"A Crime to Remember" - Investigation Discovery Channel's New True Crime Show Debuts Tuesday, November 12, 2013

A Crime to Remember debuts Tuesday night on Investigation Discovery at 10 PM Eastern time. Check your local listings for channels in your area and set your DVRs to record the entire series.

Episode number five, "A New Kind of Monster" will air on Tuesday, December 10th, 2013. It will deal with the Washtenaw County Coed Murders of 1967-1969, the subject of the true crime book I'm close to completing called The Rainy Day Murders.

The six-part limited series premieres: 

Tuesday, NOVEMBER 12 at 10PM/9PM on ID.

Watch the NEW and GORGEOUS series promo:  https://vimeo.com/78664854

Or you can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZaCOomqaMA

Crime never looked so classy.

Link to it, tweet it, share it, post it - whatever you like!

For a review of the series and a summary of each episode, click on this link: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news/2013/11/06/investigation-discovery-revisits-the-good-old-days-gone-bad-with-a-crime-to-remember-683204/20131106id01/ 

Investigative Discovery Channel's New Series Debuts - A CRIME TO REMEMBER - on Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

"Michigan Coed Murders"

In February, I flew out to New York to do a segment on a new series XCON Productions was doing for the Investigation Discovery Channel called A CRIME TO REMEMBER. The series recounts six cases that have fallen through the cracks of time or which are generally unknown to the public at large.

XCON's fifth show of the series covers the "Michigan Coed Murders," which occurred in Washtenaw County, Michigan, in 1967-1969. The accused killer of seven young women was convicted of only the last, Karen Sue Beineman. The program will surely focus on that part of the story to stay within their forty-two minute time constraint.

In addition to re-enactments, several people involved with these cases were interviewed: former Washtenaw County Sheriff, Douglas Harvey; forensic psychologist, Dr. Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D; former Eastern Michigan University campus policeman, Larry Mathewson; and others will provide commentary on these matters. The real names of the victims are used in this new production, as well as vintage photographs from the era.

Be sure to view the sneak preview of the first episode of the series below in the XCON announcement of the season opener.

I am very pleased with the production values I see and look forward to the Washtenaw County episode on Tuesday, December 10th, at 10:00 PM Eastern Time.


Set your DVR to record the entire series, as scheduling may be subject to change.

Greetings from XCON Productions,

We are happy to announce the premiere of A CRIME TO REMEMBER  (formerly titled The Bad Old Days) on Investigation Discovery, Tuesday Nov 12th at 10pm.  

The episode order is always subject to last-minute network changes (so check your local listings!) but looks like this right now:  

The Alice Crimmins Case -11/12/13

The Career Girl Murders - 11/19/13

The Chillingworth Murders - 11/26/13 

United 629 - 12/3/13

The Michigan Coed Murders - 12/10/13

The Ann and Billy Woodward Story - 12/17/13

And here's a link to the network promo: http://investigation.discovery.com/tv-shows/a-crime-to-remember/a-crime-to-remember-videos/a-crime-to-remember.htm

Once again, thank you very much Greg for your time and generosity throughout the process. We couldn't have done it without you. As I'm sure you're aware (since you're now a seasoned TV pro!), 42 minutes is nowhere near enough time to tell these stories in the degree of detail that you have provided or that we would like.   So please forgive us for truncating in certain places and expanding in others...television is a strange creature, with particular demands.  We hope you understand.

We are very proud of the series and hope you like the shows. 

Thank you again for your participation!

All the best, 

The XCON team

The Demise of Kristi Kurtz - November 1990

My girlfriend during the years covering the Washtenaw County coed killings (1967-1969) was Kristi Kurtz. When we met up, she had just dropped out of Eastern Michigan University and managed a small boutique called Stangers near Ned's Bookstore on West Cross Street in Ypsilanti.

I worked part time evenings at the university and took classes during the day. We lived together one block up the street from the boarding house where John Norman Collins lived on 619 Emmet St. and walked past that house daily unsuspecting the eventual notoriety of the place.

Kristi was a vibrant, outspoken, and fiercely independent young woman who found solace in her love of animals. They were the center of her life. Tragedy struck Kristi's young life when her father and mother were killed in a private plane crash. Her father owned a steel company in Detroit and had provided well for his orphaned family. Losing both parents so early in life had a lasting impact on her, and she became more independent because of it. 

Kristi and her older sister and brother grew up in Grosse Pointe and were raised by her aunt who kept tight control of the children's trust fund which was sizable. But after Kristi dropped out of college, the money dried up. Kristi wasn't twenty-one and had limited access to her money, so she worked just enough to get by, against the day when she would inherit the money outright.

Kristi liked animals better than people, and she wanted to raise and board horses on a small farm of her own. As soon as she was able, she bought the 113 acre Firesign Farm on Trotters Lane in Webster Township north of Ypsilanti. Kristi set out to live her dream, but I decided that finishing my education was more important than being her horse groom. We parted ways but remained friends. It was a defining moment for both of us.

Twenty years later, I'm living in California, and I get a phone call from a mutual Michigan friend of ours that I hadn't heard from in over ten years. "I've got some tragic news for you," he says. "Kristi's body was found shot to death and discovered buried under some bales of hay in her barn. She's been missing for a month."

It took me a few seconds to wrap my head around what I had just been told, then I heard what few details were known at that time. Two days after Thanksgiving on Saturday, November 24th, 1990, Kristi was last seen by a friend. When Kristi disappeared and hadn't fed her nine horses or other animals for a day or two, her neighbors got worried and contacted Kristi's sister who lived in Colorado. She called the Michigan State Police and filed a missing persons report on Monday, November 26th.

Then on Wednesday, December 26th at 10:15 AM, the day after Christmas, the Good Samaritan neighbor who had been caring for Kristi's horses and dogs, Rick Godfrey, removed another bale of hay to feed the horses, then he recognized her leather boots sticking out. Godfrey had given them to her as a Christmas gift two years before. He moved another bale and saw her frozen, fully clothed body. She had been missing for thirty-two days.

Twice the police had searched the barn with canines but felt the pungent smells confused the dogs. The barn cats had managed to find her body though. Dental records were required for a positive identification.

Check the link for archival news footage about the capture of Kristi Kurtz's murderer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7fnfrk6ZpA

Facing Down John Norman Collins - Kristi Kurtz

The tale I'm about to tell really happened. It took over a year for me to contextualize the incident  that occurred one Sunday evening to me and my then girl friend, Kristi Kurtz, as we were walking to our apartment after visiting friends.

We stopped at Abby's party (convenience) store on the corner of W. Cross Street and Ballard Street just off of Eastern Michigan University's campus. We bought a bag of groceries, walked up the street a block, and turned right on Emmet Street heading for College Place where we shared an apartment.
 
This neighborhood was over a hundred years old and the old growth trees that lined the street provided a natural canopy of added darkness. As Kristi and I casually walked up the street, a car pulled along side us. It was a muggy July evening, and the windows were rolled down revealing three males in the car.

The driver addressed Kristi first saying, "Hey, baby. Want to go out with some real men?" My response was, "Hey, man. She's with me." The next thing I heard was, "Shut the fuck up asshole or the three of us will get out and kick the shit out of you."

Before I could respond, Kristi was impugning their manhood. "What a bunch of dickless wonders!" she scolded the driver. "Three against one, you cowardly faggots." Did I mention that Kristi didn't take crap from anyone and had a mouth on her?

I figured that it might be time for us to drop our groceries and sprint home, but something unexpected happened. Kristi's defiant response seemed to perplex the driver, then out of frustration, he punched the gas pedal and left us in a cloud of screeching tires and stinking exhaust.  That was sometime after nine o'clock on the evening of July 30th, 1968.

Although I thought this was an isolated incident, one day I was reading an article about the series of unsolved murders in the Ypsilanti area and focused on the second murder victim, Joan Schell. Suddenly, I was able to connect the dots. Joan had been hitchhiking and had taken a ride with three guys in a black and red, unidentified car some time after Kristi and I had been approached.

A year after John Norman Collins was arrested for the abduction and sex-slaying of Karen Sue Beinemen, Collins ex-housemate, Arnie Davis, told police while being interrogated that he was in the black and red car with Collins the night they picked up Joan Schell. Then Collins and Schell left Davis and an unidentified third person to cruise around town while John would drive Joan to Ann Arbor in his car. After that fateful ride, Miss Schell was never seen alive again.

In yet another cruel twist of fate, Kristi Kurtz (41) was found murdered in 1990 during a bungled burglary attempt at her horse farm in Whitmore Lake. More on that story in my next post.

 

Kristi Kurtz Murder 

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. 

Aurora Borealis Lights Up Michigan Skies

Near Marquette, Michigan, on October 9, 2013

When I was twenty-one, I went camping in the northwoods on a granite outcropping that towered above the pine, birch, and cedar trees. It was about five miles west of Marquette in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

As night fell, the cosmic light show began. I can attest that it was much better than anything I had ever seen in the heyday of Detroit's Rock Mecca, The Grande Ballroom. 

The night sky inspired me to write a poem. That was forty-four years ago, and I haven't seen the Northern Lights or the poem since.

But as luck would have it, I found a wonderful photograph taken recently on October 9th, 2013, by Ryan Stephens that captures a glimpse of how beautiful the heavens were that night so long ago.

Todd and Brad Reed Photography took a photograph of the same event from Ludington, Michigan, in the Lower Peninsula for a different perspective.

Same event from Ludington, Michigan

By the way, I found the poem I wrote so many moons ago. I'm awash with good memories of great times with old friends.

 Northern Lights

Near Marquette,

encircled by woodwinded

dark moans and whistling howls,

lies a Sanctuary of Stone.

Above noise, above trees,

this towering mound is dwarfed

by a panorma

of star strewn sky

shooting waves 

of promenading luminary reflections,

streaking and undulating,

a spectacle of the heavens

stroked with hues of

incarnadine, emerald, and canary.

The only show -

the only sounds around.