The All American KILLER: Michigan's Most Terrifying Man

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New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. Come the summer of 1969. Every newsroom across Michigan had fallen into the same grim routine. Another young woman missing, another body discovered days later. Another absolutely brutal murder with no suspect in sight. And there was really no general way to tell the community that a killer was hunting their daughters and girlfriends, and that despite the authorities trying their very best, there seemed to be nothing they could do to put an end to it. In just a two-year span, a seven young women were murdered in unsettling ways. Their bodies then discarded with a cool tee that suggested whoever was doing this felt nothing at all except pure exhilaration. Hey guys, it's Andrew, welcome to another episode of Every Town, where today we have a very dark one for you, so strap in because it's going to get intense. When you hear the details of this case and find out who is responsible, well, that will make you think twice about these people you keep closest to you. Let's head on over to the great lake state now and check out the insane true story of the Michigan murders. In 1969, the Vietnam War was raging overseas. The civil rights movement was reshaping the country, and right here in the middle of it all, life in the college towns of Ipsilanti and Ann Arbor was humming along the way it always had. My students packed the sidewalks and motorcycles lined the curbs on any given evening you could find kids hitchhiking, wandering, and trusting the world around them the way a young person does when nothing bad ever happened to them. Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan sat just a few miles apart, and together they gave this corner the state a kind of easy youthful energy. On the warm summer evening of July 9th of that year, a 19-year-old accounting student named Mary Fleser decided to walk home from campus, and this was the beginning of all the horror that followed. Mary was an accounting student at Eastern Michigan University, and she was a good kid. The kind who never missed Sunday Mass and called her parents every single week religiously. There was nothing about that walk that should have been dangerous, but a neighbor watching from outside noticed something that didn't sit right. It was a blue gray Chevrolet that kept circling the block and moved slow and deliberate, and each time it passed Mary, the driver leaned out and called to her, trying to get her to climb on in. As she shook her head and kept walking, he came around again and she refused again. The neighbor actually thought about stepping in but hesitated, and then Mary turned a corner and was gone, and I mean for good because no one would ever see her alive again. When a roommate filed a missing persons report the following morning police weren't exactly hitting the panic button. Mary was basically an adult and in college, and people like her took off all the time. In the free-loving '60s, maybe she went on a spontaneous road trip or met a guy who was having some fun somewhere, and point is that with no real sign of anything bad happening, these were the simplest explanations, so the police went in that direction, not soon enough, but they before us to change their minds. Four weeks passed before a couple of teenage boys stumbled across what was left of her and hearing a band in farmhouse and superior township, and when investigators found that scene, told them everything they needed to know about who they were dealing with. Mary had been stabbed roughly 30 times, and her feet were being cut off above the ankles. All five of her fingers were removed from one hand, and the other hand, that had been severed from the forearm down, and none of those removed parts by the way were ever found. The pathologist confirmed she'd been severely beaten before she died, but the detail that really stood out to investigators was evidence of the scene that suggested the killer had come back multiple times. Over the weeks her body had been lying there, while someone had been returning to it, moving it, and revisiting what he had done. That takes a certain type of psychopath, so police knew that if they didn't find this guy soon, that likely more bodies would turn up. A Mary's funeral was a tragic affair, and it's one thing to lose someone so young but hurt to happen in such a brutal way it was hard to grasp. A young man showed up there, claiming to be a family friend, and yet a peculiar request. He asked the funeral director if he could take a photograph of Mary in that casket, so that her parents wanted to keep safe. When the director told him no, the man pushed harder, but they just fixed her up enough for one picture. After being turned away a second time he walked out without another word, and it was weird enough that the police were notified, and the receptionist tried to help them with the description. Good looking, dark hair, early 20s. But most importantly, he'd been driving an old blue-gray Chevrolet, the same kind of car that had been circling Mary the night she vanished. The police logged it, and we have a clearer picture now, so it seems obvious, but back then they didn't have everything lined up in order. As a result, they filed this incident away as some kind of morbid curiosity had moved on, and they had no idea the killer had just shown up to admire his own work. Almost a full year went by after that, and the investigation into Mary's murder had gone completely cold. When 20-year-old Joan Shell stepped out of her apartment on Emmett Street on the evening of June 30, 1968, she wanted to visit her boyfriend and Ann Arbor, so her roommate walked with her down to the bus stop on Washington Avenue. They talked about nothing in particular while they headed there, but Joan Mr. Bus, instead of hanging around for the next one while she decided to hitch-hike. Her roommate stood there watching as a red and black Pontiac Bonneville pulled up with three young men inside, and the driver, he was wearing a green, eastern Michigan University shirt, and short dark hair neatly parted, and every single thing about him suggested he was just another clean-cut college kid, and he asked Joan if she needed a ride. While she looked back at a roommate uncertain, almost asking for permission, a roommate tried to talk her out of it, but Joan got in anyway, calling back that she'd phone once she got to Ann Arbor safely. Well, that call never came. Construction workers found her body five days later off Ear Heart Road in Ann Arbor, as she'd been stabbed 25 times with what investigators estimated was a four-inch blade. Her throat had been sliced so deeply at the knife scraped against bone, whoever did this had tied her own mini-skirt around her neck. The pathologist noticed something strange about the way the body had decomposed, but her lower half was relatively preserved, but her head and shoulders had degraded significantly, which meant she'd been stored somewhere cool with the upper body exposed to heat. In other words, the killer had kept her somewhere before dumping her. And when he was ready, he'd driven her body out to Ear Heart Road, made a half-hearted time to cover it with some grass and left and again. connection to Mary's case was kind of hard to ignore. Police tracked down and cleared more than 150 people across Michigan who owned red and black vehicles. They sketched a composite of the driver based on the roommate's description and plastered it across campus. By August, they had absolutely nothing. A couple of months after Jones murdered, two different witnesses came forward and told police they'd seen her walking with a male student along Emmett Street the evening she disappeared. And both thought the guy looked like John Norman Collins. An EMU student lived directly across the street from Jones at 619 Emmett. And his appearance lined up pretty well with a composite sketch, too. So police brought him in. And Collins flatly denied knowing Jones shell at all. And said he'd spent that entire weekend at his mother's house in center line, a suburb just north of Detroit, and hadn't returned until July 1st. Investigators simply took him at his word. They never even checked whether the alibi held up. Em, they let him walk. Now look, I know this is starting to look pretty bad for the authorities, but Collins, he was a clean-cut college kid. If you looked him in the face, you didn't think he was a psycho killer. And you have to remember this happened at a time before the phrase serial killer was even used by police. And we know true crime podcasts, so the world was just more innocent. On top of that, the murders, well they went quiet after that. Months passed without another body turning up, long enough that people started allowing themselves to wonder if maybe it was over. If whoever had done this had moved on or stopped or maybe just disappeared. As it turns out, though, they hadn't. Because in the spring of '69, well, things got so much worse so fast that the entire state went into a kind of collective panic. On March 20th, a 23-year-old university of Michigan law student named Jane Mixer pinned a handwritten note to a campus bulletin board. She needed a ride home in Muskegon because she had good news to share with her family back there. It was an engagement and plans to move to New York City, so a whole bright future laid out in front of her. Now somebody saw that and no one responded. In the next morning, her fully-closed body was found on top of a grave in Denton Cemetery and Van Buren Township. She'd been shot twice in the head with a small caliber pistol and then strangle with an nylon stalking that didn't belong to her. Am, whoever left her there, had placed a copy of the book, Catch 22, Besider Body. And she hadn't been, I say, like the other two victims, but her clothes had been moved to exposure. And Jane was on her period when she died. And the thinking was that the killer discovered that and had stopped him from going further. As a result, he shot her, strangled her, and placed her body in that cemetery instead. So here, this case didn't fit so neatly together with the other two. Investigators found out Jane had tried to call a student named David Johnson, as she believed he'd offered her a ride in Muskegon. But Johnson said he never responded to her message and he had a solid alibi. So somebody had been impersonating him. Whoever answered that note knew exactly what they were doing. They'd read or bulletin board message, seen an opportunity and used another student's name to get close to her. And it was calculated in a way that was different from what had come before. Just four days later, let all go worse. A surveyor working out on Earhart Road, discovered the body of 16-year-old Marilyn Skeleton, lying face up on a blue jacket behind a vacant house on a wooded hill. And she'd been left in a position that investigators described as deliberately degrading. And what had been done to her represented an escalation so severe that had detected. It would work tomasides for 30 years. Said it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his career. Marilyn had been flat out tortured. They killed her, used her own shirt to muffler screams while he beat her. When she had been tied down and whipped with a belt, her skull was fractured. And she had been violated with a tree branch. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she fought back. Blood at the scene suggested she actually broke free and tried to run, but she didn't make it too far. Because of the rain recently, any footprints and tire tracks that might have told investigators something were gone, washed away like they'd never been there at all. Now Marilyn had a bit of a reputation around Ann Arbor. There's a high school student from Romulus, known as a party girl who dealt drugs and occasionally passed information to police. But when her body turned up, some investigators initially wondered if her murder was drug-related, rather than connected to the pattern they were seeing. But the details were too familiar to ignore. Her killing was too passionate. On top of what was done to her, she was dumped only a few hundred yards from where Joan Shell had been found. Same stretch of road, so likely the same killer. Returning to a place that meant something to him or he felt comfortable with. And each time he came back, he was getting bolder. [MUSIC PLAYING] Less than a month later, 13-year-old Don Bassam went missing on the evening of April 15, while walking home from a friend's house. She was taken a shortcut along the railroad tracks, and a boy named Earl Kid walked part of the way with her before saying goodbye about five blocks from her house. And she was almost there, but never made it. A truck driver, the following morning, found her body about a mile away on Gail Road. She had been stabbed and strangled with an electrical cord. The pathologist estimated she had been dead for about 10 hours. Police found Don's orange sweater inside an abandoned farmhouse near where her body had been dumped. In glass in the basement, match fragments found on her skin, so she had been killed there. A week later, a detective went back to that same basement, and he found a piece of Don's blouse. Next to it, a gold earring that had belonged to Marilyn Skeleton. Now, police didn't miss those things on the first go-around. Now, the killer, he had gone back. He left those items there deliberately, like trophies arranged in a place only he knew about. And so that tied every murder together beyond any doubt. And then, get this. On May 13th, someone burned that farmhouse down. When firefighters arrived and went through what was left, they found five lilac flowers lined up in the driveway, one for each victim. By June of 1969, this one's calm, college-on-clave had completely unraveled. Women were carrying knives and tear gas, nobody went anywhere alone. Even in the summer heat, the windows they stayed locked. At this point, police had worked through more than 1,000 suspects and 800 tips and were no closer to an arrest than the day Mary Flesher's body was found two years earlier. And then, it got worse. On June 8th, 21-year-old Alice Callum, was seen leaving a party on the back of a motorcycle. And three days after that, her body turned up in a field. And she had been stabbed, her throat had been sliced, and she had been shot in the head. She also had a bullet wound through her thumb from when she raised her hand trying to protect her face. And the gun sort of changed everything. Only one other victim, Jane Mixer, had been shot. And that detail sent investigators into a spiral. Because of a firearm was involved now, where they even shared all these murders were connected. Was this one man or maybe multiple killers operating in the same area at the same time? And the sheriff had to do something, so he went in front of reporters and told them the killer was still out there because of luck. Not because police weren't working hard enough. And he promised they'd get him eventually, but behind closed doors, investigators were running out of road and they knew it. Things got so desperate that on July 21st, the community brought in a Dutch psychic named Peter Herkos to help crack the case. And look, laugh if you want, but Herkos walked investigators to the precise location where each body had been found and revealed details about the murders that had never been made public. They put together a profile of the killer, strongly white male, under 25 years old, and born outside the United States, who wrote a motorcycle. And then he made one final prediction. The killer would strike again very soon. Just two days later, a teen-year-old Karen Benman walked into a wig shop in downtown Ypsilani. While she was browsing, she noticed a young man waiting outside on a blue Triumph motorcycle. He had short dark hair, striped sweater, and he was just sitting there. And Karen turned to the shop owner, Joan Gosh, and said she was doing two foolish things that day, buying a wig and accepting a ride from a stranger. As she even laughed and said she was either the bravest or stupidest girl alive for getting on that bike. Gosh and her assistant looked out the window, and the moment they did the man turned his head away. Karen walked out, climbed on the back of that bike, and three days later, her body was found near the Huron River. And she had been beaten and tortured with a caustic chemical. And fabric had been stuffed into her throat, and her underwear had been forced inside her body. And when investigators examined that underwear, and what they found inside, they would finally break the case wide open. There was male DNA, but also 509 individual human hair clippings, each one less than three eighths of an inch long, mostly blonde, and carefully cut. And Karen's hair was dark brown, to those hairs that come from somewhere else entirely. Police suspected the killer might come back to the scene the way he had done before, so they smartly replaced Karen's body with a mannequin, and then waited. On July 27, during a heavy rain storm, an officer spotted a young man sprinting away from the gully. But the rain had killed his radio. By the time backup could be reached, the man had vanished into the woods. A meanwhile, investigators brought Joan Gosh in and showed her a photo lineup, and she pointed a one-picture without even hesitating. A neighbor from the chocolate shop next door then confirmed it, and then another witness, and then another, and by the end, seven separate people had placed the same man outside that wig shop on the day Karen got on that motorcycle, and three other women came forward saying he had tried to pick them up before Karen had said yes, and his name was John Norman Collins. [Music] On paper, John looked exactly like the kind of guy you'd want your daughter to bring home, and it's in par with police, let him go all those years earlier, based on his word alone. An education student, and former high school football captain, handsome, charming, easy with people, but dig a little deeper, and for those who actually knew him, well they had seen something darker underneath all that. His fraternity had kicked him off for stealing, and also had a vicious temper that seemed to frighten people, and he'd also a particular rage towards women who were menstruating, and there are accounts of him screaming at a girlfriend and storming out the moment he found out he was on a period, and given what investigators knew about every single victim in the case, well that detail landed hard. At work, he unsettled co-workers by describing the victim's injuries in graphic detail, claiming that his uncle, a police sergeant, fed him inside information. Now nobody could prove that was alive at the time, but they remembered it for sure. The more investigators dug, the more Collins kept appearing at the edges of every single case. He'd worked directly across from where one victim lived. He'd dated someone whose apartment was right next to another victim's home, and he'd been spotted and areas connected to a third, and when police brought him in for questioning early on, he refused a lie detector test. His roommate later watched him walk out of their apartment carrying a box containing a woman's purple shoe in a purse, and Collins told him he was just getting rid of it. And then came the moment that finally unraveled everything. While his uncle, state police sergeant David Leake was away on vacation, Collins had been given the keys to his house to watch the family dog. When the leaks came home, something wasn't right. The basement floor had been covered in fresh paint. Several cleaning supplies were missing as well, and once Leake was told his nephew was a suspect, he looked closer, and found what appeared to be blood underneath that paint. But what investigators found when they got into that basement was the piece that locked it all together. The Leake children were all blonde, and Collins' aunt had cut their hair down there just before the family left for vacation, and the clippings had been swept in the neat little piles. And those same clippings, tiny, blonde, less than 3/8 of an inch long, were precise for forensic match to the hairs found inside Karen's underwear. So she had been in that basement, and Collins had taken her there, and then he tried to paint over what he had done. The big evidentiary item that convicted him was the hair analysis. They found those hairs on Byton and Spotty, and they were able to match them forensically, and that's the first case in a nation that had been done with that, so it was very, very groundbreaking stuff back then. On July 30th, 1969, police finally arrested Collins, though the trial was a bit complicated. To unpoliced, Surge Collins' apartment found plenty of stolen items, but very little that directly tied him to the killings. The real proof was in that basement, evidence that Karen had been there, and the fact that Collins was the only person with a key, and that's what the prosecution built its case around. The trial began in 1970, and even though investigators privately believed Collins was responsible for all seven deaths, they only charged him with Karen's murder. The evidence in the other cases simply wasn't strong enough to guarantee a conviction, and they needed one. In court, Joan Gosh pointed straight at him. Forensic experts explained that the hair match wasn't a coincidence. The odds of those clippings appearing in two separate locations by accident was essentially zero. And Collins sat there through all of it, and he just said nothing, and didn't even flinch when the verdict was read, even as his own family wept around them. "If you get somebody admitting something that they denied earlier, not only do you have their own words going against each other, which you take that to a jury, and you've got to doubt his built right in, that's what they're saying is bullshit." He was sentenced to life in prison, and later changed his name to Chapman, and has been behind bars for over fifty years, and today, Young Collins is 78 years old. But here's one last thing to leave you with before we wrap this up. Joan Shell, the second victim, she was last seen getting into a car with three young men and one of those men was Collins's own roommate, Arnold Davis. Now, what Davis told police later was that Collins had insisted on taking Joan in his own car after she got in and the two of them got out of Davis's car together, and Collins came back alone almost three hours later. He called Joan a very bad name and said he dropped her off. When I was 1968, police questioned Collins, and he gave them an alibi, and they took them at his word and never checked it. If they had, really dug in, verified, Karen might have gone to that wig shop and come home safe. Don Bassum might have made it down those railroad tracks. Now let's call him, might have made it home from that party. Instead, my case went cold and the murders continued, and six more women never came home. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Every Town, hope you enjoyed it. If you did, then you certainly have an interesting true crime, so take a look around at all the other episodes we have. Remember to come on back here next week for another episode till it's strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. 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