Popular Crime

by Bill James

  3. The Secret Service, a governmental agency with an annual budget of many millions of dollars, is seriously compromised.

  There have been other incidents of men being accidentally killed by their own bodyguards—indeed, a book argues that this is what happened to the Kingfish, Huey Long. Ross Perot argued during the 1992 presidential campaign that the Secret Service was a vast waste of money, that it was used for political purposes, that it was used to disguise perquisites of office, and that it should be disbanded. There is much truth in his argument; certainly no journalist close to the President would deny that the Secret Service is routinely used to enable the President to “stage” events.

  If, in addition to these abuses, it became known that the Secret Service had accidentally shot President Kennedy, do you think the public would still be willing to shell out millions for this “protection”? I’m not an investigative reporter; I’m just a guy who reads lots of crime books. To me, Mortal Error remains the most persuasive account of the tragedy in Dallas.

  It is a conventional wisdom that the assassination of President Kennedy represented the loss of America’s innocence. In popular history the death of JFK marks the end of the sheltered, prosperous post-war era, and the beginning of the cynicism and alienation which culminated in the anti-war movement. The movie JFK sells this point of view, but so do countless other movies, from Forrest Gump to Mermaids, with Cher.

  I don’t buy it. Again, I’m not claiming any special expertise here, but I was a child of the sixties, too, and I think my perceptions of the time are probably as accurate as the next person’s. If I were to make a list of 50 factors which contributed to the schism in society which rocked the sixties, I’d list things as diverse as the invention of LSD and the “modernization” of small schools into large, impersonal school districts, which put teenagers into contact with hundreds of other teenagers but isolated from adult society, and thus created a youth culture. I’d list pop psychology, rock music and the maturation of the radio market, which caused young people, for the first time, to be listening to different radio stations than their parents. I’d list the civil rights movement and the popularization of the 1950s Beat culture. I wouldn’t list the Kennedy assassination among the 50 factors.

  Why? It just doesn’t ring true in my experience. I wasn’t a full-blown hippy, but most of my friends were. We talked incessantly about why we were the way we were; hell, we were the most insufferably self-conscious generation in American history. People talked about their parents, about the police, about the irrelevance of the academic curriculum to the lives we all expected to lead. Some people talked an awful lot about how wonderful sex was, and how terrible it was for all of those previous generations to have repressed their sexuality. We talked about the Kennedy assassination twice a year, when we were bored. What the sixties were about was Sex and Race and War. Our parents were irreparably damaged, as role models, because they were racists and believed in war as an instrument of national policy. We couldn’t be like them, we all thought; hell, they’re racists.

  Sure, the assassination of Kennedy was a shock, but you know what? We had all heard about murder. We had all heard of lunatics. Nobody was under the illusion that a bullet wouldn’t kill the President as it would kill anybody else. And almost nobody, at the time, thought anything other than that one of those lunatics had gotten a bullet to the President.

  I have no empirical evidence to support what I’m saying, but go to the library, and look up magazines from 1965 to 1968. You’ll find volumes of essays about the “generation gap,” the split of society into young and old. Very, very few of those articles will make any mention of the assassination of JFK. It’s an easy, after-the-fact dividing line between the generations, but it’s just not true.

  On the other hand, the cultural impact of the Manson murders is enormously under-appreciated. The murder of Sharon Tate rocked the nation when the counterculture was just past its peak. The arrest and trial of Charles Manson and his followers delivered to young Americans a simple message of enormous impact: that evil men, adorned with flowers, would look much the same as saints. A culture based on categorical trust and unconditional acceptance was a balloon waiting to burst, and Charles Manson was the needle.

  We didn’t ask ourselves what evil lurked beneath the skin of strangers, so long as they dressed like us. Evil belonged to the other generations, to the hard cases among our generation who would not open their hearts. Was this naïve? It was preposterously naïve. We were younger than young. The sixties weren’t cynical, and they certainly didn’t come about after the loss of the nation’s innocence. They were innocence personified, innocence run amok. They could not co-exist with personified evil.

  XXI

  On July 10, 1967, a student at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti went out to get some air. A few minutes later she was seen walking on a nearby street. A gray Chevy stopped, apparently offering her a ride. She rejected the ride; it stopped again, menacingly. She wandered out of sight. She was never seen alive again. Her body was found near an abandoned farmhouse in early August.

  Police were baffled by the crime.

  On June 30, 1968, a second EMU co-ed disappeared. She was seen getting into a red coupe with a black vinyl roof, going to visit a friend. She never got there. Her body was found by construction workers five days later. She had lived only blocks away from the first victim.

  Police were unable to identify the killer.

  On March 20, 1969, a female law student from the University of Michigan, only a few miles away, was reported missing. She had posted a note on the board at the student union, asking for a ride home. Someone had answered, apparently with an alias, and had then abducted and murdered her. Her body was found just hours later, dumped in a semi-rural graveyard.

  The police, to this point, had downplayed the suggestion that the murders were linked, and were investigating them as separate crimes. Apparently they were at least partially right about this, as a killer will be identified here shortly, and, many years later (2005), a different man was convicted of this last murder. At the time, it all fed into the same community fear. Less than a week later there was a fourth victim, a troubled sixteen-year-old who hung around the campuses. She had disappeared while hitchhiking. Her body was found resting in the woods, a few hundred yards from where the second body had been discovered. This was virtually an announcement that a serial murderer was at work, and persuaded the police to re-direct their efforts toward identifying the killer.

  Not that they got anywhere.

  On April 16, a fifth young woman was found murdered in a semi-rural area north of Ypsilanti. On June 9, 1969, a sixth victim was found. Her body was dropped in the same area. The pace of the carnage was accelerating, and police remained unable to solve the crimes.

  While the Michigan Murders did not fire the public’s interest on the same scale as the Boston Strangler, each body, after the fifth, was a national news story. Peter Hurkos, a famous psychic, flew in from Los Angeles to participate in the search—as he had meddled in the Boston Strangler investigation, at the invitation of the Bottomly commission, and with the same result. He was a waste of time.

  About one o’clock on July 23, 1969, a young woman named Karen Beineman stopped to pick up a hairpiece, a “fall,” from a wig maker’s shop in Ypsilanti. She told the clerk that she was having an amazing day. She was doing two things that she never thought she would do in her life: buying a wig, and accepting a ride on a stranger’s motorcycle. The clerk, reminding her of the murders, urged her not to go with the stranger, even though he looked alright. She went anyway. She was reported missing later that day.

  This gave the police a description of the murderer, who had been seen by several clerks and, as it turned out, several other women whom he had also approached. The task force caught a break, and they were able to make use of it because they had done something smart: they had added a kid to their staff. A young man named Larry Mathewson, who had been a part-time patrolman at EMU
while a student there, had been added to the task force, in part because he was young and able to talk to the students. The familiarity turned out to be critical. Mathewson remembered that at about the time in question, 1:00 P.M. on July 23rd, he had seen a young man he knew, John Norman Collins, out riding his motorcycle in the same area, dressed similarly to the suspect—a yellow-and-blue striped pullover shirt. He remembered this because Collins had been talking to a striking blonde girl at the time; Larry remembered the blonde. (We all remember the blondes.) Well, he thought, maybe John saw something. Maybe, if he was out riding around at that time wearing those clothes, he would have noticed somebody else, out and around, wearing similar clothes. He thought he’d ask.

  Collins turned defensive in mid-interview. Mathewson looked at him in a different light. Not only was Collins in the same area riding a motorcycle at the time in question wearing similar clothes, Mathewson realized, but he matched the description of the suspect. He lived right across the street from one of the victims.

  Mathewson got the name of the blonde, wondering if she would confirm the time, place, and Collins’ clothing. As he was leaving, he wrote down the numbers off Collins’ motorcycle. Collins became angry.

  The blonde girl confirmed the time, date, and the shirt. She also had a picture of Collins. Mathewson took the picture to the clerks at the wig makers. Two of them thought it might be him, might not; fuzzy picture. The third one dropped her sandwich in her lap when she saw the picture.

  Carefully, almost gingerly, the young officer typed up a report. What Mathewson didn’t know, but his commanding officer did, was that Collins had been investigated in connection with the death of Joan Schell, the second victim. He had been seen by a former fraternity brother, and a date, in the company of Joan Schell on the night she disappeared the previous year. Collins had been questioned at that time, but had said that it wasn’t him.

  John Collins became the subject of round-the-clock surveillance. The background investigation began turning up markers. Collins had been asked to leave his fraternity after he was suspected of theft. In an unrelated incident, someone had stolen a wallet, then used the stolen ID to rent a trailer, then stolen the trailer. The cop investigating that one had realized that the composite sketch of the trailer thief looked a great deal like the composite sketch of the murderer, which didn’t do much good without a name. When Collins’ name was thrown into the hopper, it was learned that he had made a trip to California just after the trailer had been taken—and the man from whom the trailer was stolen positively ID’d the photo.

  Collins was a handsome young man who had been extremely successful with the opposite sex. One of his former girlfriends said that he had once told her, mischievously, that he might be the co-ed killer, and she shouldn’t be alone with him.

  He had worked in the same building as the first victim at the time she disappeared. He had worked in another office, right across the hall from her.

  He spent a good bit of time in a tavern near where the fourth victim had disappeared.

  He had once beaten up his sister, badly enough to put her in the hospital.

  Collins’ uncle, David Leik, was a Michigan state trooper. Collins was close to his uncle, and had been given a key to his house, to keep an eye on things while the uncle was on vacation. When the family returned, there were splotches of paint on the basement floor. When Leik was informed that Collins was a suspect in the investigation, he mentioned the paint splotches to a friend. The friend suggested that maybe the paint was covering up something else. They decided to check.

  Blood.

  Actually, it wasn’t blood. It was a red varnish that looked like blood. Somebody had painted it over, apparently thinking it was blood.

  Collins was arrested. That made the national news, and the California police called within a few hours. On June 30, a month earlier, a young girl had been murdered in California. An unknown Michigan college student—unquestionably Collins—had become a suspect in that investigation.

  Collins admitted nothing, ever, for which reason many things about the case remain unknown. In August, 1970, he was convicted of the murder of Karen Beineman. He was never tried for the other crimes, although it might have been possible to make one of the cases. From prison, he continues to this day to deny the crimes.

  Like almost all serial murderers, Collins was a thief. He had stolen vehicles, motorcycles and motorcycle parts for years, and for the last eighteen months had been burglarizing homes and apartments, although he didn’t need the money. He was just doing it for the kick.

  It is the California murder which keeps at bay the nagging fear that the murders were hung around a convenient target. Much of the case against Collins is of the type which might be accidentally manufactured by an intense police investigation, focusing on a flawed and unlucky petty criminal. He lived across the street from one of the victims … but hey, who didn’t? You’ve got seven murdered students in a small city. Looking hard enough, the police would inevitably find someone who matched the description of the perpetrator. Looking closely enough at that person, they would no doubt find a hundred little links between that person and the murders. Most of the evidence is of that nature.

  But how does one explain that that unlucky suspect took a two-week trip to California, and wound up as a key suspect in an unrelated investigation of an extremely similar crime? The only reasonable explanation is that he was a serial murderer. He was Ted Bundy before Bundy was. And the California case against him was strong, perhaps stronger than any of the Michigan cases.

  The book about the Michigan Murders is The Michigan Murders, by Edward Keyes (Simon & Schuster, 1976). The book is good—well-researched, written in clear, unpretentious, journalistic prose without undue padding. Keyes worked out the sequence of events carefully, and put every detail exactly where it belongs. He used pseudonyms for everybody including Collins, which is pretty silly, but the case itself is interesting, and the book is recommended.

  In the endless effort to make the law work, here is a problem that nobody talks about. Definition creep.

  In the 1930s “Little Lindbergh Laws” were passed by many states which made kidnapping a capital offense. The problem is, what is kidnapping?

  “Kidnapping” is seizing a child and holding him or her to force the payment of a ransom, but what if the child is seized not for ransom but for some other reason?

  Well, sure; that’s still kidnapping.

  What if the person seized is not a child, but an adult; is that still “kid” napping?

  Sure.

  Well, what if the person is seized by a non-custodial parent, a person who feels that they have the right to see the child, but is legally limited for some reason. Is that still kidnapping?

  Still kidnapping.

  The Little Lindbergh Laws failed to say what wasn’t kidnapping, and this allowed prosecutors to seek a death penalty for a wide range of criminal activities. By 1950 prosecutors had established that anytime a criminal pointed a gun at someone and forced them to move from one place to another—even, let’s say, into a back room—that was kidnapping, and the criminal could be sentenced to death. Of course this was never meant to be “kidnapping,” but once prosecutors had established that the law could be applied that way, then it could be applied that way again and again. That’s definition creep. The words of the law start out meaning one thing; they wind up meaning another.

  Take “premeditated” murder. When laws were first passed to distinguish “premeditated” murder from acts of passion—in cold blood, as opposed to hot—“premeditated” murder meant that it was actually premeditated. It was thought through in advance. “All murder is heinous,” the law intended to say, “but to murder someone in cold blood is especially heinous, and so we will give a harsher penalty for that.” The law, however, failed to say how much premeditation was enough. Prosecutors immediately began arguing that any premeditation was the same as actual premeditation. One second’s premeditation was enough.

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bsp; And, of course, the prosecutors won; the law very soon was taken to mean that one second’s premeditation was enough. The problem was that the intended distinction was entirely lost. Once prosecutors succeeded in getting the law to “read” that one second’s premeditation was enough, then the higher penalty applied to all murders.

  We have “three strike” laws now; three crimes of violence, and you get a life sentence. In principle, I’m on board; hell, I don’t understand why it takes three crimes of violence to lock somebody away. If you’re talking about a real, serious crime of violence—rape, or aggravated assault, or murder—I would certainly think that two was what my father would have called a God’s Green Plenty.

  But we had these laws before, the “habitual criminal” laws. The Big Bitch, they used to call it; three felony convictions, you’re locked up for life. Most states had habitual criminal laws from the 1940s into the 1970s.

  Those laws failed because of definition creep. The original meaning of the term “felony” was that a felony was a crime for which the penalty was the loss of life or the loss of a bodily part. Now, anything can be a felony. You steal something worth $1,000, that may be a felony. If you’re caught with enough marijuana to host a frat party, that’s a felony.

  What happened to the habitual criminal laws was that they relied on the definition of a “felony,” when damned near anything can be prosecuted as a felony. So prosecutors would get on somebody’s case, and, boom, he’s got three felonies before he can get to the bathroom. This was never the intention of the habitual criminal laws, so those laws gradually collapsed.

  Then, ten years later, we started re-passing the same laws, only calling it “three strikes and you’re out.” It started out with three violent crimes, but … what’s a violent crime? If you use a gun, is that a violent crime?

  Sure.

  What if you don’t use the gun, but you wave it in the victim’s face? Is that a crime of violence?