The Family Massacre That America Solved… But Never Charged

On a warm July afternoon in 1968, in one of the most beautiful corners of Michigan, a group of vacationers sat down to their annual game of bridge. They never finished it. Because drifting through the pines carried on the lake breeze, came a smell, heavy, wrong, the kind of smell that doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in a postcard resort on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The complaint went to the caretaker. The smell, the guest said, seemed to be coming from the cottage down the private drive, the pretty log and stone one at the end of the road, the one belonging to the Robinson family. The caretaker knew the place well. He’d even stopped by earlier that month and noticed a few odd little holes in the window glass.

He’d shrugged them off as the Robinson boys fooling around with plet guns. There was a note pinned to the door in neat handwriting, back by 710. Nothing to worry about. The family had said they were traveling. Now he forced his way inside and staggered back out, unable to speak.

 Inside that locked cottage was an entire family of six, a father, a mother, four children, the youngest just 7 years old. They had been there sealed in with the summer heat for 27 days. 27 days in which their two cars sat parked outside. 27 days in which a note on the door quietly turned every visitor away. 27 days in which a caretaker looked directly at bullet holes and saw nothing wrong.

 Within weeks, investigators believe they knew exactly who had done this. A man the father trusted. A man with 60,000 stolen dollars worth of reasons. They matched his guns. They matched his lies. They wrote it all up and asked for charges. And then nothing happened. No arrest, no trial. Not in 1968, not ever. This is the story of the Robinson family and of the murder case that Michigan solved but never got to finish.

 Richard Carl Robinson was by every outward measure a man living the American dream. 42 years old, an advertising executive from Lath Village, a comfortable suburb of Detroit. He ran his own agency, RC Robinson and Associates, and he had ambitions far beyond ad copy. He published his own glossy arts magazine called Imprasario. He talked about big plans, big clients, big deals on the horizon.

 Colleagues knew him as driven, religious, a little intense, a man determined to be somebody. At home, he was a husband and father. His wife Shirley, 40, kept the family’s world running. Together, they had four children. Richard Jr., everyone called him Richie, 19 years old and a student at Eastern Michigan University.

Gary, 16, Randy, 12, and the baby of the family, seven-year-old Susan, Susie. And like thousands of successful Detroit families, the Robinsons had a place up north. Theirs was called Somerset, a log and stone cottage the family had owned since the 1950s. Tucked into the woods at the Blisswood Resort near the tiny village of Goodart at the end of a long private drive, close to a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

 The family had spent every summer there for over a decade. It was secluded, peaceful, and safe. The kind of place where the biggest danger was a sunburn. The cabins at Blisswood had mostly been built by one local family. Chanty Bliss and his son Monty, who stayed on as the resort’s caretaker. Everybody knew the Blisses.

Everybody knew everybody. On Sunday, June 16th, 1968, the Robinsons loaded up two cars, their Ford station wagon and a rented Chrysler, and drove the 275 mi north for their annual summer escape. They planned to stay for weeks. Richard would run his business remotely by phone and by mail while the kids swam and skip stones on the lake.

 The first days were exactly what summer at Somerset had always been. The family was seen around the area, shopping in Paskki and Harbor Springs, attending church, walking the shoreline. And on June 24th, Richard Robinson did something that everyone who knew him would have expected, something kind. The caretaker’s family was grieving.

 Monty Bliss’s son, Norman, a friend of the Robinson boys, had just been killed in a motorcycle accident. Richard drove over to pay his respects to the elder blisses and left $20 for funeral flowers. While he was there, he mentioned the family’s plans. They were heading out the very next day, he said, a trip down to Kentucky, then Florida.

He was thinking about looking at some real estate. Remember that conversation? It’s the reason this case has a 27 in it. Because the next day, June 25th, nobody in the Robinson family went to Kentucky. The morning of June teth began with a phone call. Richard Robinson spoke by telephone with his office back in the Detroit area, specifically with the 30-year-old employee he had left in charge while he was away.

 His trusted right-hand man, a smooth, well-dressed, fast-talking young executive named Joseph Scolaro III. What exactly was said in that call? No one alive can say for certain, but investigators would later come to believe it may have been the trigger for everything that followed, because Richard Robinson, reviewing his company’s finances from his cottage up north, had been closing in on a very ugly discovery about the man minding his store.

 That evening, the family was together at Somerset. Dinner had been made. The children were inside. It was an ordinary summer night at the lake. At around 9:00, people in the area later recalled hearing sharp cracks in the distance, sounds they took for firecrackers or a car backfiring or someone plinking at cans in the woods.

In a rural resort area in June, nobody gave it a second thought. It wasn’t fireworks. Based on the physical evidence, investigators reconstructed what happened. The attack began from outside. Shots fired through the cottage’s window glass from the treeine with a small caliber rifle. Richard Robinson, investigators concluded, was the primary target.

 But the killer didn’t stop there. He entered the cottage and using that rifle and a second weapon, a small 25 caliber pistol. He made sure that no one inside Somerset was left to say what they had seen. Six people. The youngest, little Susan, was also struck with a claw hammer taken up at the scene. and the examiner’s findings suggested Shirley may have been subjected to a further assault, though the condition of the scene would leave even that question clouded.

 I’m not going to describe any more than that, and I don’t need to. What matters is this. The evidence painted a picture of a crime with a clear purpose at its center. The elimination of Richard Robinson and five other lives taken simply because they were his family and they were there. And then the killer did something almost surgical in its coldness.

 The bodies were moved together, most of them into the hallway at the center of the cottage. The drapes were drawn. The cottage was closed up tight, and on the front door, pinned neatly where any visitor would see it, was a note. We’ll be back. 710 Robinson. 7:10. Was that 7:10 this evening? Was it July 10th? The ambiguity was the genius of it.

 Any neighbor, any delivery man, any friend who came up that private drive would read that note, nod, and walk away. And thanks to Richard’s own conversation with the Blisses the night before, we’re leaving for Kentucky and Florida tomorrow, the entire community already believed the family was gone. Whether the killer knew about those travel plans or simply got impossibly lucky is one of this case’s enduring questions.

 I her way, the effect was the same. The Robinson family had been erased, and the world had been politely asked not to notice. What happened next is, in its own quiet way, as disturbing as the crime itself. Nothing happened. For almost a month, the cottage at the end of the drive sat silent, drapes drawn in the heat of high summer.

 The family’s two cars, the station wagon and the rented Chrysler, sat parked right there beside it, in plain view the entire time. The Robinsons had told the Blisses they were driving south. Apparently, no one paused on the obvious question. Driving south in what? The note on the door did its job. The caretaker, Monty Bliss, came by the property in early July on routine rounds. He saw the note.

He even saw the small holes punched through the window glass, and his mind did what human minds do. It reached for the harmless explanation. Pellet guns, he figured. The Robinson boys messing around. He walked away. Richie Robinson missed appointments back downstate. Business associates couldn’t reach Richard. Mail went unanswered.

 Each loose thread on its own seemed explainable. The family was traveling after all. Everyone knew that. And inside the sealed cottage, June became July. The temperature climbed. A gas heater left running in the middle of summer made the interior hotter still, 27 days. Then on Monday, July 22nd, the smell finally reached the neighbors.

 A cottager hosting her annual bridge party found the afternoon ruined by an overpowering odor rolling through the trees. Coming, it seemed, from the direction of the Robinson place. She complained to Monty Bliss, and this time Bliss couldn’t wave it away. He went down the drive. He forced his way in. Later accounts describe what met him at the threshold as a wall of flies.

 He got far enough to understand and no further. At 3:00 that afternoon, Bliss telephoned the EMTT County Sheriff’s Department. Under Sheriff Clifford Fosmore and Deputy Clarence Lucky Cole were the first to respond. What they walked into was beyond anything a small resort county was equipped for. Six people nearly a month gone in a closed cottage in summer heat.

 Identification came from a family photograph found in a wallet. This was the Richard Robinson family of Lath Village. The local hospital refused to take the remains, so the examinations were carried out in a temporary setup at the EMTT County Fairgrounds. The findings along with the last confirmed sightings and those sounds heard on the evening of June 25th fix the date of death.

 The family had been killed the very night before they were due to leave for Kentucky. Four days later, on July 26th, 1968, six members of one family were laid to rest together at Acacia Park Cemetery outside Detroit. Michigan had never seen anything like it, and the questions were only beginning. The Michigan State Police and the EMTT County Sheriff’s Office threw everything they had at the scene.

 But 27 days of summer heat had been the killer’s greatest ally. The scene had degraded catastrophically. Early responders and onlookers had disturbed things further. The claw hammer itself was picked up by a deputy in a way that compromised any fingerprints. Still, the cottage gave up some evidence. More than a dozen spent shell casings from two different weapons, a 22 caliber rifle and a 25 caliber pistol, a single bloody bootprint on the floor, and a scene layout that told investigators this was no burglary, no wandering madman.

 This was targeted. So, who targets an advertising executive on vacation? The answer started to take shape when detectives went south into Richard Robinson’s business life and what they found didn’t match the image at all. Because behind the confident executive, the glossy magazine, and the talk of huge deals, things were murky.

 The companies had money trouble. The finances of Imprasaria were tangled. Richard had told colleagues and family about lucrative arrangements supposedly in the works, including dealings connected to a wealthy business figure that investigators, try as they might, could never actually locate. A man who, as far as anyone could ever prove, may not have existed at all.

 But the discovery that mattered, the one that would define this case for the next 50 years, was waiting inside the company’s books. While Richard was up north, he had left the business in the hands of his 30-year-old protetéé, Joseph Scolaro III. And Joseph Scolaro had been stealing from him systematically. The eventual accounting put the embezzlement at roughly $60,000, well over half a million in today’s money.

 And here was the detail that turned suspicion into theory. There was evidence Richard had found out. In his final weeks from his cottage on the lake, he had been reviewing the company’s finances and closing in on the irregularities. On the very morning of June 25th, Richard and Scolaro had spoken by phone. That night, everyone who could ever testify to what Richard knew was dead.

Joseph Raymond Scolaro III was on the surface everything Richard Robinson wanted in a lieutenant. Polished, energetic, persuasive. Underneath, investigators found a man juggling debts, schemes, and lies with increasing desperation. And within two weeks of the discovery at Somerset, he had become their prime suspect. Here’s why.

 Piece by piece. Start with the day of the murders. For a stretch of roughly 12 hours on June 25th, the afternoon and evening the family died, Scolaro’s whereabouts could not be verified. The alibis he offered didn’t hold together. The accounts he gave shifted and one by one failed to check out. Detectives noted something else, too.

 It was possible to drive from the Detroit area to Good Hart and back within that unaccounted window. Tight. His defenders would argue too tight. And that debate continues to this day. But possible. Then the weapons. The family had been killed with a 22 caliber AR7 rifle, a lightweight survival rifle that can be broken down and stowed in its own stock, and a 25 caliber Beretta pistol.

 Joseph Scolaro owned both. In fact, he owned duplicates. Investigators learned Scolaro had a lifelong habit of buying two of everything, and that included his guns. He had purchased two identical Beretta pistols, and he had owned AR7 rifles. When police came asking, Scolaro handed over a Beretta and an AR7 for testing.

 Neither matched the casings from the cottage, but he had bought two of each, and the twins, the second pistol, the second rifle, were nowhere to be found. Detectives believed the same logic extended to the bloody bootprint. Evidence suggested Scolaro had owned two pairs of the same boots, one pair worn and disposed of, one pair conveniently new.

 Then came the polygraphs. Scolaro sat for three lie detector examinations about the murders. He failed two. The third was inconclusive. And then in November 1969 came the breakthrough that should have ended this story in a courtroom. Scolaro’s own brother-in-law told detectives something crucial. He had personally watched Scolaro fire his AR7 rifle at a family firing range on his father-in-law’s property in Oakland County back before the murders.

Detectives Lloyd Sterns and John Fliss went to that range with metal detectors and began sweeping the dirt. They found spent 22 caliber shell casings. The crime lab compared them against casings recovered at the Robinson cottage casings ejected by the missing murder rifle. They matched. Let that land. The rifle that killed the Robinson family.

The specific individual weapon had been fired before the murders at the private target range of Joseph Scolaro’s own family by Joseph Scolaro. A witness said so, and the brass in the ground said so. The state police were convinced. They assembled their findings into a report running some 200 pages, laid out the embezzlement, the broken alibi, the duplicate weapons, the failed polygraphs, and the ballistics, and delivered it to the prosecutor of EMTT County with a clear recommendation.

Charged Joseph Scolaro with the murder of the Robinson family. In January 1970, EMTT County prosecutor Donald C. Noggle gave his answer. No charges. Not now. His reasoning, the actual murder weapons had never been found. Scolaro’s fingerprints weren’t in the cottage. The case, though damning, was circumstantial.

 And EMTT County was a small rural jurisdiction without the money or machinery for a monster trial against a downstate defendant with good lawyers. Prosecutors held out hope that something harder would surface. The guns, a witness, an accomplice flipping. Veteran investigators were beside themselves. One of the detectives on the case would later insist they could have won a conviction on the circumstantial evidence alone.

 That most murder cases are circumstantial and that what was really miss Singup North wasn’t evidence. It was experience and nerve. So the file sat. 1970 became 1971, then 72. The man the state police believed had ended six lives went about his business in the Detroit suburbs and his business tellingly was falling apart. Scolaro had taken over his dead employer’s business interests and driven them into the ground.

 He launched a new venture with an impressive name, Dimensional Research Incorporated, which was little more than a check kiting scheme. Detectives kept pulling threads, creditors circled. His mother worked as his unpaid secretary. And every single day on his way to work, Joseph Scolaro drove past Aacia Park Cemetery, the place where the Robinsons were buried.

Then at last, the machinery moved. A newly elected prosecutor in Oakland County, where the Robinsons had lived and where a piece of this crime, the embezzlement, had arguably been set in motion, decided he wasn’t waiting on EMTT County any longer. His name was L. Brooks Patterson, and by early 1973, he was preparing to charge Joseph Scolaro in connection with the murders.

5 years after Somerset, it was finally happening. a warrant, an arrest, a courtroom, except someone talked. Word that charges were imminent leaked, reaching Scolaro’s mother, who told her son, and Joseph Scolaro, a man who had spent 5 years lying his way out of everything, understood that he was out of road.

 On the afternoon of March 8th, 1973, two men walked into Joseph Scolaro’s office in the Detroit suburbs. They weren’t police. They were there to collect a debt, $730. They found Scolaro at his desk. He had taken his own life with a 25 caliber Beretta, the same model as one of the guns that killed the Robinson family. On the desk was a note, most of it was typewritten, a rambling confession, not to murder, but to a life of fraud.

 He listed people he had swindled. He admitted forging his own mother’s signature on worthless checks. In his words, “I am a liar, cheat, phony.” He wrote that he knew he was sick and that getting help wouldn’t undo the people he’d hurt. And then, in a handwritten postcript addressed to his mother, Joseph Scolaro spoke to the accusation that had shadowed half his adult life.

He denied it. He wrote that he’d had nothing to do with the Robinsons. A cheat, he admitted, but not, he insisted, a murderer. He was 34 years old, and with him died any possibility of a trial. Think about what that note actually is. It’s a document written by a man with nothing left to lose, confessing freely and in detail to every fraud he ever ran, while denying the one thing he was about to be charged with.

To some, that final denial reads as the truth of a desperate, broken con man who was guilty of everything except murder. To others, it reads as the last con, a man curating his own legacy on the way out the door with one final lie for his mother’s sake. The investigators who had lived inside this case for 5 years had no doubt which it was.

 to the Michigan State Police and the EMTT County Sheriff’s Department. The man responsible for Somerset died at that desk, untried, unconvicted, and unpunished. And because of one quirk of Michigan law, the story couldn’t even properly end there. In Michigan, an open murder case is never officially closed. No conviction, no closure.

 The Robinson file simply moved to the inactive drawer where legally speaking it sits open to this day. Six victims, a 200page case file naming one man, and a status line that still reads unsolved. Now, is it really that simple? Officially, no one was ever proven guilty of this crime. And honesty requires looking at the cracks in the case against Scolaro because they exist. The biggest is time.

Critics of the Scolaro theory have always argued the drive was too tight, that shooting six people at Goodart and getting back downstate inside his unaccounted for window would have required everything to go perfectly. That objection has kept alternative theories alive for over five decades. Some of those theories point to an accomplice that Scolaro arranged the crime but didn’t necessarily pull every trigger alone.

 Investigators themselves considered this seriously. It was one reason prosecutors kept waiting before charging him, hoping someone would flip. Others have pointed at different men entirely. One theory notes that Richie Robinson’s University, Eastern Michigan, was the hunting ground of John Norman Collins, the convicted killer at the center of the Michigan co-ed murders, and that the two young men are even said by some accounts to have possibly crossed paths during orientation.

 It’s a chilling coincidence, but investigators found nothing more than that. and it remains at most a footnote of speculation. And in good heart itself, local gossip for years circled the man who found them, caretaker Monty Bliss. He was eccentric. His son had just died. Some whispered he’d felt slighted by Richard Robinson in his grief.

 But police never regarded Bliss as a suspect, and nothing beyond talk was ever produced against him. He deserves to be remembered as what the record shows, the neighbor who had to open that door. Weigh all of it, though, against what the evidence file actually contains. The $60,000 motive, the collapsed alibi, the duplicate guns with the matching twins missing, the failed polygraphs, and above all, casings from the murder rifle in the dirt of his own family’s firing range.

 And you understand why more than half a century later, the sheriff’s office in EMTT County still speaks of this case the way it does. Modern investigators who have periodically re-examined the file have landed where detectives Sterns and Fliss landed in 1969. They believe they know who did this.

 They’ve believed it for 50 years. The law just never got its day. There’s a strange emptiness where this story’s ending should be. And it’s not just and legal. It’s physical, too. In the spring of 1969, less than a year after the murders, the bank managing the Robinson estate ordered Somerset demolished, the cottage was deemed uninhabitable after what had happened inside it, so it was simply erased.

Today, there is no marker at the end of that private drive, just trees and the sound of the lake. The people of Goodart never quite escaped it. For decades, it was the thing outsiders asked about at the general store, the sleepy village of a few dozen souls that became shortorthhand for one of the most notorious crimes in Michigan’s history.

Authors kept returning to it. Journalist Marty Link’s meticulous account when evil came to good heart remains the definitive book on the case, and novelists and podcasters have circled it ever since. Every few years, a new sheriff inherits the file, reads it through, and reaches the same conclusion as the last one.

 And the Robinsons rest together at Acacia Park. Richard and Shirley, Richie, Gary, Randy, and Susie. A whole family buried on a single day in July 1968, while the man the state police believed responsible was still taking calls at their company’s offices. 27 days it took to find them. 50 plus years and the finding has never been finished.

 Of everything in this case, it’s the note that stays with you. We’ll be back. 7 10 A few polite words pinned to a door that bought a killer 27 days. It worked because of what it exploited. Not locks, not luck, but trust. The unspoken agreement of a place like Goodart. That a note means what it says. That drawn curtains mean privacy.

 that odd little holes in a window are just boys being boys. Someone understood that trust well enough to weaponize it. And whether that someone was the smiling embezzler with the matching guns or an accomplice history never named, the result is the same. Six people, a father with big dreams, a mother, four children who had spent every summer of their lives on that shoreline were taken on the very night before a family trip.

 And no court anywhere has ever said the words guilty on their behalf. Michigan law keeps the case open forever. So in its way does good heart. Their family asked only that they be remembered. So remember their names. Richard Robinson, Shirley Robinson, Richard Jr. Gary, Randall Susan. If this story stayed with you, consider subscribing because cases like this one deserve to be remembered properly, not forgotten.