John Norman Collins: The All-American Monster

Between the summer of 1967 and the summer of 1969, seven young women were killed in and around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mary Fleszar, 19, was the first, in July 1967. Joan Schell, Maralynn Skelton, Dawn Basom, Alice Kalom and Roxie Ann Phillips followed. Newspapers took to calling the unknown killer the Co-Ed Killer, and students at Eastern Michigan University stopped walking anywhere alone.

Karen Sue Beineman, 18, was last seen on July 23, 1969, leaving a wig shop in downtown Ypsilanti. The shop owner watched her climb onto a blue motorcycle behind a young man and later picked out photographs of John Norman Collins, an elementary education major and former high-school sports star. Beineman’s body was found three days later in a gully near the Huron River. More than five hundred hair clippings in her clothing matched clippings in the basement of a house belonging to Collins’s uncle, a state police corporal, where he had been house-sitting alone.

Collins went on trial in the summer of 1970. Jurors deliberated more than twenty-seven hours before convicting him of first-degree murder on August 19, 1970, and he received Michigan’s mandatory sentence of life without parole. Appeals filed through 1976 were rejected. He was never charged in the other six deaths, and in 1972 California decided not to pursue its case over Roxie Ann Phillips.