The Ann Arbor Mallet Murder

Pauline Campbell was a nurse at St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Saturday, September 15, 1951, had been a hot day in Ann Arbor, but near midnight it was pleasantly cool. Pauline Campbell (34) had just finished her evening shift working the maternity ward at St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital. She crossed Observatory Street kitty-corner and headed down Washington Heights, a narrow, darker street towards where she lived several houses away. 

***

Only four nights before, a man had slugged a nurse with a blunt instrument while walking home from University Hospital in this same neighborhood. 

Bill Morey, Max Pell, and Dan Meyers were recent Ypsilanti High School graduates. On Wednesday night, they drove to Milan and bought two six-packs of beer at a tavern known to sell to minors.

Dan Meyers owned the car but didn't have his license yet and allowed Bill Morey to drive his car that night. They were cruising Ann Arbor, according to Dan, because they wanted to steal some hubcaps they could sell or trade for an echo can--a fifteen inch chrome exhaust pipe for his car.

Rather than steal hub caps on a quiet, shadowy street, Bill drove towards the well-lit University Hospital area. The three of them were tipsy, and Bill decided he wanted to pick up some girls. On the way over, Max and Bill began talking about snatching a nurse's purse. Later in court, Dan testified it was mainly Bill's idea.

"Let's hit somebody over the head and rob them," Bill said. There was a 12" crescent wrench among some loose tools they used to steal car parts under the front seat.

"This should do it," he said, striking his open palm to test its heft.

The street was busy, but when they saw a nurse walking up a deserted street alone, Bill said, "I'm going to hit her and drag her into the car."

In court, Dan Meyers claimed he kept telling Bill not to do it, but he did not hold Bill back nor did he shout out a warning to the nurse.

Bill got out of the car swiftly and walked up behind the unsuspecting nurse and swung the wrench. He hit her--but she didn't fall down--she screamed and ran. Bill jumped back to the car, and the three teenagers drove away laughing about the failed attempt.

Shirley Mackley was able to describe her attacker for police: five feet, ten inches tall; about one-hundred and seventy-five pounds; and young--possibly twenty years old. She was not seriously hurt. Her attacker had wanted to stun her and drag her into the car, so he held back a fatal blow. That would not happen again.

***

Four nights later, Bill Morey and Max Pell were out cruising again, but this time with Dave Royal, someone they recently met. Max was driving his beloved car that night.

They talked Dave into paying for the beer because he worked construction and had money. Max bought a case of beer, and they split it between themselves and two "wild" girls Bill knew from Milan. Dave was the odd man out and drank alone in the car.

They drank most of the beer and dropped the girls off at their homes at about eleven. The inebriated trio headed into Ann Arbor. That's when Bill told Max Pell, "Go up around the hospital."

There was a rubber mallet with a foot long wooden handle in the car that Max's father used to repair household furniture. They spotted a lone nurse leaving Mercy Hospital. She crossed Observatory Street kitty-corner and starting down the hill on Washington Heights Street which was narrower and darker.

Max turned off his headlights and Bill said, "Let me out here behind the nurse." 

With Bill on foot, Dave asked Max if Bill intended to assault and rob the nurse. "I know he had it on his mind, but I don't know if he is going to do it."

Wearing moccasins, Bill gained on the nurse, rushed her from behind, and knocked her unconscious. Bill struck her several more times, then he called out to Dave to help him drag her limp body to the car. 

They got only as much as her head in the car when Max told them, "Don't put her in the car!" They dropped her body in the street and drove off leaving her unconscious. She died soon after in the hospital where she had just finished her shift.

The young thugs took Huron River Drive back to Ypsilanti, but not before Bill went through the victim's purse. In it was a cigarette lighter, a watch, and a dollar and a half. From a bridge, they threw her purse into the Huron River. Afterward, they bought ninety-four cents worth of gas, ate sandwiches, and drank coffee to sober up at a truck stop called the Fifth Wheel.

***

After the first nurse attack, Bill confessed to his good friend, Dan Baughey, who was on probation at the time, that he was the person who hit the nurse. When Dan heard about the killing of the second nurse, he was urged by his priest and his father to tell the police what he knew.

At 3:00 PM on Wednesday, September 19, Dan Baughey reported to police, and the three suspects were apprehended. On their drive from the Ann Arbor police station to Lansing to take lie-detector tests, Bill chatted with detectives about police cars. That's all he talked about. Dave Royal did not say much for most of the ride. 

But Max Pell was worried chiefly about his car which had been taken into evidence. He told the police that he recently put a new engine in it and asked them not to drive it over fifty miles an hour.

The young toughs confessed when they got to Lansing. Max Pell was the first to break down when police told him they were going to cut up his car's upholstery to check for blood evidence.

"You don't need to tear my car apart. I'll tell you. It's blood."

***

The victim, Pauline Campbell, was an orphan born in Ohio and raised by a farm family. She worked her way through college as a housemaid and later as a nurse's aide. She was single, quiet, tidy, and rather slight of build said her landlady.

Less than six weeks after the arrest, the case went to trial. The courtroom as packed with local teenage girls, some who managed to get their pictures in the paper and later got in trouble for skipping school. When the defendants entered or left the courtroom, Bill was always first, then Max, and then Dave. 

In his summation, Washtenaw County Prosecutor Reading told the jury that "...on the night Miss Campbell was killed she, unlike the three teens, had been working and working at a task that benefits other people." He asked the jury to bring forth a first degree murder conviction for all three defendants.

Bill Morey's aunt, mother, and father at arraignment.

Bill Morey and Max Pell were found guilty of murder one and given life sentences. Dave Royal was convicted of second degree murder and got twenty-two years to life for his part. Dan Meyers was sentenced to serve one to ten years for his complicity in the attack upon the first nurse who survived. 

***

After the trial, the community of Ypsilanti felt that the finger of shame was being pointed at them for letting their kids run wild and get out of control. This was true from the Ann Arbor News perspective and the Detroit newspapers also.

The city of Ypsilanti went into a defensive mode. One former Ypsilanti policewoman, Mrs. Dellinger, was quoted as saying, "The community has committed itself to a hush-hush policy. My feeling is that there will be another episode just as horrifying before this community can be awakened."

Sixteen years later, the first of the Washtenaw County Murders struck the Ypsilanti community. This time a serial killer was on the loose, and the rubber mallet murder had long been forgotten.

Why I Chose To Write About John Norman Collins

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.

Treading on the Grief of Others in the John Norman Collins Case

It is not easy writing about terrible matters which stir up painful memories and open old wounds. So it is with the Terror In Ypsilanti cases in Washtenaw County that occurred between the summers of 1967 and 1969.

If these deaths were matters of private grief, interest would be limited to the family and friends of the deceased, but a lone murderer bent on venting his rage against defenseless young women held two college campuses hostage during his two year reign of terror.

Coeds at The University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University felt threatened by chronic fear. Parents whose hopes and dreams rested upon the fragile shoulders of their daughters lived in dread of getting a knock on the door from plainclothes policemen with the news that their daughter was the latest victim of the phantom killer.

When a sixteen year old Romulus, Michigan, girl and a local Ypsilanti thirteen year old junior high school student were found murdered only twenty-two days apart, the entire city of Ypsilanti panicked.

Sheriff Douglas Harvey on crutches watching John Norman Collins leave the courthouse.

The murderer was no longer killing only college girls, every young woman in town was now a potential victim of this at-large killer, and police were no closer to making an arrest than they were with the murder of the first victim almost two years before. 

Only two of the eight families of victims ever had their day in court--the Beinemans in 1970 and the Mixers in 2005. After forty-five years, most of the parents of the victims have gone to their graves never to see justice done. It is a persistent wound carried by the brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends of the victims. But generations further removed from those times want to know the facts about what happened to their relatives and the man accused of killing them.

Comments on John Norman Collins websites show a remarkable amount of misinformation about these cases. Some people have elevated Collins to the status of a folk hero who was falsely imprisoned for the deeds of another, then scapegoated and railroaded by Washtenaw County law enforcement anxious to prosecute this case. When the actual details and facts of these murders are generally known, it is my hope that such people will disabuse themselves of their fallacious notions.

Many young people in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor would like to know more about their history and discover what their grandparents and parents never knew, the full evidence as it exists in the unsolved murders of these six young women. A debt to history must be paid. The facts of these cases need to be documented and preserved for posterity, so time doesn't swallow up the memory of these young women whose fatal error was not recognizing danger before it was too late.

Soon, all living history of people with knowledge of these cases will be lost. If you can shed some light on these tragedies, now is the time to come forward. You can contact me confidentially at  gregoryafournier@gmail.com 

The John Norman Collins Mess and My Motivation For Writing About It

A small number of people have questioned my motives for writing The Rainy Day Murders about John Norman Collins. Why reopen old wounds?

The sex slaying murders of seven and possibly more local young women created an atmosphere of sustained panic and mortal fear for college coeds on two college campuses, Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti and The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. 

 ***

This tragedy left an indelible impression on me and anyone else who lived through that terrible period of Washtenaw County history. I first realized an arrest had been made in the "Coed Killer Case" when I was walking down from my apartment on College Place St. to have lunch at Roy's Grill, a diner on the corner of W. Cross and College Place. It was Friday, August 1, 1969, around 10:30 or so in the morning.

I lived only a block down the street and saw an assortment of four or five police cars surrounding the corner house on Emmet St. A small group of people had gathered across the street from the house; the police were keeping spectators away.

My first thought was that another girl's body had been found. A year before, Joan Schell, the second victim of a phantom local killer, had lived across the street from this very same Emmet St. house. Her body was found in farm country on the northern outskirts of Ann Arbor.

I approached someone I knew and asked him what was happening, "John Collins was arrested for the murder of that Beineman girl a week ago," he told me. 

My friend had occasionally ridden motorcycles through the countryside with Collins, and now and then they "exchanged" motorcycle parts, so he knew him. When I asked how he got his information, he pointed to a guy in front of the cordoned off house who was arguing with policemen. 

Arnie Davis lived across the landing from Collins on the second floor and described himself, during the court case a year later, as Collins' "best friend." Davis wanted to get his stuff out of the house, but it had already been locked down as a potential crime scene. 

I walked a scant block further to W. Cross St. and ate lunch at Roy's Grill. When I walked up the street to go home, the crowd had grown and the media had arrived by this time. I have a vivid memory of reporters questioning bystanders. 

When I saw Collins' picture in the newspaper later that evening, I was able to place the name with the face. I realized that I had several negative brushes with this guy while I was a student at Eastern Michigan. 

He tried to clothesline me once when I passed by him. Perhaps he was displeased with me because I witnessed him and his friend Manny attempt to break into a car on my street, College Place.

As I was about to walk past him, I ducked and swung around in a defensive position, but Collins and Manny continued walking down the street like nothing had happened. They headed towards the Emmet St. boarding house where they each rented rooms.

After learning of Collins' arrest, my mother called me on the phone relieved. She reluctantly told me that she had suspected I might be the murderer because I resembled the eyewitness descriptions in the newspapers. Can you believe that? Thanks, Mom.

***

When The Michigan Murders came out in 1976, I snapped it up like so many other people in Ypsilanti and anxiously read it. I was disappointed because I felt the novelization of the story took liberties with the facts and relied too heavily on official reports and the work of an Eastern Michigan University English Professor, Dr. Paul McGlynn.  He had allowed Edward Keyes to use his notes which McGlynn had gathered while attending the court proceedings doing research for his own book.

I soon discovered that many assumptions and liberties were taken with the story which made for smooth flowing fiction, but the real story is anything but smooth flowing. It is a ragged mess of complicated misinformation, shaky news reporting, and missing documentation. If this was an easy story to tell, it would have been done long ago.

The most frustrating and confusing aspect of Edward Keyes' novelization was that he chose to change the names of the victims and their alleged murderer. When another author took up the charge of this case some years later, he too changed the names of the victims and of the accused, and then referenced those names to the fictitious names which only compounded the confusion and led to the obscurity of the real victims.
  

Over forty-five years have passed since these sad events, and it is time for the record to be restored and updated. It may have been customary in the past for authors to change the names of victims to protect the families and their feelings, but those days are long gone. I would rather get the facts right than be polite. 

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.

***

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

"Terror In Ypsilanti" - Who Were the Victims?

 

Without a full confession and tangible corroborative evidence, it may never be proven that John Norman Collins was the killer of Mary Fleszar (19), Joan Elspeth Schell (20), Maralynn Skelton (16), Dawn Basom (13), Alice Kalom (23), or Roxie Ann Phillips (17) - the California victim from Milwaukie, Oregon.

Collins was only brought to trial for the strangulation murder of Karen Sue Beineman (18), which occurred on the afternoon of July 23, 1969. Three eyewitnesses were able to connect Collins and Beineman together on his flashy, stolen blue Triumph motorcycle. Then an avalanche of circumstantial evidence buried John Norman Collins. The lack of a credible alibi also worked heavily against his favor with the jury.

Technically, the term serial killer does not legally apply to Collins. He was only convicted of one murder. It wasn't until 1976 that the term was first used in a court of law by FBI profiler, Robert Ressler, in the Son of Sam case in New York City. 

When the Washtenaw County prosecutor, William Delhey, decided not to bring charges in the other cases, Collins was presumed guilty in the court of public opinion by most people familiar with the case.

Today, however, not everyone agrees because of the ambiguity that surrounds this case and the many unanswered questions. To prevent a mistrial in the 1970 Beineman case, prosecutors suppressed details and facts about the other unsolved killings. 

There are some people who believe Collins was railroaded for these crimes by overzealous law enforcement and that he should be given the benefit of the doubt and released. That can happen only with a pardon by a sitting Michigan governor. the chances of this are slim and none.

When the sex slayings stopped with the arrest of Collins for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, everyone was relieved. Most certainly, other young women were murdered in Washtenaw County after Collins was arrested, but none with the same signature rage and psychopathic contempt for womanhood. These were clearly brutal power and control murders.

The six other county murders of young women in the area from July 1968 through July 1969 were grouped together and considered a package deal. Law enforcement felt they had their man. The prevailing attitude of Washtenaw County officials was that enough time and money had been spent on this defendant.

DNA testing and a nationwide database was not available in the late 1960s. Even if it had, Collins would not have been screened because he was not in the database. He had never been arrested or convicted of any crime and had no juvenile record.

Still, in 2004, over thirty years since Collins was thought to have murdered University of Michigan graduate student, Jane Mixer, DNA evidence exonerated him and pointed the finger at Gary Earl Leiterman, a male nurse in Ann Arbor at the time of Jane's murder.  For some people, the Mixer murder cast the shadow of doubt over Collins' alleged guilt in the remaining unsolved murders attributed to him.

*** 

Authors Edward Keyes and Earl James changed the names of the victims and their presumed assailant in their respective books on Collins. Between them, they left readers with a mishmash of fifteen fictitious names. Then William Miller wrote a script about these murders called Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep and once again, the names of the victims were changed. Even people familiar with the actual case became confused.

John Norman Collins officially changed his last name in 1981 to his original name Chapman, his Canadian birth father's last name. Collins/Chapman attempted unsuccessfully to engineer an international prisoner exchange with Canada. The end result was that the real identities of the victims and their assailant were obscured over the years and all but forgotten by the public.

Using the real names of the victims, here is a micro-sketch of each of the remaining young women whose cases have yet to be solved but are considered open by the Michigan State Police. The Roxie Ann Phillips California case is the exception.

Roxie Ann Phillips

Mary Fleszar (19) went missing on July 9, 1967, and was found a month later on August 7, 1967. She was not killed where her body was found. It had been moved several times and was unrecognizable. Mary taught herself to play guitar left handed and played for church services for several denominations on Eastern Michigan University's campus. People who knew her said she was very sweet and vulnerable.

Joan Elspeth Schell (20) was seen hitchhiking and getting into a car with three young men in front of McKinney Student Union on EMU's campus. She was last seen with Collins just before midnight on June 30, 1968, by three eyewitnesses. Prosecutors felt this case was promising but never pursued it.

Maralyn Skelton (16) was last seen on March 24, 1969 hitchhiking in front of Arborland shopping center. An unidentified witness said she got into a truck with two men. Of the seven presumed victims, Maralyn took the worst beating of the lot and then in death was pilloried by the county police and the local media.

Dawn Basom (13), the youngest of the victims and a local Ypsi girl, was abducted while hurrying to get home before dark on April 16, 1969. Dawn was last seen walking down an isolated stretch of railroad track that borders the Huron River. She was less than 100 yards from her front porch. Police discovered where she had been murdered not far from her home. Her body was found tossed on the shoulder of Gale Road in Superior Township. A fifteen mile, triangular drop zone began to reveal itself to investigators.

Alice Kalom (23), who was the oldest victim, was on her way to a dance on the evening of June 7, 1969. Two people report that she had a date with someone she had only recently met at a local restaurant--the Rubaiyat in Ann Arbor. Another person said he saw her standing outside a Rexall Drug store on Main and Liberty streets that evening. Alice's body was found two days later with the earmarks of the previous killings. Her murder site was discovered also - a sand and gravel pit north of Ypsilanti. Her body was deposited on Territorial Road furthest north of any of the victims. Police claimed they found evidence in the trunk of Collins's Oldsmobile Cutlass that linked Collins to Miss Kalom. This was another case the prosecution thought they could win but never brought to trial

Roxie Anne Phillips (17) was from Milwaukie, Oregon visiting a family friend in California for the summer in exchange for babysitting services. On June 30, 1969, Roxie had the misfortune of crossing paths with John Norman Collins in Salinas, California where Collins was "visiting" to escape a narrowing dragnet in Washtenaw County. In many ways, the California case was the strongest of any of the cases against Collins. Extradition was held up so long in Michigan that Governor Ronald Reagan and the Monterey County prosecutor lost interest in the case and waived extradition proceedings. This remains a cold case. 

What links these murders are the mode of operation of the killer, the ritualized behavior present on the bodies of the young women, and the geoforensics of the body drop sites.  

At the time of the murders, investigators thought that the killer may have had an accomplice, but that idea was largely discredited by people close to the case. The two likeliest suspects were housemates with Collins. Both men were given polygraph lie detector tests and were thoroughly interrogated by police detectives. Prosecutors hoped one or both of Collins's roommates  would roll over on him after being given immunity by the prosecutor. They didn't.

But investigators did discover that both friends of Collins--Arnie Davis and Andrew Manuel--were involved with him in other crimes such as burglary, fencing stolen property (guns and jewelry), and motorcycle theft. 

There was also a "fraud by conversion" charge brought against Collins and Andrew Manuel for renting a seventeen foot long travel trailer with a stolen check that bounced. They abandoned the trailer in Salinas, California. It is the suspected death site of Roxie Ann Phillips.

These guys were not Eagle Scouts--that's for certain. When the trailer was discovered, police found that it had been wiped clean of fingerprints inside and out. Both men vanished and returned to Ypsilanti two weeks earlier than planned, driving back to Michigan in the 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass registered to Collin's mother but in John's possession for months.

Back in the sixties, police protocols and procedures for investigating multiple murders were not yet firmly established. For two long years, an angry killer of young women was able to evade police, but slowly a profile was developing and police were closing in on the suspect from two different fronts. Washtenaw County's long nightmare was about to end. 


Link to Amazon author site: http://www.amazon.com/Gregory-A.-Fournier/e/B00BDNEG1C