Mardi Link - When Evil Came to Good Hart

The University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Tenth Anniversary Edition first published 2018

Copyright 2008 by Mardi Link

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,

without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Link, Mardi.

When evil came to Good Hart / Mardi Link.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-472-11666-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-03315-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Mass murderMichiganGood Hart. I. Title.

HV6534.G66L56 2008

364.152'30977488dc22 2008015028

Photographs courtesy of Michigan State Police

ISBN: 978-0-472-03722-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-0-472-12390-2 (e-book)

To my boys

I have so much gratitude toward the many people in northern Michigan and elsewhere who welcomed me into their homes, their businesses, their past, and their present. Thanks to book-lover extraordinaire Trina Hayes; mobile tour guide Bill Little; Good Hart historian Carolyn Sutherland and her husband, Jim. Linda Bolton gave me a gracious tour of her home in Good Hart, a beautiful and charming example of Bliss architecture that she and her husband Rick have had lovingly restored by Bill Glass. Bonnie Bliss Weitzel has let nothing destroy her love of Good Hart, and for that she has my respect and admiration. Stephanie Guyor is due much credit by anyone who takes in the lovely St. Ignatius Mission Church in a quiet moment.

Sheriff Pete Wallin and Detective J. L. Sumpter of the Emmet County Sheriffs Office graciously opened up their exhaustive records on the case and provided me with their own personal observations and wisdom, which was invaluable. Thank you to Petoskey News-Review editor Kendall Stanley for a well-lit room and a pile of old photographs and faded newspaper clips. Thank you, Shannon Akans and Linda Ortiz of the Michigan State Police, for access to that agencys well-organized, behemoth file on the case. I am proud to be a citizen of a state that has the Michigan State Police looking out for our welfare. Thanks to Scott Libin of the Poynter Institute and John Flesher of the Associated Press for lessons in journalistic ethics; thanks to Rod Doherty for getting me started; Al Koski offered his pointed and motivational remarks.

Thanks also to the University of Michigan Press and Mary Erwin for an institutional and personal commitment to Michigan storytelling; Bear River Writers Conference and Richard McCann; and Antioch Writers Workshops Betty Crumrine Creative Nonfiction scholarship program. Your support and kindness continue to be immeasurable. Thanks to Lynne Hugo, writer, teacher, and friend. Thank you, Alex Moore, for canoe floats and literary laments; Deb Schepperly, Aim Merizon, Mary Ellen Geist, and Emily Meier for your kind editorial encouragement.

Thanks to the Drummond Girls for nurturing my love of the north, thanks to my Link family for time alone on the Lake Huron shore, thanks to my sons Owen, Luke, and Will, three bright, happy, and thriving boys despite their preoccupied mother. And finally, thank you, Pete Morton, for continuing to ask me every writers favorite question: What happens next?

The true crime empire continues to thrive because modern culture still offers no systematic and satisfying way to come to terms with human evil. The question posed here is fundamentally theological: is evil a super-natural power engaged in a timeless, cosmic struggle against the forces of Good, or do bad things just happen randomly in an amoral universe devoid of any larger meaning?

Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination

This is a true story. It was written nearly forty years after the murder of the Robison family, and many of the people you will meet in these pages were deceased long before I began writing about them. Meticulous records of the case were kept by both the Michigan State Police and the Emmet County Sheriffs Office, including taped and written interviews of friends, family members, business associates, suspects, and others in the midst, and on the fringes, of the investigation.

In addition, the case was thoroughly covered by reporters working for the New York Times, United Press International, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, the Petoskey News-Review, the Traverse City Record Eagle, the Harbor Light, and other newspapers and magazines. Even the noir and titillating True Detective magazine published an in-depth article on the crime, with names disguised. Quoted material attributed to deceased persons or to persons still living whom I was unable to interview was obtained from these official reports and journalistic accounts.

Other sources I consulted include Michigan State Attorney General records, U.S. Army Military Intelligence records, crime scene photographs, investigative photographs, Freedom of Information Act filings, compilations of local history, personal interviews with year-round and summer residents of Good Hart, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix, and Petoskey, Michigan, and my own observations. Any errors of omission, history, fact, or judgment are mine.

Fifty years have passed since Richard Robison, his wife Shirley, their four children Richard Jr., Gary, Randy, and Susan, walked the Lake Michigan coastline, skipping stones and enjoying time away from the city. Ten years have passed since the first edition of When Evil Came to Good Hart was published. Ive since written two other books about mysterious cold cases in Michigan, and yet it is this case that inspires the most mail from readers, the most questions from law enforcement, the most urgent calls for a solution. Since the summer of 1968, a single question has reverberated throughout the village of Good Hart: Who killed our summer people, and why? For my thoughts on these issues, consult the new afterword in this 10th Anniversary Edition.

Some say that the village of Good Hart, Michigan, is haunted. It is not haunted in the manner that most well-rooted places can become haunted. There is no ghost here that I have seen or felt the opaque presence of, no dark wraith or caped phantom dragging chains in the night or galloping through town on a mist-shrouded mount. No, this diminutive northern coastal town of well-tended cottages, ancient trees, Native American legends, and a clenched fist of locals is haunted by an answer that will not come.

In June 1968, a wealthy Detroit family, the Robisons, was slain here inside their summer cottage by an unknown assailant, who murdered them while they sat at their dining room table playing a game of double solitaire. Today the guilty person is a stranger still, officially at least. Forty years later Good Hart still asks, Who killed our summer people, and why?

The RobisonsRichard, Shirley, and their four childrencame to Good Hart every summer to find their bliss, as the saying goes. And from all accounts, for a time they did find it. The family drove the 275 miles north as soon as school let out for the summer, and planned to spend the next three months at Blisswood, a private development of pine log and birch bark summer homes nestled in the protective dunes alongside Lake Michigan. Like countless other downstate families, the Robisons left behind the schedule of the city, replaced its grime with beach sand and its grit with carefree hunts for Petoskey stones. Every June, when they drove away from their home in a suburb of Detroit and headed north, they also left behind the crime of the cityor so they thought.