Unsolved '66: Railroaded?
Valerie Percy's killer murdered sixty-nine others, and it was covered up. (12th in a series)
While researching a string of murders that occurred in the Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor area in the late 1960s, I noticed that the description of the purported killer, John Collins, matched the description of William Thoresen.
Collins seemed an unlikely killer. He was too young. Serial killers usually aren’t from towns the size of Ypsilanti. Karen Beineman’s murder, which he was convicted of, was atrociously sadistic. Yet Collins had no record.
On the other hand, Thoresen was from the Chicago area and was twenty-nine when the murders started, a prime age for a serial killer. He also had committed bombings and violent assaults, and he illegally possessed over seventy tons of weapons.
Police said Beineman’s slayer returned to the scene of the crime of the murder. But it was not Collins, who had an ironclad alibi, and the prosecution did not cross-examine the witness who provided it.
When charged, Collins refused to enter a plea and denied killing anyone. Such behavior is not indicative of serial killers.
The more I looked at the investigation of Collins, the stranger it seemed.
None of the witnesses who saw suspects knew John Collins or William Thoresen. The witness who changed her story about the suspect’s motorcycle was shown a photo of Collins before she identified him in a lineup.
Witness Donald Kaufman, a motorcycle salesman, said an Ann Arbor police sergeant threatened him: If Kaufman would not tell a story about selling a motorcycle to another man the day of the murder, which Kaufman knew was a lie, he would be charged with perjury.
This made me suspect that the witness who changed her story about the type of motorcycle the suspect rode had been threatened as well. She was unable to explain the change when cross-examined during the trial.
The prosecution said that Collins tortured and murdered Beineman in the basement of a house that was owned by Collins’s brother-in-law, who also happened to be a cop.
All agreed that Collins was no dummy. Despite this, the prosecution maintained, he picked up a student with the intent of murdering her yet paraded her around his small hometown on a motorcycle in broad daylight first, while police were searching every street for a serial killer, and then took her back to the home of a cop to kill her. None of this adds up.
I’ve read a considerable amount regarding evidence in homicide cases. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say what the prosecution said regarding evidence from the basement sounds incomprehensibly complex, if not like BS.
A paid witness, Dr. Howard Schlesinger, testified for the prosecution regarding hairs purportedly recovered from the basement. But his “neutron activation analysis” of hair samples (NAA), even before the age of DNA-rendered evidence, sounds like junk science, courtroom quackery. As far as I know, it was never heard of again inside a court of law.
Perhaps most troublingly, between the time that Collins was arrested and when he went to trial, Thoresen died. So if, upon his death, the feds—who already believed he murdered a US senator’s daughter—learned that he murdered dozens of others, including the Michigan victims, many of them after Valerie Percy, there would be hell to pay if it ever got out.
All of this would give authorities incentive to keep not only the Percy case files secret, but also the memos they exchanged in 2016 while discussing them as a lawyer sought to pry them free from government hands.
In turn, they needed an excuse, one that also appears to be BS, to keep the files secret, namely that the investigation into the half-century-old, ice-cold case was “active and ongoing.”
Meanwhile, in 1970, officials likely knew that Collins resembled Thoresen and was in custody awaiting trial for Beineman’s slaying, the last of the Michigan murders. Maybe they could convict him for it and imply that he was responsible for all of the Michigan cases. They knew that the murders had ceased for the same reason they knew the Zodiac murders had ceased: Thoresen was dead! Collins’s conviction might keep someone from discovering that Thoresen was the real killer.
The only thing that appears to be ongoing about these cases is the cover-up that William Thoresen, a rich man’s son who may be the most egregious example of a two-tiered justice system, committed these murders.
An exhaustive telling of the Michigan crimes was published in 1976 by author Edward Keys. Yet, forty years later, another writer, Gregory Fournier, released a book on the Michigan murders: Terror in Ypsilanti: John Norman Collins Unmasked.
Based on Fournier’s conclusions regarding the trial, it’s not a stretch to say that the reason for his book was to link Collins’s name to the murders on its cover and set off a round of propaganda about Collins, a “serial killer” who was convicted of a single murder.
And it did—though Collins represents nothing that’s been learned in the last half century about killers, serial and otherwise.
But Collins’s conviction isn’t the only thing to suggest that he was the fall guy in a cover-up of William Thoresen, who was both a serial killer and a serial mass murderer.
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