Mardi Link is a journalist and the author of the above-mentioned book on the Robison case as well as the forthcoming Isadore’s Secret: Sin, Murder & Confession in a Northern Michigan Town to be published this summer by the University of Michigan Press. She lives in Traverse City.

Mardi Link

 

When Evil Came to Good Hart (Univ. Mich. Press, July '08)

Isadore's Secret (Univ. Mich. Press, Summer '09)

 

www.mardilink.com

Visit our website to learn more about these titles:
When Evil Came to Good Hart
Isadora's Secret: Sin, Murder & Confession in a Northern Michigan Town