Showing posts with label
Michigan Department of Corrections.
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Showing posts with label
Michigan Department of Corrections.
Show all posts
The crime of rape is a soul-wrenching experience for anyone to endure. As society has become increasingly open with discussing this issue, more and more children of rape are opting to discover their birth mothers and family histories. If any human experience is bittersweet, this is it.
Today, there are organizations and support groups for adult children of rape to reconnect with their birth mothers. The stigma in our society against these innocent offspring still exists, but increasing public exposure of successful reunions is making it easier for more people to come forward.
In 2011, I was contacted by a woman who has asked that her name not be revealed. She was a child of a rape in 1968 and located her birth mother only several years ago. She has since established a loving, healthy relationship with her. Upon inquiring about her birth father though, her mother was uncomfortable and evasive when it came to revealing who he was. After some hemming and hawing, the mom admitted that she knew who the father was, that he was still alive, but that he was unavailable for a meeting.
On a hunch, she asked if her father was in prison. "Yes," was the answer. Reluctantly, her mother told her that she believed her father to be John Norman Collins. When Collins was arrested in 1969 and his picture was in all the papers, she thought she recognized him as the man who raped her.
Only two months ago, I received another gmail from a woman who now lives on the East Coast. After reading some of my Collins blog posts, she decided to contact me believing that her father may be John Norman Collins. This woman searched for and discovered her birth mother and has since established a relationship with her.
And of course, this woman also wanted to know who her birth father was. Whenever she inquired about him, her mother refused to tell her his name because she was still scared of him. Then her daughter found a copy of The Michigan Murders in her mother's house and read it. When she asked her mother about it, her mother looked quite upset. That was her daughter's first inkling that JNC could be her birth father, despite the antagonist's name being changed to John Armstrong in the novel.
I gmailed her back and asked if we could speak on the phone so I could report on what I knew. When I told her that she was the second person to contact me about JNC's possible paternity, she livened up. I told her the background of my efforts to contact Collins and his siblings to see if we could arrange for a paternity test to show kinship. They were unresponsive. I was told by the Michigan Department of Corrections that there is a statute of limitations for rape and we would need a court order to get a DNA sample from Collins.
John Norman Collins has often said that he loves children and would love to have been a dad, so I wrote to him in Marquette Prison telling him that he may be not only a father, but also a grandfather. If he would like more information, contact me. To date, he has refused to show any interest in his fatherhood. That's how strong his paternal instinct is. Again, it is not what he says, but what he does or doesn't do that is most revealing of his character.
On a personal note, I have spoken to the first alleged daughter many times on the telephone and am very familiar with her voice. When I heard the voice of the second woman on the phone, I'll be damned if I didn't hear a similar tone and tenor in the voices of both woman. It was eerily apparent. After receiving permission to have them contact each other, they both asked me to reluctantly inquire if there are any others within the reach of my blog who suspect Collins may be their father.
From my extensive research on Collins, I've found he was a practiced rapist, so other offspring may be waiting to be discovered. If you believe Collins may be your birth father, or if you have any information that might be useful in our quest, please contact me at gregoryafournier@ gmail.com. Your information will be held in strictest confidence.
See what one woman recently did to find her birth mom:
http://www.today.com/news/burger-king-baby-finds-birth-mom-i-am-filled-emotions-2D79437635
Even though it has been almost fifty years since the Washtenaw County murder cases, more than once I've been asked what my personal connection is to them and John Norman Collins. Why do I feel the need to disturb the ghosts of the past and resurrect the pain of the living? To that, I say that the seven innocent victims were real people who deserve to be remembered.
I believe Elie Wiesel's quote from his Holocaust memoir, Night, is fitting because it addresses this attitude: "To forget them - would be like killing them twice." We don't get to choose our history, and it is up to the living to speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.
These 1967-1969 serial murders terrorized the college towns of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, directly affecting the lives of thousands of Washtenaw County residents. What most people remember about those times is based on the hasty novelization by Edward Keyes, The Michigan Murders.
Besides changing the names of the victims, the witnesses, and their presumed murderer which obscured their real identities, assumptions were made about the backstory to these ugly slayings without contacting people associated with these cases.
What Keyes should be given credit for is keeping the essential facts and circumstances of these cases intact. Were it not for his novelization, this dark chapter of Michigan history would have vanished with time.
But his work came out only six years after these things happened. He relied heavily on official reports and the copious notes of Eastern Michigan University English Professor Paul McGlynn, who attended all of the court sessions.
Decades of hindsight combined with new living history accounts makes it possible to create a more accurate picture of those times and circumstances and place those events in some meaningful historical context.
Over the years, because of ambiguities in the novel and the absence of factual information about these cases, an urban legend has grown up around John Norman Collins making him a folk hero in some circles. People who were not even born then or old enough to know any better believe the Karen Sue Beineman trial was a travesty of justice.
They show up on the internet comment threads talking about how Collins was hounded by desperate police, persecuted by vengeful prosecutors, and brought low by unfair media coverage. They contend that circumstantial evidence doesn't prove anything and that the Michigan Department of Corrections uses Collins as their poster boy for crime in Michigan. Rather than imprison an innocent man, the mantra goes, the police should be out there looking for the real murderer.
Each of these talking points comes directly from the John Norman Collins Playbook, a product of Collins' many attempts to manipulate the media and mold public opinion from behind bars. Unbelievably after forty-five years, Collins still has the power to cast an evil aura and infect people's minds.
For the above reasons, I was drawn to this subject matter. There is a vacuum in the historical record that needs to be filled. But I have other reasons for writing The Rainy Day Murders, personal reasons.
On Monday, I completed the first full draft of The Rainy Day Murders (RDM) about John Norman Collins (JNC) and the Washtenaw County sex slayings of seven defenseless young women in the late 1960s.
The dark shadow of time has obscured the facts of this once prominent case that History seems to have unwittingly forgotten. Institutional neglect has taken its toll on the truth story of this case also. The trial transcripts have been purged, and no microfilm, microfiche, or digital files were made of these Washtenaw County court documents. It is tough for me to understand that.
Invoking The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), my researcher and I requested and received many documents from the Ann Arbor City Attorney's office, the Michigan State Police, the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), and several other governmental agencies.
Not honoring our FOIA requests at all were the State of California and the Ypsilanti City Attorney's Office. Their refusal to comply, for whatever reasons, forced us to seek information from other sources.
Lucky for us, the Ypsilanti Historical Society, the Halle Library on the campus of Eastern Michigan University, and the Ypsilanti Public Library archives were all open and available for our use. We have carefully gleaned facts and quotes from news clippings from across the state of Michigan to faithfully reconstitute the court proceedings.
Part one of The Rainy Day Murders will discuss the facts of each of the young women's cases including new living history accounts seasoned with forty-five years of hindsight. Part two of this book will be the restored court proceedings of these murders from 1969-1970. Part three of RDM will cover an area never before written about to any great extent, JNC's prison years.
The prison years tells of Collins life and times behind bars and his attempts to legally and illegally get out of serving his full life sentence in Michigan prisons. This section also goes into his attempts to manipulate the media and shape public opinion. To round out the prison years, we have come into possession of twenty recent JNC prison letters which will add new information to the canon of this case.
At this writing, I plan to end the book with JNC's alibi defense claiming to his Canadian cousin that Collins was innocent of the murder of Karen Sue Beineman. He names the person who testified against him in court as her murderer and implicates this same person in two other murders.
This makes for fascinating reading but my treatment of this case will be a true crime account; Collins' elaborate fantasy defense is clearly fiction. So this book will have something for everyone.
From the facts and circumstances presented, I leave it up to the reader to decide the guilt or innocence of JNC. The other six cases will never be formally brought against Collins. What's the use? He is locked down and his days are numbered.
When John Norman Collins discovered in 1980 that Michigan Governor William Milliken had signed an international prisoner exchange agreement with Canada, he had an idea.
John was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1947, and moved with his mother and siblings to the Detroit area on the American side of the river in 1951 where he grew up. If he changed his adopted father's last name, Collins, and returned to his birth father's last name, Chapman, it might strengthen his claim at repatriation.
He most certainly was hoping also that the name change would help him coast under the radar of public notice and the scrutiny of the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC). On January 5, 1981, in an Oakland County courtroom, John Norman Collins legally became John Norman Chapman.
Collins' Michigan sentence called for Life without the possibility of parole. If transferred to Canada, he would be subject to their law which provides for the possibility of parole after fifteen years of a Life sentence. Additionally, a foreign conviction does not constitute a criminal record in Canada.
Including his time served in the Washtenaw County Jail prior to his prison sentence, Collins had served twelve years of his Life sentence. A transfer to a Canadian prison meant he would have been eligible for parole in 1985.
***
Collins (Chapman) handled all of the paperwork successfully and he was transferred from Marquette Prison in the Upper Peninsula to Jackson Prison, closer to the Federal building in Detroit where the international transfer was to take place.
But on the day of the hearing, it was discovered that one signature from Ottawa was missing, so the transfer hearing was rescheduled until the paperwork caught up with the necessary signature.
Before that could happen, a fellow Marquette prison inmate familiar with Collins' plan to circumvent his full sentence blew the whistle on him. He posted a letter to the Detroit Free Press night editor, someone he had worked with on an earlier prison story.
The night editor gave the story to Marianne Rzepka who ran a story the next day called "Transfer to Canada For Killer?" That evening, Michigan's Associated Press picked up the story on their wire service, and by morning, thirty-three newspapers and eight-five radio and television stations ran with the story.
When the prosecutor of the case, William Delhey heard of the transfer request, he immediately contacted the parents of Karen Sue Beineman and they started making phone calls and writing letters.
To convince John Norman Collins' last remaining Canadian relatives not to sponsor him for eventual parole, a letter of some graphic detail about the case and other troubling details, was sent by Prosecutor Delhey to their Canadian home.
When Collins' uncle received a call from the Canadian Director of Prisons, he was told to stay away from the case due to its graphic nature and content. After reading about the details of the case, Mr. Chapman, John's paternal uncle, refused to support Collins any further.
In a collect phone call from prison, Collins became unhinged when he was told that he didn't have the support or acknowledgement of his Canadian relatives, an essential part of the transfer agreement.
John's Canadian cousin remembers it this way: "When my Dad realized that John was lying to him about his innocence, my Dad told him off in no uncertain terms.... There were some colorful metaphors thrown around and it was after that, that my Dad refused to take any more of John's collect phone calls from prison, but he never stopped me from writing him.... I was in the living room watching TV, so I heard everything."
"After my Dad got off the phone, he spoke with my Mom out on the balcony. When they came inside, he sat me down and spoke with me. In that conversation, he told me that some day, John might try the same thing on me, as he did with him.... My Dad was only looking out for me and wanted to let me know that this possibility might happen. And the truth is - it did!"
***
On another front, the MDOC was getting heat from the press, the public, and the politicians. The MDOC and Marquette's warden, T.H. Koehler, would have liked to trade off their most notorious inmate. The warden was quoted as saying, "John Norman Collins is the only inmate in this prison who has a book about him for sale in the prison gift shop."
On January 20, 1982, MDOC's Deputy Director, Robert Brown Jr., revoked approval of Collins' transfer bid on the grounds that John Norman Collins was a naturalized American citizen raised in the United States, and he has had minimal contact with his few surviving Canadian relatives over the years.
Collins was immediately shuttled by prison van back up to Marquette Branch Prison to serve out the rest of his Life sentence, only to find someone else occupying his former cell. The warden hadn't expected him to return.
For more information on this subject, check out this earlier post:
http://fornology.blogspot.com/2013/06/john-norman-collins-and-canadian-prison.html
On Friday, January 16, 1970, the people's case against John Norman Collins finally went to the jury.
They had been sequestered in a hotel for a full month during the trial proceedings. Now, after lunch at an undisclosed Ann Arbor restaurant, they returned to the jury room to begin deliberations at 1:10 PM. They retired for the evening at 9:30 PM.
On January 20, 1970, after four stressful days, one-hundred and one hours and thirty minutes since the jury began deliberations, the jury foreman informed the bailiff that they had arrived at a verdict.
The jury had weighed the evidence for a total of twenty-seven hours, heard five and a half hours of trial testimony read back to them, and listened to the judge's instructions for a second time. The jury brought a murder in the first degree verdict against John Norman Collins for the wrongful death of Karen Sue Beineman.
Collins' mother Loretta audibly gasped when she heard the words no mother should hear, but many other Michigan mothers felt some level of relief at the headlines screaming out from the newspapers: Collins Found Guilty.
Washtenaw County District Court Judge John W. Conlin set the date for sentencing as Wednesday, August 28th, 1970.
On the appointed day with a courtroom packed mostly with press, the defendant and his family heard Judge Conlin pass the mandatory sentence: "Life in prison without possibility of parole at hard labor in solitary confinement."
One hour after the court proceedings, Collins was in a prison van headed for Jackson State Prison.
As imposing as that may sound, Michigan Department of Corrections spokesperson told the press that the hard labor and solitary provision had not been enforced in Jackson State Prison for "the past fifteen years or so." It is impossible to do both at the same time, he said, so other inmate management plans were in place.
The press also learned that new prisoners are eased into the prison population for the first thirty days. Collins would be quarantined for testing and an adjustment period.
Physicals, aptitude, intelligence, and psychological tests (which Collins has tacitly refused to take) are given to new arrivals. This helps prison committees determine the best placement for offenders and eligibility for parole.
Collins managed to work a number of menial jobs until he secured a job tutoring other inmates, which his supervisors thought he was good at, particularly with difficult inmates. In that job, he was able to meet people from many different areas of the prison.
While working at a food service job, a large amount of sugar was found missing from the kitchen pantry. When some inmates were caught with "spud juice" one evening. Collins was implicated in the sugar theft and the making of potato vodka. He soon lost all of his job privileges.
***
Today, John Norman Collins is on Administrative Segregation at Marquette Prison and spends most of the day in his cell with the exception of a one hour exercise period. Weightlifting, a life long interest, is difficult these days because of knee and back injuries. To complicate matters, rumor has it that Collins had a mild stroke in the early spring of 2012.
Prison reports have it that Collins has taken to feeding birds during his exercise breaks, and he has in fact been reprimanded by prison officials for that. The birds recognize him when he is in the yard earning him the sobriquet, "the bird man."
Because of several attempts over the years to escape from prison, Collins has earned a Level Five security classification. He can not be trusted to work any prison job, but he has his own cell with a television, a prison bed, a small writing area, a bookshelf, and a toilet. So at least the solitary confinement part of his original sentence is being served - sort of.
In the early 1980's, John Norman Collins quietly changed his name to John Norman Chapman and started to engineer another way out of serving his full prison sentence. He hearkened to his Canadian roots.
http://www.amazon.com/Gregory-A.-Fournier/e/B00BDNEG1C
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.
