John E. Peterson of The Detroit News reported after the guilty verdict was announced in the John Norman Collins case that "the two prosecutors had no use for histrionics. They were concise and they were precise. Prosecutor William F. Delhey and Assistant Prosecutor Booker T. Williams came out of the trial looking more like clinical workers than dramatists."
On Sunday, May 31, 1970, two days before the Collins trial was to begin, William B. Treml wrote in The Ann Arbor News that Prosecutor Delhey was "cool, unemotional, professional. He has a fifteen year reputation for being meticulous, methodical, and calculating in the preparation of a criminal case."
Delhey was forty-five years old and had a wiry, athletic build and a penetrating voice. He lettered in football for three years at Ann Arbor High School and placed second in the 880 yard dash in the 1942 state track meet. Delhey enlisted in the Army Air Corp and took pilot training but World War Two ended before he saw any combat action.
After his enlistment, he earned a Bachelors of Science degree in 1947 from The University of Michigan. He worked as an air pollution chemist for the Ford Motor Company and took night classes part-time at The University of Detroit graduating with a law degree in 1954.
Delhey went into private practice in 1955 and became assistant prosecutor in Washtenaw County in 1957. In January of 1964, he was appointed prosecutor and won the office outright in the November elections of that year. He was re-elected in 1968.
William Delhey was married and had two boys and two girls, ages ranging from two through twelve. Politically, he was said to be a Republician.
***
Assistant Prosecutor Booker T. Williams was forty-nine years old and born in North Carolina. He had combat experience in the Pacific theater of war as a sergeant in World War Two.
Williams also worked his way through school. He began at The University of Pennsylvania in 1947-1948 and moved to Ypsilanti in 1950. He paid the bills by working as a night clerk in an Ann Arbor hotel and earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1952, and his law degree in 1955, both from The University of Michigan.
Booker T. Williams went into private practice but joined the prosecutor's staff in 1958 and left in 1960. When William Delhey was appointed prosecutor in January in 1964, Williams returned to become an assistant prosecutor.
While he was actively engaged with the Collins trial, Booker Williams had to overcome personal tragedy. During the jury selection process, his wife Arletta Marie had a heart attack. He took off nineteen days to be with her at her bedside before her death and another week to get his household of seven young children organized. Williams was the father of six boys and one girl, ages ranging from thirteen to nineteen months.
John Peterson wrote that "Williams effectively poked holes in the scientific testimony of defense experts sniffing out inconsistencies and hammering away at discrepancies. He earned a reputation for rapid-fire, rapier cross-examination."
Prosecutor Delhey lauded Williams for his work on the Collins' trial and said it was critical to the People's 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
