Serial Child Murderer Bathed His Victims and Washed Their Clothes Before Dumping Their Bodies in the Snow By Virginia Chamlee

The suburban enclave of Oakland County, Michigan is a quiet and calm area — one just 30 miles outside the larger, more bustling Detroit. But over two winters in 1976 and 1977, it was a neighborhood gripped by fear, after four children turned up murdered.

PEOPLE detailed the incidents in 1977, noting that the children — all from the county — had been killed by a suspect who kept the the children anywhere from three days to nearly three weeks, bathing and feeding them and washing their clothes before either smothering them, strangling them, or, in the case of one, shooting them in the face, investigators said.

The suspect then took one final measure, leaving the bodies in nearly public view — within feet of nearby homes, in a ditch, or on the side of the road. Being that it was in the winter, the bodies were placed in snowbanks.

The victims were Mark Douglas Stebbins, 12; Jill Robinson, 12; Kristine Marie Mihelich, 10; and Timothy John King, 11. Autopsy reports revealed that most of the children had been fed and groomed prior to their deaths (three by strangulation, one by gunshot) and some had been sexually abused by the killer.

Three other children — ages 12 to 17 — were suspected to have been killed by the same suspect, though the links were unproven.

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As Mark’s mother, Ruth, told PEOPLE after her son’s death, she called police when he didn’t come home following a pool tournament.

“I kept hearing noises and thinking it was Mark,” she recalled, “and the next few days I set three places at the table in the hope that he’d come home.”

On the fourth day, police found Mark’s body in a parking lot two and a half miles from his home. Later, at the same spot, they found a commemorative card that had been given to visitors at the funeral home. “I didn’t recognize everyone who came,” Ruth told PEOPLE. “I might even have shaken hands with the killer.”

Karol — mother of Jill Robinson — told PEOPLE the grief was all-consuming.

“It’s the small things that get to you,” she said. “The hardest thing is when someone asks how many children I have and I automatically say three. I can’t believe that now it’s only two.”

Deborah Ascroft, mother to Kristine, had gone on television continuously in the 19 days her daughter was missing — until a postman discovered Kristine’s body buried in a snowbank six miles from home.

Speaking to PEOPLE in the 1970s, Ascroft said she was “living in hell.”

“Kris was really a joy,” she said. “This is why whoever took her kept her so long. He was enjoying her company. At least this is what we have told ourselves, and I prefer not to think any differently.”

Marion — mother to Tim King, the youngest of the four children — feared the worst when her son didn’t return home one day after a trip to the local pharmacy, even penning a letter to the killer of the other children on the front page of the Detroit News.

Six days after his disappearance, her fears were confirmed when Tim’s body was found in a shallow ditch 11 miles from their home.

The incidents gripped the town, with the county releasing “Don’t Go with Strangers” bumper stickers, T-shirt iron-ons, and recorded radio jingles and a $70,000 reward being posted for information leading to an arrest.

Said one area social worker to PEOPLE at the time: “When the killer is caught, our children are going to have to be deprogrammed. Under, normal circumstances, the fear we’ve taught would be unhealthy.”

A task force assembled to devote resources specifically to hunting down the killer, launching what was the largest murder investigation of its kind in U.S. history at the time. It was disbanded by 1978. Nearly 50 years later, the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) — as the suspect would come to be known — has never been identified.

Composite sketches of a suspect were released after some witnesses, under hypnosis, claimed to have seen a man at the site of the Tim King abductions but those leads did not materialize.

The case even inspired a 2019 true crime documentary mini-series on Hulu, Children of the Snow, which featured families of the victims and author J. Reuben Appelman as they sought to uncover the truth behind the 40-year-old cold case.

No official suspects have ever been named in the case.