In June of 1968, the wealthy Robison family was heading for their beautiful cabin in the Blisswood Resort on the shores of Lake Michigan to begin their long summer vacation. It is not known on what exact date the family arrived at their cottage near Good Hart; all that is known for certain is that by late June, all six of them would be dead.
In mid-July, Blisswood Resort caretaker Chauncey Bliss paid a visit to the Robisons’ cabin, investigating complaints of a foul smell emanating from the property. Believing that a dead animal was probably to blame, Bliss was appalled to find that the pretty little cabin on the lake was actually the scene of a savage mass murder.
Forty-two-year-old ad executive and magazine publisher Richard Robison had been shot five times with a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle, the bullets fired through a window of the cabin. He had also been viciously beaten in the head with a hammer. Richard’s forty-year-old wife Shirley had been shot several times with a .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol. The couple’s four children—nineteen-year-old Richie, sixteen-year-old Gary, twelve-year-old Randall, and seven-year-old Susan—had all been shot in the head with the same pistol that had killed their mother. Young Susan had also been bludgeoned with the hammer.
The bodies were in a state of severe decomposition, leading police to theorize that the Robisons had been murdered on or around June 25th. Though Shirley Robison’s body had been posed to suggest a sexual motive, the remains were so degraded that a forensic examination could not determine whether she had indeed been raped, or whether the crime scene had been deliberately staged to appear as though it was a random, sexual attack.
Investigators were able to collect several shell casings and a bloody shoeprint from the scene, and immediately determined that the killer had first shot in through the windows at Richard before entering the cottage through an unlocked door to slaughter the rest of the family.
The inquiry was less than two weeks old when a particularly strong suspect caught investigators’ attention. Thirty-year-old Joseph Scolaro III worked for Richard Robison at Impresario magazine, and had been left in charge of the business while the Robisons were on vacation. During this time, it appeared that Scolaro had embezzled more than $60,000, and phone records from the morning of the murder showed that Robison and Scolaro had exchanged several calls, which might have suggested that Robison knew about the crime and had called Scolaro to accuse him.
Further implicating Scolaro was the fact that he was known to own two firearms of the same caliber as those used to kill the Robisons, and ballistics tests of the shell casings found at the crime scene demonstrated that the bullets had likely been fired from these two particular weapons. Scolaro claimed that he no longer owned either firearm, but a neighbor told police that he had seen one of the guns in Scolaro’s possession shortly before the murders.
Additionally, Scolaro owned a pair of new shoes whose soles matched the bloody print found at the Good Hart cabin. However, it appeared that these shoes had never been worn.
Scolaro told investigators that he had been at a plumbing convention in Detroit on the day of the murders, but could produce no witnesses that could verify his presence there. The suspect also failed two polygraph tests, and the results of a third test were inconclusive.
Despite the compelling circumstantial evidence implicating Joseph Scolaro, it was ultimately decided that there was insufficient cause to charge him with the crime. The guns had never been found and could no longer be definitively connected to the suspect, and though the shoes in his possession were a match to the prints left at the scene, there was no way to prove that it had been Scolaro who had actually worn them. There was also no other forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, that tied him to the location.
A few other suspects were considered, including the owner of the resort and the man who had discovered the bodies, Chauncey Bliss. Though Bliss was intimately familiar with the area and the cabins’ layouts, having built the resort himself, there was no discernable motive for Bliss to have murdered the Robisons, much less in such a brutal fashion.
Another possible culprit was alleged serial killer John Norman Collins. Though Collins was ultimately only convicted of one murder in 1970, police believed he was responsible for several abductions, rapes, and murders of teenaged girls in the southeastern portion of Michigan between 1967 and 1969. Collins evidently did attend the same college as victim Richie Robison, but there is no evidence to suggest that the two young men knew each other, and at any rate the slaying of the Robison family did not particularly fit Collins’ usual modus operandi.
Joseph Scolaro remained the prime suspect, however, and by the time 1973 rolled around, the new Oakland County chief prosecutor decided to pursue a conviction. But shortly after this decision was made public, Scolaro committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol, perhaps the same weapon he had used to kill Shirley Robison and her children. In a note he left behind, he admitted to being a “liar,” a “cheat,” and a “phony,” but insisted he was not a murderer and had not killed the Robisons.
The massacre of the Robison family still stands as open and officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 