After the murder of a doctor in Michigan, her husband offered a reward for information leading to the perpetrators.

And then, he increased the reward. And then, against the advice of police, he increased it again to half a million dollars.

But would it be enough for a tip to come in?

I'm Charlie and welcome to crime lines.

Hello and welcome to crime lines. The case we're talking about this week is one that I found thanks to my friend Nina from the podcast already gone, though it's a little bit of an indirect connection. I was thinking about unsolved cases that have large rewards attached to them and how often those rewards do not

lead to any answers. So then I flipped the question in my head. And I wondered if there were any

cases where the reward did lead to closing a case. It did motivate someone to come forward with

what they knew. So I googled that question,

and a redditor, Melissa ASN, asked that same exact question a couple of years ago on the

True Crime podcast subreddit. And Nina answered her question with this case, and that's how I started

reading up on it. But the reason I wanted to cover it, the more I looked

into it, had less to do with the reward and more to do with this being a very good look at the

media's role in publicizing details, while also trying to walk the line of not harming the

investigation. And there was debate whether the media stayed on the right side of the line or not harming the investigation. And there was debate whether the media stayed on the right

side of the line or not in this case. And we're going to get into that a bit later, but first we need

to back up and start with Deborah Budd, who was born in Oakland County, Michigan in September of

1957. She was daughter number three out of four and grew up in Livonia.

Debbie's father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a nurse, so it shouldn't really be a

surprise that Debbie also went into the medical field, but that was not Debbie's first choice of

careers.

After she graduated from high school, she initially pursued music at the

Indiana School of Music. She played the flute, but her focus was on opera singing. But Debbie found that

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