"The Rainy Day Murders" - Who Were the Victims?

Without a full confession and tangible corroborative evidence, it may never be proven that John Norman Collins was the killer of Mary Fleszar (19), Joan Elspeth Schell (20), Maralynn Skelton (16), Dawn Basom (13), Alice Kalom (23), or Roxie Ann Phillips (17) - the California victim from Milwaukie, Oregon.
Collins was only brought to trial for the strangulation murder of Karen Sue Beineman (18), which occurred on the afternoon of July 23, 1969. Three eyewitnesses were able to connect Collins and Beineman together on his flashy, blue Triumph motorcycle. Then an avalanche of circumstantial evidence buried John Norman Collins. The lack of a credible alibi also worked heavily against his favor with the jury.
Technically, the term "serial killer" does not legally apply to Collins. He was only convicted of one murder. It wasn't until 1976 that the term was first used in a court of law by FBI profiler, Robert Ressler, in the Son of Sam case in New York City.
When the Washtenaw County prosecutor, William Delhey, decided not to bring charges in the other cases, Collins was presumed guilty in the court of public opinion by most people familiar with the case.
Today, however, not everyone agrees because of the ambiguity that surrounds this case and the many unanswered questions. To prevent a mistrial in the 1970 Beineman case, prosecutors suppressed details and facts about the other unsolved killings.
There are many young people who believe Collins was railroaded for these crimes by overzealous law enforcement, and that he should be given the benefit of the doubt and released. That can happen only with a pardon by a sitting Michigan governor.
When the series of sex slayings stopped with the arrest of Collins for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, everyone was relieved. Most certainly, other young women were murdered in Washtenaw County after Collins was arrested, but none with the same signature rage and psychopathic contempt for womanhood. These were clearly power and control murders.
The six other county murders of young women in the area from July of 1967 through July of 1969 were grouped together and considered a package deal. Law enforcement felt they had their man. The prevailing attitude of Washtenaw County officials was that enough time and money had been spent on this defendant.
DNA testing and a nationwide database was not available in the late Sixties. Even if it had, Collins would not have been screened because he would not have been in the database. He had never been arrested or convicted of any crime and had no juvenile record.
Still, in 2004, over thirty years since Collins was thought to have murdered University of Michigan graduate student, Jane Mixer, DNA evidence exonerated him and pointed the finger at Gary Earl Leiterman, a nurse in Ann Arbor at the time of Jane's murder. For some people, the Mixer case cast the shadow of doubt over Collins' alleged guilt in the remaining unsolved murders attributed to him.
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When Edward Keyes and Earl James changed the names of the victims and their presumed assailant in their respective books on Collins, they left readers with a mishmash of twenty-three fictitious names. When Collins officially changed his last name in 1981 to Chapman, his Canadian birth father's last name, even people familiar with the case became confused. The end result was that the real identities of the victims and their assailant have been obscured over the years and all but forgotten by the public.
Using the real names of the victims, here is a micro-sketch of each of the remaining young women whose cases have yet to be solved but are considered open by the Michigan State Police. The Roxie Ann Phillips California case is the exception.

At the time of the murders, investigators thought that the killer may have had an accomplice, but that idea was largely discredited by people close to the case. The two likeliest suspects were housemates with Collins. Both men were given polygraph lie detector tests and were also thoroughly interrogated by police detectives. Prosecutors were satisfied of their innocence or complicity in the murders.
But investigators did discover that both friends of Collins were involved with him in other crimes such as burglary, fencing stolen property (guns and jewelry), and motorcycle theft.
There was also a "fraud by conversion" charge brought against Collins and one of his friends for renting a seventeen foot long house trailer with a stolen check that bounced. They abandoned the trailer in Salinas, California. It is the suspected death site of Roxie Ann Phillips.
These guys were not Eagle Scouts, that's for certain. When the trailer was discovered, police found that it had been wiped clean of fingerprints inside and out. Both men returned to Ypsilanti two weeks earlier than they had planned, driving back in the 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass that was registered to John's mother but had been in John's possession for months.
Back in the Sixties, police protocols and procedures for investigating multiple murders were not yet established. For two long years, an angry killer of young women was able to evade police, but slowly a profile was developing and police were closing in on the suspect from two different fronts. Washtenaw County's long nightmare was about to end.
Next post: Treading on the Grief of Others
Published on January 06, 2013 05:28
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