“SUMMERSET” – The Robison Family Murder Tragedy of Good Hart (June 1968)

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.

 

An adopted child of Michigan’s north country, Carolyn Sutherland talks freely about Good Hart in the dead of winter. How the interminable snow is always whiter than the stuff downstate. How there’s no salt on the roads and no dampness in the air. How the only really bad time is mud season, those ugly months of November and April when Old Man Winter can’t decide whether he’s coming or going.
“That’s when I head for Florida,” says the saucy sexagenarian, who grew up in Huntington Woods. “I have my drinks poolside.”
What sets the proprietor of the village’s general-goods store apart from other locals is that she’s equally glib about the dead of summer in Good Hart — the dead of the summer of 1968, to be precise. “People come into the store and they all want to know about the murders. I’m a walking encyclopedia, so I tell ’em.”
It was a crime that gripped the state and focused an unwelcome microscope on this stretch of wooded bluffs hugging the Lake Michigan shore.
On July 22, 1968, a caretaker investigating complaints of an overpowering stench pried open the door of an isolated cottage just two miles up the road from the Good Hart General Store. He walked into a wall of flies. Inside were the badly decomposed bodies of six members of a vacationing Lathrup Village family: advertising executive Richard Robison, his wife, Shirley, and their four children. Shirley had evidently been raped; the youngest child, 7-year-old Susie, had been bludgeoned with a hammer. All had been shot. They had been dead a month.
“The sheer mad violence of those killings burned into my mind,” recalls Tom DeLisle, then a young reporter for the Detroit Free Press. “It’s disturbing to this day.”
READ MORE: http://www.hourdetroit.com/Hour-Detroit/June-2008/A-Web-of-Intrigue/

MORE AT LINKS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIWzjCDyH6I

                             http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtw7sYfx2AU

                            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5-rRUE5Kyg

                            http://www.goodhartstore.com/Good_Hart_General_Store,_Events_and_News_files/Robinson%20Murders%20Free%20Press%201993.pdf


http://mardilink.typepad.com/files/couvaults-letter-of-evidence.pdf

http://rawiles.weebly.com/white-paper-1.html

http://www.record-eagle.com/news/lifestyles/article_b3d5fdc6-8b49-57c0-aacd-35e7c6345e7a.html?mode=jqm