THE ANN ARBOR MURDERS-V Speculation Mounts During Hearing Of Murder Charge

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32078, 28 August 1969, Page 20

THE ANN ARBOR MURDERS-V Speculation Mounts During Hearing Of Murder Charge

(From

JEFF PENBERTRY

in

« W>l»..v.ras- AAnn Arbor) The burly sheriff’s deputy blocking the courtroom door demands to see your pass, and tells you to raise your arms. Another deputy steps up behind and “frisks” you carefully, from your armpits to the cuffs of your trousers. No matter how many times you enter and leave, you go through the routine every time. After the brutal murder of seven young girls, feelings are running high beneath the sedate leafy surface of this college town—-and police are not taking any chances of losing their suspect. John Norman Collins, aged 22, sits beside his lawyers in the modern Ann Arbor Circuit Court room on the first floor of the county office building, and listens intently to the proceedings in which he is being arraigned for the murder of the latest victim, Karen Sue Beineman, aged 18. He is also being investigated for links with the other six college town murders, plus three similar killings in California and two in New Jersey.

Occasionally Collins, who sits with his prominent jaw thrust forward, hanging on every word of evidence, leans

over and whispers urgently to his attorney, Mr Richard Ryan, or one of his two assistants. Behind them in the small public gallery packed with reporters, his mother, smartly dressed double-divorcee Mrs Loretta Collins, sits In the front row with her arm about John’s older brother Jerry, and his sister Gail. As he strides with a peculiarly stilted self-conscious walk back to his cell behind the courtroom during recesses, Collins avoids his mother’s eyes, and habitually buttons and unbuttons the front of his light blue sports coat “He looks so much like an All-American college boy,” a reporter from Detroit 40 miles east, whispers. “If he looked more like a monster perhaps the people out there could understand.” Curious Throngs The people “out there” are the throngs of curious townsfolk who wait for hours behind police lines hoping to catch a glimpse of John Norman Collins, who has lived in their midst since he came to Eastern Michigan University (E.M.U.) in neighbouring Ypsilanti, as an elementary education student three years ago.

Now that he is suspected of raping, torturing, mutilating and killing at least seven young girls, this “nice, quiet, gentleman-like and extremely polite” young man is suddenly an object of morbid fascination.

“He was a quiet guy,” Wayne Patterson, aged 23, one of his former fraternity brothers, recalled. “And he loved motor-cycles." (Karen Sue Beineman was last seen driving off with a young man, since identified as Collins, on a motor-cycle.)

A girl in the crowd outside the court, who said she was “a half-friend,” also recalled that Collins, who represented his college in football and baseball, was “all wrapped up in motor-cycles.” “He had pictures of himself on motor-cycles all around his room," the girl said. They also remembered that the suspect was a good dancer, read children’s literature at a drama festival in Ypsilanti last spring, and many still can’t believe he was the one who did “all of those terrible things.” As the speculation mounts, aside from his time in court the athletic 6ft, 12st 21b, suspect sits on a mattress in his bare cell in the basement of Ann Arbor’s block-like little Washtenaw County Gaol, and mopes. Doukhabor’s Visit Apart from his lawyers, his mother, and the police, the only person he has spoken to is a bogus “bishop” of the old Russian Doukhobor sect How Joseph Pass aged 62, a former mental patient calling himself “Bishop Bartholomews” self-appointed leader of the 200-year-old sect, whose members are given to burning their houses and running in the streets naked, came to spend two hours in the maximum security cell with Collins is yet another of those incredible mysteries which have marked this ease. Collins is a Roman Catholic.

Some people believe, however, that the County Sheriff, Douglas Harvey, in whose custody the suspect is being held, allowed the “cleric” in to the cell so that he could listen to their conversation through a two-way microphone. A television surveillance set in the cell had been removed earlier on the insistence of Collins’s lawyers. In television appearances later “Bishop Batholomew” explained that he was trying to convert the suspect, and they had talked about the killings. “Of course, it is privileged Information,” he said.

During their meeting Collins cried. “He seems to be a very repentant young man,” the bogus priest said, “and he’s worried about what this will do to his future as a school teacher.” But if John Collins is the schizophrenic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde character police believe, there is little to his early life to indicate where it began. 4k Normalßoy” He was bom in Windsor, Canada, In 1947, the third child and second son of Richard and Loretta Chaj> man, who were divorced when he was six. His mother then married William Collins, but they were divorced also, two years later. The effect of two divorces by the time he was eight did not noticeably disturb young John, and from that time he and his mother, brother and sister lived happily in the Detroit suburb of Centre Line, where for 12 years he attended classes at St Clement’s School.

Sister Honora, his favourite teacher there, who is now teaching in Wisconsin, said: “John was as norma! as bread and butter and applesauce. If this is true then something must have snapped.”

. Sister Honora sent a note to Collins saying she believes him to be innocent “and telling him he mustn’t feel awful.”

She added: “Some of the boys had violent tempers, but not John. I never found him ruthless, and he was very

sensitive and responded to what people said.”

Sister Honora remembers John as a boy who was prepared to argue with some determination when he thought he was right, but would admit he was wrong and readily apologise once be saw it.

Sister Anaclete, the principal of the school—where Collins was once vice-president of the Spanish Club, treasurer of the Audio Visual Club, and in senior years a member of the Drama Club—said: “I have nothing but pleasant memories of him as a student” Another teacher, Mr John R. Guinn, went further. “He was the kind of person whose goodness seemed to emanate,” he said. “It felt good just being around him. He had leadership ability.” Neighbours recall him as a healthy, normal boy mowing his mother’s front lawn every Saturday afternoon. “Manners Galore” He was well-liked by those who knew him best although a few of his closest friends found him “moody” as he got older. His high school girl friend, Bernadette Hudak, a pretty, green-eyed brunette, said he was “moody, mad most of the time. He wasn’t vicious though,” she added. “If he got mad he would just stay mad and wouldn’t say much." Bernadette also recalled that Collins was very polite. “He had manners galore,” she said. Anomalies in John Norman Collins’s character did not really begin to show until after he entered the Central Michigan University at Mount Pleasant in 1965, and then transferred to E.M.U, In Ypsilanti the following year. A room-mate moved out of their quarters because he “couldn’t take all the noisy drinking and bringing girls up to the room.”

After the murder arrest, Ypsilanti police also revealed that Collins and “associates” had been involved in several thefts, including the larceny of at least one motor-cycle, several wallets, sporting equipment and a gun. Most of the thefts, police said, occurred after Collins fell behind in his rent. A 14-foot trailer which Collins and his room-mate Andrew Manuel, jun., alias Richard Diaz, towed to California behind the suspect’s car, was purchased under a

false name with a bogus cheque. Found By F. 8.1. Police are still trying to discover whether Manuel, a 25-year-old factory worker, knew anything about the college town murders, or several others near Salinas, California, where the pair dumped the stolen trailer. John Collins returned to Ypsilanti, but Manuel, fearing arrest for stealing the trailer, stayed. After Collins was arrested on the murder charge a nation-wide hunt for Manuel began, and he was eventually found by F. 8.1. agents hiding at his sister-in-law's house in Phoenix, Arizona. “He has only known Collins for six months,” Manuel's sister-in-law, Emestina Masters, said. “He was scared, and afraid he would be blamed for something he didn’t do.” Many detectives, however, are convinced that Manuel at least knew about, or had a passive role in, some of the college town murders, and perhaps the killings in California. Manuel is now also In Ann Arbor’s Washtenaw Countv Gaol, where he is being held on a charge of concealing stolen property—a woman's diamond ring. Two floors below him a heavy-jawed young man in much deeper trouble sits despondently on his mattress and contemplates his fate. And because he is there, the people in the tree-lined streets around him—-who tried for so long to pretend it wasn’t all happening—arc trying to pick up the threads of the normal lives they led when Ann Arbor was just another pretty American university town.

Girls are getting used to taking walks alone at. night again, and most student con versatlon is about campus politics and the coming fall semester.

But as a police officer pointed out: “You can’t drive anywhere around here without coming across some reminder of the murders—the place where a body was found, a victim’s house, the house where one of the girls was killed, or the place where John Collins lived.” It is doubtful whether Ann Arbor can ever really forget what happened here. (Concluded)