The summer of 1968 was not a pretty one for the United States.
There was the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War that saw American boys dying by the thousands for no good reason, racial tensions were at a boiling point after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
And, on June 6, presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
In Detroit, the city was still reeling from race riots in July 1967 that left 43 dead and a metropolis forever wounded. Still, the auto plants were booming, Motown owned the airwaves and the hometown Tigers were en route to a World Series victory.
Like thousands of others, when the mercury turned scorching Dick Robison packed up his family and headed to the cottage in Good Hart, a speck on the map in the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.
Robison was a 43-year-old Detroit publishing executive who visited his Lake Michigan cottage with his wife and four children every summer since he bought it in 1957.
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Dick and Shirley Robison had not been heard from since late June. Their neighbours first noticed an unpleasant smell in the area, then a putrefying stench.
On July 22, 1968, a caretaker stopped by the log-and-stone cottage the family called Summerset. The door was locked but he pried it open.
Lying on the ground dead was Shirley Robinson, 40, a plaid blanket covering her body. She had been shot in the head with a .25 calibre handgun. Her husband was dead in the hallway, he too had been shot in the head. Dick had also been shot with a .22 rifle in the chest.
Their oldest son, Richard, 19, was shot multiple times in the head while a younger brother, Gary, 16, was shot twice in the head and once in the back. Randall, 12, was found lying on top of his father. He died the same way.
The Robison family’s only girl, Susan, 7, was lying dead by her father. She had been shot in the head and suffered a fractured skull from a claw hammer.
Cops believed that the killer had first shot Dick Robison through the window and then hunted down and murdered the others. Before leaving, the monster locked the door and turned up the heat.
Detectives spoke to neighbours, friends, family, relatives and scores of locals. And then, the case seemingly went ice cold and was marked: Unsolved.
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With few answers, rumours, speculation and myth found fertile soil around the horrifying bloodbath.
“People care,” local author Mardi Link told the Grand Rapids Press. “This was an entire family. It wasn’t just a movie. It wasn’t a novel. It was a real family who had people who loved and cared about them.”
Detectives soon zeroed in on a suspect in Dick Robison’s inner circle.
His name was Joseph Scolaro III. He had worked for Robison’s publishing company since 1965.
Cops said “glaring discrepancies in the statements of Joseph Scolaro III … were becoming obvious.”
There was the matter of his alibi and whereabouts, the location of his weapons on that date. And the troubling realization that the handgun’s bullets matched those taken from several of the victims.
The slimy person of interest told cops he last spoke to his boss in a June 25 phone call.
“The guy was as smooth as glass,” researcher Richard Wiles told Michigan Live on the 50th anniversary of the massacre. “It was like trying to nail down Jell-O.”
Detectives believed money was the motive. Scolaro had given himself a large raise and bump to his expense account without Robison’s knowledge. He was robbing his boss blind.
Cash-o-la also played a role in why Scolaro was not prosecuted. Up in Emmet County where the murders occurred, a tight-fisted prosecutor didn’t want to spend the money for a trial.
“It was so big, it was so obvious who did it, it was like an elephant in the room,” Wiles said.
In addition, ground-breaking lab work connected the suspect’s guns to the investigation: A .25-caliber Beretta automatic pistol and an uncommon .22-caliber Armalite AR-7 rifle.
Scolaro had two of each but said he gave both rifles away and one of the Berettas to Robison. This did not jive with the discovery of bullets from the murder weapons at a shooting range owned by the suspect’s father.
Things stayed cold until 1972 when Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson asked for the file. The embezzlement had occurred in suburban Detroit.
“I’d reached my conclusion that Joseph was the killer. I took my opinion and file to Patterson. He said, ‘We are going to charge that man with murder,’” former prosecutor John Covault said.
Six first-degree murder charges.
But then the case took another twist.
Just before law enforcement was about to charge Scolaro with the heinous crime, he killed himself in March 1973.
Rumours persisted that Scolaro had been tipped off he was about to be charged and took the easy way out.
At the bottom of his typewritten suicide note, he added: “P.S. I had nothing to do with the Robisons. I’m a cheat but not a murderer.”
The case is still listed as “inactive.”