John Norman Collins was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan for one killing: the first-degree murder of Karen Sue Beineman, an 18-year-old woman, in July 1969. A jury in Washtenaw County found him guilty on August 19, 1970. Between 1967 and 1969, seven young women and girls, aged 13 to 23, were killed in and around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and public accounts have long treated Collins as responsible for all of them. He was tried for only one. He was never charged in the other six, and he has said throughout that he killed no one.
The legal position needs to be stated exactly. The conviction is a single count, upheld on appeal. Everything else attached to his name is attribution: investigators and later writers linked him to the earlier deaths, a California grand jury indicted him over a death there in 1969, and none of those matters ended in a conviction. In one of the six Michigan cases, that of Jane Mixer, a different man was convicted in 2005 on DNA evidence.
Collins was born in 1947 in Windsor, Ontario, according to a 2010 review in Hour Detroit, and grew up in Center Line, a small city north of Detroit. An Eastern Echo account from 2019 says he lived there with his mother and two siblings, and that the children were told their father had left. He went to St. Clement High School, where he captained the football team, and he had a steady girlfriend.
He began college at Central Michigan University and then moved to Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where he trained as a teacher and joined the Theta Chi fraternity. The university's archives record that he was 24 credits short of finishing a degree in the School of Education when he was arrested. The Ann Arbor Observer wrote in 2023 that his family, friends and former teachers found it hard to believe he could be a killer, and that he had been a clean-cut team captain. CBS News, writing in 2005, described him as an education major with no known criminal record.
The first of the young women to die was Mary Fleszar, 19, in the summer of 1967. Joan Schell, 20, died in 1968. In 1969 the pace quickened: Jane Mixer, 23, in March; Maralynn Skelton, 16, within days of her; Dawn Basom, 13, in April; Alice Kalom, 21, in June; and Karen Sue Beineman, 18, in July. Two of the seven were younger than the rest: Dawn Basom was 13 and Maralynn Skelton 16.
Little of these women's own lives is on record beyond their ages and the years in which they died. What is established is that seven young women were killed over about two years in a small area, that few clues were left, and that, in the words of the University of Michigan Press, six separate police agencies failed to stop the killings. CBS News reported that by the end of July 1969 the number of dead stood at seven, that police were described as stymied, and that the public pressure on them was heavy.
Little is on record about the steps of the investigation. The publisher of Edward Keyes's book on the case, which was first issued in 1976 and reissued in 2010, says the break came almost by accident and led to Collins, then described as a quiet, all-American young man. The Ann Arbor Observer wrote that the killings stopped after his arrest. Hour Detroit reported that his activity ended after he drew suspicion from a relative who served in the Michigan State Police.
Michigan State Police detectives interviewed Collins in prison in later years, according to the Eastern Echo, and Detective Eric Schroeder, who reopened the Mixer case in 2001, was quoted by CBS News in 2007.
Collins was arrested in late July 1969. The Eastern Echo gives the date as July 29, and a 2023 radio account gives July 31. He was arrested for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, and CBS News reported that a witness had connected him with her. He was charged with that one killing only.
Jury selection in Washtenaw County ran from June 2 to July 9, 1970, and the transcript of that questioning filled twelve volumes. The Michigan Court of Appeals later described each juror as having been questioned individually after general questioning of the panel. Testimony began on July 20, 1970. Judge John Conlin presided. Collins was represented by Joseph Louisell and Neil Fink, two Detroit defense lawyers; William Delhey, the Washtenaw County prosecuting attorney, appeared for the state. The Eastern Echo reported that the defense did not let Collins testify, fearing that he would incriminate himself, and that on the first day he told the court that a travesty of justice had taken place during the preceding weeks.
The state's evidence, as the Court of Appeals later summarized it, included blood typing that matched the victim's blood type, a comparison of hairs by neutron activation analysis, a microscopic comparison of hairs by a state health department criminalist, and in-court identifications by two witnesses. The Ann Arbor Observer wrote in 2023 that this was described as the first case in which neutron activation analysis was used to solve a murder. CBS News, looking back in 2005, called the case against Collins largely circumstantial.
The jury returned its verdict on August 19, 1970: guilty of first-degree murder. The University of Michigan Press gives that date and says the sentence was life imprisonment. Its own page and the 2010 Hour Detroit review describe the term as life without the possibility of parole.
Collins's lawyers moved for a new trial, which was denied, and he appealed. The Michigan Court of Appeals decided the case on October 24, 1972, in an opinion by Presiding Judge Quinn, with Judges McGregor and Van Valkenburg concurring. It affirmed the conviction.
The court dealt with four main arguments. On venue, Collins said pretrial publicity made a fair trial in Washtenaw County impossible. The court held that a trial judge may defer the decision until an attempt to seat a jury, that the jury selection had been careful and no lasting prejudice shown, and that there was no continuing hostile publicity during the trial. On identification, he argued that police had shown the two witnesses photographs of him before a lineup and without his lawyer present. The trial judge had found that both witnesses could identify him from what they had observed themselves, and the Court of Appeals held that the record supported that finding. It found no support in the record for his claim that he had been put in a lineup without counsel.
On the scientific evidence, the court held that the defense objections to the neutron activation and microscopic hair testimony went to weight rather than admissibility. It did find one error. An expert's statistical opinion about the probability of the hair match relied partly on another expert's opinion, which the court called impermissible, and the related graphs and testimony should have been struck. The court held the error harmless because that evidence only corroborated other properly admitted proof. Finally, the trial court's failure to define premeditation for the jury was not reversible error.
A later case history lists leave to appeal as denied by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1974 and review denied by the United States Supreme Court the same year.
After the verdict, the other six deaths in Washtenaw County stayed on the record as unsolved, with Collins as the person most often named. The Michigan State Police were still investigating them, according to the 2023 radio account. CBS News reported in 2005 that he had never been charged in any of the six, and that investigators had given the public the impression that they knew he was responsible for all seven. The Eastern Michigan University Archives, which holds a collection of press clippings on the case from 1969 to 2007, describes him as having been linked to six other deaths in southeastern Michigan between 1967 and 1969, and says he was sentenced only for the last.
The Ann Arbor Observer wrote in 2023 that Collins never confessed. In a 1988 interview quoted by Hour Detroit, he said it was bad enough to be convicted of one thing without being labeled for other things he had not done.
The Mixer case is the one that changed. Her death in March 1969 was long treated as part of the series, and the Michigan Court of Appeals recorded in 2007 that a task force had looked at it as possibly connected to the other killings, and that active investigation ceased for more than thirty years after Collins's conviction. In 2001 Detective Eric Schroeder of the Michigan State Police reopened the case, and evidence stored since 1969 was sent for DNA testing. A profile developed from it matched Gary Earl Leiterman, who had given a DNA sample after a 2002 plea in an unrelated matter. CBS News reported in 2005 that police approached him in November 2004.
A jury convicted Leiterman of first-degree premeditated murder in 2005, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on July 24, 2007, rejecting arguments about the admissibility of the DNA evidence, a claim of newly discovered evidence and a claim of ineffective counsel. A former roommate of Leiterman's testified that he had found newspaper articles about Collins among his belongings. CBS News reported that the Mixer family had come to accept that Collins was the killer, in part because the deaths stopped after his arrest, while a researcher who corresponded with Collins and the detective on the reopened case both saw her death as standing apart from the others. Collins was never charged with it. Hour Detroit's 2010 review put the outcome this way: in 2005 he was absolved of that death after DNA evidence helped convict another man.
Collins traveled to California in 1969, according to the Eastern Echo, and a 17-year-old, Roxie Ann Phillips, died in Salinas that year. Hour Detroit reported that he was indicted by a California grand jury for a 1969 murder there. No trial, conviction or dismissal in California is on record, and Deadline Detroit wrote in 2016 that he was suspected in a California murder but was never prosecuted for the other crimes.
Collins was reported at Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 2008 and 2010. The 2010 Hour Detroit review reports that in 1979 he and six other prisoners attempted to escape; the outcome of that incident in the courts is not on record. He changed his surname to Chapman while in prison: Hour Detroit's review places the change in the 1980s, and the Ann Arbor Observer confirmed it in 2023. A magazine profile in about 2008 recorded that he was then 62 and still serving a life term at Marquette. In 2005 CBS News noted that he had served about 35 years.
A September 2023 radio account said he was held at the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan, and still maintained his innocence. The 1970 sentence was described by the University of Michigan Press and by Hour Detroit as life without the possibility of parole. No parole hearing or denial is on record.
The cases shaped the memory of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti for more than half a century. Edward Keyes, a New York journalist who spent several years in the early 1970s on the case, published his book in 1976; it was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best fact crime in 1977, and the University of Michigan Press reissued it in 2010 with a new prologue by Mardi Link and an epilogue by Laura James. Mixer's niece, Maggie Nelson, wrote a book about her aunt, and an award in Mixer's name was created at the University of Michigan in 1970.
The Eastern Echo reported that a film production about the case was halted after protests some years after the trial. In 2023 the Ann Arbor Observer wrote that a videographer was making a documentary about 1969 in the area and was looking for women who lived there at that time to interview. The Eastern Michigan University Archives preserves the press collection on the case, noting that it holds no material from the court case or the investigative files.
Neil Fink, who defended Collins with Joseph Louisell, was remembered in a 2016 Deadline Detroit obituary as one of Detroit's leading criminal defense lawyers.
The central open question is how many of the deaths can be laid to one person. Collins was convicted of one, and the Mixer case has an entirely different resolution. The other five Michigan deaths and the California death are attributed to him in popular accounts, and none was tried. A 2008 magazine profile said he was thought responsible for as many as 15 young women in Michigan and California; that figure has no court finding behind it.
The same profile recorded that police investigating the 1968 killings of a family in northern Michigan considered Collins as a suspect and then eliminated him. A writer quoted in it argued that the link should not have been dismissed, while another said there was no proof of it. No charge or finding connects him to those killings.
The case against him in 1970 was circumstantial, as CBS News put it, and rested on identification and forensic comparison evidence that the Court of Appeals found largely admissible but, in one respect, improperly supported. Collins has maintained throughout that he is innocent, including of the Beineman killing. The conviction has never been overturned.
1947: John Norman Collins is born in Windsor, Ontario; he grows up in Center Line, Michigan.
Summer 1967: Mary Fleszar, 19, the first of the seven young women, dies in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area.
1968: Joan Schell, 20, dies.
March 1969: Jane Mixer, 23, and Maralynn Skelton, 16, die.
April 1969: Dawn Basom, 13, dies.
June 1969: Alice Kalom, 21, dies.
July 1969: Karen Sue Beineman, 18, dies. Collins is arrested in late July 1969.
1969: Roxie Ann Phillips, 17, dies in Salinas, California; a California grand jury later indicts Collins over a 1969 death there.
June 2 to July 9, 1970: jury selection in Washtenaw County.
July 20, 1970: the trial begins.
August 19, 1970: the jury finds Collins guilty of first-degree murder; he is sentenced to life.
October 24, 1972: the Michigan Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.
1974: leave to appeal and review are denied.
1976: Edward Keyes's book on the case is first published.
1979: Collins and six other prisoners attempt to escape from Marquette Branch Prison.
1980s: Collins changes his surname to Chapman.
2001: the Mixer case is reopened and stored evidence sent for DNA testing.
2005: Gary Earl Leiterman is convicted of the first-degree murder of Jane Mixer.
July 24, 2007: the Michigan Court of Appeals affirms Leiterman's conviction.
2010: Keyes's book is reissued.
September 2023: a radio report places Collins at a prison in Jackson, Michigan.