Blood, Semen, Saliva, Prints
The lies and money behind a 1970s serial murder case
It’s autumn of 2010 and I’m standing in the exact spot where 10-year-old Kristine Mihelich’s ice-burned body had been found in the dead of winter, 1977, her newly plum-colored face a muted beacon in the freshly fallen snow off the side of a wooded cul-de-sac 30 minutes from the more slushy detritus of Detroit. It was 34 years ago that Kristine had been snatched, exploited like a new toy, then re-gifted to the world as a mere conjecture of what she’d been when new.
A mailman had discovered Kristine on his regular route here in Franklin Village, only ten minutes from my boyhood home. He’d banked his mail truck and walked toward swaths of color off the side of the road. There was no blood at the drop scene but he’d been drawn by Kristine’s coat, slightly frozen to the mannequin of her torso.
The mailman, a homely guy in his early thirties, stood over Kristine’s body, then made hurried footprints back to his vehicle.
At the time, Franklin Village, even beyond this street, was still very wooded, pocked here and there with chimneys that built downward into great rooms that found fireplaces with dogs snoring next to them, balls rolling across the hardwood flooring, the smell of bread being baked and, more or less, families still intact…
