World War II Secret Sub

This is one of the best documentaries about the war in the Pacific. Attached is a fifty-three minute documentary about an incredible and unknown super weapon of World War II. Germany had the V-2 rocket, the United States had the atomic bomb, and Japan had the super-sub.

The Largest Submarine in World War II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPC51Mh-jtU

Allegory of Spring - La Primavera

One of the loveliest expressions of springtime is the early Renaissance painting La Primavera (aka. Allegory of Spring) meaning literally "first green" by Italian painter Sandro Botticelli. It is believed he painted it in 1482. The painting hangs in the Uffizi Galley in Florence, Italy, and is a prized Italian national treasure.

Botticelli self-portrait at age thirty in 1475,

Botticelli took his inspiration from the classical writing of the Roman Ovid and his description of spring. The central figure is Venus. To the right of the painting, the blue and chilly Zephyrus catches Flora and impregnates her and she morphs into a fertility figure. To the left, the Three Graces--Charm, Beauty, and Joy--dance as Mercury holds the clouds back from Venus' realm. A blindfolded Cupid seems up to mischief. That's what I see anyway.

For a more detailed analysis of the painting, check out this short link: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/early-renaissance1/painting-in-florence/v/botticelli-la-primavera-spring-1481-1482

Looking Evil in the Face

In act one of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the idea that guilt shows on a person's face is a motif that runs throughout the play. Lady Macbeth warns her husband early on "Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men may read strange matters." She advises him to "...look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't."

Macbeth has a conscience - Lady Macbeth doesn't. By the end of act one, he tries to take her advice, "False face must hide what the false heart doth know." A person with a conscience cannot pull that off - unfortunately, a sociopath can. By the end of the play, King Macbeth has become a serial killer, through his henchmen, of men, women, and children.

Cesare Lombroso

The idea that criminal traits can show on a person's face gained popular acceptance near the end of the nineteenth century. An Italian criminologist and physician named Cesare Lombroso was credited with the theory "...that some types of people are closer to our primitive ancestors than others." He utilized the work of Pierre-Paul Broca to create this "new science" of criminal anthropology which relied upon facial measurements and anomalies of the skull, face, and body to determine who was a criminal type and who was not.

Broca believed in the concept of the born criminal who was a "throwback to earlier hedonistic races." In the twentieth century, this theory was strongly reinforced in the popular culture through movies, dime novels, pulp fiction, radio mystery shows, and television crime dramas. Rather than scientific, these ideas broke along racial, ethnic, and religious lines more often than not. The Nazis made great use of this junk science which they proudly documented in the last century.

Today, crime science has reliable and irrefutable tools like fingerprints, DNA analysis, and chemical and fiber labs to help catch and convict sociopathic killers. The trouble is that someone must lose their life before any of this science can be put to work.

Understanding "the construction of the mind" simply by looking at someones physical traits does not work. Sociopaths who kill usually look normal and blend into the background, so their behavior often requires psychological profiling before they are caught. Regrettably, profiling only becomes more accurate as the body count rises.

The Missing John Norman Collins Trial Transcripts

Dr. Paul McGlynn and I--February 2016.

Last week, I flew to Florida to visit my former English professor from Eastern Michigan University--Dr. Paul McGlynn. He earned his doctorate degree at Rice University in Texas and taught at Eastern Michigan for thirty-seven years, including the years during the Washtenaw County sex-slayings in the late 1960s.

We hadn't seen one another for forty years, but I knew Paul McGlynn had attended every court session of the John Norman Collins' trial and taken notes of the proceedings. His goal was to write a novel loosely based on the Collins' trial.

Author Edward Keyes was fresh off his success with the novel and movie The French Connection. As part of a multi-book contract, Keyes learned of the Collins' trial and the unsolved murders. He contracted with Simon and Schuster to write The Michigan Murders.

McGlynn read about Keyes' project in the Ann Arbor News, contacted him, and offered to help research his book. For an undisclosed stipend, McGlynn gave Keyes access to his trial notes. Much of what Keyes wrote regarding the trial comes directly from McGlynn's notes, and he gives McGlynn an acknowledgement in the introduction to The Michigan Murders.

Edward Keyes made an unfortunate editorial decision to use pseudonyms for the seven victims, their killer, and the witnesses. The overall effect was to obscure their identities and cloud the history behind these cases. Forty years later, people who lived through those times and were familiar with people involved with this case become confused after reading Keyes' novelization.

A debt is owed to history to get the facts straight. The Collins' trial was the longest and most expensive criminal proceeding in Washtenaw County history. After Collins' lawyers exhausted every appeal, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the constitutionality of Collins' life sentence for first-degree murder. The high court returned the trial transcripts on April 19th, 1974. After that date, no mention of the transcripts is made in the county record log book.

After my researcher Ryan M. Place made an exhaustive statewide Freedom of Information search, the only response we received was from the Washtenaw County Clerk saying the records were "purged" in the mid-seventies. Why the county officials purged the trial transcripts is unknown. Surely, the historical significance of the case warrants that the public record be preserved somewhere--either in print or digitally.

Whether these documents were shredded for shelf space, misplaced through institutional neglect, or destroyed willfully to obfuscate the public record, the bottom line is they are missing. Meeting with Paul McGlynn was a unique opportunity to speak with someone who attended every court session. Collins is the only other person I know who was in court for all of the sessions, but he isn't talking.

My treatment of the trial is based on hundreds of vintage newspaper articles and interviews with some of the trial participants. The quoted dialogue from the daily reports is surprisingly detailed and helped me reconstruct the lost Collins' trial and the legal maneuvering that went on inside and outside the courtroom. Thank goodness for the press.

I asked Paul McGlynn if he would read my manuscript and question or comment on anything. I was most interested in his response to the trial. Here is what he wrote: "I'm wondering how you got the details of the trial so exactly. Did you finally manage to round up a transcript? It reads like a transcript, though of course much abbreviated. It brought back many memories of the long hours spent in the courtroom. Kudos."

East Cross Street/Depot Town/Water Tower

Rather than dress-up this dark episode in Ypsilanti's history as narrative nonfiction, I decided to take a terse journalistic approach and retell the events as they happened. The facts and conflicts are enough to carry the story line without manufacturing melodrama.

With any luck, Terror in Ypsilanti: John Norman Collins Unmasked should be available in July 2016. I decided to change the title to make the book more suitable for internet searches. 

 

 Terror In Ypsilanti

The Grande Ballroom - Detroit's Sixties Rock Mecca

In the late Sixties, the place in Detroit to hear the best high energy, heavy metal rock music was the stage of the Grande Ballroom on 8952 Grand River Boulevard.

People of my Boomer generation can only imagine what the ballroom looked like in its heyday of the Thirties and Forties. But in the Sixties, it was all but a run down tenement--the perfect venue for the post apocalyptic brand of music Detroit's angst ridden white males were churning out in those days.

Soon, the word went out to the international rock and roll community that the Grande was the place to play if you wanted to connect with a live audience. Savoy Brown's classic album A Step Further may be the foremost example of that.

Local Detroit blues dynamo Dick Wagner and his band Frost rocked the house for their debut album Rock and Roll Music. Both of these albums preserve the musical madness and delirium that audiences experienced here. The Grande Ballroom was a Detroit icon that became legendary.

The tune Kick Out the Jams by the MC5 (Motor City 5) became the rock anthem for the place. Famous world class rock and roll musicians from London and California showed up and sat in with established and local groups for many one of a kind musical experiences. Some of the performances were filmed in Super 8 and never seen publicly before.

The following link is a trailer for a film documentary on the Grande Ballroom's fabled Rock and Roll era--fifty years in the making.

http://vimeo.com/couchmode/louderthanlove/videos/sort:date/35631404

Michael Kay - Sitting on a Dock by the Bay?

For some unknown reason, my thoughts have turned to a friend of mind I haven't seen or heard from in forty years - Mike Kay. We went to junior high school in Dearborn Heights together; then my family moved to Allen Park, so we went to different high schools, but we still remained friends. It was the Vietnam era, and he joined the Navy, while I went to Eastern Michigan University.

He and I were watching some 8mm home movies, which my parents took of sharecroppers in Arkansas in 1963. Mike was inspired to paint what he saw in his mind's eye - an oil painting of two weary black women trying to cool down after a long, exhausting day in the fields. Sitting on a dock, they dangle their tired feet in the water and contemplate eternity. Mike's vision was, no doubt, also inspired by Otis Redding's iconic song. I call the painting - Dock Ladies.

My mother purchased this evocative painting from Mike for fifty dollars in 1965, and she passed it on to me before she died. I have proudly displayed it in my home for many years, but when I remarried, my wife wanted to put her art on the walls. The two weary black ladies have had their faces turned to the wall of my closet for the last five years. Many people have wanted to buy this painting from me over the years, but it is not for sale.

When Mike originally painted this scene, he placed a watermelon between the ladies, that they appeared to be too tired to finish. When he realized that this could be construed as politically incorrect (a term which had not been coined yet), he painted a small wild flower in its place. Even the daisy looks wilted, but it adds a sensitive touch of beauty to the otherwise oppressive tone.

Mike fell off my radar one day many years ago. He moved to Traverse City, Michigan, and was involved in community theater there as a set designer and artist. When several of my letters to him were returned with no forwarding address, I lost touch with him. My efforts to locate him over the years haven't been successful.

If you are out there, Mike, contact me with some information, so I can get your painting back to you. It deserves to see the light of day. By the way, how the hell are you?

The Dutch Psychic--Peter Hurkos

I was just settling into an interview with someone who knew John Norman Collins. It was a late lunch meeting at Haab's--downtown Ypsilanti's oldest and finest restaurant. I overheard two women, sitting in a booth adjacent to us, talking in hushed tones about John Collins and those times. What a coincidence!

After the lunch crowd, the restaurant was almost empty, so I interjected myself into their conversation. "Ladies! I'm in town this week doing research and interviewing people for a book I'm writing about John Norman Collins."

Both ladies said in unison, "Really?" One of the women had worked for the county police as a dispatcher at that time, and the other claimed to be a psychic.

"How amazing is this?" I said. "I just learned something new about Peter Hurkos--the Danish psychic who was summoned onto the unsolved murdercases by an Ann Arbor citizens' group."

"He helped solve the Boston Strangler case, didn't he," the lady psychic added.

Peter Hurkos being fingerprinted.

"Not really," I said. "He played a controversial role in that case. Boston police arrested him for impersonating an officer when he aggressively interrogated an emotionally disturbed man. He was told to leave town or face a judge.

Back in Los Angeles, he parlayed his experience into a nightclub act. Hurkos entered the coed killing media circus in an attempt to punch up his waning career."

Hurkos was hired for one day as a consultant for the disturbing Tony Curtis movie The Boston Strangler--a film John Collins was obsessed with. Years later, Hurkos was hired to appear in a cameo role in the movie version of the Collins' killings entitled Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep--which began filming in 1969 but was never released.

I explained to the ladies, "Mr. Archie Allen--head of an Ann Arbor citizens' group--offered Peter Hurkos $1,100 for expenses to come down from LA to look into this case. Hurkos asked for $2,500 plus expenses and was insulted when the group could not raise more money. He reluctantly agreed to come anyway because of all the potential free publicity generated from this case--especially if he got lucky and helped solve it."

"The man had powers," the lady psychic insisted. "He was a painter who fell off a ladder and banged his head, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. From then on, he could sense people and events from handling their things. He had the gift."

"Yes, I know. That was his claim to fame."

The former police dispatcher added, "Yes, that's right. I remember Lieutenant William Mulholland--an investigator on the case--saying, "He (Hurkos) is making a believer out of me."

John Sinclair

Well," I continued, "do you know who the citizens' group was?" I gave the psychic another chance to divine the answer. She could not.

"Remember, John Sinclair? He was always in trouble with the Washtenaw County sheriff."

"Yes, we do!"

"Sinclair and a bunch of his followers were tired of the police harassment they were getting, so they offered to help. They wanted to show they were responsible, caring members of the Ann Arbor community. One of their members said she thought there might be something cosmic or supernatural going on with this case, so why not try to get a psychic involved?"

"That's interesting," the women agreed

"My theory is they wanted to throw a wildcard into the mix and make the police look stupid. Soon afterwards, the Washtenaw County police were called the Keystone Kops by the Detroit Free Press."

Sheriff Douglas Harvey

"I remember how upset Sheriff Harvey was with that reporter," the former dispatcher said.

"Harvey did take it personally," I agreed. "I also discovered John Collins came into close contact with Hurkos just before Hurkos left town for LA. Peter Hurkos did not have the slightest clue. I got that information from someone who was there with Collins."