Unsolved '66: Michigan
Unsolved '66: Michigan
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (11th in a series)
Like the day that I sat down to watch the documentary that made me suspect William Thoresen was the Zodiac Killer, one evening I perused information regarding a string of brutal murders of female college students and young girls.
The crimes took the lives of seven. Police believed they were perpetrated by the same killer. After all, such crimes where they occurred, in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor during the 1960s, were as out of place as Valerie Percy being stabbed to death in her bed by an intruder in Kenilworth.
They occurred for two years starting in July 1967. The only difference was, that evening I was looking for evidence that William was responsible for the murders that terrorized residents of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor in much the same way and for the most part at the same time as Zodiac’s attacks were doing the same to greater Bay Area residents.
It took barely a minute to find the evidence.
The reason I found it so quickly is a man named John Collins has been in prison for more than half a century for the last of the so-called Michigan Coed Murders.
One of the first things I saw that evening was a mugshot of Collins, who was age twenty-one at the time of the murders. In the photo, Collins is standing in front of a height chart. I immediately noticed that he was six foot one, the same height as William. Collins had dark hair, like William, and he parted it on the left side, like William. Both he and William also had athletic-looking builds, shoulders, and muscular arms. Collins was a jock. It appears that William worked out.
Then I noticed something peculiar: Collins is called a serial killer by many writers. Yet he was convicted of only one of the crimes, the final one, the murder of an Eastern Michigan University student named Karen Beineman, who was murdered by a motorcyclist she accepted a ride from. An eyewitness who owned a shop in downtown Ypsilanti observed the suspect and his motorcycle while he waited outside the shop for Beineman.
After her body was found, police replaced it with a mannequin in hopes that the killer would return to the scene of the crime. Just after midnight, they chased a man at the scene and said it was Beineman’s killer.
Nine days after the suspect escaped, the Zodiac Killer’s first letter arrived at the San Francisco Examiner.
It’s been presumed that Collins murdered some or all of the other Michigan victims because there were no more such murders after his arrest. It seemed weird, though: Collins is the only “serial killer” I have heard of who was convicted of just one murder.
That the murders ceased after Collins’s arrest is worthy of note, but I see that William strikes a far better match between criminal and crimes regarding the brutal Michigan cases than Collins.
Also, if Collins was not the killer, whoever fled police that night knew that he almost got caught. That would be enough to stop the Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor killings.
The Michigan victims were brutally assaulted; some were beaten, bound, tortured, shot, stabbed, scalded with caustic substances, and strangled.
I already suspected William for dozens of murders, many with these MOs. I did a quick search of the dates of those murders, including the ones committed by Zodiac. Not only did I find no conflicts in the dates, I learned that other people have suspected that the Michigan Coed Killer and Zodiac were the same person.
I could imagine William committing the atrocious Beineman murder. He was dangerous, extremely violent, and a suspect in a shooting and dismemberment murder in Chicago a dozen years earlier.
Collins, on the other hand, had no prior record. William was a high school dropout. Collins was a college student and was well liked when in high school.
In the half century since the Zodiac and Michigan murders, a lot has been learned about serial killers.
One is they’re often several years older than Collins was (when arrested) at the time they commit their first murder. Yet it was presumed Collins had already murdered seven women. Meanwhile, William was twenty-eight, a prime age for a serial killer, when when the Michigan murders began.
Another thing I noticed was that serial killers don’t tend to come from small towns like Ypsilanti. They are often products of large metro areas like Chicago, where William was from.
All agreed that Collins was smart. But the motorcyclist rode Beineman around town in broad daylight at midday while police were searching for the killer. It didn’t make sense that Collins would do this. Police spent years combing Michigan vehicle registration records but had not come up with a suspect linked to the two cars and a motorcycle that witnesses reported.
William did not reside in Michigan. An acquaintance of his told me that he rented cars when he visited her in Chicago. I also knew from his wife’s book that he owned a Honda 350 motorcycle that was registered in Arizona. I was not surprised to learn that a witness told police that the motorcyclist was riding a Honda 350 or 450.
I was surprised to learn that sometime between the time that she was first questioned by police and Collins’s trial the witness changed her story about the motorcycle.
During the trial, she claimed that the motorcycle was not a Honda but a Triumph, like Collins owned. When cross-examined, she was at a loss to explain why she had first said it was a Honda.
Meanwhile, it was not lost on me that between the time of Collins’s arrest and trial something happened. William was shot dead.
So now I wasn’t just looking at the Michigan case, wondering whether the killer was William. I was wondering whether the feds knew it was William and railroaded Collins as a part of a cover-up.
There’s more to this. The story continues here and please subscribe: