Soon, I'll be wrapping up my Michigan Terror In Ypsilanti booktalks. I'll be at the Ypsilanti District Library on May 11th and the Ann Arbor Barnes & Noble on May 13th. To round out this mini-tour, I'm giving four talks for the Jackson District Libraries as well.
After a forty-five minute presentation, I'll take questions from the audience. Books will be available for purchase before and after the talks as long as supplies last.
Terror In Ypsilanti: John Norman Collins Unmasked is available on Amazon in a quality paperback edition. Kindle and all ebook formats are reduced to $6.95. Now, an audiobook can also be purchased on Amazon. Makes a great vacation or airplane read. Click on the book cover in the right sidebar for more details.
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Free five minute listening sample of audiobook:<http://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/Terror-in-Ypsilanti-Audiobook/B06XSKGMMJ?action_code=AUDORWS0424159DCE>
Autographed copies of Terror In Ypsilanti are available at the sale price of $20 on my author website <www.gregoryafournier.com>
Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep was writer/producer/director William Martin's attempt to tell the story of the coed killings, alleged to have been committed by John Norman Collins in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, between 1967 and 1969. The title comes from the well-known children's bedside prayer.
Martin made an earlier film in Michigan called Jacktown, the nickname for the world's largest walled prison at the time - Jackson State Prison. It was an uneasy mix of documentary footage from the Jackson prison riot in the 1950s, location shooting in Royal Oak, Michigan, and an uninspired script with wooden acting. What makes this movie fun to watch is how really bad it is.
As with Jacktown, Martin used seasoned actors in the lead roles for Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep and wanted some local talent to play several of the murdered girls. Local actress, Kathy Pierce of Chelsea, Michigan, was chosen to play the role of Karen Sue Beineman, the only murdered coed Collins was convicted of killing. Allison Date from Ann Arbor had also been cast as one of the victims.
As other writers have done in the past, Martin changed the names of the victims, which over time has obscured the girls' identities. Karen Sue Beineman was renamed Carol Ann Gebhardt in one account, Karry B. in another, and Norma Jean Fenneman in Martin's movie. By my count, the seven victims are referred to by no fewer than twenty-eight names in various treatments of this material. Is it any wonder the public is so confused about this case? John Norman Collins' character was to be called Brian Caldwell, played by veteran actor, Robert Purvey (See bio link for more information about him).
At first, Martin said he encountered lots of local resistance, but after the The Michigan Murders came out in 1976, resistance became pointless. Then, Collins' lawyers tried to get an injunction against the film because it prejudiced the appeals process against their client. At his own expense, Martin, offered to close down production of his film if John Collins would take a lie-detector test exonerating himself. He never did.
More serious was an Ann Arbor News report from July 30th, 1977, about William Martin being approached by "a large man with a beard" at about 10:00 AM as he was preparing for the day's shoot. The burly man poked his finger into Martin's chest and told him, "You, you're dead. We'll kill you!" Afterwards, Martin told of other threats to him and some of the film's stars. The article goes on to say, "a truckload of road blocks led some to believe that this film would never be made."
Last week, actor Robert Purvey contacted my researcher with a different story. He said that Martin had only half a script and asked Purvey to help write the story as they went along. They spent their days on location and their evenings feverishly preparing for the next day's shooting. Once the crew returned to Hollywood, there were additional studio scenes to shoot and post production costs skyrocketed, so the project was shelved.
Probably just as well. The story of the murders of these young woman deserves to be told accurately - not cobbled together like some mystery movie of the week. If William Martin's early film, Jacktown, is any indication, it is better that Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep never saw the light of day.
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.
