The college towns of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, have been shattered by a reign of terror that has claimed the lives of seven young women over a two-year period. The killer, now identified as John Norman Collins, a former high school football captain and education student at Eastern Michigan University, has been arrested and charged with the murder of 18-year-old Karen Bemman. But authorities believe he is responsible for a string of brutal slayings that began in July 1967 and continued until July 1969.
The community, once defined by its youthful energy and trusting spirit, now lives in a state of collective panic. Women carry knives and tear gas. No one goes anywhere alone.
Even in the summer heat, windows stay locked.
The first victim was 19-year-old Mary Fleszar, an accounting student at Eastern Michigan University. On July 9, 1967, she walked home from campus. A neighbor noticed a blue-gray Chevrolet circling the block, the driver leaning out to call to her.
She refused. Then she turned a corner and vanished. Her body was found four weeks later near an abandoned farmhouse in Superior Township.
She had been stabbed approximately 30 times. Her feet were cut off above the ankles. Five fingers were removed from one hand, and the other hand was severed from the forearm.
None of those parts were ever found. Evidence at the scene indicated the killer had returned multiple times, moving and revisiting the body.
At Mary Fleszar’s funeral, a young man claiming to be a family friend approached the funeral director. He asked to take a photograph of Mary in her casket, saying her parents wanted to keep it safe. When denied, he pushed harder, asking if she could be fixed up enough for one picture.
Turned away again, he left. The receptionist gave police a description: good-looking, dark hair, early twenties, driving an old blue-gray Chevrolet—the same car seen circling Mary the night she disappeared. Police filed it as a morbid curiosity and moved on.
Nearly a year later, on June 30, 1968, 20-year-old Joan Shell left her apartment on Emmet Street to visit her boyfriend in Ann Arbor. She missed her bus and decided to hitchhike. A red and black Pontiac Bonneville pulled up with three young men inside.
The driver wore a green Eastern Michigan University shirt, short dark hair neatly parted. He looked like a clean-cut college kid. Joan’s roommate tried to talk her out of it, but Joan got in, promising to call when she arrived.
That call never came. Five days later, construction workers found her body off Earhart Road. She had been stabbed 25 times with a four-inch blade.
Her throat was sliced so deep the knife scraped against bone. Her own mini skirt was tied around her neck.
The pathologist noted something strange: Joan Shell’s lower body was relatively preserved, but her head and shoulders had degraded significantly. This suggested the killer had kept her in a cool place, with her upper body 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to heat, before dumping her. Police tracked down and cleared more than 150 people who owned red and black vehicles.
They sketched a composite of the driver based on the roommate’s description and plastered it across campus. By August, they had nothing.
Then two witnesses came forward, saying they had seen Joan Shell walking with a male student along Emmet Street the evening she disappeared. Both thought the man looked like John Norman Collins, an EMU student who lived directly across the street from Joan at 619 Emmett. His appearance matched the composite sketch.
Police brought him in for questioning. Collins flatly denied knowing Joan Shell, claiming he spent that entire weekend at his mother’s house in Centerline. Investigators took him at his word.
They never checked whether the alibi held up. They let him walk.
Months passed without another body. People began to hope the killer had moved on or stopped. But in the spring of 1969, the horror escalated beyond anything anyone could have imagined.
On March 20, 1969, 23-year-old law student Jane Mixer pinned a note to a campus bulletin board, asking for a ride home to Muskegon to share news of her engagement and plans to move to New York City. Someone responded. The next morning, her fully clothed body was found on top of a grave in Denton Cemetery in Van Buren Township.
She had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber pistol and then strangled with a nylon stocking that did not belong to her. A copy of the book Catch-22 lay beside her body. She had not been sexually assaulted, but her clothes had been moved to expose her.
Jane was on her period when she died, and investigators believe the killer discovered that and stopped him from going further. He shot her, strangled her, and placed her in that cemetery instead.
Investigators learned that Jane Mixer had tried to call a student named David Johnson, believing he had offered her a ride to Muskegon. But Johnson said he never responded to her message, and he had a solid alibi. Someone had been impersonating him.
The killer had read the bulletin board, seen an opportunity, and used another student’s name to get close.
Just four days later, a surveyor working on Earhart Road discovered the body of 16-year-old Marilyn Skelton, lying face up on a blue jacket behind a vacant house on a wooded hill. She had been left in a position investigators described as deliberately degrading. What had been done to her represented an escalation so severe that a detective with 30 years of homicide experience said it was the worst thing he had ever seen.
Marilyn had been tortured. The killer used her own shirt to muffle her screams while he beat her. She was tied down and whipped with a belt.
Her skull was fractured. She had been violated with a tree branch. Blood at the scene suggested she broke free and tried to run, but she did not make it far.
Rain had washed away any footprints or tire tracks.
Marilyn Skelton was a high school student from Romulus, known as a party girl who dealt drugs and occasionally passed information to police. Some investigators initially wondered if her murder was 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔-related, but the details were too familiar. She was dumped only a few hundred yards from where Joan Shell had been found—the same stretch of road.
The killer was returning to a place that meant something to him.
Less than a month later, on April 15, 1969, 13-year-old Dawn Bassom went missing while walking home from a friend’s house. She took a shortcut along railroad tracks. A boy named Earl Kidd walked part of the way with her before saying goodbye about five blocks from her house.
She never made it home. A truck driver found her body the following morning about a mile away on Gail Road. She had been stabbed and strangled with an electrical cord.
The pathologist estimated she had been dead for about ten hours. Police found Dawn’s orange sweater inside an abandoned farmhouse near where her body was dumped. Glass in the basement matched fragments found on her skin.
She had been killed there.
A week later, a detective returned to that same basement and found a piece of Dawn’s blouse. Next to it, a gold earring that had belonged to Marilyn Skelton. The killer had gone back and left those items there deliberately, like trophies arranged in a place only he knew about.
This tied every murder together beyond any doubt.
On May 13, someone burned that farmhouse down. When firefighters arrived, they found five lilac flowers lined up in the driveway. One for each victim.
By June 1969, the college towns were completely unraveled. Women were carrying knives and tear gas. No one went anywhere alone.
Even in the summer heat, windows stayed locked. Police had worked through more than a thousand suspects and 800 tips. They were no closer to an arrest than the day Mary Fleszar’s body was found two years earlier.
Then, on June 8, 21-year-old Alice Kalom was seen leaving a party on the back of a motorcycle. Three days later, her body turned up in a field. She had been stabbed, her throat sliced, and even shot in the head.
She also had a bullet wound through her thumb, from when she raised her hand to protect her face. The gun changed everything. Only one other victim, Jane Mixer, had been shot.
Investigators spiraled: Were all these murders connected? Was it one man or multiple killers operating in the same area at the same time? The sheriff went before reporters and told them the killer was still out there because of luck, not because police weren’t working hard enough.
He promised they would get him eventually. Behind closed doors, investigators were running out of road.
Desperate, on July 21 the community brought in a Dutch psychic named Peter Hurkos to help crack the case. Hurkos walked investigators to the precise location where each body had been found and revealed details about the murders that had never been made public. He put together a profile: a strongly built white male under 25, born outside the United States, who rode a motorcycle.
Then he made one final prediction: The killer would strike again very soon.
Two days later, on July 23, 18-year-old Karen Bemman walked into a wig shop in downtown Ypsilanti. While she browsed, she noticed a young man waiting outside on a blue Triumph motorcycle. He had short dark hair and wore a striped sweater.
Karen turned to the shop owner, Joan Gosh, and said she was doing two foolish things that day: buying a wig and accepting a ride from a stranger. She laughed and said she was either the bravest or stupidest girl alive for getting on that bike. Gosh and her assistant looked out the window.
The moment they did, the man turned his head away. Karen walked out, climbed on the back of that motorcycle, and was never seen alive again.
Three days later, her body was found near the Huron River. She had been beaten and tortured with a caustic chemical. Fabric was stuffed into her throat.
Her underwear had been forced inside her body. When investigators examined that underwear, they found something that would finally break the case wide open: male DNA and 509 individual human hair clippings. Each hair was less than three-eighths of an inch long, mostly blonde, and carefully cut.
Karen’s hair was dark brown. Those hairs had come from somewhere else entirely.
Police suspected the killer might return to the scene the way he had done before. They replaced Karen’s body with a mannequin and waited. On July 27, during a heavy rainstorm, an officer spotted a young man sprinting away from the gully.
But the rain had killed his radio. By the time backup arrived, the man had vanished into the woods.
Meanwhile, investigators brought Joan Gosh in and showed her a photo lineup. She pointed to one picture without even hesitating. A neighbor from the chocolate shop next door then confirmed it.
Then another witness, and then another. By the end, seven separate people had placed the same man outside that wig shop on the day Karen got on that motorcycle. Three other women came forward, saying he had tried to pick them up before Karen said yes.
His name was John Norman Collins.
On paper, John Norman Collins looked like the kind of guy you would want your daughter to bring home. An education student, former high school football captain, handsome, charming. But those who knew him saw something darker.
His fraternity had kicked him out for stealing. He had a vicious temper that frightened people. He had a particular rage toward women who were menstruating.
There were accounts of him screaming at a girlfriend and storming out the moment he found out she was on her period. Given what investigators knew about every victim, that detail landed hard. At work, he unsettled co-workers by describing the victims’ injuries in graphic detail, claiming his uncle, a police sergeant, fed him inside information.
The more investigators dug, the more Collins kept appearing at the edges of every case. He had worked directly across from where one victim lived. He dated someone whose apartment was right next to another victim’s home.
He had been spotted in areas connected to a third. When police brought him in for questioning early on, he refused a lie detector test. His roommate later watched him walk out of their apartment carrying a box containing a woman’s purple shoe and a purse.
Collins said he was just getting rid of it.
Then came the moment that unraveled everything. While his uncle, state police sergeant David Leek, was away on vacation, Collins had been given keys to watch the family dog. When the Leeks returned, something was wrong.
The basement floor had been covered in fresh paint. Several cleaning supplies were missing. Once Leek was told his nephew was a suspect, he looked closer and found what appeared to be blood underneath that paint.
Investigators entered that basement and found the piece that locked it all together. The Leek children were all blonde. Collins’ aunt had cut their hair down there just before the family left for vacation.
The clippings had been swept into neat piles. Those same tiny, blonde hairs, less than three-eighths of an inch long, were a precise forensic match to the hairs found inside Karen Bemman’s underwear. She had been in that basement.
Collins had taken her there. Then he tried to paint over what he had done.
The hair analysis was the first case in the nation where such evidence was used to secure a conviction. It was groundbreaking.
On July 30, 1969, police finally arrested John Norman Collins. Although investigators privately believed he was responsible for all seven deaths, they only charged him with Karen Bemman’s murder. The evidence in the other cases simply wasn’t strong enough to guarantee a conviction, and they needed one.
The trial began in 1970. In court, Joan Gosh pointed straight at him. Forensic experts explained that the hair match wasn’t a coincidence; the odds of those clippings appearing in two separate locations by accident was essentially zero.
Collins sat through all of it and said nothing. He didn’t even flinch when the verdict was read, even as his own family wept. He was sentenced to life in prison.
He later changed his name to Chapman and has been behind bars for over 50 years. Today, John Norman Collins is 78 years old.
But there is one final chilling detail. Joan Shell, the second victim, was last seen getting into a car with three young men. One of those men was Collins’ own roommate, Arnold Davis.
Davis told police later that Collins had insisted on taking Joan in his own car after she got in. The two of them got out of Davis’ car together. Collins came back alone almost three hours later.
He called Joan a very bad name and said he dropped her off. That was 1968. Police questioned Collins, he gave an alibi, and they took him at his word.
They never checked it. If they had dug in and verified, Karen Bemman might have gone to that wig shop and come home safe. Dawn Bassom might have made it down those railroad tracks.
Alice Kalom might have made it home from that party. Instead, the case went cold, and six more women never came home.
The story of John Norman Collins is a story of a killer who wore the mask of the all-American boy. It is a story of a community that trusted too much, of a police force that missed critical clues, and of a monster who slipped through the cracks for two long years. Today, the college towns of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor are still haunted by the memory of those seven young women.
Their names are Mary Fleszar, Joan Shell, Jane Mixer, Marilyn Skelton, Dawn Bassom, Alice Kalom, and Karen Bemman. They were daughters, girlfriends, students, and dreamers. And they were taken by a man who looked like he belonged.
The terror is over, but the scars remain. The summer of 1969 will never be forgotten.
