Abduction in broad daylight: Shawn Moore remembered

Editor's note: This story was first published Aug. 31, 2015.

Ronald Lloyd Bailey was 13 when he kidnapped and molested his first victim.

Bailey was 27 when sentenced in 1986 to life in prison for kidnapping, raping and murdering his last victim: Shawn Moore, a 13-year-old Green Oak Township boy who was riding his bicycle home from a nearby convenience store when he was taken.

"I remember most Shawn's kindness of being and environmentalism," older brother Scott Moore, an international lawyer based in New York, said. "I would want people to remember Shawn's kindness and concern for animals and the environment."

Shawn was kidnapped Aug. 31, 1985, as he rode his 10-speed bicycle home from the now defunct Pump & Pantry on the corner of Lee Road and Old U.S. 23, less than 2 miles from his family's home in the Horizon Hills subdivision.

Bailey testified at his 1986 trial that he spotted Shawn at the store and followed him because he could not control his "impulses" and he needed to "take" the boy. He also claimed he killed Shawn because he believed he was killing himself, but the men who prosecuted the now-56-year-old convict still call Bailey's story psycho-babble.

Bailey denied the Livingston Daily's requests for an interview.

However, his trial attorney, Raymond Cassar, said Thursday: "Bailey was truly remorseful for his actions."

"I never saw him as an evil person, but rather a truly misguided soul," Cassar said.

Although it has been 30 years, the classmates who remember Shawn recall his warm smile. The eyes of the men who hunted and prosecuted his killer, still tear up as they remember a boy they describe as the all-American son any parent would have been thrilled to call his or her own.

A typical teen

Shawn was born June 30, 1972, to Bruce "Bud" Moore and his wife, Sharon Eister Moore.

The youngest of three siblings, Shawn was raised in a middle-class home in the Horizon Hills subdivision in Green Oak Township.

His headstone in Saint Patrick Calvary Cemetery in Brighton provides a quick, poignant portrait of him through his family's eyes. The inscription reads: "Son, brother, friend, smiling, hugging, teasing, family, Gratiot Lk [sic], Mr. Peabody, mouse, inventor, artist, biker, fun-loving, 'Shawn.' "

In an August interview, Scott Moore says his little brother was an environmentalist in 1985 "before it was fashionable."

"He had grown up loving animals and spending summers at our wilderness summer home in the (Upper Peninsula)," Scott Moore said. "By age 13, Shawn had developed a sense of protecting animals and the wilderness."

Shawn often spoke with his family about discussions at Hawkins Elementary School regarding the ethical aspects of drug companies and medical schools using animals to test medical drugs and treatment. Shawn firmly believed that animals should not be harmed, his older brother said.

At the family's cabin, Shawn built a "nature platform" in trees where he spent hours studying nature.

"When a couple local boys once stopped by to shoot chipmunks with their BB guns, Shawn sent them packing," Scott Moore said. "Our grandmother, then in her 80s, one summer climbed up the nature platform with Shawn, to our amazement. The nature platform is long gone now, but I still keep a log chair he built on the cabin porch."

Abduction in broad daylight

It was Labor Day weekend 1985 and Shawn was doing weekend chores when the lawn mower broke. He asked his dad if he could ride his bicycle to a local store to purchase a soda.

Bud Moore said yes. Scott Moore noted the time — 3 p.m. — and he reminded his baby brother that dinner will be early so the family could watch a movie at 7 p.m.

Shawn sat at the store to drink the A&W root beer, then he got back onto his 10-speed and began pedaling his way down Whitmore Lake Road.

Meanwhile, Bailey was ready to do something. He asked his girlfriend to go to her family's cabin in Gladwin. She declined.

Bailey drove from his home in Livonia to Fowlerville, where he tried to get his cousins to go to the cabin northeast of Saginaw and more than 130 miles from Green Oak Township if one travels U.S. 23/Interstate 75 today.

Bailey's cousins, however, also declined, as did his co-workers and other friends, so Bailey returned to the Brighton area, where he saw a boy in a hallway near the entrance to Brighton Mall looking at motorcycles on a bulletin board.

The blonde teenager appeared to be alone.

Bailey approached him, telling him he had a motorcycle on a trailer. Did he want to see it? Bailey asked.

The boy said no and Bailey left, traveling by the Pump & Pantry. It was around 2:56 p.m.

Bailey spotted Shawn and he could not control his impulse to "take him," Bailey testified at his trial.

"I had these uncontrollable impulses to kidnap people, and I didn't know if it was anger or if I did it for sex or what I did it for," Bailey testified during his September 1986 trial in Livingston County Circuit Court.

At around 3:25 p.m. Aug. 31, 1985, when Shawn reached a quiet spot on Whitmore Lake Road, Bailey approached the teen, telling him that he wasn't going to hurt him and the two of them were going to "have a good time for the weekend," according to a trial transcript.

Shawn most likely struggled because a witness traveling south on U.S. 23, which runs parallel to Whitmore Lake Road, initially believed it was a father and son arguing.

Bailey grabbed Shawn by both arms, turned him around, causing the bicycle to fall, and forced Shawn into his waiting silver Jeep Renegaded and eventually he drove north on U.S. 23 toward the Gladwin cabin owned by his friend's family.

While en route, Bailey and Shawn talked about his schooling and how they both played instruments — Shawn the clarinet and Bailey the saxophone, according to trial testimony.

Cabin in the woods

Once at the cabin, Bailey testified, he fixed the teen macaroni and cheese and the two drank beer.

Bailey testified that the next day he had 12-15 beers, whiskey or schnapps and "maybe three or four joints," but he denied forcing Shawn to consume drugs and alcohol — two vices police said would have been foreign to the 13-year-old.

A toxicology report later showed phenyltoloxamine, which is an antihistamine that produces sleepiness and drowsiness, in Shawn's system.

Bailey also testified that he wrapped an elastic band around Shawn's neck and molested him and during a subsequent rape, he wrapped a belt around the teen's neck, tightening it while holding Shawn's hands down.

Bailey molested Shawn and strangled him to death and then dumped his body in a wooded area near the cabin.

Finding Shawn

The investigation began when a Thumb-area man traveling south on U.S. 23 saw a white, blond-haired man put his arm around a boy and push him toward a vehicle.

That man, on his way to the hospital at the University of Michigan because his daughter was having surgery following a fall off farming equipment, turned around at Silver Lake Road and found then-Green Oak Township Officer Dave Ostrem.

The officer was sitting in his police cruiser thinking about getting off duty and joining his then-girlfriend, who is now his wife, for their holiday weekend.

"I'm at the southbound Whitmore Lake Road traffic sign when a pickup comes up to the northbound stop sign and starts flashing the lights," Ostrem explained. "My immediate response is, 'Oh really?' I'm thinking he's going to tell me about a broken vehicle on the highway."

Ostrem pulls alongside the vehicle and the man inside says: "I think we just saw a kidnapping."

Ostrem spends the next few minutes gathering information from the man and his girlfriend that leads him to put out a BOLO, or be on the lookout, for a pickup.

Then Livingston County Sheriff's Detective Edwin Moore, who is in the area, went to Whitmore Lake Road where Shawn's bicycle is lying on the side of the road in the grass.

There are tire tracks.

Moore photographs the scene while then-Detective Bob Bezotte, who is now sheriff, also arrives on scene.

Today, Bezotte said he tries not to think about the "what ifs," but he does wonder if the initial report of a pickup, which turned out to be inaccurate, had been correct that it could have led to finding Shawn alive.

"I wonder if we passed Bailey's vehicle," he said.

It is a sentiment shared by Ostrem, but neither man blames the witness, who reiterated that it was a truck during a hypnosis session during the investigation. They understood he most likely had his own child in his thoughts.

While police continued to process what happened, Scott Moore walked up to the officers and told them his little brother Shawn failed to show for dinner and he must have been in an accident since his bicycle is lying abandoned and police are on scene.

Ostrem, who knew Scott Moore from school, shook his head.

"We had already checked hospitals, wondering if it was an accident," Ostrem explained. "I had to tell him it wasn't an accident. We don't know where (Shawn) is and now we knew it was a kidnapping."

A Michigan State Police canine unit was called in and the track went nowhere, confirming for police that Shawn was taken from the scene in a vehicle.

The investigation went into warp speed with multiple activities happening at the same time.

While one group of officers searched Island Lake State Recreation Area, others worked to identify and find the pickup. Some officers investigated the Moore family because statistics tell police to look at family first.

One state police detective called the television stations and put out what today is known as an Amber Alert.

An Eastern Michigan University student watching the 11 p.m. news heard that alert and had a tip that helped focus the investigation. She was traveling north on U.S. 23 when she saw a silver Jeep Renegade near a boy on a bicycle. She went with state police troopers to a dealership and pointed out the type of vehicle she saw.

Two days after the kidnapping, police had a sketch of the blond man seen with Shawn, which was released to the media. Someone put it on a wanted poster along with a photo of a Renegade and Shawn's school photograph.

The task forced received between 1,600 and 2,000 tips throughout the course of the two-week investigation. Five of those tips were about Bailey, including one from a Livonia police officer who investigated Bailey 10 years earlier when he was 16 and kidnapped, drugged and sexually assaulted a 12-year-old boy before strangling him and leaving him for dead.

Bailey, who had served a stint at Hawthorne Center for the kidnapping he did at 13, was charged in that incident and committed to Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital, where he met Dr. Jose Tombo, who became a central figure in the defense although he never testified at trial.

The second tip came from Bailey's co-workers at ARA Coffee Systems in Livonia. The employees, Ostrem said, claimed Bailey spent the Tuesday after Labor Day meticulously cleaning and vacuuming his Jeep, which they found odd for a man they considered strange anyway. The co-workers said Bailey told them he was attending a wedding that night and needed the vehicle cleaned, but they were suspicious because people did not traditionally wed on a Tuesday.

Ostrem said those two tips led police to narrow their focus and their energies on Bailey as a suspect although other people were questioned throughout the investigation.

Police executed search warrants on Bailey's parents' home where he lived.

Ostrem recalls a striking resemblance between Bailey's family and the Moore family.

"Bailey's parents were nice people," he said. "They just had a kid who was a monster. He is every child's worst nightmare."

Investigators interviewed Bailey twice. In the first interview, Bailey claimed he spent the Labor Day weekend fishing with a friend in Caseville, but when police questioned the friend, he denied the fishing trip occurred. Bailey had a lawyer at the second interview and they were not able to interview him directly, but they learned Bailey had a preference for Benson & Hedges Light — the same cigarette butt later found in the area of Shawn's body.

Police also were able to photograph the contents of Bailey's wallet, including a receipt that led them to his girlfriend, who told police that Bailey wanted someone to go to the cabin but she wasn't interested.

While police went to the cabin, the task force kept Bailey under surveillance and followed as he withdrew money from an automatic teller machine and boarded a plane to Florida. On the same plane were FBI agents who followed as Bailey deplaned and took a bus from Orlando to a friend's house in Ocala.

Meanwhile, at the cabin, 25 officers were looking for Shawn.

Then-Detective Harold Janiszewski of the Michigan State Police's West Branch Post described the cabin as an unkempt one-story white cabin with a green roof on Ridge Road in a state forest area.

There, police found a neighbor who remembered seeing Shawn come of out of the cottage and hang clothes out on a line and a man and his son reported seeing Bailey sitting atop his Jeep hood smoking a cigarette near where the body was found.

"The kid picked out the spot where they saw him sitting on the hood and 50 foot from where they found the body," then-Prosecutor Frank Del Vero said. "Talk about a break through. We put (Bailey) within 50 feet of the body."

Del Vero said investigators found Shawn's palm print inside the cabin. A news report at the time said it was Shawn's fingerprints.

Police walked a dirt, twigged-lined path into a wooded area, searching for Shawn. One officer noticed a usual amount of scavenger birds, and when he walked in that direction, a flock of vultures burst out of the trees and into the sky.

There, officers found Shawn's nude, decomposed body barely hidden under twigs and brush and not far from a large tree.

"Our hearts sunk," said Ostrem, who was with the Moore family when news of the discovery came.

Then-Prosecutor David Morse immediately wrote warrants for Bailey's arrest for kidnapping and murder.

FBI agents in Florida then kicked in the door where Bailey was staying only to find he had fled when his friends heard on a police scanner in their home that police were looking for Bailey. An estimated 200-250 corrections officers, police officers and FBI agents as well as police canines and a helicopter crew searched for Bailey.

"The next thing you know, they're slugging through swamps of Florida," Morse said. "It was high drama. You see an abduction taking place and the manhunt goes on for several days. … Then they had the suspect under surveillance and he leaves the state, eludes the surveillance in Florida and goes into a swamp."

After two days, Bailey walked out of the swamp and surrendered to a female officer. He was fingerprinted in Florida and returned to Livingston County and booked into the county jail.

"Then we find out this isn't the only time he's done this," Morse said. "It was high drama."

The trial

Ronald Bailey went to trial in Livingston County in September 1986.

In all, 66 potential jurors were questioned out of a pool of 300. Of those questioned, people were excused from serving for various reasons, including financial hardship, or pre-emptory challenges from both sides.

The defense argued that Bailey was made insane by Tombo, the Northville psychiatrist who allegedly forced Bailey into a homosexual relationship. The doctor became a central figure in the defense, although he never testified because authorities could not locate him when it came time for trial.

There was an outcry from the defense when it was learned a Michigan State Police detective spotted Tombo having dinner at a Northville-area restaurant, but the prosecution did not procure his appearance in court because they were not calling him as a witness. The sighting reportedly took place before the judge asked for Tombo's appearance.

The defense lost its appeal to the Court of Appeals seeking a stay until Tombo could be located. The appeals court said the defense did not show "enough urgency" in its request.

Del Vero believes Tombo had an inappropriate relationship with Bailey, but the man was not charged. Del Vero believes Tombo has since returned to his native country.

Cassar said Tombo was hiding in Detroit while the trial was pending and then in Canada when the trial began. He said the doctor came to his office claiming he could help with the insanity defense as long as the defense did not reveal that Tombo took Bailey to Windsor on the weekend.

Cassar said Bailey's father cursed at Tombo and blamed him for "what you did to my son," and Tombo replied "it was for therapy."

The Michigan attorney general later went after Tombo and took away his medical license for what he did to Bailey and many other patients at Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital, and years later the facility closed, Cassar said. However, the doctor was not charged criminally.

Dr. Joel Dreyer, a psychiatrist who testified for the defense, compared Bailey to the character Norman Bates in the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie, "Psycho." He said Bailey is schizophrenic and "totally psychotic" and that Bailey "may appear" to be like others, but is "quite crazy, quite psychotic."

Cassar, who was fresh out of law school when he began representing Bailey, said his client's "long period of dealing with mental illness made the case more complex than I could have ever imagined."

"I did everything I could to help Ronald," Cassar said. "I argued the insanity defense at trial."

Dreyer claimed Bailey became more violent after his abuse by Tombo, but on cross-examination, Morse hammered away at Dreyer's credibility and their verbal sparring led the judge to tell both men not to bicker. At one point, Morse made a reference to the doctor's consistent appearances on the courthouse steps with the media. The comment drew applause from spectators.

A psychologist testifying for the prosecution said Bailey's urge to kidnap Shawn was not irresistible because he had the "capacity to choose to resist it; it was his choice not to." This doctor also testified that Bailey lied in his psychological assessments to give the appearance of mental illness, but Bailey really only had a severe personality disorder that did not make him legally insane.

Another psychologist testified that any effect of Tombo's relationship with Bailey "was probably positive" in promoting an adult homosexual relationship, "which would be better than continuing on his road of homosexual pedophilia and sexual sadism."

During his testimony, Bailey said he tightened the belt on Shawn's neck and strangled him because his "whole past just came rushing into my head" and he thought Shawn was himself and "I had to kill me."

Morse argued Bailey kidnapped, molested and choked young boys into unconsciousness before he met Tombo. During the trial, Morse repeatedly hammered Bailey with questions about his impulse, which Bailey maintained was to "take" someone — not kill someone.

"I felt that was important," Morse said.

Morse maintains today that Bailey's testimony he was killing himself when he killed Shawn was merely a story he latched onto when his psychologist suggested it during a session.

The trial was important to Morse and Del Vero for personal reasons and the case shaped their lives as well as Ostrem's and Cassar's.

Both Morse and Del Vero acknowledged that they felt the community had high expectations about justice being served.

"Everywhere you went, that's all people were talking about. It pervaded every aspect of this community's life from the time it happened to the time the trial was over," Morse said.

"This community needed a conviction in this case. We felt a responsibility for the community," he added.

Cassar remembers waiting for the verdict and "many people" walking around the courthouse with flashlights. He said it "was surreal, but it was a continuing sign of how upset the community was."

The jury's verdict: Bailey was guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping.

When the verdict was read, Bailey remained "expressionless, staring vacantly at the carpet off the front end of the defense table," according to one news report. After the verdict, Bailey stood up, shoved both hands down to the bottom of his trouser pockets and walked out of the courtroom to the holding cell.

Cassar said at the time of the verdict that his client cried every day at the trial, but did so privately because he felt his emotions "are private."

At sentencing, Judge Stanley J. Latreille, who has since retired, told Bailey: "You are responsible. You may have impulses, but you choose to do evil. You are a cold, calculated predator. You made the choice to kill. You'll never walk the streets again."

In December 1986, Bailey was convicted in Wayne County of first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree felony murder and the predicate felony of kidnapping in a bench trial and subsequently sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 14-year-old Ferndale boy Kenny Myers. An appeals court in 1989 vacated the conviction for felony murder on the grounds of double jeopardy.

Bailey also was suspected in the sexual assaults and murders of two Florida boys, but he has not been charged in those cases.

After the verdict, Bailey assisted the FBI, who asked him to participate in its "new science of criminal profiling." He subjected himself to hours of questioning in the hopes the FBI could learn how to stop the Ronald Bailey's behaviors in the future.

After the Livingston County verdict, Del Vero, who attended Shawn's funeral, went to the teenager's grave. He was not sure what he would say, but he needed to share the conviction, although his feelings were not quite what he expected.

"After (the jury) came in with guilty, it was more of a relief," Del Vero said, his eyes watering. "I was kind of down. We had been so emotionally involved and so intent that it was kind of a letdown when it finally was over. You expected to be happier.

"The sadness of the fact was, Shawn Moore was never coming back again and it affected me. … I knew we had done everything we could," he said.

Both Morse and Del Vero think about Shawn — and when they do, they prefer to remember the school photograph of a smiling, happy kid who seemed so full of promise.

"It was a loss of innocence for the time," Morse said.

Del Vero added: "How can you not think of Shawn? His teachers said he had an amazing mind. Who knows what he would have become, but he never had a chance."

Contact Livingston Daily justice reporter Lisa Roose-Church at 517-552-2846 or lrchurch@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @LisaRooseChurch.

The jury

The jury who heard the state's case against Ronald Lloyd Bailey, who was convicted of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing 13-year-old Shawn Moore in August 1985 was comprised of: