Qualla: Robison Family Murders

Robison Family Murders: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For twenty-seven days, the curtains stayed drawn at Summerset cottage. The heating ran. The door stayed locked. Inside, six members of the Robison family lay where they had fallen on June 25, 1968, shot with two different calibers of ammunition, two of them also bludgeoned with a claw hammer. It was not until July 22 that a neighbor's complaint about a terrible smell brought the caretaker to pry open the door of the secluded log-and-stone cottage near Good Hart, Michigan. What he found inside became the worst mass murder in Michigan history -- and a case that, officially, remains open to this day.

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Robison Family Murders: The Family at Summerset

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Richard Carl Robison was a self-made man from Wayne County who had built a small advertising empire. His firm, R.C. Robison & Associates, ran campaigns for businesses across the Detroit region. He published Impresario magazine, a cultural journal covering arts, theater, and music...

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Robison Family Murders: The Morning Call

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The trouble started with a phone call. On the morning of June 25, Richard Sr. rang his personal banker at the National Bank of Detroit, Frank Joity, to discuss an expected $200,000 deposit. The money was not there. Worse, Joity informed him of financial irregularities in his busi...

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Robison Family Murders: Twenty-Seven Days of Silence

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The killer had been methodical. Investigators determined a single person committed the murders, based on a single bloody footprint left on the floor. After the killings, this individual closed every curtain in the cottage, attempted to cover the bullet holes in the rear window wi...

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Robison Family Murders: A Suspect Who Never Stood Trial

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Michigan State Police and Emmet County Sheriff's Office launched an exhaustive investigation. Suspicion centered on Joseph Scolaro III, the Robison employee with access to company finances -- the man Richard Sr. had desperately tried to reach on the morning of the murders. Sc...

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Robison Family Murders: A Place That Remembers

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Good Hart sits in Readmond Township, Emmet County, along one of the most beautiful and remote stretches of Michigan's Lake Michigan coast. The area draws summer visitors to its wooded bluffs, private lanes, and wide views of the water. It is the kind of place people come to disap...

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