A Web of Intrigue

Forty years ago this month, six vacationing members of the Robison family were murdered at their secluded cottage in the northern Michigan village of Good Hart. Although theories and suspects continue to be discussed, no one was ever charged in the crime. To add to the mystery, the father's business dealings turned out to be as dark and inscrutable as the woods surrounding the town

The Robison family.

Courtesy of Richard Bak

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For the next 27 days, the bodies lay in the heated cabin. Dust settled on the family’s two parked cars. A sickening smell wafted over Blisswood, ruining one cottager’s annual bridge party. Nonetheless, everybody assumed the Robisons were on the out-of-town trip they had mentioned. Finally, caretaker Monnie Bliss and a helper went to remove what they figured was a dead raccoon rotting in the crawl space. A few minutes later, the phone rang at the Emmet County Sheriff’s Department in Petoskey. “There’s a body inside one of our cottages,” Bliss said.

Deputies encountered a grim tableau. Swaths of congealed blood and armies of dead flies covered the plank floors. The victims were dressed as if going on a trip; a partially packed suitcase was on a bed. Shirley’s skirt was hiked up and her undergarments pulled down to the ankles. The medical examiner could not determine if she had been raped, but seven stab-like perforations were found in her sanitary napkin. The bodies were in such wretched condition that the hospital in Petoskey refused to accept them. Instead, autopsies were performed inside a chicken coop at the local fairgrounds.

Investigators wearing gas masks went over the crime scene. Fifteen shell casings, 11 from a .22-caliber rifle and four from a .25-caliber handgun, were found. An expensive ring and some cash were missing, but the killer left most valuables behind. There was one bloody boot print. The initial theory was that there was a maniacal gunman loose.

Seven-year-old Mardi Link was in the back seat of the family Ford, on her way to a relative’s cottage, when WJR interrupted a ballgame to break news of the grisly discovery. Link, who now lives in Traverse City, is the author of the forthcoming book, When Evil Came to Good Hart, the first nonfiction account of the murders. “I guess I was struck by the fact that Susie and I were the same age,” Link says. “I was always intrigued by the case. Who would kill an entire family? And why?”

Police asked those same questions. Within a few weeks, all persons of interest around Good Hart, from transients and summer people to “mentals,” had been cleared. “We now believe the killer was familiar with the cabin, that he knew the family, and they knew him,” the county sheriff said. The focus of the investigation shifted 275 miles south to Detroit.

Joseph Scolaro III had spent three years in the Army and a year at Harvard before joining Robison’s firm in 1965. He was a stocky 6-footer with a high I.Q. and an interest in guns, Link says, a competitive trap shooter used to hitting fast-moving targets. The bookish-looking Scolaro “had no history of violence,” Link says. “But detectives determined he had embezzled about $60,000 over a couple of years from the company and Robison had just found out about it. There was the motive.”

Lloyd Stearns and John Flis were the veteran state police detectives assigned to the case. They grilled Scolaro about his activities on June 25, and much of what he said didn’t match up. He said he had gone to a plumbing convention at Cobo Hall, then had a drink at the Salamander Bar in the Hotel Pontchartrain before doing a little shopping and then driving home in a rainstorm. Not a single person could be found to corroborate Scolaro’s whereabouts in the 10 to 11 hours after he left the agency that morning.

Stearns and Flis learned Scolaro had owned two model AR-7 .22-caliber rifles, the type of weapon determined to have been used in the murders. One was recovered from a friend in Chicago, but the other, supposedly given to his brother-in-law, was never found. The detectives visited a private range where Scolaro was known to have fired the missing AR-7, and Flis dug some old cartridge casings out of the mud. A crime lab identified them as coming from the same gun used to kill the Robisons. Moreover, in early 1968, Scolaro had bought two matching .25-caliber Beretta pistols. He said he kept one and gave the other to Robison, who brought it to the cottage. Based on the rare kind of ammo the pistols used, police concluded Robison’s Beretta — also missing — was the second murder weapon.

In all, Scolaro would take — and flunk — three polygraphs. “We interviewed him a dozen times,” says Stearns, now retired and living on a farm near Greenville. “Not once did we ever walk away thinking, ‘This guy is innocent.’ ”

Still, doubts remain. The drive between Detroit and Good Hart takes five to six hours. Witnesses heard shots about 9 p.m. the day of the murders, yet Scolaro’s wife said he was home in Birmingham at about 11 that evening. One also has to believe that Scolaro could change from a composed white-collar criminal into someone capable of Helter Skelter-style monstrosities, a leap not everyone is comfortable making. “You come across guys like Scolaro all the time,” Stearns responds. “People say, ‘We never suspected him.’ But out of fear of exposure, they’re capable of doing these things.”

Even if Scolaro was determined to kill the Robisons, skeptics say it would have been nearly impossible to do it within an 11-hour time frame. And arranging a contract killing on such short notice was improbable.

Dick Robison’s own secrets began to emerge after his murder. A little spadework revealed that he’d had several affairs. He also had the habit of inviting a secretary into his office after work, then asking her to lift her skirt while he admired her legs. No sex was involved, but sometimes the ogling and fondling lasted as long as an hour.

Worse, the solid citizen dubbed by newspapers as “the man without a vice” had swindled clients out of as much as $50,000 over a three-year period, billing them for ads he either didn’t run or didn’t pay for. He’d also published full-page airline ads without permission in his own magazine, making it appear more successful than it was. The choice of ads was telling, as Robison saw Impresario as being a marketing tool for his quixotic scheme to create an international network of giant computerized warehouses; each would be based at an airport and feature a fly-in cultural center.

Robison aimed to raise $100 million from investors known as the “Superior Table.” He described the Table as a “world-wide organization” dedicated to “complete peace and unity among all countries on Earth.” Its chairman was a mysterious figure named “Roebert,” who presided over other investors with names like Mr. Thomas and Mr. Peters. The cryptic references to Roebert included a St. Christopher medal Robison wore that was engraved with the words: “Richard — To my chosen son and heir — God bless you — Roebert.”

Was Roebert the “Mr. Roberts” expected on the night of the murders? If so, no such person ever arrived at the Pellston airport nor inquired about the family afterward. Detectives learned Robison had spent three days at the Metro Airport Hotel just before the family left for Good Hart — not the first time he had secretly checked into an airport hotel while telling his family he was away on a business trip. Scolaro, who claimed to have almost no idea of what the secretive Robison was up to, said the hotel was probably being used as a headquarters for the new venture. But Robison evidently never left his room, saw any visitors, or placed any unusual phone calls. What, if anything, did these clandestine activities have to do with the murders? Were Roebert and other members of the Superior Table real or part of some elaborate fantasy? To this day, nobody knows.

As the investigation moved along, the search for another mass murderer seized the public’s imagination. Between August 1967 and July 1969, the mutilated bodies of seven young women were found dumped around Ann Arbor. Some anxious citizens began to think the rape-killings had to be related somehow to the equally horrific murders in Good Hart. A clean-cut college student named John Norman Collins — who coincidentally had attended Eastern Michigan University with the oldest Robison boy in 1967 and may even have roomed with him during a week of orientation — finally was arrested for the last of the murders. Collins was convicted in 1970, but not before various agencies had shared information and decided he was not a suspect in the Robison case.

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