Chase, meanwhile, took the baby’s body home with him, where he chopped off the head and used the neck as a straw through which he sucked the blood out of the body. He then sliced the corpse open and consumed several internal organs and made his grotesque ‘smoothies’ out of others, finally disposing of the corpse at a nearby church.
Chase eventually came to the notice of the police as a viable suspect following the identification of his fingerprints at the house of Evelyn Miroth. They went to his apartment and knocked repeatedly, but Chase would not open the door. The police pretended they were going to leave and then waited. Chase emerged with a box in his arms and made his way towards his car. The police apprehended him, but not without a struggle. They noticed that he was wearing an orange parka that had dark stains on it and that his shoes appeared to be covered in blood. A .22 semi-automatic handgun was taken from him, which also had bloodstains on it. Then they found Dan Meredith’s wallet in Chase’s back pocket, along with a pair of latex gloves. The contents of the box he was carrying also proved interesting: pieces of bloodstained paper and rags. They took him to the police station and interviewed him. He admitted to killing several dogs but stubbornly resisted talking about the murders. While he was in custody, police searched his apartment in the hope of finding a clue to the whereabouts of the missing baby.
What they found in the putrid-smelling place was disgusting. Nearly everything was bloodstained, including food and drinking glasses. In the kitchen, they found several small pieces of bone, and some dishes in the refrigerator with body parts. One container held human brain tissue. An electric blender was badly stained and smelt of rotting flesh. There were three pet collars but no animals to be found. Photographic overlays on human organs from a science book lay on a table, along with newspapers on which ads selling dogs were circled. A calendar showed the inscription ‘Today’ on the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders and, chillingly, the same word was written on 44 more dates yet to come during that year.
Police officers continued the search for the missing baby, and finally the body was found. On 24 March, a church caretaker came upon a box containing the remains and called the police. When they arrived, they recognised the clothing of the missing boy from the Miroth home. The baby had been decapitated and the head lay underneath the torso, which was partially mummified. A hole in the centre of the head indicated that the child had been shot. There were several other stab wounds to the body and several ribs were broken. Beneath the body, too, was a ring of keys that fitted Dan Meredith’s car. The police now had enough evidence to charge Chase.
In 1979, he stood trial on six counts of murder. In order to avoid the death penalty, his defence team tried to have Chase found guilty of second-degree murder only. Their case hinged on Chase’s history of mental illness and the lack of planning of his crimes, evidence that they were not premeditated. But on 8 May, the jury found Chase guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. The defence asked for a clemency hearing, in which a judge determined that Chase was not legally insane. Chase was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
While on death row, Chase became a feared presence in prison; the other inmates, aware of the graphic and bizarre nature of his crimes, feared him and, according to prison officials, they often tried to convince Chase to commit suicide, too fearful to get close enough to him to kill him themselves.
On 26 December 1980, a guard doing cell checks found Chase lying awkwardly on his bed and not breathing; he was pronounced dead. A post-mortem determined that he had committed suicide with an overdose of prescribed antidepressants that he had been saving up over the preceding weeks.
JOHN NORMAN COLLINS, AKA THE MICHIGAN MURDERER
In summer 1967, the first of a series of murders in and around the Michigan suburbs of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor took place. Mary Fleszar, 19, was the victim. She had last been seen by a room-mate when she left their apartment near the university campus to go for a walk on 9 July. She was wearing a bright orange tent dress with large white polka dots, and a pair of sandals. She was 5ft tall, weighed about 110lb, wore glasses and had brown hair. She had not taken her handbag, but her car keys were gone and her car was parked across from where she normally left it, which her mother thought was odd. Half an hour after she left the apartment, a university police officer saw her walking alone. Later, a man sitting on his porch who knew her saw her walking towards her apartment. Then he saw a young man driving a blue-and-grey Chevrolet stop beside her, open his window and talk with her. She shook her head and walked on. He drove by again and pulled up in front of her. She again shook her head and walked around him. He backed out, accelerated with an angry screech and left. Concerned, the man on the porch watched her draw close to her building and then lost sight of her, but did not see the car return. He was the last person to see Fleszar alive. Her naked body was found on 7 August at an abandoned farm not far from where she lived. She had been stabbed 30 times in the chest with a knife or other sharp object. Her lower leg bones had been smashed just above the ankles. It also appeared that she had been brutally beaten. One of her hands was missing, along with the fingers of her other hand. Her clothing was found under a pile of rubbish.
The frozen naked body of Eileen Adams, 13, was found in a field on 19 December 1967. It had been wrapped in a rug and mattress cover, and tied with an electrical cord. She had been raped, strangled with the same electrical cord and stuffed into a sack. Her bra was tied around her neck. She had been cruelly beaten with a hammer, and a 3in nail was driven into her skull. Her stockings were arranged on her body, but her shoes were missing. There was evidence of sexual assault and her body was placed in plain sight. She had apparently been left alive but bound in such a way that her struggles to get free had tightened a telephone cord looped around her neck and tied to her ankles, which strangled her. Her shoes and coat were also missing. Police believed that her abductor had held her somewhere for up to two weeks before leaving her in the field.
It was almost seven months before another victim’s body was found, on 6 July 1968. This was another college student, Joan Schell, aged 20, who had last been seen alive on 30 June, hitchhiking in front of the student union building, around 10.30pm. She had been sexually assaulted. Her throat was cut and she had been stabbed five times; her miniskirt was twisted around her neck. She’d been killed in a different place from where she was found.
On 21 March 1969, the body of another college student, Jane Mixer, 23, was found in a cemetery in Denton Township. She had been shot twice in the head with a .22-calibre gun. She too had been killed elsewhere. A stocking was twisted around her neck and her tights pulled down, but a sanitary napkin was still in place, which indicated no sexual attack.
On 26 March, the body of Maralynn Skelton, 16, was found. She had last been seen the previous day hitchhiking in front of a shopping centre. Her skull was fractured; she had been whipped with a belt and sexually assaulted. She had also been killed elsewhere and dumped. A suspender belt was found wrapped around her neck.
The body count was now starting to rise and police searched for clues to the identity of the serial killer. On 15 April 1969, Dawn Basom, aged 13, was last seen leaving a house near the college campus. She was found dead the next day. She had been strangled with a black electrical wire and stabbed, and her breasts and buttocks were viciously slashed. A handkerchief and a piece of her blouse were stuffed in her mouth. She had been killed elsewhere, possibly in a deserted farmhouse where items of her clothing were later found.
Alice Kalom, 23, was the next victim. On 7 June 1969, she went to a party and was seen dancing with a young man with long hair. Her body was found near an abandoned barn. She had been raped and shot once in the head and stabbed twice in the chest. She had been killed elsewhere and her clothing was scattered around her body. Her shoes were missing.
Roxie Phillips, 17, disappeared on 30 June 1969. She had gone out to post a letter and meet a friend. A pair of boys looking for fossils found her body on 13 July in Pescadero Canyo
n just north of Carmel, California. She was badly decomposed and naked, except for a pair of sandals and a red-and-white cotton belt wrapped tightly around her neck. The body must have been carried to where it lay amid poison oak (Collins was treated in California that same week for poison oak). Some of Phillips’s possessions were found strewn along Route 68. A friend of hers mentioned she had met a ‘John’ driving a silver Oldsmobile, who was going to college in Michigan and who rode motorcycles. She didn’t think Roxie knew him, but she did admit that she had met him while he was cruising near Roxie’s house.
Karen Sue Beineman, 18, was last seen on 23 July getting on the back of a motorcycle with a young man. She was later found, strangled, in a ravine. Her face was badly battered and she was naked. A piece of material was stuffed into her throat, her torn knickers were stuffed into her vagina and there were human hair clippings stuck to them. She had been killed elsewhere. Vital evidence found on her would ultimately lead police to her killer.
The witness told police that the young man with the motorcycle was John Norman Collins (b. 1947), who, at the time of the murder of Karen Beineman, was living at his uncle’s house. His uncle just happened to be a police officer and on learning that his nephew was possibly a suspect looked around the house and garage. He acknowledged that something was amiss. He went into his basement and scraped up some of the paint, finding a stain that looked like blood. Immediately he called in forensic experts. The stain turned out to be varnish. However, they were soon to be rewarded in their search; one of them noticed hair clippings near the washing machine. The uncle explained that his wife had cut the children’s hair. Aware of the odd clippings found on Beineman’s knickers, the police gathered some from the basement floor to compare to those already at the lab. Then they noticed tiny droplets that looked like blood. When tested, they did indeed prove to be blood. After later tests revealed that the bloodstains were human and that the hairs might be consistent with those on the knickers, blood was found on Collins’s car seat, even though his car had been thoroughly cleaned. A red-and-white piece of cotton fabric was also found. Forensic tests proved that the hair found in the garage was consistent with the hair found in Beineman’s knickers. The blood from the car was found to match the blood of Alice Kalom. The police decided to arrest Collins. However, he denied any knowledge of any murders. He was, however, later charged with the murder of Karen Sue Beineman.
Collins’s trial began on 30 June 1970 and, after deliberating for three days, the jury returned with a unanimous verdict that he was guilty of first-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 20 years. He went through three appeals and even changed his name to Chapman to get a transfer to Canada, where he would have been eligible for parole in 1985. He also tried to escape by tunnelling out of the prison. The murders of the other six girls remain officially unsolved. To this day, Collins still protests his innocence. Since then, a police officer involved in the case made public that there was other evidence never made public, linking Collins to the other murders. In the case of Mary Fleszar, missing from her effects was an Expo 67 Canadian silver dollar that she wore around her neck. Such an item was apparently found on Collins’s dresser, according to police, when his rooms were searched. He claimed that it was not his and denied that it had been in his room.
In the case of Joan Schell, she had last been seen getting into a car with three men. Collins’s room-mate, Arnie Davis, said that he was in that car with Collins and another man whose name he claimed not to know. Collins had allegedly told the girl that he would take her to Ann Arbor in his own car. Davis says that they left the apartment together and Collins had come back two and a half hours later to say that he had failed to have the sexual encounter with her that he’d hoped for. He had her red handbag with him, which he said she had left in his car. He went through the wallet, says Davis, and called her a bitch. There was also speculation by the police that Davis was actually there when Collins and the other man together raped and killed Schell in a car park. Later, Collins apparently asked Davis to hide a hunting knife; the type of knife that could have made the wounds found on Schell. Collins told someone that he did not know Schell, although several witnesses claimed to have seen them both together that night. He told someone else that he’d had a date with her but had stood her up. No one checked out his alibi of being at his mother’s that weekend, although someone said that he had overheard Collins on the phone to his mother, telling her that he was in some trouble. One person said that he talked obsessively about the wounds on Schell’s body, claiming that he got the information from his uncle, a corporal on the state police force. However, Corporal Leik said he knew only what had been printed in the newspaper. He could not have told Collins the things he apparently knew.
The Dawn Basom murder was also mentioned. Young Dawn Basom lived across the street from an apartment complex where a girl whom Collins used to date lived. Dawn was strong and would not accept rides, even with men she knew. She was last seen near her home, walking along the road. A neighbour had seen two cars parked in front of a vacant house in their neighbourhood: a red Chevrolet and a blue Volkswagen. She had seen a young woman in the front seat of the red car sitting with a man with dark hair. Then both cars drove away. Many people believe that one man alone could not have forced Basom into a car, unless he had a gun. Glass particles on the soles of her shoes indicated that she was forced into the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, where it is thought she was killed. The link to Collins was his knowledge of the neighbourhood.
Collins was seen both on foot and on his motorcycle the day that Alice Kalom disappeared, not far from her apartment. Friends who stopped to talk with him claimed later to police that he had had a strange look on his face and seemed distant. He would not look them in the eye. Arnie Davis said that Collins had brought Kalom back to their apartment on 7 June. There was some commotion between them in Collins’s room and Kalom broke away and fled. According to Davis, Collins chased her. He returned later alone. When she was found, there was a boot print on her skirt that was later matched to a boot that Collins owned. Blood found later in Collins’s car and on his raincoat matched her type. The bullet found in her head could have come from a High Standard revolver, which Collins was said to have stolen a few months before in a burglary. The knife wounds were consistent with the hunting knife that Collins later told Davis to hide for him (as stated by Davis).
The body of Roxie Phillips had been dumped amid poison oak; Collins had been treated for a case of poison oak. Also, 22 pubic hairs were found on one of his sweaters that were consistent with hers. If he had carried her over his shoulder in a state of rigor mortis, this would have accounted for the hairs being rubbed into his sweater. The one person who recalled the man that she and Roxie met gave the following information: his name was John, he was from Michigan, he was 5ft 11in tall with dark hair, he drove a silver-grey Oldsmobile, he was there with a friend in a camper, he was a college senior with the goal of being a teacher and he was in his twenties. That was a close match to Collins; too much to be coincidence.
On 25 November 2004, more than 35 years after these murders, there came a new development. DNA evidence came to light to connect a new suspect to one of the original murders. Gary Earl Leiterman, 62, was charged and convicted of the murder of Jane Mixer, the third victim in the series. Leiterman’s DNA had been found on Mixer’s knickers. There was now some serious doubt about whether Mixer had been one of Collins’s victims. When found, she was fully dressed, unlike the other victims. In addition, she had been shot twice in the head and not mutilated in any manner or sexually assaulted. However, other victims had been dumped within a few miles of the cemetery, so it still seemed possible; Mixer also had a stocking tied around her neck. Other victims were strangled as well. Leiterman was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. His lengthy appeal is still ongoing.
On 27 November 2006, it was announced that the same DNA technology had identified the killer of
another girl, Eileen Adams, who had been linked to Collins. Semen found in the dead girl’s knickers was matched to the DNA of a man named Robert Bowman, already wanted by police in two states. He remained at large until April 2011 when, at the age of 75, he was finally arrested and charged with the murder. He came to trial in August 2011 and pleaded not guilty. The jury could not reach a verdict and a retrial was ordered. That took place in October 2011; the jury in this trial found him guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 20
