Mental Health and John Norman Collins - Two Extremes Too Hard To Comprehend At Once

Doing research for The Rainy Day Murders has lead down corridors my researcher and I could not have envisioned when we began this true crime project over three years ago. But one key area of information has remained closed to us, the mental health records of John Norman Collins. That information is privileged and protected.

Shortly after Collins was arrested, his second attorney, court appointed Richard Ryan, arranged a "private" lie detector test for Collins to take. After the examiner revealed the results to the defense attorney, Ryan suggested to John's mother that they go for a diminished capacity plea, commonly known as an insanity defense. 

Loretta Collins became unglued and fired Ryan on the spot. He is said to have left the conference room shaken but no doubt relieved to be off the case. When the legal team of Joseph Louisell and Neil Fink took over, there was no more talk of an insanity defense.

Early on in our investigative research, my researcher, Ryan M. Place and I invoked the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) documents. Every time the Collins' case comes up for review and reclassification, Collins is offered psychiatric services. In the space provided on the form, he always writes, "Not interested."

Most people would agree that it is impossible to help someone who doesn't want to be helped. What good are psychological and psychiatric services to a person whose existence is built upon the mirrored reality of delusion? To break through that wall of falsehoods would be to admit guilt and responsibility; a narcissistic, psychotic personality will not tolerate this.

*** 

Several months ago, I received an email from Kristin Bronson, whose father worked briefly with John Norman Collins in an official mental health capacity. What follows is a loving tribute to her father:

"My father (now deceased) was in the mental health profession all his life, first at Mercywood Sanatorium and then at the University of Michigan Neuropsychiatric Institute. He worked with a vast number and all kinds of patients and always worked very hard to find a way to reach and help them. He usually succeeded, though not often enough. One lost is one too many.

"My father was involved in the evaluation and treatment of John Norman Collins. He was the only patient I am aware of that my father bailed out from his case. It gave him the shudders. 


"My dad said that Collins was never going to change. He was too evil. It really got to him, even just being around Collins. He was wickedness incarnate! There were other killers my father worked with, but this one was too much even for him who loved every human soul alive.


"Rest in peace my beloved father, William Arthur Bronson, born September 7, 1926. You helped so many people regain their lives and paid a price to do so."

John Norman Collins, aka Bill Kenyon - The 8mm Muscleman

My search for reliable information to restore the facts of the Rainy Day Murders has been a Sisyphean task.  

Drawing together what is known about John Norman Collins and the "coed killings" in one place is a huge undertaking but long overdue.

My researcher, Ryan M. Place, and I have invoked the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain documents from the Michigan Department of Corrections, the Michigan State Police, and the Washtenaw County Coroner's Office, with several more government agencies pending.

Despite major gaps in the public records, we have discovered some interesting information by scouring through these boxes of government documents. Among the more surprising finds are some items on an evidence log in the Karen Sue Beineman case folder. 

Somewhere in the Michigan State Police vault in East Lansing, Michigan, there are weightlifting photos of John Norman Collins posing for Tomorrow's Man magazine as Bill Kenyon. He appeared in the September, 1969, issue which came out on newsstands at roughly the same time he was arrested for the first-degree murder of Karen Sue Beineman.

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Tomorrow's Man was a pulp magazine popular in some male circles in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the guise of male physical fitness and weightlifting, the magazine was available on newsstands across the country and was often a young man's first exposure to alternative male lifestyles. Their magazine's motto was "Hunks in Trunks."

This was before gay rights and the lessening of the social stigma against male homosexuality. By the end of the 1960s, American culture underwent a fundamental shift in cultural mores. Tomorrow's Man became obsolete and went out of business. The magazine's back issues are collector's items and very hard to obtain. (See the link below for some of their iconic cover art.)

***

My researcher and I have made an additional FOIA request for the photos of JNC posing for Tomorrow's Man magazine.  These items were not used as evidence in the case, and the Michigan State Police has determined that they have no monetary value.

• two 8x10 black and white stills of Collins posing
• one 8x10 contact proof sheet with twelve poses
• one copy of Tomorrow's Man magazine showing Collins posing as Bill Kenyon
• fourteen color pictures of Collins posing
• and a must see to believe - twenty-five foot long reel of 8mm film of John Norman Collins striking poses.

Last week, I wrote a Michigan State Police detective who has worked on these cases recently. I asked him to suggest to his commander that the state police consider digitizing the 8mm film stock before it fades to nothing and turns brittle in the can. If Ryan and I are successful in obtaining this film, we will post it on YouTube.

At the very least, we hope to secure some decent scans of photographs to include in a photo bank in the true crime book I'm writing, The Rainy Day Murders. The photograph of Collins above is a photocopy taken from a vintage Detroit Free Press article dated August 30, 1970.

http://www.pulpinternational.com/pulp/entry/Assorted-covers-of-Tomorrows-Man-bodybuilding-magazine.html

The John Norman Collins' Prison Papers

Blocking the facts and details of the John Norman Collins coed killer case, through the trial and sentencing, has been a time consuming and tedious process. But bringing out the voices of the past by reconstructing the dialogue of the witnesses' testimony from newspaper reports of the day has been insightful and fascinating.

Working with old information and with what we've learned about this case since the seventies, an account is starting to form which will give a more textured and resonant picture of the trial than the phonetically transcribed court transcripts would have, which incidentally were unavailable to me. The Washtenaw County Courthouse Records Department has "purged" this case from their files.

My researcher, Ryan Place from Detroit, and I are entering uncharted territory now - the John Norman Collins prison years. Using the Freedom of Information Act, we were able to secure a thousand prison documents from the Michigan Department of Corrections. 

Once we paid our tribute ($500), we were sent a box full of unsorted photocopies which had to be categorized, placed in chronological order, and thinned of duplicate copies. Of the one-thousand photocopies we purchased, only about three-hundred are useful to us, and many of them are routine paperwork of little or no interest to the general reader. 

The good news is that now I have a manageable amount of information to work with, and a picture of John Collins' years behind prison bars is beginning to take shape. 

When we saw the initial amount of prison materials, we hoped that we had received the full sweep of his four decades in prison at Marquette, Jackson, and several other Michigan correctional institutions, including a short stay at Ionia, which houses Michigan's mentally ill and deranged prison population.

But there are huge gaping holes in the chronology of his many years in prison. Still, there is some interesting factual information to be found among the routine and often sketchy paperwork. 

Something missing is any information on John Collins attempted prison breaks, especially a tunneling attempt he made with six of his prison inmates. They tried to dig themselves toward an outside wall of Marquette prison in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 

Discovered by a prison guard on January 31, 1979, Collins and six other convicts had dug nineteen feet toward an outside wall within thirty-five feet of freedom. They had been scooping out handfuls of sand since the previous summer. 

The prisoners were charged with breaking the prison's rules but little more is known about the incident. There must have been an investigation, but we don't have any evidence of any. Were escape charges ever brought against them? I'd like to know more and will pursue it further.

It would have been nice to get a well-organized and concise information drop from the Michigan Department of Corrections, but they aren't in the business of helping me do research for my book, In the Shadow of the Water Tower.

It is the search for knowledge that drives me and my researcher to uncover as much about these matters as we possibly can and to shed light on this dimly remembered and deliberately shrouded past.
 

Invoking the Freedom of Information Act in the John Norman Collins Case

Trying to piece together the forty-three year old John Norman Collins sex-mutilation murder case of Karen Sue Beineman, without the benefit of the court transcripts which have been purged from the Washtenaw County court records, has been a challenge to say the least.

Collins was convicted on August 19, 1970, of the Beineman murder, but six other young woman thought to be multiple murders committed by Collins between 1967 and 1969 were never brought to trial. Behind bars, he has steadfastly maintained his innocence for over four decades.

Were it not for about 800 pages of news clippings from 1967-1970 and the efforts of court and crime reporters of that era, the true facts of this case would be lost to history. Another thank you and acknowledgement goes to the archivists at the Ypsilanti Historical Museum and the Halle Library at Eastern Michigan University for their generous help and expertise.

My researcher, Ryan Place, and I have been pursuing every lead possible to obtain information about these cases. When Ryan's lawyer told him how to invoke the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a private citizen, he petitioned the Michigan Department of Corrections for information on John Norman Collins' prison years, and we received 1,000 pages of documents, taken primarily from Marquette Prison records. There were many duplications of routine documents and some were illegible photocopies, but much of the material gives an interesting view into his prison years. This cost us about $500, but we were happy to have some new information.

Next, we invoked the FOIA to get Michigan State Police documents that would be useful for their information and the authentication of facts. After a ten day waiting period, the department asked for a week's extension; then after that week, they asked for another extension. No problem for us, we were still working our way through the prison docks.

Well, they finally came through. We hit the jackpot! The Michigan State Police scoured the state of Michigan for forty-five years of documents related to these murders and this case. They discovered approximately 800,000 pages, and for a paltry sum of $318,000 (conservative estimate) they will photocopy them and send them out to me. Even if I could afford a third of a million dollars, it would take me and a warehouse full of trained researchers months to sort through, catalog, and annotate the material.

Ryan and I are going to narrow the scope of our request severely, so we can tell the essential story with as much authority and documentation as possible. 

One interesting side note to all of this is that Ryan was told by an informed source that these cases have been reopened within the last year. Now that's a story I hope we can get a piece of before I finish my true crime account of these events entitled, In the Shadow of the Water Tower.

 Check out the link for FOIA paperwork:
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/new.aspx?id=175&utm_source=103&try=1&v=3&gclid=CKzU-bfyzrMCFUxxQgodjQQAfg#q1 

October Ypsilanti Trip Proves Productive

I just returned home after two weeks of field research for In the Shadow of the Water Tower on John Norman Collins and the Michigan murders in and around Ypsilanti, Michigan. People have started to come forward and share information from those difficult days forty-five years ago.

These cases from the late Sixties are still considered "open" by the Michigan State Police. Getting information about them from official sources is no easy task. The Washtenaw County Courthouse, for instance, has "purged" the Collins' files from their records.

But thanks to the efforts of my chief researcher, Ryan Place of Detroit, Michigan, we were able to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to obtain more than 1,000 pages of prison documents from the Michigan Corrections Department.

Soon we hope to have a similar number of documents from the Michigan State Police. Most of these files will have routine information, but we are sure to find some nuggets of new information in them as well.

Through this blog and my Facebook page, I was able to connect with some former Ypsilanti High students of mine and several former Ypsilanti High School colleagues. This research trip was like old home week for me.

Thanks for your hospitality.