TERROR IN YPSILANTI-Gregory A. Fournier

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of Karen Sue Binnemann. The other murders attributed to Collins never went to trial with one exception, and soon became cold cases. With the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, hundreds of vintage newspaper articles, thousands of police reports, and countless interviews. Terror in Yipsilanti John Norman Collins Unmasked tells the stories of the other victims, recreates the infamous trial that took Collins off the streets, and details Collin's time

spent in prison. Terror in Yipsilante compiles an array of physical and circumstantial evidence, drawing an unmistakable portrait of the sadistic murderer who slaughtered these innocent young women. The book they were featuring this evening is Terror in Ypsilanti John Norman Collins Unmasked with my special guest, journalist and author Gregory A. Fournier. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Gregory Hey Fournier.

uh uh maybe have some input into it. Before you know, it goes to the next step. And I'm very very excited about it.

door slam. Tell us what these two teens heard and what they reported, tell us about what happens that day August seventh.

abandoned farms. And they're filling up the tractor with some gas and they hear a car door slam actually open, and then well, what's going on? So they were walking around the barn and there was a horseshoe driveway coming in and out of the place, and just as they came to a rise, they saw or heard a car leave, and you know, they said, well, you know, but then they smelled something that smelled like what it was the

decomposition of flesh and this happened. Happened in Michigan and uh a farm area that's also known to uh uh you have lots of white tailed deer, and to see a dead deer carcass uh in the woods is not that rare. And they went up and they uh uh you know, the smell was getting worse and worse, and they saw this body and uh they thought it was just a deer. It was a nude body and uh and then one of the boys noticed that there was an earring, and you know, there was an ear with

an earring attached, and and they both freaked out. They got in the car and they ran right to the uh uh uh State Police in Ifslane and uh you know, they sent out a group of people to investigate and to cut to the chase. This is one of the worst crime scenes that these state policemen had ever seen. Her body had been sitting out in the elements for thirty days, and you know, it was horrific. And I do explain it in the book, but I prefer not to right now over the air. But it was a

bad situation. And then two weeks later, the Detroit riots occurred in nineteen sixty seven and Mary's investigation, her case, everything just got pushed way off on the back page and for the next month everything was about the riots, in the after math of the riots and so on, so people in short forgot about Mary Fleager. But the police, the policeman who was investigating, told the parents that if we don't catch this guy with in the next thirty days,

he's going to kill again. Within a year, and almost to the day, I think it was two days shy of a year, the second body turned up and and then you know, went on from there.

She just you know, she wanted to get back. And she told her parents, you know, I've got a big testomer I got to study. You know, I can't linger here. So they had a quick dinner and they took her to her apartment. Well, as it turns out, she had not seen her boyfriend for quite some time. He had been drafted into the military and was in Kentucky, No no, No, Fort Gordon, Georgia actually, and he did his boot camp and then he went to aw O well, and he worked his way back up to Ifslani and Arbor to

college towns separated by about nine miles. And so he was at the University of Michigan, working under an assumed name, and was going to get off at about midnight, I think it was, And so she was really anxious to see him. She hadn't seen him in a while, so she was going to go out and take the bus. She stands out on the corner with her roommate is just keeping her company while she was out there in

the dark, and they watched the bus zoom by. It's packed standing room, and so it didn't even make a pretense to stop or anything. So she's you know, heartfalling and anxious about seeing the boyfriend. So she sticks her thumb out, which was not something that was you know, rare in those days, especially between these two college towns, because there was a lot of traffic, you know, all day long and at night between the two campuses, and

so she felt reasonably safe. But I have to say that there was a lapse of judgment on her part. But she stuck her thumb out, and these three guys come in a convertible and oh, where are you going. I'm going to ann Arbor. Hey, we're going to ann Arbor. Hop in the car, and that's what she did. Her roommate tried to talk her out of it.

never made it to ann Arbor. From about midnight to one o'clock, the boyfriend and her roommate were on the phone saying did she make it? No, she didn't make it. Are you sure? Did she come back to the apartment, And so the boyfriend gets in the car and goes looking for her frantically all over and you know, can't find her. So they call in the morning, they call Joan Shall's parents, thinking, well, maybe she went home or

but that was not the case either. So three days later they find Joan Shell in the countryside just north of the Eastern Michigan University campus, and Joan is laying along the fence throw with twenty five stab wounds. She's been sexually molested. She had a red burlap bag, you know,

with overnight things, and that was missing. And the police, some of them who had worked the first murder, said, you know, there's some real strong similarities between the Pleasure murder and the Shell murder, and that sent up the first alert. But the FBI has a protocol and before they officially declare a serial killer on the loose, they need to have three murders. It's got to be pretty much the same modus operandi the three murders. There's always a cooling off here and uh, and the first two

murders met that criteria without having that third murder. Everything else matched up, and later on I'm going to jump in the story. It's because it's fragmented. It's on my mind. The red burlap bag. Apparently that evening John Collins showed up at the apartment with where one of the guys who was in the car. His name is Arnie Davis.

You know, they both rented a room in the same boarding house, and Collins came back later that evening with the red burlap shoulder bag that had Jones overnight things. But Collins also had her and he opened it up and he took the money out of it, and he exclaimed and Arnie later on in court that's way done in the story.

was found. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about this event and and what happens with John Collins and any suspicion by police that he may be involved by knowing that those details.

because they had no leads. So he was interviewed and John Norman Collins bluffed his way out of suspicion. Let's say, as he's being interviewed, the police see a clean cut kid. Well, he was a weightlifter, so he had a very nice trim physique. He looked like an athlete because he was

an athlete, and real short hair. Well in nineteen sixty eight, you know, everybody had started growing their hair out and you know, wearing bell bottoms, and you know, there was a real schism because here this guy looks like mister Joe College and hiding behind that protective coloration. Uh. He then casually says, hey, uh, do you guys know my uncle, he's a state policeman. And he drops his uncle's name and uh, they say, oh, yeah, we we know him. A nice guy, lives over on corn Allen so on.

So they strike up a conversation and uh, he's let go, and the police never follow up on that. It was it was like almost like a professional courtesy once removed. You know, Collins isn't the policeman, but within the Fraternal Order of Police, I know, some communities have little stickers that families put in the uh a windshield of their car to you know, indicate that they're husbands or police officers and so on stuff there they speed a little bit, okay,

slow it down, you know that sort of thing. And in the small town of Ipsilani. Uh, basically it worked and he wasn't under suspicion again until a number of bodies, quite a few bodies started turning up and you know, he had bluffed his way out of an arrest.

them of her disappearance. This is a bizarre murder. Tell us a little bit of the details of who found her and what was the state of her body at that location.

Miskegan and so on and so forth. Here's my number. Today the ride board does not exist. Uh, And no young women, uh, you know, wouldn't just publicly put their phone numbers down there. Uh. And so she got a call and uh from allegedly a person called David Johnson, UH, and I'm just I want to sweep that off off the list here. Uh turned out to be a fictitious name.

But there was a lot of police energy that went into locating every David Johnson within a two or three year range, uh in the whole state of Michigan, and UH, every one of those clues went nowhere. So if she was picked up, supposed to to be driven home and she was found by the next morning, she was found by a high school kid, ninth grader, I believe, walking to school and walking to the bus stop rather to get to school, and he sees a bag on the road and it's a shopping bag, you know, with the

loop handles and so on. And he looks in there and there are several wrapped presents and a couple of notebooks with notes in him your students would have, and I don't recall what else, but you know, maybe some personal items. So he sees it. He's only a couple of houses away from his house. He takes it to his mother and he's says, hey, I found this on the street, and maybe you can see you know who it belongs to, and we'll get it back to him.

And then he heads off so he doesn't miss his buss, and about three blocks down the street, well, the mom looks at it. He takes the things out the presence and notices that there's congealed blood that had soaked through the bottom of the bag. And she freaked out. So she jumped in her car, and you know, she knew that her son had found it right in front of

the entrance to the Denton Cemetery in Denton, Michigan. So she goes to the Denton Cemetery and pulls in and at one of the graves, just real close to where you pull into the cemetery, it is the body of Jane Mixer beneath her her raincoat. And this lady went hysterical. She pulled out of the cemetery real fast, continued down the road, her her sons still waiting on the corner for the bus. She just takes the car, goes through the stop sign and goes to her sister's house and

starts beating wildly on the door. And this is very dramatic, but this is how the sun and the aunt told me how I went and opened the door, and that mom was just so upset and she couldn't really get it out, you know, what it is that she had seen, and you know, finally they calmed her down, called the police, and that was the finding of the third body. But

something was different about this one. You know, here we now have three co eds killed, and you know, with cooling off period, you know, all those things I said before, But the police that were most familiar with the other two murders said, this doesn't look like like the other two. The FBI also categorizes serial murders serial killer murders as either organized or disorganized. The first two were disorganized, you know,

murders of passion, murders of opportunity. But this one, she was laid out nicely and and she as the investigators discovered. They take the coat off of the body, and she's fully clothed except her dresses pulled up around her waist and her pantyhose are pulled down around her thighs. But her pennies are on, and she has a sanitary napkin in and it had not been that area, had not been tampered with or anything. But that's how they found her.

And then the coat was put on top of all of that, almost as if the murderer didn't want some kid to find the body like that. That was one of the police suppositions. This murder also started the myth that John Collins went wild whenever he was confronted with the menstruating woman. Whether it was the odor or you know, I don't want to get too graphic, but he just apparently that was a trigger according to the police, and I personally don't think that that it was a big

factor in the murders. There was another more compelling reason that we'll get to. But this murder was organized, and it took thirty years before her family and they kept on it for thirty years with the police, and one thing or another, and DNA had come to the the forensic toolkits and there was a drop of blood or no, I'm sorry, I think it was perspiration, but it could

have been a drop of blood. I don't remember. And the DNA was checked out and it was a direct hit for somebody who had just gotten into the system, because the whole system of the DNA profiling was you know, being being born. But this got bang a direct hit and turned out it was from a male nurse in the area called Gary ear a lighterman and Gary was convicted of this murder. But this is thirty years later, and so bang. Now we have three unsolved murders and

the FBI of parameters I'll go into effect. And if Solani is beside itself and they know that there's a murder somewhere in town and it really affected how people raise their kids, and there was a lot of freedom that kids had taken away, and the fear was palpable.

parental response in this particular case. But this body again was another atrocious crime scene with something protruding from her genitals by the killer, and welts and bruises over her body indicating that she had had a belt buckle and

a violent strapping with a belt. So this is again another shocking crime scene, and the killer known to be, as you mentioned, sadistic a killer certainly, so tell us about this not to go too far into this because this is again very bizarre that the parents would respond like this with their daughters.

argument with her father. Was a backstory, but to cut to the chase, her family moved to Flint from Romulus, Michigan, uprooted her. She wasteen years old. But well, on that day she was sixteen. She had been sixteen for only twenty days, and she was picked up by someone taken out into the country to what most people believe is another abandoned farm on Getty's Road. And I'm trying to think what the other road was, but it doesn't matter.

And she was horribly beaten. And Marylyn had been a runaway quite a few times, and it was a terrible home life. And she ended up hooking up with a bunch of hippies in Detroit at the Brandy Ballroom. She went there quite a bit and got to know some of the band members and then you know, she got to be kind of an underage groupie and had, you know,

a whole lot of life experiences early. But the reason I mentioned that is because the county sheriff decides that the murderer is a drug crazed hippie, and he did everything he could to the murders, to somebody, to a group led by somebody called John Sinclair. And that's a whole other side story that I don't want to go into.

But here's the deal. Marilyn had taken a karate class, a woman's self defense class at Belleville High School and with a couple of friends, and apparently she was very good at it, and you know, she took the course because she felt like she needed it. Apparently. My theory.

And I think she gave him a powerful kick and enraged him further than he already was, because he's already a mad dog, you know, hits a branch, hits her as hard as he can in the face, and crushes in her eye socket, and then he breaks off a part of that branch, about seventeen inches of that branch, and violates her repeatedly tears her up inside. And you mentioned the belt, big leather belt with a belt buckle. She had welths in the shape of that buckle all

up and down the front of her body. And she was beat up worse than any of the others. And then she was left in the back of a subdivision that was being in East ann Arbor. And for me, the interesting part of the story is that the road crew putting in sewers and electrical or whatever they were doing for the county looked, I think there might be a dead body or a body back there on this

little rise. So he goes into one of the houses that's being built and there are two carpenters there, and he asked the carpenters, He said, would you see there's we think there's a body in the back, and you know, we're busy over here, and you know, don't would you check to check it out? They didn't want to, you know, get mired down with it. And so one of the carpenters goes over there and you know, looks the body up, up and down and says, yeah, it's a body and

called the police. That man just happened to be my landlord. And that's one of my many links to this case and why I wrote this book, why I felt like I was the only person that could have written this book, because I have so many personal links. My landlord found Mary's Skelton's body. Yeah, it's terrible, and probably because if we start talking about her anymore, I can go another

half an hour just on her. But here we have, as far as people know, four murders, two Eastern co eds, one U of them co ed. And now we have a high school dropout. When she turned twenty, she has sixteen. I'm sorry. When she turned sixteen, she as an emancipated team, dropped out of school, and twenty days later, this is what happened to her.

on red alert. But for the city. When fourteen year old Don Basin was abducted and her body found the next morning, it went through town and chilled everyone to the bone, and nobody wanted to talk the police or the press or to each other because you didn't know

if next door that's where the killer lived. And so there was a book some years ago, very good book by the way, called Killer among Us, and it's about two college towns where there were serial killers, and one of them is Ipsey, and he really went into the impact of the murder of Don Basin on the town. And no clothes were coming in, nothing, people were afraid.

And a little side note human interest story, is that one of the police, the first police to show up on the scene was a police a policeman from Ipsilanti, Michigan, and just I believe it was the night before, or maybe it was the weekend before, Dawn had been at his house at a slumber party with his daughter. Can you imagine the impact on that officer?

I was working. I didn't get the newspaper, so I wasn't tuned into any of this at the time. But you know, there was a switch that was turned, and you know, we'll get to that in a bit. But so she was found laying on the side of the road. Don Base I'm fourteen years old. And another side note here, real quickly, if Don would have made it another year into the ninth grade, I would have had her. I would likely have had her in my English class at Ifsolani High School as it was, I had several of

her close friends. And fifty years later, when I'm writing this book and trying to get information in ipsil Ani on the internet, people started surfacing from my past, several college professors and a number of students who knew Don And when you read that particular chapter, you can get evidence that I went a little more into the character of who this young woman was because I had more people willing to volunteer personal information and really put themselves

out there because fifty years had gone by and they didn't even talk about it. They tried to get it out of their head, but couldn't, And when my book came out, it gave them an opportunity, a vehicle to deal with their feelings. And that was one of the great pleasures I've had with writing this book, is because it seemed to help a lot of women in particular deal with these memories that had been haunting them for fifty years. You need to take a drink care.

in the area. And three hours later, less than a mile you write from the victims, and about a third of a mile from Mary Flesser's body, on Getty's Road, there's a barn. What do they find in that barn?

I don't remember, uh everything they found. I know there was a a pierced earring. I don't know if it was gold or a pearl. You know, the details aren't coming to me.

pull together. We need to get this guy. That was an impassioned letter, and I printed the whole letter in my book and people started loosening up with the information, but the fear factor was still extreme.

believe this guy or not? And everything he told me in some subsequent things I had corroboration on, and so I went with it. Alice had uh was on our way to a party at a place called, uh not Depot Town because that's an epsilenty. Uh, I'll just call it the Depot House. And it was an an old railroad kind of warehouse to store luggage in and so on, which was now in the sixties being used to rent out to bands and for parties and receptions and you know,

different things. Well, she was going to a birthday party for a local and ourbor musician. Alice again is is a U of M student. She's not an Eastern student. But again the two campuses are are, you know, very closely linked. And so she apparently went to this place and met John Collins there and he came on to her real strong. He'd danced with her for a while. They go outside and then he'd put the moves on

her and they'd go in and dance some more. And eventually, according to my source and it may or may not be accurate, on the back of his motorcycle and takes off, and that's the last that she was seen alive. And she was taken to Ipseil Annie to his room, his apartment. So the name Arnie Davis comes up again because he knew she was there. He knew she was there, and

he puts some you know, serious moods on her. Collins did in his room and essentially half tore off her clothes and her blouse is ripped and open, and she ran out of there and happened to see some people walking along, and you know, she asked if she could know she was in trouble, she could walk with them. Now, I don't know what happened after that, but apparently he just wouldn't let her go running around crazy and maybe tell the police that you know, she escaped being raped

or whatever. Somehow he looked for her founder and maybe with help, took her to this abandoned Farman Northtorial Territorial road and killed her. And what's notable about Alice's murder is that she had more semen in her than one man can produce. That was in the autopsy report. So that suggests somebody else was involved. Was it Arnie Davis? Was it another room called Andrew Manuel. If we don't know,

we don't have the absolute evidence on that. But by that time the town has gone crazy, and Ann Arber as well. So this is ifsy Ann Harber.

He's a Dutch psychic. And but you also introduce the the Washington Washington County Sheriff Douglas Harvey and the psychic and Douglas Harvey are a clash, to say the least, like to say, the community is going crazy and they're and they're looking, especially at that time, at any kind of help that they can possibly get. And it comes

with this Peter Hirkis trying to interject himself into this case. Uh, tell us just a little bit about this Peter Hirkis and what he does, how he interacts with this Sheriff Harvey, and what happens when he is set to leave the city.

a book in and of himself. So Peter came from Europe with a reputation for helping solve hundreds of cases, and he had medals and citations, and he had been apparently a patriot during World War two and there's a statue of him with three other men in his hometown. So he decides he's going to come to America and psychics believe in him or don't believe in him. It was a growth industry in the nineteen sixties, and he was more about show business. He was a show business psychic.

But he had fallen on hard times. You know, he wasn't getting so many bookings anymore on the Tonight Show, or actually he wasn't so much of a first tier Tonight Show kind of host. He was on Michael Douglas and Dinah Shore had a show, and Merv Griffin, you know those second tier talk shows, and he was a

common guest. As far as the Boston Strangler goes. He had to leave town because he did some very unethical things and drove a person with emotional problems into an institution because of the pressure her coast put on this man. The Boston police told him to get out of town or we're going to arrest you. And that was his great Boston Strangler event, which got fictionalized and parleyed into the movie, which then became the reality for many people

that oh he helped with the Boston Strangler case. Well that's all BS he's not getting the bookings in Hollywood anymore. And he gets this offer to come to ann Arbor at Soelani all expenses paid to look into this case, and so he does lots of hoopla, and it had been for the press. This has been boring because nobody's talking to them. The police don't have any real new clues. And here comes Peter her Cooas walking off the airplane with crutches, and there's a whole story there I'm not

going into. Well, right from the start, Doug Harvey and Peter her Cooas aren't hitting it off. But the ann Arbor police chief is more open minded, and let's give this guy a chance. So he goes trumping over the different crime scenes and one thing or another comes out with some pronouncements, and one of them that turned out to be very accurate. But you know, he had somebody come to town prior to that research the whole thing. You know, he was slick and he did his homework.

But and I'm going to cut to the last murder and talk about the California murders yet, but I don't want to confuse people. So here we are in July twenty third nineteen sixty nine. The last of the murders that occurred in Michigan was Kiaren Sue Bineman. She was going to the summer session. A real go getter, just got out of high school and decides she's going to go to summer school so she can get a jump on her classes, but so she can get a better

room assignment in the fall. So that's why she's an IPSILENTI.

hair piece, there's another word for him. But you know, I hear something to clip into her hair to give

her fuller hair or whatever. And she had never ever considered doing that, but you know, she wanted to, you know, glam out a little bit for her friend's wedding, and on the way to the wig shop, this guy comes by and tries to pick her up on the bike and talks to her and how you do him and blah blah blah, and she, being careful, hops on the back of that bike, drives about only it's only a block and a half two blocks, and the guy stops. She gets off and goes in the wig shop and

she's buying her wig in one thing or another. And as she's buying the wig, she says, you know, today, I've done two things I never thought i'd do. One is, you know, buy a wig, and the other is get

on the back of a stranger's motorcycle. Well, the two women who were working inside the shop, and I think there were other people in the shop too, a couple, but the two women who work there, their hair just lifted up off the back of their necks because you know, they've been living this nightmare for almost two years, about for two years and three summers in two years. And they said, no, honey, you know, do you know what's

going on? Do you know about the murders? Yeah, yeah, I just read an article about it, and I know, you know, there's well, you know, don't get back on that motorcycle. And the owner of the store goes out and takes a you know, good look at the guy on the bike, walks outside, comes back in. She says, honey, let me drive you back to the campus. Uh. And Karen said, oh no, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to bother you. She just ober polite.

Uh and uh. So she buys the thing and in a small box and then goes out to the bise Bic motorcycle and tells the guy, Hey, I'm I decide it's a nice day, I'm going to walk and he says, oh no, he says, he says, uh, you know, it's kind of o let me, you know, take you home. And the hair blown, the wind blown through your hair and all of that. So she gets on there and they talk for a minute, and another woman in a store just happened to be out and she took a

look at the bike. She didn't care about who was on the bike. She was a motorcycle enthusiast herself and her boyfriend and she's looking at this real sharp motorcycle. But she does notice that the woman was on the bike and then she got off. The guy talked her back onto the bike and then they took off. Well that was the last time she was ever seen alive

by anybody but the killer. And she was taken to the basement of a Michigan State policeman, Corporal David Like and the murderer hesitating his name, and I've already used it several times, but you know, there still nobody really

knows who he is yet. And he takes her to his uncle's home and not you know, too far from campus in Ipsilani, and the family is on a two week vacation, and John Norman Collins, the nephew, was asked if he would feed the dog and you know, look after the place, and he had a key, and he did just that, except he brought several women there because I talked to two other women that he brought to

that house before he murdered Karen Sue Minemann. And he took her down in the basement of that house, and from bruises on her body, it appeared as if he threw her down the stairs, dragged her into a utility room. It was a Michigan basement, which means it's you know, like a half basement, and then it was half again into a kid's playroom and then a utility room, so

in a very confined area. And you know then he killed her there, and of course, like the others, took her body someplace else, not too far away, but still north of Eastern's campus, in a sparsely a sparse area. It's adjacent to a nature area. And here on river runs right near where he dropped her body and rolled her down a small ravine gully, let's call it a gully. And that's where her body was found seven days later. Eight days later, I'm trying to get to six days later,

I got some dates written here. Six days later, her body is found in this gully. And her murder was not that the others were insignificant, but in terms of solving this crime, her murder is the most significant.

from UMM E W campus. So what he does is he goes to this fraternity row and he approached some co ed's and he describes the person he's looking for, and a former member there says he was kicked out of the frat and anyway, he directs him to where he is, and so Matthewson goes, and this is about sixty feet away from the apartment Joan Shell lived the previous summer before she was.

Larry h recognizes that. Yeah, there was this guy and he had been identified the man who rode off with Kiaren.

you know, he was being alert. So he walks up to the house and he sees Collins and another guy in the back there working on a motorcycle, and he just happens to notice that the license plate on this green Triumph is bent up and biker's motorcyclists would do that so it couldn't be easily read by the police. It's not like everybody did that, because not everybody's a criminal out there, but you know, it's it's a ploy that motorcyclist sometimes shoes. And he notices that. So he

goes up and he says, hey, how you doing. And I think by this time he knew his name John and Larry. Remember we used to, you know, to compete against one another and so on and so forth. Now Larry is not in his uniform, he's playing clothes. And one of the guys there that's with Collins says, oh, yeah,

this is Larry. You know Larry, he's campus fuzz. So whoever said it made sure that Collins knew that he was talking to somebody connected with the police, which which tells me there's some culpability with this person or knowledge about a motorcycle theft ring and taking parts off of bikes and so on that Collins did a lot of. He was known for them, and so they you know, John Collins says, well, what can I do for And

he says, well, you know these murders? And did you happen to see this is a girl a couple of days ago, and and he had a picture and he looked at it and I haven't seen it. The other guy, no, we don't know. And while they're doing that, a third guy comes out. Turns out it's Arnie Davis again. And Arnie says, hey, hey, John, I got that tag for you. Well, he was getting an illegal tag from the the What do you call that d m v U R. There's

another in Michigan they call it something different. I live out here in California now, but whatever it was, you know the where you're right registration and so on. As it turns out, we find this later in retrospect that Ernie's cousin worked at the DMV and they put in some fraudulent paperwork to get him some clear plates for this motorcycle that he had stolen, and that's the one reason why it was bent up like that, because it was a hot bike. And he's, no, I've never seen her,

never was you know. And Larry starts writing down the license plate numbers in a little notebook, and Collins turns on him and says, what are you doing. I'm writing numbers down. You know, it's just routine. Hey, you go play cop and know he gets vulgar with him, you know,

I gumees's manhood. Get out of here. Yeah, blah blah, So acting guilty, and Matthewson goes to this place that you mentioned earlier where the five different police departments that were connected with, you know, some of all these murders had a command center. He goes back to the command center and says, hey, this he wrote up his report

and it was a real strong lead. And at the same time, the corporal in the state Police, the uncle of John Collins, has brought his family back home and him and his wife noticed some things out of place and some things missing in their basement. He happens to go, you know, he still has another day or so before he has to get back to work, but he wants to, you know, get an update and hit the ground running. And he so he goes to the command center and the chief calls him in the office. He says, hey,

I want to talk to you. And he says, John Norman Collins is your nephew. Huh And he says, yeah, yeah. He was taking care of my house, so my family was away for a couple of weeks. And he says, well, he's under surveillance for the murder of Karen Sue Bynemann, and we think you should do you know, should be

aware of that. Well he's blown away, as you can well imagine, but he does his duty and he says, you know, Chief, when I got home, we noticed my wife and I noticed some things in the basement which I talk about in the book, that we're missing or out of place. And we saw some blotches on the floor that weren't there before. And my wife, who is fastidious about housework, had the house all clean before we left on vacation because she wanted to come home to

a clean house. I do the same thing, and she notices on her freshly waxed kitchen floor that there are there's a pair of heel marks skid marks from shoes being dragged across that clean floor, and so like tells his commander.

different story. You know, the murders all that, you know, have been done, but the story about the case and some of the crazy people that got involved with that case, and that's part two of the book. And I don't know where you want to go from here. Those are the murders, the Michigan murders that were committed in Michigan. But while Collins was arrested in jail, the story gets reported. I'm just gonna forgehn. The story gets reported on the

National news. I think it was NBC National News serial killer for two years and killed seven women in the Ipsiloni John Norman Collins well all the way across the country. In Salinas, California. A police detective had been investigating the June ninth murder of Roxy and Phillips in California. Her body was found in Salinas, California. He's sitting there after work, eating a TV dinner. I guess, you know, as it was reported in the police reports, and he hears about

this case. The woman was found in a gully. Her clothes had been removed, you know, she had been violated. And by this time in California, they knew that there was a car involved, but they didn't know what kind of car. And so the report, or it wasn't a report that alert investigator contacted the Washna County prosecutor. I think there could have been the police and he wanted information. He told him about the case he was working on

and it was very similar to this case. So the Michigan investigators gave him a make and model and license plate number of a car and that was a key clue to nailing down this roxy in Phillips murder because the California police went around to every GM dealership because it was an olds cutlass and went with the license plate number and got a positive hit that yes, this car had been brought in that was after the murder. Short the next day it had been oil changed and

whatever else was done to it. But there was a record, you know, you go take the car to the dealer and there's a serial number, ven number and whatnot. The car actually belonged to his mother and he had full use of it. It may it has well been his car.

But then they got the address and more information, and then the story just gets more and more textured as these two cases collide, and it's very clear who the murderer is and now the washena county prosecutes prosecutor has to get a guilty verdict to get this guy off the street.

California Governor Ronald Reagan and Michigan Governor William Milligan. And you know, they went back and forth. The Roxy and Phillips case, and you know, it was a slam slam dunk, and the buying them in case not quite so much. But they had some witnesses and a lot of the case was circumstantial, but they felt like they had a good case. And if that case wasn't good enough, then they had another stellar case, and that was the Joan Espeth spell Shell case, and they were sure they could

get a conviction on that one too. But here, you know, and again to cut to the chase, So there's this back and forth with the state attorney generals and politically Milken can't extradite him until he's been tried and convicted. And then his secretary of State of Frank, Oh jeez, I'll just his first name is Frank, and I'll think

of it, said Kelly. Frank. Kelly says, California has a provision that if they try a person and he gets off, you're an extradited person and he gets off, that they have no jurisdiction or legal obligation to return him back to the home state. Yeah, it was very, very crazy. And then just to put a period to the end

of this case. After Collins is convicted of first degree murder and given a life in prison sentence, there had been a prison riot at San Quentin and you know, out in California, and six people were convicts or whoever,

six people were killed in this riot. So the California prosecutors had six cases of their own, and those are long drawn out cases, lots of people to talk with, and it came down to sorry to say, it came down to money because in California here they have six cases to try, there's only so much in the in the budget for prosecutions. And Michigan and this murder case with Roxy and Phillips. She was from Portland, Oregon, visiting.

Collins was visiting from Michigan and killed her. So they had to decide, are we going to put our resources into a case of a woman who young young woman in tragic though it was, and killed by a man from Michigan and all the expense with extraditionary or do we just punt on it? And they punted, yeah, we have.

and life in prison for him. We won't give away the twist though, because there is out of the blue, even shockingly and surprisingly, because he had lived in Windsor, Ontario. In Canada, there was an agreement at some point where a plan to reintegrate, reintegrate criminals that had been born in say Canada, and return them to Canada to be

able to do their sentence. However, with Canadian law and the parole board, Canadian Parole Board, this person that would have been never gotten out of prison in America would certainly be eligible and within a couple of years they predicted he would have day parole and be walking around loose on the streets of Canada.