Michigan’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder!
(Until Now)
“GoodHart”
Who Killed the Robisonsand Why?
A True Story
A quiet summer evening in Good Hart, a northern Michigan town nestled in the hardwood forest along Lake Michigan. This is where it happened. On June 25th, 1968, in less than three minutes, the sleepy village was thrust into the national spotlight and changed forever. The serenity of summer was suddenly interrupted by a loud, crashing rage filled with gunshots, panic, screaming, fear, and death.
In their expensive cottage 42year old advertising executive, Richard Robison, his wife, and all four children were literally assassinated.Shot through an outside window, RichardSr. ishit twice in the chest. Son Randy is struck in the back. The killer, now inside the cabin shoots again. This time hitting Shirley Robison, 12year old Randy, and as she was running away, 8 year old Suzan. Gary and Richard Jr. scramble for a bedroom; possibly to retrieve a hidden rifle. But they too are gunned down.
The killer clubs the little girl with a hammer and then methodically shoots each of the others once in the head with a 25 caliber handgun. The assassin then locks the doors, covers the bullet holes in the window with cardboard, draws the curtains, leaves the heater running, and vanishes. The bodies are not discovered for 27 days. They are unrecognizable. Police enter the cottage wearing gas masks; the heat still on in the cottage.
Shirley Robison’s body, nude from the waist down, was covered by a blanket.
Mr. Robison was piled over a heating vent with 8year old Suzan and 12 year old Randy. The bodies of Richard Robison Jr., 19 a sophomore at Eastern Michigan University and Gary Robison 17, a senior at Southfield-Lathrop High School were in the bedroom.
The murder guns were never found. Fingerprints on the hammer were destroyed when a sheriff’s deputy held it high in the air in his hand for photographers to see.
Richard Robison was the owner of a high profile advertising and publishing firm. Although he appeared to have no enemies, investigators learned his agency had been losing money and to replace it. Somehow they swindled something close to $50,000 from its largest client, Delta Faucet. Police discovered that a magazine published by Robison’s firm was running unpaid full page ads to make it look more successful.
Robison’s business partner, Joe Scolaro engaged in heated phone conversations with Robison on the morning of the murders. There was money missing from the agency account. At about 10:30 that morning, after the phone call, Scolaro left the office for the day. Although police considered him to be a prime suspect he was never charged.
Five years later on March 8, 1973 a note on the door of suite 112 at the Harvard Plaza office building in Southfield read: “Mother-don’t come in”. Inside, seated in a high back chair, was Joe Scolaro. . dead of a self inflicted gun shot. Or…was he too murdered to keep him silent A typewritten note read: Mother, where do I start? I’m a liar-cheat-phony, but I am not a killer. I did not kill the Robisons.
An engraving on the back of a St Christopher medal worn byRichard Robison read: “Richard - -To my chosen son and heir- - God Bless you.”
It was signed, Roebert.
From letters police learned of an organization called Superior Table that refers to the mysterious Roebert as chairman presiding over 5 other investors- -Mr. Thomas, Mr. Richard, Mr. Joseph.,Mr., Peters, and Mr., Martin. Police could never confirm the existence of Roebert or the others mentioned in the letters or learn anything about the mysterious organization.
19 year old Richard Robison Jr. was a student at Eastern Michigan University where he became acquainted with John Norman Collins, a student who would soon become known as a cold blooded killer. In 1969 John Norman Collins was convicted of the sex murder of Karen Sue Bienamen and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. A police report filed on August 8, 1969 places John Norman Collins near the Robison’s cottage July 11, 1968.
Monnie Bliss was the care taker of the Robison cottage in Good Hart. Two days before the Robisons were murdered, Bliss’ son, Norman was killed in a strange motorcycle incident on a nearby back road. Mr. Robison, saying he could not make it to the funeral, left 20 dollars for flowers with Mrs. Bliss. 29 days later Monnie Bliss told police he discovered the bodies of the robisons after noticing a foul odor coming from the cottage. Bliss became a suspect.
Organized Crime was suspected. Because of business and money problems in his advertising agency, sources reported to police that Robison had borrowed from organized crime. They said that he was supposed to have been paying them $12,000 a month, but wasn’t.
The partner, the caretaker of the cottage, a shadowy figure head of a strange organization, a convicted murderer, organized crime, a neighbor of the Robison’s in Lathrop Village, a strange prison confession, and others. All were suspects and yet, until now no firm conclusions.
Was Richard Robison involved in somethingso sinister, that in less than 3 minutesin a blizzard of gunshots, rage, screaming, beating, horror and blood, someone slaughtered him his wife and four innocent children leaving them to go undiscovered in the cabin for 27 days, furnace running full blast in the heat of summer?
The Robison family is buried together in Acacia Cemetery
Birmingham, Michigan.
Less than 75 yards away another headstone reads:
. . . . ROEBERT . . . .
Good Hart
The Movie
Who Killed the Robisons and Why?
A True Story
- MORE -
John Norman Collins Then & Now
THE ROBISONS
(Top) Gary & Richard Jr (Bottom) Shirley, Susan, Richard
- The Cottage in GoodHart, Michigan
6 x 9. 200 pgs. 20 B&W photographs. (2008)
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Subjects
History--American History / Michigan and the Great Lakes--History
/ When Evil Came to Good Hart
Mardi Link
A new look into an old story—the cold-case file of the murders of a wealthy Detroit-area family in their northern Michigan cabin in 1968
About the Book
"The murder mystery that has confounded and fascinated people for over forty years has been given a whole new life. When Evil Came to Good Hart is a well-researched and well-written piece of nonfiction that holds the reader in its spell, just as it has the many writers, reporters, and law officers who have puzzled over it. My highest praise for Mardi Link's book is to say that it reads like a good novel, a real page-turner."—Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and The Tarnished Eye
In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link details all the evidence to date. She crafts her book around police and court documents and historical and present-day statements and interviews, in addition to exploring the impact of the case on the community of Good Hart and the stigma that surrounds the popular summer getaway. Adding to both the sense of tragic history and the suspense, Link laces her tale with fascinating bits of local and Indian lore, while dozens of colorful characters enter and leave the story, spicing the narrative.
During the years of investigation of the murders, officials considered hundreds of tips and leads as well as dozens of sources, among them former secretaries who worked for murder victim Dick Robison; Robison's business associates; John Norman Collins, perpetrator of the "Co-Ed Murders" that took place in Washtenaw County between 1967 and 1969; and an inmate in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, who said he knew who killed the Robison family.
Despite the exhaustive investigative efforts of numerous individuals, decades later the case lies tantalizingly out of reach. It is still an unsolved cold case, yielding, in Link's words, forty years worth of "dead-end leads, anonymous tips, a few hard facts, and countless cockamamie theories."
Mardi Link is a journalist and the 2007 Betty Crumrine Scholar from the Antioch Writers' Workshop. She is the cofounder and former editor of ForeWord magazine and the former editor of Small Press magazine. She lives in
Traverse City. / On the Web
Mardi Link's website
Mardi Link's blog
/ Watch: Mardi Link discuss the Emmet County Cold Case on 9&10 News
/ Listen: UMP Author Podcast Series: Mardi Link| mp3 | July 2008
Read: Articleon CLEWS| 2/3/2009
Read:Article onPublishers Weekly| 2/2/2009
Read: Q&A with Mardi Link (PDF)
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Book Information
Scribner
Hardcover: 288 pages
ISBN: 0743257367
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/ The Tarnished Eye
Loosely based on a true crime that happened in northern Michigan in 1968, when a family—mother, father and four children—was murdered in their summer home, after which the killer closed all the drapes, locked the doors and walked away. The crime has never been solved and the story haunts the small town where it happened to this day. I read every newspaper article I could get my hands on at the time of the murders and was fascinated by several aspects: why, for instance, did the police focus on the father as the primary victim and look only at his life for solutions? How did one person manage to murder six people at once and leave no clue to his/her identity? Was there a second killer? And, most importantly, why is it that, when people are murdered, it becomes the single most important thing about them? Time after time we see it: all the hopes, dreams, and accomplishments pale in the face of this one obliterating fact. I wanted to make this family real to my readers before they realized that they were gone, and before they were able to distance themselves from them, as we consistently do in real life. “This couldn’t happen to me; I don’t take those kinds of chances. I don’t live their kind of life. I don’t make friends with dangerous people.” The truth is, given the right circumstances, these kinds of things do happen; none of us are immune to it. My favorite Iris Murdoch quote: “There is no order in the world. There is only chance, and the terror of chance.”
Critical Acclaim
“The characters are so real that their insistence on hope, in the face of inexplicable evil, suggests how all of us might best cope in these perilous times.” Dean Koontz
“Judith Guest brings new depth and emotion to the police procedural with this finely woven tale of family, death, duty and redemption.” Pete Hautman, National Book Award Winner for Godless
“A rich, powerful novel of how crime bleeds from the dead to the living, haunting even the most gentle of moments.” R. D. Zimmerman
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/ Biography
I was born in 1936 in Detroit, Michigan and grew up there, attending Mumford High School in my freshman year and graduating from Royal Oak Dondero High school in 1954. I studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan and graduated with a BA in Education in 1958, whereupon I promptly a) got married to my college sweetheart, b) got a job teaching first grade in Garden City, Michigan, and c) got pregnant and had a baby boy—all inside fourteen months. I have been writing all of my life—since I was about ten years old, actually—in the closet, to the emotional moment, sticking reams of paper in drawers, never finishing anything. I taught more school, had two more sons and then in 1970 I wrote a short story and sent it to a national contest, where I won 60th prize out of 100. It was a book by Richard Perry entitled One Way to Write Your Novel. I read it from cover to cover and decided I already knew all this stuff, so why didn’t I just write a novel myself? It took me three years, during which time I decided to quit teaching and concentrate on finishing something. In retrospect, it was the most important decision I’ve made to date about my writing. After I finished Ordinary People, I sent it to a publisher, who turned it down flat. The second sent a rejection letter that read in part: “While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it.” (I know this letter by heart—didn’t even have to look it up.) The third publisher, Viking Press, hung onto it for 8 months before they decided to publish it. They published my second novel (Second Heaven), turned down my third (Killing Time in St. Cloud), so I went to Delacorte. Delacorte turned down my fourth (Errands), so I went to Ballantine (which had turned down my first one). Ballantine turned down my fifth (The Tarnished Eye) so I went to Scribner. This is the book business in a nutshell. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
I am now working on a sequel to The Tarnished Eye. It’s called White in the Moon. When I finish that one, I have another on the back burner—a sequel to Second Heaven, called Don’t Be Too Sure. I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I’m enjoying it. I have also written several screenplays, one of which was based on three short stories by Carol Bly and was made into a movie called Rachel River. The others are languishing in the Hollywood Doldrums. That’s my writing life so far.
My private life is a bit more varied and exciting. I have a husband and three sons and seven grandchildren who all live here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We see them often, summer together, and do an assortment of family things. They are my real life—my obsession and my best material.
I think I should also say that I am the great-niece of Edgar A. Guest, who was at one time the Poet Laureate of Michigan and who wrote a poem a day for the Detroit Free Press for forty years. Which is where I get my endurance from. I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Dead End is based on a true-life crime committed in 1968. The setting is a quiet vacation area in northern Michigan, where six members of a prominent family from the city of Detroit were slain in their vacation cottage. It is also a story of two Michigan State Police detectives who spend countless days, months and years trying to find and arrest the person or persons responsible. After years of intensive research, a review of official Michigan State Police reports and correspondence with individuals familiar with the case, the author has come to some startling conclusions as to who may have committed the crime and why. Dead End is a story that no one could imagine or conceive that it could actually happen, but it did. It will make you turn each page with anticipation and anxiety in order to find out the conclusion of this despicable crime.
About the Author
James J. Pecora was born in Lansing, Michigan, USA and continues to reside there along with his wife of 40 years. He graduated from Lansing Community College with a degree in Business Management and attended Michigan State University. After many years in private business, he eventually went to work for the City of Lansing, Michigan as a Personnel Assistant, Cemetery Manager and a Supervisor in the Parks and Recreation Department that lasted for 21 years. After his retirement and with the encouragement and support of his wife and married children, he continued to work on and finish his first novel, Dead End. Mr. Pecora is currently editing and preparing to publish his diary and journal about his travels in Italy.