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.
Established in 1144 AD, "The Clink" was the prison that gave its name to all others. The name derived from the clinking sound made by the blacksmith when closing the irons around the wrists and ankles of prisoners. The prison was located on the south side of the Thames River just west of the London Bridge in an area named Southwark.
Originally, the prison was built within palace walls owned and operated by the Bishop of Winchester. It served as the bishop's private gaol (jail).
Southwark became the place where the people of London went for their adult entertainment, much like Las Vegas is today for many Americans. It was louder, cruder, and more notorious than staid London across the river.
Activities which were illegal north of the Thames were given free rein on the south side of the river. Drinking and carousing were popular past times. Bull and bear baiting attracted gamblers, as did dog fighting and cock fights. There were twenty-two bath houses (brothels) along Bankside, and in 1587 AD, the new playhouses added to the general lawlessness as petty crimes were rampant and cut purses (pick pockets) worked the area.
Over its six-hundred year history, the Clink has held debtors, heretics, drunkards, prostitutes, thieves, political prisoners, Protestants, Catholics, and the pilgrim fathers before they shipped out to America.
Despite barbaric prison conditions, punishment was not the purpose of Medieval prisons. Prisons were used to confine the accused before his or her trial. The punishment came after the trial.
For minor offenses, a prisoner could be locked in the stocks for a public show of humiliation or taken to a pillory where the guilty party would be tied to the whipping post for a public scourging.
For capital crimes, a person could have his head chopped off, get his neck stretched by the business end of a rope, or be burned at the stake if you were a religious heretic. Executions were popular forms of entertainment in those times and drew huge crowds.
The lower cellars of the prison would regularly flood during high tides and prisoners would have to stand waist high in sewage and human waste. Waterborne infections killed countless people with diseases like Camp Fever (typhoid), The Ague (malaria), and The Flux (dysentery). During the plague years, the Clink must have resembled Hell itself as bodies were piled up outside the prison waiting to be hauled away for hasty burial.
Because of the accumulated filth, William de Rakyer was hired in 1375 to rake up the muck. This is believed to be the origin of the term "muckraker" used in politics.
In a footnote to history, King Henry II in 1161 issued fifty-two regulations for the Bankside "stews" in an effort to regulate prostitution. The working girls were not allowed to cheat their patrons, nor could women be forced into that line of work. Women for the first time were allowed to earn an income and achieve a level of independence from men hitherto unknown.
Ironically, the Bishop of Winchester owned several of these "rented" houses and made a sizable income from the wages of sin. The girls were nicknamed "Winchester Geese" partially because of the white aprons and yellow hoods they were required to wear by law.
The brothels were called stews, which is believed to be a corruption of the Old French word for stove - estuve - for the "hot work done in them."
For the first time, these women had some immunity from prosecution and could ply their trade without constant fear of arrest and incarceration in the Clink.
http://www.clink.co.uk/
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.
