"The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation"

Author Marney Keenan discusses her new book "The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation." During 1976 and 1977, four children were abducted in affluent Detroit suburbs, each held captive for days before their still-warm bodies were tossed in the snow near public roadsides.

The Oakland County Child Killer spawned panic across southeast Michigan, triggering the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history. Yet, after less than two years, the task force formed to find the killer shut down without naming one suspect. The case gathered dust for more than 30 years until a chance discovery by one victim’s family pointed to the son of a wealthy auto executive: a four-time convicted pedophile who was freed weeks before the fourth child disappeared.

Veteran journalist Marney Rich Keenan takes the reader inside the investigation revealing how law enforcement concealed evidence connecting the suspect to the children’s murders, rather than risk letting a terrorized community know they had committed a grave error: they had the suspect in custody and they let him go.

The narrative follows the trajectory of the case through two sets of eyes: a tenacious detective who uncovers evidence that hubris and political ambition sought to thwart and, in intervening chapters, the family of an eleven-year-old victim, as their grief is compounded by the discovery of a cover-up that was designed to keep them in the dark forever.

Marney Rich Keenan is an award-winning reporter and columnist, who retired in 2017 after 26 years with The Detroit News. She lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

This is a recording from a Zoom program that took place on Tuesday, January 18, 2022 at 6:30 p.m.

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