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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Geese, Bundy, Dalhmer, The Night Stalker DTK.
Speaker 5: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 5: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 5: your host, journalist and author Dan.
Speaker 6: Zufanski, Good evening between the summers of nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 6: through nineteen sixty nine, before the term serial killer was coined,
Speaker 6: a predatory killer stock the campuses of Eastern Michigan University
Speaker 6: in the University of Michigan, seeking pray until he made
Speaker 6: the arrogant mistake of killing his last victim in the
Speaker 6: basement of his uncle's home. All American boy John Norman
Speaker 6: Collins was arrested, tried, and convicted of the strangulation murder
Speaker 6: of Karen Sue Binnemann. The other murders attributed to Collins
Speaker 6: never went to trial with one exception, and soon became
Speaker 6: cold cases. With the benefit of fifty years of hindsight,
Speaker 6: hundreds of vintage newspaper articles, thousands of police reports, and
Speaker 6: countless interviews. Terror in Yipsilanti John Norman Collins Unmasked tells
Speaker 6: the stories of the other victims, recreates the infamous trial
Speaker 6: that took Collins off the streets, and details Collin's time
Speaker 6: spent in prison. Terror in Yipsilante compiles an array of
Speaker 6: physical and circumstantial evidence, drawing an unmistakable portrait of the
Speaker 6: sadistic murderer who slaughtered these innocent young women. The book
Speaker 6: they were featuring this evening is Terror in Ypsilanti John
Speaker 6: Norman Collins Unmasked with my special guest, journalist and author
Speaker 6: Gregory A. Fournier. Welcome to the program, and thank you
Speaker 6: very much for this interview. Gregory Hey Fournier.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm very excited about it. This is a story
Speaker 7: that was pretty much buried for fifty years, and I
Speaker 7: felt that it was about time for the facts to
Speaker 7: be aired. And it's done quite well. It's been out
Speaker 7: a couple of years and people are very generous with
Speaker 7: their praise and it's been a great experience.
Speaker 6: Just tell us before we launch into this and get
Speaker 6: right down to the events. Starting in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 6: in your book, tell us just about the developments briefly
Speaker 6: about this miniseries plan for adaptation of Terror in Yipsilani.
Speaker 7: Yes, a Canadian uh actually Toronto Media company about a
Speaker 7: two year option to uh uh develop Terror in Enpsilani.
Speaker 7: And at first they were thinking about a two hour movie,
Speaker 7: but the span of what happened and uh the ins
Speaker 7: and outs of the plot line could couldn't be done
Speaker 7: in two hours. And so they came back with an
Speaker 7: idea for an eight part mini series and uh, I'm
Speaker 7: hoping in February to look over the the uh uh
Speaker 7: the plot outline, story arc of the eight episodes and
Speaker 7: uh uh maybe have some input into it. Before you know,
Speaker 7: it goes to the next step. And I'm very very
Speaker 7: excited about it.
Speaker 6: I well, as as you should be. It sounds very
Speaker 6: very promising. Let's get to August seventh, nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 6: As you opened the book, two teens were about to
Speaker 6: plow a cornfield on some farmland. One of the teens
Speaker 6: father least in Superior Township, just north of Eastern Michigan
Speaker 6: University campus. It was an all area known as a
Speaker 6: lever's lane. So they heard some voices in a vehicle's
Speaker 6: door slam. Tell us what these two teens heard and
Speaker 6: what they reported, tell us about what happens that day
Speaker 6: August seventh.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, they were in the lot I think they
Speaker 7: were sixteen seventeen years old and putting gas into a
Speaker 7: tractor and they were to plow a field for their father,
Speaker 7: who at least, you know, some farmland on a deserted farm.
Speaker 7: The farm itself was known as the Scottney Brothers place,
Speaker 7: and the Scotney brothers had been long long dead and
Speaker 7: the farm went into receivership, like so many of the
Speaker 7: farms in that area had done during the thirties and
Speaker 7: forties and so on. So there were lots of these
Speaker 7: abandoned farms. And they're filling up the tractor with some
Speaker 7: gas and they hear a car door slam actually open,
Speaker 7: and then well, what's going on? So they were walking
Speaker 7: around the barn and there was a horseshoe driveway coming
Speaker 7: in and out of the place, and just as they
Speaker 7: came to a rise, they saw or heard a car leave,
Speaker 7: and you know, they said, well, you know, but then
Speaker 7: they smelled something that smelled like what it was the
Speaker 7: decomposition of flesh and this happened. Happened in Michigan and
Speaker 7: uh a farm area that's also known to uh uh
Speaker 7: you have lots of white tailed deer, and to see
Speaker 7: a dead deer carcass uh in the woods is not
Speaker 7: that rare. And they went up and they uh uh
Speaker 7: you know, the smell was getting worse and worse, and
Speaker 7: they saw this body and uh they thought it was
Speaker 7: just a deer. It was a nude body and uh
Speaker 7: and then one of the boys noticed that there was
Speaker 7: an earring, and you know, there was an ear with
Speaker 7: an earring attached, and and they both freaked out. They
Speaker 7: got in the car and they ran right to the
Speaker 7: uh uh uh State Police in Ifslane and uh you know,
Speaker 7: they sent out a group of people to investigate and
Speaker 7: to cut to the chase. This is one of the
Speaker 7: worst crime scenes that these state policemen had ever seen.
Speaker 7: Her body had been sitting out in the elements for
Speaker 7: thirty days, and you know, it was horrific. And I
Speaker 7: do explain it in the book, but I prefer not
Speaker 7: to right now over the air. But it was a
Speaker 7: bad situation. And then two weeks later, the Detroit riots
Speaker 7: occurred in nineteen sixty seven and Mary's investigation, her case,
Speaker 7: everything just got pushed way off on the back page
Speaker 7: and for the next month everything was about the riots,
Speaker 7: in the after math of the riots and so on,
Speaker 7: so people in short forgot about Mary Fleager. But the police,
Speaker 7: the policeman who was investigating, told the parents that if
Speaker 7: we don't catch this guy with in the next thirty days,
Speaker 7: he's going to kill again. Within a year, and almost
Speaker 7: to the day, I think it was two days shy
Speaker 7: of a year, the second body turned up and and
Speaker 7: then you know, went on from there.
Speaker 6: So you talk about the second person co ed and
Speaker 6: these are all co eds from the university campus and
Speaker 6: they this was Joan Yeah, and this is j.
Speaker 7: Yeah. She was a twenty year old who sophomore. And
Speaker 7: there's a little backstory with her uh situation, but she
Speaker 7: was by all accounts, just a very cheerful, positive, UH
Speaker 7: young woman. She worked in the union, in the cafeteria
Speaker 7: service at McKinney Union, and just just a very very
Speaker 7: nice young woman. Anyway, she's having dinner with her parents
Speaker 7: on a weekend where she had gone home for the weekend,
Speaker 7: and it was Sunday, and they took her to a
Speaker 7: restaurant called hobbs in Epsilani, and she was real jumpy.
Speaker 7: She just you know, she wanted to get back. And
Speaker 7: she told her parents, you know, I've got a big
Speaker 7: testomer I got to study. You know, I can't linger here.
Speaker 7: So they had a quick dinner and they took her
Speaker 7: to her apartment. Well, as it turns out, she had
Speaker 7: not seen her boyfriend for quite some time. He had
Speaker 7: been drafted into the military and was in Kentucky, No no, No,
Speaker 7: Fort Gordon, Georgia actually, and he did his boot camp
Speaker 7: and then he went to aw O well, and he
Speaker 7: worked his way back up to Ifslani and Arbor to
Speaker 7: college towns separated by about nine miles. And so he
Speaker 7: was at the University of Michigan, working under an assumed name,
Speaker 7: and was going to get off at about midnight, I
Speaker 7: think it was, And so she was really anxious to
Speaker 7: see him. She hadn't seen him in a while, so
Speaker 7: she was going to go out and take the bus.
Speaker 7: She stands out on the corner with her roommate is
Speaker 7: just keeping her company while she was out there in
Speaker 7: the dark, and they watched the bus zoom by. It's
Speaker 7: packed standing room, and so it didn't even make a
Speaker 7: pretense to stop or anything. So she's you know, heartfalling
Speaker 7: and anxious about seeing the boyfriend. So she sticks her
Speaker 7: thumb out, which was not something that was you know,
Speaker 7: rare in those days, especially between these two college towns,
Speaker 7: because there was a lot of traffic, you know, all
Speaker 7: day long and at night between the two campuses, and
Speaker 7: so she felt reasonably safe. But I have to say
Speaker 7: that there was a lapse of judgment on her part.
Speaker 7: But she stuck her thumb out, and these three guys
Speaker 7: come in a convertible and oh, where are you going.
Speaker 7: I'm going to ann Arbor. Hey, we're going to ann Arbor.
Speaker 7: Hop in the car, and that's what she did. Her
Speaker 7: roommate tried to talk her out of it.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 7: You know, Joan's primary directive that night was to hook
Speaker 7: up with her boyfriend. And then the story takes a
Speaker 7: turn because rather than goes straight to ann Arbor, which
Speaker 7: is the direction the car was pointed, they looped around
Speaker 7: the campus a little bit and the driver had two
Speaker 7: there were three people, so the other two guys, hey,
Speaker 7: you know, I'll take her in ann Arbor. We'll see
Speaker 7: you guys later, and dropped him off. Well, he took
Speaker 7: off and three days later her body was found. She
Speaker 7: never made it to ann Arbor. From about midnight to
Speaker 7: one o'clock, the boyfriend and her roommate were on the
Speaker 7: phone saying did she make it? No, she didn't make it.
Speaker 7: Are you sure? Did she come back to the apartment,
Speaker 7: And so the boyfriend gets in the car and goes
Speaker 7: looking for her frantically all over and you know, can't
Speaker 7: find her. So they call in the morning, they call
Speaker 7: Joan Shall's parents, thinking, well, maybe she went home or
Speaker 7: but that was not the case either. So three days
Speaker 7: later they find Joan Shell in the countryside just north
Speaker 7: of the Eastern Michigan University campus, and Joan is laying
Speaker 7: along the fence throw with twenty five stab wounds. She's
Speaker 7: been sexually molested. She had a red burlap bag, you know,
Speaker 7: with overnight things, and that was missing. And the police,
Speaker 7: some of them who had worked the first murder, said,
Speaker 7: you know, there's some real strong similarities between the Pleasure
Speaker 7: murder and the Shell murder, and that sent up the
Speaker 7: first alert. But the FBI has a protocol and before
Speaker 7: they officially declare a serial killer on the loose, they
Speaker 7: need to have three murders. It's got to be pretty
Speaker 7: much the same modus operandi the three murders. There's always
Speaker 7: a cooling off here and uh, and the first two
Speaker 7: murders met that criteria without having that third murder. Everything
Speaker 7: else matched up, and later on I'm going to jump
Speaker 7: in the story. It's because it's fragmented. It's on my mind.
Speaker 7: The red burlap bag. Apparently that evening John Collins showed
Speaker 7: up at the apartment with where one of the guys
Speaker 7: who was in the car. His name is Arnie Davis.
Speaker 7: You know, they both rented a room in the same
Speaker 7: boarding house, and Collins came back later that evening with
Speaker 7: the red burlap shoulder bag that had Jones overnight things.
Speaker 7: But Collins also had her and he opened it up
Speaker 7: and he took the money out of it, and he
Speaker 7: exclaimed and Arnie later on in court that's way done
Speaker 7: in the story.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 7: This is from his testimony. Colin said, the bitch lied
Speaker 7: to me. She told me she was married, and the
Speaker 7: license played at you know, Jones shall single and so on.
Speaker 7: So that's a wrecked connection bang with that murder. But
Speaker 7: it was still another year and the six more murders
Speaker 7: before you know, this guy finally was caught.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm. Let's use this as an opportunity to stop
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Speaker 6: Now, we just talked about Joon Shell. But there wasn't
Speaker 6: an employee. There was a at the school. There was
Speaker 6: and he had a coworker and John Collins worked at
Speaker 6: the at the school, and there was somebody that complained
Speaker 6: a coworker that they were John Collins was harassing them
Speaker 6: about details about the mutilation found when Joan Shell's body
Speaker 6: was found. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: this event and and what happens with John Collins and
Speaker 6: any suspicion by police that he may be involved by
Speaker 6: knowing that those details.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, John kept dropping details about the second murder,
Speaker 7: which by that time in the campus newspapers. You know,
Speaker 7: everybody knew that, you know, that Joan had been murdered.
Speaker 7: And he kept irritating one of the female workers. He
Speaker 7: worked in the alumni association office, and he just kept
Speaker 7: dropping these disturbing remarks around this woman, a young woman,
Speaker 7: and she told her supervisor, and you know, not much happened,
Speaker 7: and but the police were, you know, interested in anybody
Speaker 7: because they had no leads. So he was interviewed and
Speaker 7: John Norman Collins bluffed his way out of suspicion. Let's say,
Speaker 7: as he's being interviewed, the police see a clean cut kid. Well,
Speaker 7: he was a weightlifter, so he had a very nice
Speaker 7: trim physique. He looked like an athlete because he was
Speaker 7: an athlete, and real short hair. Well in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 7: you know, everybody had started growing their hair out and
Speaker 7: you know, wearing bell bottoms, and you know, there was
Speaker 7: a real schism because here this guy looks like mister
Speaker 7: Joe College and hiding behind that protective coloration. Uh. He
Speaker 7: then casually says, hey, uh, do you guys know my uncle,
Speaker 7: he's a state policeman. And he drops his uncle's name
Speaker 7: and uh, they say, oh, yeah, we we know him.
Speaker 7: A nice guy, lives over on corn Allen so on.
Speaker 7: So they strike up a conversation and uh, he's let go,
Speaker 7: and the police never follow up on that. It was
Speaker 7: it was like almost like a professional courtesy once removed.
Speaker 7: You know, Collins isn't the policeman, but within the Fraternal
Speaker 7: Order of Police, I know, some communities have little stickers
Speaker 7: that families put in the uh a windshield of their
Speaker 7: car to you know, indicate that they're husbands or police
Speaker 7: officers and so on stuff there they speed a little bit, okay,
Speaker 7: slow it down, you know that sort of thing. And
Speaker 7: in the small town of Ipsilani. Uh, basically it worked
Speaker 7: and he wasn't under suspicion again until a number of bodies,
Speaker 7: quite a few bodies started turning up and you know,
Speaker 7: he had bluffed his way out of an arrest.
Speaker 6: You include a woman named Jane Mixer as a victim,
Speaker 6: and later we find out that that's not included in
Speaker 6: the crimes of Collins. But in terms of the community,
Speaker 6: they don't know what's going on. Except women are mixing
Speaker 6: or are missing, and co eds are missing. So Jane
Speaker 6: Mixer needed a ride to Missan and she didn't arrive,
Speaker 6: and her dad calls the Michigan State Police and alerts
Speaker 6: them of her disappearance. This is a bizarre murder. Tell
Speaker 6: us a little bit of the details of who found
Speaker 6: her and what was the state of her body at
Speaker 6: that location.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, Jane Mixer looking, as she said, looking for
Speaker 7: a ride. Now, Jane as a University of Michigan student,
Speaker 7: not an e MU student, but you know, a lot
Speaker 7: of dating and back and forth from one campus to
Speaker 7: a lot of cross pollination. And Jane, uh needed a ride.
Speaker 7: So in the University of Michigan Union student union, and
Speaker 7: it had a big courtboard with a map on it
Speaker 7: of Michigan, and then another one with the map of
Speaker 7: the United States. And uh, it was a ride board
Speaker 7: you'd put you know, I'm looking for a ride to
Speaker 7: Miskegan and so on and so forth. Here's my number.
Speaker 7: Today the ride board does not exist. Uh, And no
Speaker 7: young women, uh, you know, wouldn't just publicly put their
Speaker 7: phone numbers down there. Uh. And so she got a
Speaker 7: call and uh from allegedly a person called David Johnson, UH,
Speaker 7: and I'm just I want to sweep that off off
Speaker 7: the list here. Uh turned out to be a fictitious name.
Speaker 7: But there was a lot of police energy that went
Speaker 7: into locating every David Johnson within a two or three
Speaker 7: year range, uh in the whole state of Michigan, and UH,
Speaker 7: every one of those clues went nowhere. So if she
Speaker 7: was picked up, supposed to to be driven home and
Speaker 7: she was found by the next morning, she was found
Speaker 7: by a high school kid, ninth grader, I believe, walking
Speaker 7: to school and walking to the bus stop rather to
Speaker 7: get to school, and he sees a bag on the
Speaker 7: road and it's a shopping bag, you know, with the
Speaker 7: loop handles and so on. And he looks in there
Speaker 7: and there are several wrapped presents and a couple of
Speaker 7: notebooks with notes in him your students would have, and
Speaker 7: I don't recall what else, but you know, maybe some
Speaker 7: personal items. So he sees it. He's only a couple
Speaker 7: of houses away from his house. He takes it to
Speaker 7: his mother and he's says, hey, I found this on
Speaker 7: the street, and maybe you can see you know who
Speaker 7: it belongs to, and we'll get it back to him.
Speaker 7: And then he heads off so he doesn't miss his buss,
Speaker 7: and about three blocks down the street, well, the mom
Speaker 7: looks at it. He takes the things out the presence
Speaker 7: and notices that there's congealed blood that had soaked through
Speaker 7: the bottom of the bag. And she freaked out. So
Speaker 7: she jumped in her car, and you know, she knew
Speaker 7: that her son had found it right in front of
Speaker 7: the entrance to the Denton Cemetery in Denton, Michigan. So
Speaker 7: she goes to the Denton Cemetery and pulls in and
Speaker 7: at one of the graves, just real close to where
Speaker 7: you pull into the cemetery, it is the body of
Speaker 7: Jane Mixer beneath her her raincoat. And this lady went hysterical.
Speaker 7: She pulled out of the cemetery real fast, continued down
Speaker 7: the road, her her sons still waiting on the corner
Speaker 7: for the bus. She just takes the car, goes through
Speaker 7: the stop sign and goes to her sister's house and
Speaker 7: starts beating wildly on the door. And this is very dramatic,
Speaker 7: but this is how the sun and the aunt told
Speaker 7: me how I went and opened the door, and that
Speaker 7: mom was just so upset and she couldn't really get
Speaker 7: it out, you know, what it is that she had seen,
Speaker 7: and you know, finally they calmed her down, called the police,
Speaker 7: and that was the finding of the third body. But
Speaker 7: something was different about this one. You know, here we
Speaker 7: now have three co eds killed, and you know, with
Speaker 7: cooling off period, you know, all those things I said before,
Speaker 7: But the police that were most familiar with the other
Speaker 7: two murders said, this doesn't look like like the other two.
Speaker 7: The FBI also categorizes serial murders serial killer murders as
Speaker 7: either organized or disorganized. The first two were disorganized, you know,
Speaker 7: murders of passion, murders of opportunity. But this one, she
Speaker 7: was laid out nicely and and she as the investigators discovered.
Speaker 7: They take the coat off of the body, and she's
Speaker 7: fully clothed except her dresses pulled up around her waist
Speaker 7: and her pantyhose are pulled down around her thighs. But
Speaker 7: her pennies are on, and she has a sanitary napkin
Speaker 7: in and it had not been that area, had not
Speaker 7: been tampered with or anything. But that's how they found her.
Speaker 7: And then the coat was put on top of all
Speaker 7: of that, almost as if the murderer didn't want some
Speaker 7: kid to find the body like that. That was one
Speaker 7: of the police suppositions. This murder also started the myth
Speaker 7: that John Collins went wild whenever he was confronted with
Speaker 7: the menstruating woman. Whether it was the odor or you know,
Speaker 7: I don't want to get too graphic, but he just
Speaker 7: apparently that was a trigger according to the police, and
Speaker 7: I personally don't think that that it was a big
Speaker 7: factor in the murders. There was another more compelling reason
Speaker 7: that we'll get to. But this murder was organized, and
Speaker 7: it took thirty years before her family and they kept
Speaker 7: on it for thirty years with the police, and one
Speaker 7: thing or another, and DNA had come to the the
Speaker 7: forensic toolkits and there was a drop of blood or no,
Speaker 7: I'm sorry, I think it was perspiration, but it could
Speaker 7: have been a drop of blood. I don't remember. And
Speaker 7: the DNA was checked out and it was a direct
Speaker 7: hit for somebody who had just gotten into the system,
Speaker 7: because the whole system of the DNA profiling was you know,
Speaker 7: being being born. But this got bang a direct hit
Speaker 7: and turned out it was from a male nurse in
Speaker 7: the area called Gary ear a lighterman and Gary was
Speaker 7: convicted of this murder. But this is thirty years later,
Speaker 7: and so bang. Now we have three unsolved murders and
Speaker 7: the FBI of parameters I'll go into effect. And if
Speaker 7: Solani is beside itself and they know that there's a
Speaker 7: murder somewhere in town and it really affected how people
Speaker 7: raise their kids, and there was a lot of freedom
Speaker 7: that kids had taken away, and the fear was palpable.
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Speaker 6: Now more in line with the signature of the killing
Speaker 6: of the two first victims rather than Jane Mixer is
Speaker 6: two days later, remarkably is Marilynn Skelton, a sixteen year
Speaker 6: old didn't arrive as plan and she again was hitchhiking
Speaker 6: and she was reported by a friend, so that is
Speaker 6: not official. This is a really sad story with the
Speaker 6: parental response in this particular case. But this body again
Speaker 6: was another atrocious crime scene with something protruding from her
Speaker 6: genitals by the killer, and welts and bruises over her
Speaker 6: body indicating that she had had a belt buckle and
Speaker 6: a violent strapping with a belt. So this is again
Speaker 6: another shocking crime scene, and the killer known to be,
Speaker 6: as you mentioned, sadistic a killer certainly, so tell us
Speaker 6: about this not to go too far into this because
Speaker 6: this is again very bizarre that the parents would respond
Speaker 6: like this with their daughters.
Speaker 7: The book in itself, Her Murder is a book in itself,
Speaker 7: And as a side note here, I had to cut
Speaker 7: a lot of pages words. I had one hundred and
Speaker 7: forty four thousand words and I cut it down to
Speaker 7: one hundred and eleven book to one hundred and eleven
Speaker 7: thousand words because there was so much to write about
Speaker 7: Maryland Skelton, but I'll compact it as much as I can.
Speaker 7: She's hitch hiking from her home. She had a violent
Speaker 7: argument with her father. Was a backstory, but to cut
Speaker 7: to the chase, her family moved to Flint from Romulus, Michigan,
Speaker 7: uprooted her. She wasteen years old. But well, on that
Speaker 7: day she was sixteen. She had been sixteen for only
Speaker 7: twenty days, and she was picked up by someone taken
Speaker 7: out into the country to what most people believe is
Speaker 7: another abandoned farm on Getty's Road. And I'm trying to
Speaker 7: think what the other road was, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 7: And she was horribly beaten. And Marylyn had been a
Speaker 7: runaway quite a few times, and it was a terrible
Speaker 7: home life. And she ended up hooking up with a
Speaker 7: bunch of hippies in Detroit at the Brandy Ballroom. She
Speaker 7: went there quite a bit and got to know some
Speaker 7: of the band members and then you know, she got
Speaker 7: to be kind of an underage groupie and had, you know,
Speaker 7: a whole lot of life experiences early. But the reason
Speaker 7: I mentioned that is because the county sheriff decides that
Speaker 7: the murderer is a drug crazed hippie, and he did
Speaker 7: everything he could to the murders, to somebody, to a
Speaker 7: group led by somebody called John Sinclair. And that's a
Speaker 7: whole other side story that I don't want to go into.
Speaker 7: But here's the deal. Marilyn had taken a karate class,
Speaker 7: a woman's self defense class at Belleville High School and
Speaker 7: with a couple of friends, and apparently she was very
Speaker 7: good at it, and you know, she took the course
Speaker 7: because she felt like she needed it. Apparently. My theory.
Speaker 3: Is that.
Speaker 7: The murderer took her to this place, you know, forced
Speaker 7: her into this deserted farmhouse, and started, you know, abusing her,
Speaker 7: and she probably gave him a hard kick to the grind.
Speaker 7: And I say that because this particular young woman had
Speaker 7: not been raped. They didn't find any semen in here.
Speaker 7: And I think she gave him a powerful kick and
Speaker 7: enraged him further than he already was, because he's already
Speaker 7: a mad dog, you know, hits a branch, hits her
Speaker 7: as hard as he can in the face, and crushes
Speaker 7: in her eye socket, and then he breaks off a
Speaker 7: part of that branch, about seventeen inches of that branch,
Speaker 7: and violates her repeatedly tears her up inside. And you
Speaker 7: mentioned the belt, big leather belt with a belt buckle.
Speaker 7: She had welths in the shape of that buckle all
Speaker 7: up and down the front of her body. And she
Speaker 7: was beat up worse than any of the others. And
Speaker 7: then she was left in the back of a subdivision
Speaker 7: that was being in East ann Arbor. And for me,
Speaker 7: the interesting part of the story is that the road
Speaker 7: crew putting in sewers and electrical or whatever they were
Speaker 7: doing for the county looked, I think there might be
Speaker 7: a dead body or a body back there on this
Speaker 7: little rise. So he goes into one of the houses
Speaker 7: that's being built and there are two carpenters there, and
Speaker 7: he asked the carpenters, He said, would you see there's
Speaker 7: we think there's a body in the back, and you know,
Speaker 7: we're busy over here, and you know, don't would you
Speaker 7: check to check it out? They didn't want to, you know,
Speaker 7: get mired down with it. And so one of the
Speaker 7: carpenters goes over there and you know, looks the body up,
Speaker 7: up and down and says, yeah, it's a body and
Speaker 7: called the police. That man just happened to be my landlord.
Speaker 7: And that's one of my many links to this case
Speaker 7: and why I wrote this book, why I felt like
Speaker 7: I was the only person that could have written this book,
Speaker 7: because I have so many personal links. My landlord found
Speaker 7: Mary's Skelton's body. Yeah, it's terrible, and probably because if
Speaker 7: we start talking about her anymore, I can go another
Speaker 7: half an hour just on her. But here we have,
Speaker 7: as far as people know, four murders, two Eastern co eds,
Speaker 7: one U of them co ed. And now we have
Speaker 7: a high school dropout. When she turned twenty, she has sixteen.
Speaker 7: I'm sorry. When she turned sixteen, she as an emancipated team,
Speaker 7: dropped out of school, and twenty days later, this is
Speaker 7: what happened to her.
Speaker 6: Now, let's get to twenty two days later. Remarkably, only
Speaker 6: twenty two days later, and you know, we haven't even
Speaker 6: mentioned about the panic of law enforcement in Ypsilani. Things
Speaker 6: like this don't happen, let alone what is happening, and
Speaker 6: they get to know, they see these crime scenes. Twenty
Speaker 6: two days later, it's news of don Luis Bason. Bason
Speaker 6: and news of her abduction and murder really sent the
Speaker 6: city into shock. She's an eighth Gradepelaniyah.
Speaker 7: If Solanie has in a very general sense, it's divided
Speaker 7: into two parts, the town and the gown. The town
Speaker 7: the city, and Eastern Michigan and University the gown. And
Speaker 7: so far none of these murders were anybody local and
Speaker 7: was there concern, Yes, Eastern Michigan University in particular was
Speaker 7: on red alert. But for the city. When fourteen year
Speaker 7: old Don Basin was abducted and her body found the
Speaker 7: next morning, it went through town and chilled everyone to
Speaker 7: the bone, and nobody wanted to talk the police or
Speaker 7: the press or to each other because you didn't know
Speaker 7: if next door that's where the killer lived. And so
Speaker 7: there was a book some years ago, very good book
Speaker 7: by the way, called Killer among Us, and it's about
Speaker 7: two college towns where there were serial killers, and one
Speaker 7: of them is Ipsey, and he really went into the
Speaker 7: impact of the murder of Don Basin on the town.
Speaker 7: And no clothes were coming in, nothing, people were afraid.
Speaker 7: And a little side note human interest story, is that
Speaker 7: one of the police, the first police to show up
Speaker 7: on the scene was a police a policeman from Ipsilanti, Michigan,
Speaker 7: and just I believe it was the night before, or
Speaker 7: maybe it was the weekend before, Dawn had been at
Speaker 7: his house at a slumber party with his daughter. Can
Speaker 7: you imagine the impact on that officer?
Speaker 6: Yes, incredibly, uh lumps.
Speaker 7: I'm still struggling with it. Incredible, no shortage of tragedy, horror, fear,
Speaker 7: and by this time the murderer is toying not just
Speaker 7: with victims, but with a whole city. And as the
Speaker 7: murders progress, it's looking at it in retrospect, I can
Speaker 7: imagine the layered horror of all of this. But honestly,
Speaker 7: when it was playing out in real time and I
Speaker 7: was on campus, it really didn't get on my radar
Speaker 7: screen that much. You know, I was working, I was
Speaker 7: going to college part time. Then I was sleeping and
Speaker 7: I was working. I didn't get the newspaper, so I
Speaker 7: wasn't tuned into any of this at the time. But
Speaker 7: you know, there was a switch that was turned, and
Speaker 7: you know, we'll get to that in a bit. But
Speaker 7: so she was found laying on the side of the road.
Speaker 7: Don Base I'm fourteen years old. And another side note here,
Speaker 7: real quickly, if Don would have made it another year
Speaker 7: into the ninth grade, I would have had her. I
Speaker 7: would likely have had her in my English class at
Speaker 7: Ifsolani High School as it was, I had several of
Speaker 7: her close friends. And fifty years later, when I'm writing
Speaker 7: this book and trying to get information in ipsil Ani
Speaker 7: on the internet, people started surfacing from my past, several
Speaker 7: college professors and a number of students who knew Don
Speaker 7: And when you read that particular chapter, you can get
Speaker 7: evidence that I went a little more into the character
Speaker 7: of who this young woman was because I had more
Speaker 7: people willing to volunteer personal information and really put themselves
Speaker 7: out there because fifty years had gone by and they
Speaker 7: didn't even talk about it. They tried to get it
Speaker 7: out of their head, but couldn't, And when my book
Speaker 7: came out, it gave them an opportunity, a vehicle to
Speaker 7: deal with their feelings. And that was one of the
Speaker 7: great pleasures I've had with writing this book, is because
Speaker 7: it seemed to help a lot of women in particular
Speaker 7: deal with these memories that had been haunting them for
Speaker 7: fifty years. You need to take a drink care.
Speaker 6: Let's just as an opportunity to stop for these messages.
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Speaker 6: Now, the difference with this crime with the Basson murder
Speaker 6: is that the sheriff decided to check out every abandoned
Speaker 6: farm building in the area between the drop site and
Speaker 6: the victims home, and what we haven't mentioned is these crimes.
Speaker 6: What's characteristic of them, Gregory, is that they realize that
Speaker 6: the people are killed elsewhere rather than where the crime
Speaker 6: scene seems to where the dumpsite is, because there's a difference.
Speaker 6: So they do an extensive search for abandoned farm buildings
Speaker 6: in the area. And three hours later, less than a
Speaker 6: mile you write from the victims, and about a third
Speaker 6: of a mile from Mary Flesser's body, on Getty's Road,
Speaker 6: there's a barn. What do they find in that barn?
Speaker 7: Well, both of those abandoned farm houses were on Getty's Road.
Speaker 7: One was three quarters of a mile or so down
Speaker 7: the road from the other one. What they found there
Speaker 7: was some electrical wire, a spool of electrical wire that
Speaker 7: had been clipped on one end, and the body of
Speaker 7: John Basin had been strangled with electrical wire, and the
Speaker 7: clipping of the wire and the spool and matched, and
Speaker 7: they knew they had something. They also found her sweater
Speaker 7: and and some other items. Off the top of my head,
Speaker 7: I don't remember, uh everything they found. I know there
Speaker 7: was a a pierced earring. I don't know if it
Speaker 7: was gold or a pearl. You know, the details aren't
Speaker 7: coming to me.
Speaker 5: But she was.
Speaker 7: Was not beat up the same way that Marilyn Skelton was,
Speaker 7: but she had been violated. Also. The town went crazy,
Speaker 7: uh in a you know, not actively, but you know,
Speaker 7: they got shut down, is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 7: And the sister of the first victim, which was now
Speaker 7: over a year ago, almost two years ago, wrote an
Speaker 7: impassioned letter, open letter to the people of Ippsilani about
Speaker 7: the loss of her sister and the impact it had
Speaker 7: on her and her family. And we've all got to
Speaker 7: pull together. We need to get this guy. That was
Speaker 7: an impassioned letter, and I printed the whole letter in
Speaker 7: my book and people started loosening up with the information,
Speaker 7: but the fear factor was still extreme.
Speaker 6: So you talk about very very soon after, and this
Speaker 6: is Washington County. They are putting the DA William Delhay
Speaker 6: calls a meeting, and they're putting the five police agencies
Speaker 6: in the different jurisdictions together to try to solve these
Speaker 6: now six unsolved murders.
Speaker 5: They have.
Speaker 7: What happened?
Speaker 6: They what happens with a person named Joseph Caleem from
Speaker 6: Kalamazoo and his daughter Alice Elizabeth.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, Alice two months after bas She's found the
Speaker 7: furthest the field from e Mu, but it's pretty clear
Speaker 7: that the murder is from that area. And she was
Speaker 7: found on North Territorial Road and that's just about at
Speaker 7: the northern edge of Washington County. And Uh, Alice, UH,
Speaker 7: what was you know that this is a difficult murder
Speaker 7: because there were a number of conflicting eyewitness uh reports,
Speaker 7: and Uh, I happened to uncover somebody, Uh who I
Speaker 7: I had to make a judgment call about should I
Speaker 7: believe this guy or not? And everything he told me
Speaker 7: in some subsequent things I had corroboration on, and so
Speaker 7: I went with it. Alice had uh was on our
Speaker 7: way to a party at a place called, uh not
Speaker 7: Depot Town because that's an epsilenty. Uh, I'll just call
Speaker 7: it the Depot House. And it was an an old
Speaker 7: railroad kind of warehouse to store luggage in and so on,
Speaker 7: which was now in the sixties being used to rent
Speaker 7: out to bands and for parties and receptions and you know,
Speaker 7: different things. Well, she was going to a birthday party
Speaker 7: for a local and ourbor musician. Alice again is is
Speaker 7: a U of M student. She's not an Eastern student.
Speaker 7: But again the two campuses are are, you know, very
Speaker 7: closely linked. And so she apparently went to this place
Speaker 7: and met John Collins there and he came on to
Speaker 7: her real strong. He'd danced with her for a while.
Speaker 7: They go outside and then he'd put the moves on
Speaker 7: her and they'd go in and dance some more. And eventually,
Speaker 7: according to my source and it may or may not
Speaker 7: be accurate, on the back of his motorcycle and takes off,
Speaker 7: and that's the last that she was seen alive. And
Speaker 7: she was taken to Ipseil Annie to his room, his apartment.
Speaker 7: So the name Arnie Davis comes up again because he
Speaker 7: knew she was there. He knew she was there, and
Speaker 7: he puts some you know, serious moods on her. Collins
Speaker 7: did in his room and essentially half tore off her
Speaker 7: clothes and her blouse is ripped and open, and she
Speaker 7: ran out of there and happened to see some people
Speaker 7: walking along, and you know, she asked if she could
Speaker 7: know she was in trouble, she could walk with them. Now,
Speaker 7: I don't know what happened after that, but apparently he
Speaker 7: just wouldn't let her go running around crazy and maybe
Speaker 7: tell the police that you know, she escaped being raped
Speaker 7: or whatever. Somehow he looked for her founder and maybe
Speaker 7: with help, took her to this abandoned Farman Northtorial Territorial
Speaker 7: road and killed her. And what's notable about Alice's murder
Speaker 7: is that she had more semen in her than one
Speaker 7: man can produce. That was in the autopsy report. So
Speaker 7: that suggests somebody else was involved. Was it Arnie Davis?
Speaker 7: Was it another room called Andrew Manuel. If we don't know,
Speaker 7: we don't have the absolute evidence on that. But by
Speaker 7: that time the town has gone crazy, and Ann Arber
Speaker 7: as well. So this is ifsy Ann Harber.
Speaker 6: You introduce a fascinating character that runs through this story
Speaker 6: from this beginning to the end, and I'll just introduced
Speaker 6: him as Peter Horkles, and he was interjected himself into
Speaker 6: the Boston Strangler case and claimed that he was instrumental
Speaker 6: in the capture of the Boston Strangler. Now he looks
Speaker 6: at this particular case and wants to interject himself again.
Speaker 6: He's a Dutch psychic. And but you also introduce the
Speaker 6: the Washington Washington County Sheriff Douglas Harvey and the psychic
Speaker 6: and Douglas Harvey are a clash, to say the least,
Speaker 6: like to say, the community is going crazy and they're
Speaker 6: and they're looking, especially at that time, at any kind
Speaker 6: of help that they can possibly get. And it comes
Speaker 6: with this Peter Hirkis trying to interject himself into this case. Uh,
Speaker 6: tell us just a little bit about this Peter Hirkis
Speaker 6: and what he does, how he interacts with this Sheriff Harvey,
Speaker 6: and what happens when he is set to leave the city.
Speaker 7: He comes into town by the recruit request of a
Speaker 7: citizens group and he makes a big splash, and the
Speaker 7: citizens group happens to be some of these hippies that
Speaker 7: Doug Harvey was going after. So this was kind of
Speaker 7: a a cynical attempt to undermine the county sheriff and
Speaker 7: divert his attention away from this group called trans Love Energies.
Speaker 7: So this was another story that just could could be
Speaker 7: a book in and of himself. So Peter came from
Speaker 7: Europe with a reputation for helping solve hundreds of cases,
Speaker 7: and he had medals and citations, and he had been
Speaker 7: apparently a patriot during World War two and there's a
Speaker 7: statue of him with three other men in his hometown.
Speaker 7: So he decides he's going to come to America and
Speaker 7: psychics believe in him or don't believe in him. It
Speaker 7: was a growth industry in the nineteen sixties, and he
Speaker 7: was more about show business. He was a show business psychic.
Speaker 7: But he had fallen on hard times. You know, he
Speaker 7: wasn't getting so many bookings anymore on the Tonight Show,
Speaker 7: or actually he wasn't so much of a first tier
Speaker 7: Tonight Show kind of host. He was on Michael Douglas
Speaker 7: and Dinah Shore had a show, and Merv Griffin, you
Speaker 7: know those second tier talk shows, and he was a
Speaker 7: common guest. As far as the Boston Strangler goes. He
Speaker 7: had to leave town because he did some very unethical
Speaker 7: things and drove a person with emotional problems into an
Speaker 7: institution because of the pressure her coast put on this man.
Speaker 7: The Boston police told him to get out of town
Speaker 7: or we're going to arrest you. And that was his
Speaker 7: great Boston Strangler event, which got fictionalized and parleyed into
Speaker 7: the movie, which then became the reality for many people
Speaker 7: that oh he helped with the Boston Strangler case. Well
Speaker 7: that's all BS he's not getting the bookings in Hollywood anymore.
Speaker 7: And he gets this offer to come to ann Arbor
Speaker 7: at Soelani all expenses paid to look into this case,
Speaker 7: and so he does lots of hoopla, and it had
Speaker 7: been for the press. This has been boring because nobody's
Speaker 7: talking to them. The police don't have any real new clues.
Speaker 7: And here comes Peter her Cooas walking off the airplane
Speaker 7: with crutches, and there's a whole story there I'm not
Speaker 7: going into. Well, right from the start, Doug Harvey and
Speaker 7: Peter her Cooas aren't hitting it off. But the ann
Speaker 7: Arbor police chief is more open minded, and let's give
Speaker 7: this guy a chance. So he goes trumping over the
Speaker 7: different crime scenes and one thing or another comes out
Speaker 7: with some pronouncements, and one of them that turned out
Speaker 7: to be very accurate. But you know, he had somebody
Speaker 7: come to town prior to that research the whole thing.
Speaker 7: You know, he was slick and he did his homework.
Speaker 7: But and I'm going to cut to the last murder
Speaker 7: and talk about the California murders yet, but I don't
Speaker 7: want to confuse people. So here we are in July
Speaker 7: twenty third nineteen sixty nine. The last of the murders
Speaker 7: that occurred in Michigan was Kiaren Sue Bineman. She was
Speaker 7: going to the summer session. A real go getter, just
Speaker 7: got out of high school and decides she's going to
Speaker 7: go to summer school so she can get a jump
Speaker 7: on her classes, but so she can get a better
Speaker 7: room assignment in the fall. So that's why she's an IPSILENTI.
Speaker 2: And she.
Speaker 7: Had just written her her mom, a letter and stuck
Speaker 7: the newspaper college newspaper, the Eastern Echo, full page article
Speaker 7: about them and everything. And Mom, I'm settled in and
Speaker 7: I'm doing I'm having a great time. I love college.
Speaker 7: I'm being safe. Don't worry about me. Put it in
Speaker 7: an envelope, mailed it. And then she's walking to downtown,
Speaker 7: which is about four blocks away, long blocks, and she's
Speaker 7: going to a wig shop. She was going to buy
Speaker 7: a fall of that's what they call them. Then a
Speaker 7: hair piece, there's another word for him. But you know,
Speaker 7: I hear something to clip into her hair to give
Speaker 7: her fuller hair or whatever. And she had never ever
Speaker 7: considered doing that, but you know, she wanted to, you know,
Speaker 7: glam out a little bit for her friend's wedding, and
Speaker 7: on the way to the wig shop, this guy comes
Speaker 7: by and tries to pick her up on the bike
Speaker 7: and talks to her and how you do him and
Speaker 7: blah blah blah, and she, being careful, hops on the
Speaker 7: back of that bike, drives about only it's only a
Speaker 7: block and a half two blocks, and the guy stops.
Speaker 7: She gets off and goes in the wig shop and
Speaker 7: she's buying her wig in one thing or another. And
Speaker 7: as she's buying the wig, she says, you know, today,
Speaker 7: I've done two things I never thought i'd do. One is,
Speaker 7: you know, buy a wig, and the other is get
Speaker 7: on the back of a stranger's motorcycle. Well, the two
Speaker 7: women who were working inside the shop, and I think
Speaker 7: there were other people in the shop too, a couple,
Speaker 7: but the two women who work there, their hair just
Speaker 7: lifted up off the back of their necks because you know,
Speaker 7: they've been living this nightmare for almost two years, about
Speaker 7: for two years and three summers in two years. And
Speaker 7: they said, no, honey, you know, do you know what's
Speaker 7: going on? Do you know about the murders? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: I just read an article about it, and I know,
Speaker 7: you know, there's well, you know, don't get back on
Speaker 7: that motorcycle. And the owner of the store goes out
Speaker 7: and takes a you know, good look at the guy
Speaker 7: on the bike, walks outside, comes back in. She says, honey,
Speaker 7: let me drive you back to the campus. Uh. And
Speaker 7: Karen said, oh no, I don't want to, you know,
Speaker 7: I don't want to bother you. She just ober polite.
Speaker 7: Uh and uh. So she buys the thing and in
Speaker 7: a small box and then goes out to the bise
Speaker 7: Bic motorcycle and tells the guy, Hey, I'm I decide
Speaker 7: it's a nice day, I'm going to walk and he says,
Speaker 7: oh no, he says, he says, uh, you know, it's
Speaker 7: kind of o let me, you know, take you home.
Speaker 7: And the hair blown, the wind blown through your hair
Speaker 7: and all of that. So she gets on there and
Speaker 7: they talk for a minute, and another woman in a
Speaker 7: store just happened to be out and she took a
Speaker 7: look at the bike. She didn't care about who was
Speaker 7: on the bike. She was a motorcycle enthusiast herself and
Speaker 7: her boyfriend and she's looking at this real sharp motorcycle.
Speaker 7: But she does notice that the woman was on the
Speaker 7: bike and then she got off. The guy talked her
Speaker 7: back onto the bike and then they took off. Well
Speaker 7: that was the last time she was ever seen alive
Speaker 7: by anybody but the killer. And she was taken to
Speaker 7: the basement of a Michigan State policeman, Corporal David Like
Speaker 7: and the murderer hesitating his name, and I've already used
Speaker 7: it several times, but you know, there still nobody really
Speaker 7: knows who he is yet. And he takes her to
Speaker 7: his uncle's home and not you know, too far from
Speaker 7: campus in Ipsilani, and the family is on a two
Speaker 7: week vacation, and John Norman Collins, the nephew, was asked
Speaker 7: if he would feed the dog and you know, look
Speaker 7: after the place, and he had a key, and he
Speaker 7: did just that, except he brought several women there because
Speaker 7: I talked to two other women that he brought to
Speaker 7: that house before he murdered Karen Sue Minemann. And he
Speaker 7: took her down in the basement of that house, and
Speaker 7: from bruises on her body, it appeared as if he
Speaker 7: threw her down the stairs, dragged her into a utility room.
Speaker 7: It was a Michigan basement, which means it's you know,
Speaker 7: like a half basement, and then it was half again
Speaker 7: into a kid's playroom and then a utility room, so
Speaker 7: in a very confined area. And you know then he
Speaker 7: killed her there, and of course, like the others, took
Speaker 7: her body someplace else, not too far away, but still
Speaker 7: north of Eastern's campus, in a sparsely a sparse area.
Speaker 7: It's adjacent to a nature area. And here on river
Speaker 7: runs right near where he dropped her body and rolled
Speaker 7: her down a small ravine gully, let's call it a gully.
Speaker 7: And that's where her body was found seven days later.
Speaker 7: Eight days later, I'm trying to get to six days later,
Speaker 7: I got some dates written here. Six days later, her
Speaker 7: body is found in this gully. And her murder was
Speaker 7: not that the others were insignificant, but in terms of
Speaker 7: solving this crime, her murder is the most significant.
Speaker 6: Yes, let's use as an opportunity to stop for a
Speaker 6: second for these messages. Now you introduce a very very
Speaker 6: important character. Without him, who knows what would have happened
Speaker 6: and how many more victims there may have been. Larry Matthewson.
Speaker 6: Now he's a patrolman and he they have the description
Speaker 6: of the triumph motorcycle. Somebody says it's a Honda four
Speaker 6: to fifty, but this other woman says it's a Triumph
Speaker 6: six fifty with a lot of clones, and so.
Speaker 7: One who knew her stuff, I correctly identified it, just
Speaker 7: to insert. But because the other women at the whigshot
Speaker 7: said it was a Honda, she didn't know what a
Speaker 7: Honda from a Suzuki. So the police were looking for
Speaker 7: somebody with a Honda, and again another break for Collins.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so Larry Matthewson, though, however, thinks he recognizes He says,
Speaker 6: I remember a guy with a striped shirt on a
Speaker 6: bike the afternoon Karen disappears, so he thinks, well, I
Speaker 6: know it's probably the fraternity Teta Chai fraternity house across
Speaker 6: from UMM E W campus. So what he does is
Speaker 6: he goes to this fraternity row and he approached some
Speaker 6: co ed's and he describes the person he's looking for,
Speaker 6: and a former member there says he was kicked out
Speaker 6: of the frat and anyway, he directs him to where
Speaker 6: he is, and so Matthewson goes, and this is about
Speaker 6: sixty feet away from the apartment Joan Shell lived the
Speaker 6: previous summer before she was.
Speaker 7: Across across the side street. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so Matthewson does some digging and talks to John Collins.
Speaker 6: You describe this very very cinematic scene where he talks
Speaker 6: to John Collins and another person that becomes important as
Speaker 6: they're fixing bikes in the back home.
Speaker 7: Yeah okay, Well he yeah figured that. You know, I
Speaker 7: saw this guy and I recognized him. He didn't know
Speaker 7: him by name, but Matthewson was in a fraternity called
Speaker 7: the Arm of Honor, and then you had the Fadea
Speaker 7: Kuys and they had their inter fraternity sports lakes. So
Speaker 7: they had played touch football I believe it was, and uh,
Speaker 7: you know, competed against each other. So Larry, who by
Speaker 7: the way, is a friend of mine, saw another link.
Speaker 7: Larry h recognizes that. Yeah, there was this guy and
Speaker 7: he had been identified the man who rode off with Kiaren.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 7: They said she he had like a I think we
Speaker 7: call them soccer shirts in those days, and horizontal stripes
Speaker 7: of green and white and some people said a green
Speaker 7: or yellow or you know, green and OFWF boy, you know,
Speaker 7: but the type of shirt was clear what it was.
Speaker 7: And Larry said, hey, I saw somebody that day with
Speaker 7: somebody on the back of his motorcycle, and Larry had,
Speaker 7: you know, been on control and he just happened to notice,
Speaker 7: you know, he was being alert. So he walks up
Speaker 7: to the house and he sees Collins and another guy
Speaker 7: in the back there working on a motorcycle, and he
Speaker 7: just happens to notice that the license plate on this
Speaker 7: green Triumph is bent up and biker's motorcyclists would do
Speaker 7: that so it couldn't be easily read by the police.
Speaker 7: It's not like everybody did that, because not everybody's a
Speaker 7: criminal out there, but you know, it's it's a ploy
Speaker 7: that motorcyclist sometimes shoes. And he notices that. So he
Speaker 7: goes up and he says, hey, how you doing. And
Speaker 7: I think by this time he knew his name John
Speaker 7: and Larry. Remember we used to, you know, to compete
Speaker 7: against one another and so on and so forth. Now
Speaker 7: Larry is not in his uniform, he's playing clothes. And
Speaker 7: one of the guys there that's with Collins says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 7: this is Larry. You know Larry, he's campus fuzz. So
Speaker 7: whoever said it made sure that Collins knew that he
Speaker 7: was talking to somebody connected with the police, which which
Speaker 7: tells me there's some culpability with this person or knowledge
Speaker 7: about a motorcycle theft ring and taking parts off of
Speaker 7: bikes and so on that Collins did a lot of.
Speaker 7: He was known for them, and so they you know,
Speaker 7: John Collins says, well, what can I do for And
Speaker 7: he says, well, you know these murders? And did you
Speaker 7: happen to see this is a girl a couple of
Speaker 7: days ago, and and he had a picture and he
Speaker 7: looked at it and I haven't seen it. The other guy, no,
Speaker 7: we don't know. And while they're doing that, a third
Speaker 7: guy comes out. Turns out it's Arnie Davis again. And
Speaker 7: Arnie says, hey, hey, John, I got that tag for you. Well,
Speaker 7: he was getting an illegal tag from the the What
Speaker 7: do you call that d m v U R. There's
Speaker 7: another in Michigan they call it something different. I live
Speaker 7: out here in California now, but whatever it was, you
Speaker 7: know the where you're right registration and so on. As
Speaker 7: it turns out, we find this later in retrospect that
Speaker 7: Ernie's cousin worked at the DMV and they put in
Speaker 7: some fraudulent paperwork to get him some clear plates for
Speaker 7: this motorcycle that he had stolen, and that's the one
Speaker 7: reason why it was bent up like that, because it
Speaker 7: was a hot bike. And he's, no, I've never seen her,
Speaker 7: never was you know. And Larry starts writing down the
Speaker 7: license plate numbers in a little notebook, and Collins turns
Speaker 7: on him and says, what are you doing. I'm writing
Speaker 7: numbers down. You know, it's just routine. Hey, you go
Speaker 7: play cop and know he gets vulgar with him, you know,
Speaker 7: I gumees's manhood. Get out of here. Yeah, blah blah,
Speaker 7: So acting guilty, and Matthewson goes to this place that
Speaker 7: you mentioned earlier where the five different police departments that
Speaker 7: were connected with, you know, some of all these murders
Speaker 7: had a command center. He goes back to the command
Speaker 7: center and says, hey, this he wrote up his report
Speaker 7: and it was a real strong lead. And at the
Speaker 7: same time, the corporal in the state Police, the uncle
Speaker 7: of John Collins, has brought his family back home and
Speaker 7: him and his wife noticed some things out of place
Speaker 7: and some things missing in their basement. He happens to go,
Speaker 7: you know, he still has another day or so before
Speaker 7: he has to get back to work, but he wants to,
Speaker 7: you know, get an update and hit the ground running.
Speaker 7: And he so he goes to the command center and
Speaker 7: the chief calls him in the office. He says, hey,
Speaker 7: I want to talk to you. And he says, John
Speaker 7: Norman Collins is your nephew. Huh And he says, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: He was taking care of my house, so my family
Speaker 7: was away for a couple of weeks. And he says, well,
Speaker 7: he's under surveillance for the murder of Karen Sue Bynemann,
Speaker 7: and we think you should do you know, should be
Speaker 7: aware of that. Well he's blown away, as you can
Speaker 7: well imagine, but he does his duty and he says,
Speaker 7: you know, Chief, when I got home, we noticed my
Speaker 7: wife and I noticed some things in the basement which
Speaker 7: I talk about in the book, that we're missing or
Speaker 7: out of place. And we saw some blotches on the
Speaker 7: floor that weren't there before. And my wife, who is
Speaker 7: fastidious about housework, had the house all clean before we
Speaker 7: left on vacation because she wanted to come home to
Speaker 7: a clean house. I do the same thing, and she
Speaker 7: notices on her freshly waxed kitchen floor that there are
Speaker 7: there's a pair of heel marks skid marks from shoes
Speaker 7: being dragged across that clean floor, and so like tells
Speaker 7: his commander.
Speaker 6: That, and.
Speaker 7: Everybody at that moment connected with the case pretty much
Speaker 7: knew who their man was, his house, where he lived,
Speaker 7: and if he was under surveillance, and he hadn't been
Speaker 7: home for a whole weekend he took off. He killed
Speaker 7: her on a Wednesday, and he took off, And so
Speaker 7: when he got home real late at night, the police
Speaker 7: had the house staked out, and they went up and
Speaker 7: talked with them in one thing or another, and the
Speaker 7: uncle uncle.
Speaker 6: Like he.
Speaker 7: Was there to kind of put Collins at ease, although
Speaker 7: I don't know how that would put him at ease,
Speaker 7: but they managed to take him for an interrogation at
Speaker 7: the State Police Post on Michigan Avenue in Ensiloni, And
Speaker 7: by that time he said, I'm not saying anything till
Speaker 7: I have a lawyer. So they had to appoint a lawyer,
Speaker 7: and you know, then they got to be a whole
Speaker 7: different story. You know, the murders all that, you know,
Speaker 7: have been done, but the story about the case and
Speaker 7: some of the crazy people that got involved with that case,
Speaker 7: and that's part two of the book. And I don't
Speaker 7: know where you want to go from here. Those are
Speaker 7: the murders, the Michigan murders that were committed in Michigan.
Speaker 7: But while Collins was arrested in jail, the story gets reported.
Speaker 7: I'm just gonna forgehn. The story gets reported on the
Speaker 7: National news. I think it was NBC National News serial
Speaker 7: killer for two years and killed seven women in the
Speaker 7: Ipsiloni John Norman Collins well all the way across the country.
Speaker 7: In Salinas, California. A police detective had been investigating the
Speaker 7: June ninth murder of Roxy and Phillips in California. Her
Speaker 7: body was found in Salinas, California. He's sitting there after work,
Speaker 7: eating a TV dinner. I guess, you know, as it
Speaker 7: was reported in the police reports, and he hears about
Speaker 7: this case. The woman was found in a gully. Her
Speaker 7: clothes had been removed, you know, she had been violated.
Speaker 7: And by this time in California, they knew that there
Speaker 7: was a car involved, but they didn't know what kind
Speaker 7: of car. And so the report, or it wasn't a
Speaker 7: report that alert investigator contacted the Washna County prosecutor. I
Speaker 7: think there could have been the police and he wanted information.
Speaker 7: He told him about the case he was working on
Speaker 7: and it was very similar to this case. So the
Speaker 7: Michigan investigators gave him a make and model and license
Speaker 7: plate number of a car and that was a key
Speaker 7: clue to nailing down this roxy in Phillips murder because
Speaker 7: the California police went around to every GM dealership because
Speaker 7: it was an olds cutlass and went with the license
Speaker 7: plate number and got a positive hit that yes, this
Speaker 7: car had been brought in that was after the murder.
Speaker 7: Short the next day it had been oil changed and
Speaker 7: whatever else was done to it. But there was a record,
Speaker 7: you know, you go take the car to the dealer
Speaker 7: and there's a serial number, ven number and whatnot. The
Speaker 7: car actually belonged to his mother and he had full
Speaker 7: use of it. It may it has well been his car.
Speaker 7: But then they got the address and more information, and
Speaker 7: then the story just gets more and more textured as
Speaker 7: these two cases collide, and it's very clear who the
Speaker 7: murderer is and now the washena county prosecutes prosecutor has
Speaker 7: to get a guilty verdict to get this guy off
Speaker 7: the street.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, it's interesting too that you talk you talk about
Speaker 6: the state of the death penalty. In Michigan, there was
Speaker 6: no death penalty and so but what California did have that,
Speaker 6: and so they would have to wait for the Michigan
Speaker 6: murder and so they had to try only the Biman
Speaker 6: case because it was had it had more possibility of conviction.
Speaker 6: So unfortunately, these other murder cases, these other women, those
Speaker 6: cases were not dealt with.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the prosecutor had an experience where he prosecuted somebody
Speaker 7: for two or three murders and then sentencing laws or
Speaker 7: there was some kind of change in the legislation something,
Speaker 7: and the guy got off on parole and he killed again,
Speaker 7: and he never forgot that. So he said, hey, I
Speaker 7: got this case. It's pretty tight here. And politically he
Speaker 7: had to try it in Michigan. And then there got
Speaker 7: to be an extradition dance between California and Michigan, between
Speaker 7: California Governor Ronald Reagan and Michigan Governor William Milligan. And
Speaker 7: you know, they went back and forth. The Roxy and
Speaker 7: Phillips case, and you know, it was a slam slam dunk,
Speaker 7: and the buying them in case not quite so much.
Speaker 7: But they had some witnesses and a lot of the
Speaker 7: case was circumstantial, but they felt like they had a
Speaker 7: good case. And if that case wasn't good enough, then
Speaker 7: they had another stellar case, and that was the Joan
Speaker 7: Espeth spell Shell case, and they were sure they could
Speaker 7: get a conviction on that one too. But here, you know,
Speaker 7: and again to cut to the chase, So there's this
Speaker 7: back and forth with the state attorney generals and politically
Speaker 7: Milken can't extradite him until he's been tried and convicted.
Speaker 7: And then his secretary of State of Frank, Oh jeez,
Speaker 7: I'll just his first name is Frank, and I'll think
Speaker 7: of it, said Kelly. Frank. Kelly says, California has a
Speaker 7: provision that if they try a person and he gets off,
Speaker 7: you're an extradited person and he gets off, that they
Speaker 7: have no jurisdiction or legal obligation to return him back
Speaker 7: to the home state. Yeah, it was very, very crazy.
Speaker 7: And then just to put a period to the end
Speaker 7: of this case. After Collins is convicted of first degree
Speaker 7: murder and given a life in prison sentence, there had
Speaker 7: been a prison riot at San Quentin and you know,
Speaker 7: out in California, and six people were convicts or whoever,
Speaker 7: six people were killed in this riot. So the California
Speaker 7: prosecutors had six cases of their own, and those are
Speaker 7: long drawn out cases, lots of people to talk with,
Speaker 7: and it came down to sorry to say, it came
Speaker 7: down to money because in California here they have six
Speaker 7: cases to try, there's only so much in the in
Speaker 7: the budget for prosecutions. And Michigan and this murder case
Speaker 7: with Roxy and Phillips. She was from Portland, Oregon, visiting.
Speaker 7: Collins was visiting from Michigan and killed her. So they
Speaker 7: had to decide, are we going to put our resources
Speaker 7: into a case of a woman who young young woman
Speaker 7: in tragic though it was, and killed by a man
Speaker 7: from Michigan and all the expense with extraditionary or do
Speaker 7: we just punt on it? And they punted, yeah, we have.
Speaker 6: Not much time to talk about all, like I said
Speaker 6: about a half of your incredible book. Because of the trial,
Speaker 6: he had a very very vigorous defense, very very capable attorneys,
Speaker 6: and they again fought very very vigorously, and so it
Speaker 6: was not a slam dunk got this at this trial,
Speaker 6: but they did get this murder, first degree murder conviction
Speaker 6: and life in prison for him. We won't give away
Speaker 6: the twist though, because there is out of the blue,
Speaker 6: even shockingly and surprisingly, because he had lived in Windsor, Ontario.
Speaker 6: In Canada, there was an agreement at some point where
Speaker 6: a plan to reintegrate, reintegrate criminals that had been born
Speaker 6: in say Canada, and return them to Canada to be
Speaker 6: able to do their sentence. However, with Canadian law and
Speaker 6: the parole board, Canadian Parole Board, this person that would
Speaker 6: have been never gotten out of prison in America would
Speaker 6: certainly be eligible and within a couple of years they
Speaker 6: predicted he would have day parole and be walking around
Speaker 6: loose on the streets of Canada.
Speaker 7: That's exactly what happened. So the Canadian connection is strong
Speaker 7: in this book. He was born in Windsor, but in
Speaker 7: the Walkerville section of Windsor, Ontario, and at five years
Speaker 7: old his mother divorced his father and they went into
Speaker 7: to uh Detroit and the mother was born in the
Speaker 7: Detroit area. So uh yeah, the story is it is
Speaker 7: very very rich.
Speaker 6: Absolutely to say the least. I want to thank you
Speaker 6: so much for coming on and talking about terror and
Speaker 6: lipsey yipsil ante pardoners. John Norman Collins on Mass of
Speaker 6: Gregory A. Fournier. Thank you so much. Is there a
Speaker 6: website that people might take a look at your other work,
Speaker 6: your other books that you have written, And yeah.
Speaker 7: I have an author's site and it's my name, Gregory A. Fournier.
Speaker 7: Most Canadians don't have trouble with that, but it ends
Speaker 7: in my last last name fou are n I.
Speaker 6: E R life.
Speaker 7: People in the state stay fourgnier. So it's Gregory A.
Speaker 7: Fournier dot com and that's it. It's very easy.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you so much. Terror and Ypsilany, John
Speaker 6: Norman Collins unmasked, thank you so much. Gregor Ray Fournier.
Speaker 6: You have a great evening. Thank you so much.
Speaker 7: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 6: Good night, good bye,