Unsolved ’66: A Pattern Emerges
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (14th in a series)
As I stated previously, I am not the first to suspect that the Zodiac Killer and the Michigan Co-Ed Killer were the same person. Prior to the 1970s, serial killers were rare, and whoever was behind the slayings in and around the San Francisco and Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor areas in the late 1960s was doing it to terrorize and to get publicity for it by means of a series of brutal, random murders.
Also, there was time between the crimes for the killer to travel between the Midwest and West Coast. The murders of Mike Morrison and Debbie Means puts Zodiac in Illinois after the series of murders in California and Michigan were underway.
People have wondered, where was Zodiac during the six months between his killings in December 1968, and his next attack on July 4, 1969? A good answer is Michigan, where he was murdering Jane Mixer in March, and Illinois, where he was killing Morrison and Means in May, and Michigan again, where he murdered Alice Kalom in June.
However, I am the first to reveal that William Thoresen, who had a house in San Francisco and an apartment in Chicago, was Zodiac.
I believe this not just because witness statements and evidence tie him to both cases. I believe it because he also strikes a balance between crimes and criminal in these cases, unlike John Collins, now in prison for the murder of Karen Beineman, the final Michigan victim; and because Collins was proven not to have been the one who returned to the Beineman crime scene. That suspect police said was Beineman’s killer.
Then there are numerous suspicious occurrences that happened after William died on June 10, 1970. The prosecution’s star witness at Collins’s trial changed her story regarding the motorcycle Beineman’s killer rode, from a Honda like William owned to a Triumph like Collins owned and she could not explain why. She also picked Collins out of a police lineup, but not until after having been shown his photo, which seemingly would defeat the purpose of holding such a lineup.
Meanwhile, a defense witness who was cooperative with police was threatened by an Ann Arbor police sergeant if the witness did not agree to lie—tell a completely fabricated story—during Collins’s trial.
I’ve researched many cases and have not heard of anything like this happening at other murder trials. Given the reasons to suspect William was the Michigan Co-Ed Killer, these things are highly suspicious.
Presumably because descriptions of the Michigan killer matched both Collins and William, Collins was in jail when William died. William also appears to have gotten away with the murders of well over fifty people, including Valerie Percy, whose father by the time of William’s death was a US senator.
The FBI sat on information that implicated him for Percy’s murder rather than sharing it with police. For all of these reasons it’s not a stretch to suggest that Collins was railroaded as part of a cover-up of William’s crimes.
Evidence and witness statements indicate William murdered dozens of people after the federal agents believed he murdered Percy, including all of the Michigan victims and the final five Zodiac victims. It seems there would have been hell to pay had this hit the press in 1970.
There are also reasons to believe Collins wasn’t the only one. Like Karen Beineman, police believed that Jane Mixer was one of the Michigan victims. Yet, in 2001, Michigan authorities filed charges in the Mixer case based on DNA evidence purportedly recovered from Mixer’s stockings, which don’t even contain Mixer’s DNA.
The man charged was not John Collins but Gary Leiterman, a sixty-two-year-old nurse. As with Collins, what’s been learned about killers in the half-century since Mixer was slain reveals that Leiterman, who died in 2019, was an unlikely suspect.
Like Collins, Leiterman had no violence in his past. There’s no doubt that whoever shot Jane Mixer twice in the head was a violent killer.
Like Zodiac, who murdered at random in order to gain publicity by terrorizing residents of a metro area, whoever murdered Mixer left her body atop a grave in a cemetery to do just that.
Also—as with Collins and not surprisingly—there were unusual circumstances in the investigation that led to Leiterman’s conviction.
Prosecutors said DNA from a drop of blood on Mixer’s hand belonged to John Ruelas, a man convicted of killing his mother. However in 1969, Ruelas was four years old.
Because the same lab handled Ruelas’s DNA and evidence from the Mixer case at approximately the same time, Leiterman’s defense argued the Mixer case evidence was contaminated.
Leiterman was convicted on DNA and because he didn’t have an alibi for where he was on a night 33 years prior to his arrest. No facts or other evidence indicates he murdered Jane Mixer.
Like Collins, Leiterman denied murdering anyone, and the state dragged his name through the mud in public as it did with John Collins starting in 1969.
Given the reasons indicating Collins was railroaded as part of a cover-up of William Thoresen’s murder spree, one may wonder if the state lied about DNA to get another conviction for the Michigan cases in order to keep someone from discovering, and arguing, that William was behind the murders, and the feds were behind the cover-up.
Meanwhile, Gary Leiterman’s conviction does not explain the murder of Iowa College student Sheila Collins, whom sleuths have long suspected was murdered by the same killer that murdered Jane Mixer. William Thoresen, on the other hand, does.
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