Richard Craig Ritchie Robison

Richard Craig “Ritchie” Robison was nineteen years old and a member of a close family from Lathrup Village, Michigan. Known in family references by the nickname “Ritchie,” he grew up in a household that owned a summer cottage on the shores near Good Hart, where the family spent time together by Lake Michigan. Public accounts of the family note that Ritchie and his siblings were typical of suburban Michigan youth of the late 1960s: attending school and college, enjoying outdoor life up north, and traveling with their parents.

Records and contemporary reporting identify Ritchie as the elder son among the Robison children. At the time of the family’s 1968 vacation to their summer cottage, Ritchie was pursuing the path a young man of his age might follow — his family’s life included ties to the Detroit-area community of Lathrup Village and extracurricular interests that come with growing up near lakes and woods.

Because public documentation about Ritchie’s private life is limited in the sources available, much of what remains most important is the human fact of a young life among a loving family and a community that remembered the Robisons for decades afterward. Local histories and later retrospectives about the Robison family emphasize the family’s place in their hometown and the lasting sorrow felt by neighbors and community members.

Today Ritchie’s memory is preserved alongside those of his parents and siblings in local histories, cold-case accounts, and community remembrances that acknowledge the family’s everyday roles — son, brother, student, and neighbor. Though public records are sparse about his personal achievements, the sources that name him do so with the quiet respect due to a young life and a family still recalled in Northern Michigan and Lathrup Village histories. This page honors Ritchie as a young man whose life mattered to those who loved him and who remains part of his family’s story.