The Medieval Clink Prison (1144-1780)

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/ 

More Theater Lore

London's oldest active theater site, Theater Royal Drury Lane, opened in 1663 in the early years of the English Reformation. Four theaters have occupied this site over the years. 

The first theater burned down in 1672. It was rebuilt by Christopher Wren and reopened on March 26, 1674. One-hundred and seventeen years later, Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan had the building demolished and opened a larger theater in 1794. That building burned down only fifteen years later in 1809. The current building was rebuilt and reopened in 1812. Presently, it is owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Theater Royal Drury Lane was really the first modern proscenium arch theater which provided a visual frame for the audience with permanent wings to the left and right of the stage to hide and shift scenery on and off the stage.

Learning about theater lore from a backstage tour is a fascinating excursion into the past. On the Royal Drury Lane Theatre tour at Covent Garden in London, the tour includes guides who dress in period costumes as they trade off their docent duties for quick costume changes. 

At one moment, a Victorian cleaning woman comes singing "I could have danced all night" down a staircase with a feather duster, then an eighteenth-century, English nobleman in costume suddenly appears and continues the tour. Next, a woman from the gaslight period comes out in a red dress and tells about how the theater was in her day. The tour is quite entertaining.

***

Learning the origins of words from these tours is an article of faith, but because it is lore, I have a willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, I learned that the term "crew" as applied to the backstage crew derives from a little known fact.

In the early nineteenth-century, the new theater owners rebuilt and redesigned the theater once again. They hired out of work sailors who were between sea tours to work backstage; they became known as "the crew." These sailors devised the system of pulleys and battens which raise and lower scenery from the loft above. This innovation created new staging opportunities for playwrights and directors.

***

On the Shakespeare's Globe Theater tour, I learned the origin of the term "box office." 

At the various entrances to the original Medieval theaters in the sixteenth-century, patrons would place their pennies in a ceramic box as they entered the theater. These boxes were collected at the box office. The theater owners would "break the bank" there for security reasons.

Today, box offices are where patrons purchase tickets for events, but the term has an additional context also. It has come to be associated with the amount of money a movie or play takes in.

"Good box office" means the production is making money; "box office poison" means the producers are losing money. Weekly and yearly figures are important to the entertainment industry and are reported widely around the world.

Gregory A. Fournier Speaks about Zug Island on the Michael Dresser Show

On Friday, April 19, 2013, I did a web radio interview for the Michael Dresser Show. It has been a while since I had done any live Zug Island promotion, but with summer coming, I thought it might be a good time to let readers know that Zug Island makes a great vacation read.

Despite its serious subject matter, race relations during the summer of the Detroit Riots, Zug Island is an often humorous account of a college dropout and an intercity young man who fall in and out of rhythm on Detroit's mean streets to discover that the face of racism comes in every shade of color.

Zug Island is a blue collar, coming of age, buddy novel which tells a slice of history much neglected in the telling of this horrible period of Detroit's history. It's been almost fifty years since July 23, 1967, and the city has yet to recover from its conflagration.


Amidst all the devastation, an unlikely friendship endures which suggests that hope for the city's recovery lies with its people and not its politicians.

Listen to my latest Zug Island web radio interview (15 minutes):
http://michaeldressershow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Greg-Fournier-4-19-2013.mp3

Willie O'Ree - First Black Player in the National Hockey League - Meets Jackie Robinson - First Black Player in Major League Baseball

Now that the new Jackie Robinson movie, 42, is out and in theaters, I am reminded of a story my friend, Willie O'Ree, told me about having the honor of meeting Mr. Robinson twice in his life. What makes this story interesting is that Willie is best known as the first black player in the National Hockey League.

When Willie was fourteen years old in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, his baseball team won the league championship. The team's reward was to go down to New York City to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field. 

Before the game, Jackie Robinson had a meet and greet session with the Fredericton champs. When it was Willie's turn to meet Mr. Robinson, he told the sports hero that he played hockey as well. Mr. Robinson said he didn't know that black kids played hockey. "They do in Canada," Willie said.

Many years later in 1962, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gave a luncheon to honor the baseball legend and to commemorate the breaking of Major League Baseball's color line. 

Willie O'Ree was invited to attend the luncheon and Mr. Robinson remembered him from their earlier meeting thirteen years before. I wish I had a photo of that meeting of the sports icons to show you.

These two sports figures, confident in their places in history as integration pioneers, are what this country is sorely in need of today - worthy heroes who can bring us together as a nation.

Willie O'Ree - Canadian Interview Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Wm-TvmC4Q

       

42 trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453562/

Jenny Hilborne - Writer of Mysteries and Psychological Thrillers

I met Jenny Hilborne at a book fair in Solana Beach in April of 2011, when we were sharing a booth and promoting our debut novels. We were both new born to the green wood of publishing.

Jenny is a Brit from Swindon in Wiltshire, England, who has lived in Southern California for the past fifteen years. She still maintains her roots in England, but she now carries a subdued British accent.

She and I hit it off when I told her the subject of my next writing project, a true crime history of the John Norman Collins murders of 1967-69. This time I would try my hand at non-fiction, and I've been buried by my research ever since.

In the meantime, Jenny had just published Madness and Murder, had No Alibi close to publication, and was planning her third novel, Hide and Seek. She has since completed and published her fourth novel, Stone Cold. She is a virtual writing machine.

So far, most of her novels take place in her favorite city, San Francisco, and people familiar with the City by the Bay will recognize the locales. But Jenny went home to the United Kingdom for six months to do research on Stone Cold to enhance its verisimilitude.


"I didn't want to be stereotyped as only writing about the West Coast," Jen said. "I needed to draw inspiration from home, but it was a challenge getting used to British English again." 


Jen says that she enjoyed her research for Stone Cold which got her out of the house and away from her computer screen. While in England, she visited the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire, the settings featured in her latest book.

Check out Jenny's blog: http://jfhilborne.wordpress.com/

Check out her Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Jenny-Hilborne/e/B003YYF5F4/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1365958456&sr=1-2-ent  

"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 

History of the Lone Ranger--The Movies (3/3)

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels reprised their television roles with three full length feature films. The first one was The Lone Ranger Rides Again made in 1955, the last year of filming the television series. The following year in 1956, the film The Lone Ranger came out. Then in 1958, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold was released. This was the last time the two men worked together on a Lone Ranger project.

In May of 1981, The Legend of the Lone Ranger came out. The copyright owner took out an injunction against Clayton Moore to prevent him from wearing the Lone Ranger trademark mask. The firestorm of bad publicity hurt the film at the box office. Despite massive publicity, the movie lost eleven million dollars. 

An authentic Yaqui Native American, Michael Horse, played Tonto, and the masked man was played by newcomer Klinton Spilsbury. Spilsbury had such trouble reading his lines convincingly that actor James Keach was hired to overdub his dialogue for the entire movie.

Legend won three and was nominated for two more Golden Raspberry Awards. It won worst actor, worst new star, and worst musical score. It won honorable mentions for worst picture and worst new song, "The Man in the Mask."

For thiry years, it was thought that the Masked Crusader of the Old West and his loyal companion Tonto were box office poison. The idea for a new Lone Ranger film knocked around Hollywood for years with nobody willing to pony up the money.

But in May of 2007, Disney Corporation signed on to distribute a Jerry Bruckheimer produced film and released the newest version of The Lone Ranger on July 3, 2013. The movie stars fan favorite Johnny Depp as Tonto, Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger, and Ruth Wilson as the female lead. The Lone Ranger rode again, but not to the delight of the fans!

Check out a trailers from the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q42DrlOczi0