The Rainy Day Murders Progress Report

Over the past year, the question I was asked most is "When will The Rainy Day Murders be finished?"

For the last five years with the help of Ryan M. Place, I have researched and rewritten the entire manuscript three times and consulted editors twice. My original 144,000 word manuscript was too long and the narrative wandered. Publishing length guidelines for true crime range from 80,000 to 100,000 words.

In 2015, I set a personal goal to finish a top-to-bottom restructuring before the end of year. On New Year's Eve, I dotted the last i and crossed the last t. I managed to trim 35,000 words off the manuscript while improving the narrative flow.

The eye sees but doesn't see itself.

Over the past year, I asked five people to read and evaluate The Rainy Day Murders. Several of them commented on the title. They felt rain was not a factor in some of the seven murders. Fair enough. Currently, I am pitching the project using my original title In the Shadow of the Water Tower. What the final title becomes will be decided at some future editorial meeting.

Beginning with the San Diego State University Writers' Conference on January 22nd, I will begin pitching the book and seeking representation. The publishing business is demanding, unforgiving, and moves at its own speed. May this be the year In the Shadow of the Water Tower sees the light of day.

The Rainy Day Murders Preparing for the Next Hurdle - Representation

Photo courtesy of Nicole C. Fribourg

I am finally at a point with my true crime project The Rainy Day Murders when it is time to get outside people involved. Getting this book ready for publication has been essentially a two person operation. For over the last three years, Ryan M. Place of Detroit has tirelessly researched the Washtenaw County murders (July 1967 - July 1969) of seven young women and the person accused of killing them, John Norman Collins.

Together, we have gone through thousands of pages of vintage government documents and newspaper clippings from the era, searched various archives in the towns of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor where these events occurred, and conducted countless interviews with people who have first-hand knowledge of this case and/or the people involved with it.

Assembling these disparate elements has been akin to aligning a Rubic's Cube with some of the colored decals missing. Without the candid cooperation of the offender and the release of all government documents connected with these cases, the full facts will never be known. Still, by repeatedly invoking the Freedom of Information Act, Ryan and I have pieced together enough of the puzzle to reveal a gestalt of evidence and circumstance that goes far beyond the purview of random coincidence and lays the burden of guilt squarely at Collins' feet.

 

Originally, the working title for this project was In the Shadow of the Water Tower. I changed it in favor of The Rainy Day Murders (RDM), so as not to besmirch the city of Ypsilanti's beloved landmark which played no part in any of the murders. The sum total of the information we have compiled has been reduced to 645 pages of hard-wrought manuscript. During my latest rewrite and revision, it became clear to me that I really had two books worth of material, not only because of length considerations, but also because of thematic focus.

Ryan M. Place

The original scope of the project was to fill a void in the historical account of the Washtenaw County murders and restore the identities of the victims that have been obscured by time and a couple of misguided treatments of this subject matter. I have the benefit of over forty-five years of hindsight which those authors didn't have.

But new material started coming to us from the Michigan

Department of Corrections (MDOC) which goes behind prison walls and tells the story of John Norman Collins' years as MDOC inmate #126833. That story looks into his prison record, his escape attempts, Collins' many court appeals, California's extradition efforts, both Canadian treaty transfer attempts, his media manipulations, and a survey of some of John's prison letters which reveal his present life behind bars.

This story is still unfolding, but its climax will be John Norman Collins' fantasy defense in the Karen Sue Beineman murder case. It is quite amazing and lays bare the interior workings of his mind feigning the inability to separate fact from fiction.

My writing instincts tell me that the focus of the first book should be the crimes, the victims, the living history, and the facts as they stand or fall in the Karen Sue Beineman trial. That book comes in at 495 pages without supplemental material.

The second book has its focus on John Norman Collins since his conviction. It doesn't seem appropriate to include material about his life in prison in a book about his crimes against seven innocent, defenseless women whose fatal flaw was not recognizing danger until it was too late. As it currently stands, this second book is still in development. It is 150 pages long and has the working title of The Ypsi Ripper.

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.

In the Shadow of the Water Tower - The John Norman Collins Story

In the Shadow of the Water Tower will be a true-crime account of what were known as “The Coed Killings” or “The Rainy Day Murders.” In the late 1960s seven young women were brutally murdered by what seemed like a phantom killer who spirited their bodies away until they were found dead, scattered within a fifteen mile triangular drop zone in the countryside just north of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

An Eastern Michigan University senior, one semester away from earning his degree in elementary education, was charged with the sex-slaying of eighteen year-old, Karen Sue Beineman. John Norman Collins was indicted, tried, and found guilty of her murder in the first degree and given a life sentence in Michigan prisons.

Evidence in the six other murders was never heard. Law enforcement “had their man.” Because Collins was only convicted of one murder, the sobriquet of serial killer does not officially apply, but his story is fascinating none-the-less.

Beineman’s murder and the ensuing court case were not only local and national news stories, but they also attracted some international attention. In Canada, Collins is known as “The Canadian Hannibal Lector,” and in Great Britain, he is known as “The Ypsilanti Ripper.”

The trial started on Monday, July 20^th, 1970 and by Saturday, the intense national media interest had shifted to the West Coast. The Sharon Tate and La Bianca murders had hit the front page. Charles Manson made better copy than John Norman Collins.

The Collins’ case has largely fallen through the cracks over time - literally. Washtenaw County Court documents for this case have been “purged.” Presently, my researcher and I are collecting every bit of information we can lay our hands on and compiling a photo bank to accompany the finished text, a feature missing from other treatments of this material.

We are piecing the story together from over 800 pages of news articles from the time, and we have just make arrangements through the Freedom of Information Act to get over 1,000 pages of documents from the Michigan Corrections Department regarding Collins and the forty-five years he has been behind prison bars. That story has never been told.

In addition to interviewing as many people as we can find who are still alive and were connected with this case, we also are interested in people who knew any of victims or their accused murderer, John Norman Collins. Some people came forward with information at the time but were ignored by the police. Some women have come forward recently for the first time and told their stories. I myself lived only one short block down the street from Collins and had several brushes with him.

In 1976, Edward Keyes rushed into print with The Michigan Murders, which told the then known basics of the case in a novelization of the real story. He took liberties by changing the names of the young female victims, their alleged murderer, and the witnesses other than the legal authorities.

Although it may have been the custom when it was written, in today’s tabloid world, protecting their real names doesn’t cut it anymore. These young women have been robbed of their identities, and the historical record has been subverted. I hope to remedy both situations.

If you have any information on these matters, I would like to hear from you.

Please contact me at:

<www.gregoryafournier@gmail.com> or post a letter to:

Fornology

PO Box 712821

Santee, CA 

92071-2821

Quick Party Caricatures by Walt Griggs

While doing research for my next book, In the Shadow of the Water Tower, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, I ran into Walt Griggs, a caricature artist preparing to set up for a party he was working at The Corner Brewery.

I struck up a conversation with him about my reason for being in town and he was quite intrigued. He had never heard of John Norman Collins or the co-ed killings.

"Would you like me to draw you? I need to warm up." The party hadn't started quite yet.

"Sure," I said. "Do you want me to pose or anything?"

"No. Just sit there and tell me more about your book."

Five minutes later, he handed me the drawing you see above. I was really pleased with it, though I don't think I'm that gleeful in real life. Of course, that's why it's called a caricature.

What a great idea! Hiring someone to caricature quests at a party. The artist gets a commission for being there, and he earns tips and future referrals for other jobs at the same time.

As people began to arrive at the private party, I traded him a copy of Zug Island and thanked him. We both made a good deal I think.

Check out Walt's website at: www.artistrising.com/galleries/waltgriggs

100th Fornology Blog Post - Zug Island Web Radio Interview

One year ago this month, I began my blog - Fornology - and coincidentally this is my one-hundredth post. That means coming up with new content every three to four days - or an average of two posts per week. I've discovered that it is surprisingly enjoyable.

I began reluctantly at the prompting of my publicist, Paula Margulies, but now, posting is a natural part of my weekly routine. Sometimes, I have a definite idea of what to write about, but other times I'll see or hear something that I want to pass on to my readers. More often than not, I document what I'm doing with my writing projects: promoting Zug Island in print and on the radio, for instance, and on the writing of In the Shadow of the Water Tower, which deals with John Norman Collins, alleged coed killer from the late 1960s.

Blogging allows me the instant gratification of immediate publication and gives me an outlet to feed my writing habit. Each post is a creative micro burst which helps me build an audience for my longer works. I check my stats daily and am pleased with the steady rise in hits each month. My blog is approaching 7,000 hits.

That Russia is my second largest audience next to the United States is amazing to me. Then to see the Canadians catching up, with the Germans close behind, is like going to the races. These "audience" stats have meaning only to me, but it reminds me of the power of the world-wide web to reach out and communicate with people internationally. The Global Village has become a reality to me.

On Friday, May 4th,  I did a web radio interview on the Hollis Chapman Show about my debut novel, Zug Island.  My segment begins the show and is thirty minutes long. We had some minor technical difficulties early on but managed to work through them while on the air. It's live radio.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hollischapmanshow/2012/05/04/join-our-cool-voice-over-show