Terry Webster King, left, and sister Wendy Webster Razlog earlier this year visit the grave of their mother Gail Webster in Royal Oak. The 48-year-old divorced mother of three was killed in her apartment in Troy on Oct. 28, 1978. Andy Morrison, The Detroit News
Terry Webster King, left, and sister Wendy Webster Razlog earlier this year visit the grave of their mother Gail Webster in Royal Oak. The 48-year-old divorced mother of three was killed in her apartment in Troy on Oct. 28, 1978. Andy Morrison, The Detroit News
Retired Detroit News columnist Marney Rich Keenan understands the anguish of grieving families looking for answers.
As author of the 2020 book “The Snow Killings,” on the Oakland County child murders of the 1970s, Keenan delved deeply into the emotional toll that cold cases extract on loved ones, police investigators and potential suspects.
So when the family of Gail Webster reached out, she listened with interest to their tale of another cold case connected to the Oakland County killings.
Then she got to work.
Webster’s daughters, Wendy Webster Razlog and Terry Webster King, have been on a decades-long quest to identify who bludgeoned their mother to death in her Troy apartment in October 1978.
They had police files, photographs and plenty of suspicions about a man police now agree is the prime suspect: Gail Webster’s now-deceased boyfriend, who also was questioned in the Oakland County child killings.
What they didn’t have was closure.
Over the course of six months, Keenan talked to family, friends and acquaintances of both the victim and suspect; combed through hundreds of pages of case files and photographs; and interviewed law enforcement from multiple agencies.
In this five-part series, Keenan delves into the Webster family’s odyssey, their rising hope in new DNA technology and their determination to keep their mother’s memory alive.