Monsters in the Corridor: How urban planners turned my Detroit neighborhood into a predator's playground

By George Hunter

When Detroit's Skid Row section was about to be demolished in the early 1960s, elected officials hatched a scheme to confine the city's addicted, mentally ill and perverted into a community full of kids. The urban planners' machinations gave rise to the Cass Corridor, a place where cops were essentially nonexistent, garbage didn't get picked up, prostitutes turned tricks while their children fended for themselves -- and predators pounced. After the Oakland County Child Killer kidnapped and murdered four suburban children in 1976-1977, with the two male victims being sexually assaulted, police knew exactly where to look to find pedophiles. The OCCK Task Force swarmed the Corridor during the three-year investigation. But when funding for the Task Force dried up, detectives seemed to lose interest in what was happening to the children of the Cass Corridor. That changed 30 years later, when authorities reopened the unsolved OCCK case and learned that a sex ring with ties to a multimillionaire's child porn operation had abused dozens of Cass Corridor children. "We ... uncovered several large rings of pedophiles and child pornographers that were operating in the Cass Corridor in the 1970's, but were not necessarily connected to the OCCK case," a detective with the new OCCK Task Force wrote in a 2006 report. Although the renewed investigation didn't close the OCCK case, it resulted in two of the Corridor's worst predators finally paying for their crimes against children. Veteran Detroit News crime reporter George Hunter grew up in the Cass Corridor during the 1970s and saw first-hand the results of the urban planners' grand vision that resulted in a breeding ground for despair and depravity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DFH37QHJ
• ISBN13: 9798337606484
• Release Date: August 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 110 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.3" x 5.0"