MATURE CONTENT WARNING: This story contains descriptions of gruesome crime scenes.

Inside the sandstone walls of the 130-year-old Marquette Branch Prison on the south shore of Lake Superior, two detectives sought to solve a half-century-old murder mystery.

Eight women and girls were slain in the late 1960s, striking fear into the hearts of Michiganders until John Norman Collins, one of Michigan’s most infamous killers, was arrested.

But Collins — a handsome college student at the time — was convicted of only one slaying. Decades later, the Michigan State Police detectives were flying more than 400 miles to the Upper Peninsula to question Collins about the other deaths.

Suspect John Norman Collins is led off to jail after arraignment in Ann Arbor. Mike McClure, Detroit Free Press

During their meeting with Collins, the detectives recalled, the killer's mood shifted from serene to furious and then back, as if his rage could be turned on and off like a light switch.

"Most of the time, he was under great control," recalled now-retired Sgt. Eric Schroeder, who would not let go of the case for more than two decades. "But if you said the right thing at the right time, that switch flipped."

Collins — now 72 — revealed disturbing new information that confirmed some of law enforcement's decades-old suspicions. He shed more light on the heinous crimes and the dark phenomenon that, at the time of the slayings, was on the rise: serial killings.

On Tuesday morning, Collins responded to the Free Press through the prison correspondence system, writing in his peculiar style that included all caps and misspelled words.

Among other things, he denied his guilt and made one request: "if You have any 'INTEGRITY' at all you will leave my Dear Mother out-of-this."

Collins wrote: "The 'ONLY' reason I am responding to your e-mail is out of RESPECT for Neil Fink." Fink was his attorney, who died in 2016. Collins said he also was responding in deference to Fink's wife and son, who also are attorneys.

In his Tuesday email, Collins said: "I felt somewhat obliged to at least give you a brief response since you have been kind of a 'PAIN IN THE ASS' with your persistance. lol"

The Free Press requested in June to speak face-to-face with Collins at the Upper Peninsula prison, which he declined. After that, the Free Press sent three electronic letters in July, August and then on Nov. 1.

Collins also addressed two never-before-published letters that he sent to his cousin in 2013 in which Collins said he wanted to "clear up" some things and revealed untold secrets about "what really happened" to the victims in the late '60s.

"I have 'NO' control over what people say about ME and that is WHY I have chosen to REFUSE interviews of any kind," Collins wrote in his Tuesday email, adding that he wanted to be left alone. "I have been deceived too many times in the past."

New details about the case

In recent weeks, hair-raising details have emerged from in-depth Free Press interviews with Schroeder, recently retired Sgt. Jim Bundshuh, one of Collins' relatives in Canada, a blogger who visited every spot where authorities found bodies, the author of a book about the case and others.

But in more than 50 years, memories have faded; witnesses, prosecutors, and police have retired and died. Now authorities must decide whether to pursue investigating the cases, picking up where the other detectives left off.

And unlike the Samuel Little case — in which authorities recently asked the public to help find bodies of women that the 79-year-old killed — in each of these unsolved cases, there are no definitive answers as to who did it, only suspicion.

To compile a comprehensive look of what authorities did to investigate in the late 1960s, the Free Press examined hundreds of newspaper articles and police photographs, including the personal items one victim carried in her purse.

In addition to a three-part report, the Free Press also created a virtual evidence locker to show what authorities found at the crime scenes in the 1960s.

Authorities say they have not given up on the cases, but the longer it takes to piece new and old evidence together, the more difficult the cases become to prosecute. Moreover, an aging Collins — or other potential suspects — could die before being charged.

With each day that passes, the cold cases are getting even colder.

MORE IN THIS SERIES

THE EVIDENCE LOCKER: What police discovered at 7 Michigan murder crime scenes

CHAPTER 1: Never-before-published letters, interviews offer clues in infamous Michigan murders

CHAPTER 2: Murders of Michigan women still unsolved 50 years later — but cops had eye on 1 man

CHAPTER 3: 'Handsome' EMU student was unlikely serial killer suspect. Letters, interviews reveal dark side.

COLLINS' LETTER: John Norman Collins — one of Michigan's most notorious killers — pens letter to the Free Press

Six unsolved slayings

Before Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer who confessed to more than 20 homicides in seven states before being executed in 1989, Michigan had a serial killer who was making national news.

Police tried to catch Collins for two years. Authorities checked out 800-plus tips; they offered more than $40,000 in reward money for the information, and, in desperation, they even consulted an internationally renowned psychic.

And with every new development in the case, newspapers in cities large and small ran headlines, including the Boston Globe, the Tennessean, the Des Moines Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Los Angeles Times and even the Deadwood Pioneer-Times in South Dakota.

Collins eventually was arrested and convicted of murdering Karen Sue Beineman.

Karen Sue Beineman, 18, of Grand Rapids. DFP file

But Beineman, an 18-year-old Eastern Michigan University student from Grand Rapids, was just one of several slayings in the Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor area that police believed one man committed.

The other known victims were: Mary Fleszar, 19, of Willis; Joan Schell, 20, of Plymouth; Jane Mixer, 23, of Muskegon; Maralynn Skelton, 16, of Romulus; Dawn Basom, 13, of Ypsilanti, Alice Kalom, 21, of Portage, and Roxie Phillips, 17, of Milwaukie, Oregon.

Between 1967 and 1969, seven bodies — most of them mutilated, decomposing and naked — turned up along Michigan roadsides and in empty lots.

Mixer's body was left on top of a grave in Van Buren Township, a few miles from Ypsilanti — a crucial detail, Schroeder said, that that would lead him and other detectives to solving that case decades later. Phillips was slain while she was in Salinas, California.

Collins, police said, was in the same part of California at the same time.

Some of the slayings were so gruesome that to shield the victims and their families and the public from the indignity and horror, police withheld crime scene details.

Collins was a suspect in every case and after his arrest in 1969, the killings stopped.

50 years later, investigation into Michigan Murders leads to DNA revelations Through interviews with John Norman Collins and DNA evidence, Michigan State Police look to solve the cold case Michigan Murders Kimberly P. Mitchell, Detroit Free Press

Detectives said it's even possible Collins also killed other people.

To complicate matters for investigators, one of the cases, Mixer's, was solved in 2005 through new DNA evidence. Yet it didn't point to Collins — it linked the slaying to Gary Leiterman, who was convicted of the murder and died earlier this year in a prison health center in Jackson.

'Held in a grip of terror'

Yet, as the body count grew, so did the panic, setting off a frantic investigation by a half-dozen law enforcement agencies, in part because serial killings hadn't been widely understood or studied. It would be a few years before the term serial killing came into use.

Authorities said this killer appeared to be slaying for psychological gratification.

Kim Maki — an Ypsilanti native who started writing about the case on her pop culture website, www.retrokimmer.com, a decade ago — said that readers from all over the world are still intrigued by the unsolved slayings.

Decades later, she went to every spot in Michigan where bodies were found and recorded video.

Show caption Hide caption Washtenaw County Sheriff's onfer on a rural road north of Ypsilanti where the body of a 13-year old was found in April, 1969. Dawn Basom... Washtenaw County Sheriff's onfer on a rural road north of Ypsilanti where the body of a 13-year old was found in April, 1969. Dawn Basom of Ypsilanti, whose nude body lies under the blanket at left, was the fifth young woman to be murdered in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti Area in the past 22 months. None of the murders have been solved. Associated Press

Not only is there curiosity and speculation about the cases, she said, but there are also so many twists and questions in the initial investigation and trial that people can't seem to let it go.

For Michiganders — especially those who lived through the '60s in the Ypsilanti area — the slayings are personal.

"When the killings first started in 1967, I was 11," Maki, now 63, said. "I was in fifth grade. When it first started, all of our parents weren't too worried about it because we were too young for him — so they thought."

"But, then," Maki added, "he killed Dawn Basom."

The fourth victim, the youngest at 13 years old, had been strangled and mutilated.

"She was in my gym class in junior high," Maki said. "After that, the whole town was just held in a grip of terror."

Authorities were convinced that the same person killed the women and girls because there were similar characteristics to the cases.

Then, in 1969, an unexpected turn of events led authorities to Collins.

An unlikely suspect

The Michigan cases — along with the Charles Manson murders and the Zodiac Killer homicides — were among the first group of these type of savage slayings that would become more common and more frightening through the 1970s, '80s, and '90s.

Detroit Free Press, published front page from Aug. 2, 1969. Detroit Free Press

The Boston Strangler cases — in which 13 single women in the Boston area were sexually assaulted and savagely slain in the early '60s — ushered in new times of violent homicides, according to Peter Vronsky, the author of "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters."

After that, serial killings increased, Vronsky said. In his book, one study of all known serial homicides between 1800 and 1995 in the United States concluded that nearly half of them occurred after 1975.

Serial killers that followed the Michigan slayings included: Ted Bundy, who was known as the Campus Killer; John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown; David Berkowitz, Son of Sam; Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, and Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer.

Bundy even infamously passed through Ann Arbor as he kidnapped, raped and decapitated women in Washington, Utah, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and California before getting caught in Florida.

What added to the public interest in the Michigan cases — and what especially challenged authorities prosecuting the Collins case in 1970 — was that Collins just didn't fit anyone's image of a killer.

Collins graduated from St. Clement High, a Catholic high school in Center Line. Many of the nuns liked him, and some defended him. He had been a football team captain, rode motorcycles and was studying to be a teacher. His uncle was a state trooper.

Another reason for the interest: The Michigan slayings also happened at a time when Americans — and Detroiters — were undergoing cultural change and upheaval. People were feeling afraid and yet freer to express themselves at the same time.

In 1967, the same year Mary Fleszar's body was found, the deadly and destructive five-day Detroit riot broke out. The violence reshaped thinking about the city, suburbs — and race.

The next year, more tragedy seemed to rip the nation apart. Nonviolence preacher Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, whose brother, John F. Kennedy, also had been shot and killed, were both assassinated.

And in 1969, a music festival drew more than 400,000 people to Woodstock, New York. The event turned into a counterculture revolution that exemplified generational change, including long hair, rock ‘n’ roll and free love.

The times, as Bob Dylan sang, were a-changin'.

Hippies and hitchhiking

Steve Keyes — whose late father, Edward, wrote "The Michigan Murders," one of the most famous books about Collins — said that a subtext of the case was that the killings happened at an inflection point in American history.

"This guy was given latitude because of the times," he said of Collins. "Everybody was hitchhiking. I was. You don't even see hitchhikers now. But back then, it was the summer of love in 1967, and by 1969 everybody was doing it."

Moreover, Keyes suggested that killing — with the high-profile assassinations and Charles Manson cult murders in California — was entering the culture, and "it was exciting to people who were out there on the edge."

Keyes said his father, a New York journalist, sought to write his 1976 true crime book in the style of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." He first read about the case in the New York papers — and was driven by a curiosity to know more and spent years working on the book.

"He followed the case from the beginning," Keyes, 66, said. "As the fear mounted — the second killing, the third killing — he was imagining what the communities were going through and what that must have been like."

The more bodies and details that emerged, Keyes said, the more people worried.

Some of the victims, he added, had been picked up thumbing their way across town, and everyone seemed to be on edge.

Moms made their daughters promise not to hitchhike — and lock their doors. Women started having second thoughts about going anywhere alone. For protection, some women started carrying knives.

The slayings, Edward Keyes wrote, upended a "peaceful mid-American community." With the book, he tried "to re-create the situations, the scenes, the moods as they were when they were happening." People are still reading it.

When talking about the cases, Kelly Rossman-McKinney, communications director for Michigan's attorney general, said her niece, while visiting Michigan from Charlotte, North Carolina, had been reading Keyes' book.

"And," Rossman-McKinney added, "I was hovering over her shoulder saying, 'I want to borrow it!' "

A forensic science first

During Collins' 1970 trial, both sides turned to forensic advancements to make their case.

They focused on whether the physical evidence — hair clippings — tied Collins to Beineman's body.

Prosecution witnesses included scientists at California's Gulf Atomic Laboratories. The defense sought the testimony of a nuclear chemist at the University of Toronto, who applied something that the newspapers called "neutron activation" analysis.

It was one of the first cases to use this kind of science.

But, it would be more than a decade before the process of determining an individual's DNA characteristics, which are unique like fingerprints, would even exist, and more years before DNA was widely used to solve crimes.

Collins did not testify at trial. His two lawyers, Joseph Louisell and Fink, said at the time that they didn't want to risk it. Fink told the Free Press at the time that the defense was confident "we have won." They turned out to be wrong.

'The unspoken evidence'

Fink's son, Wade — who is now about the same age that his father was then — recalled that his dad often talked about the case and believed the prosecution's case was weak, adding that the jury needed someone to blame for the killings.

Wade Fink said his father was convinced that the reason Collins was convicted was the "the unspoken evidence" — the community was terrified, and when police arrested Collins, the slayings stopped.

Show caption Hide caption Joseph W. Louisell, left, chief defense attorney and his assistant Neil H. Fink leave court June 2, 1970 at the end of the first day... Joseph W. Louisell, left, chief defense attorney and his assistant Neil H. Fink leave court June 2, 1970 at the end of the first day in the murder trial of John Norman Collins, 22, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Associated Press

Kimberly Stout, Neil Fink's wife, said her husband told her he thought Collins was charming, bright and not guilty. She is still in touch with Collins, although they communicate infrequently. Stout, now 58, said she believes authorities should continue investigating the unsolved cases.

"I always think they should try to exonerate someone if it's at all possible and there's a thought of it, especially if there's evidence to the contrary," she said earlier this week. "And I also think that families need answers, too."

In 1970, a jury of six men and six women began deliberating on a Friday afternoon. After a couple of days, there was a concern they just might be so divided they might not be able to reach an agreement. But eventually, they made a decision.

At sentencing, Collins decided to speak. It was his first public comment since his arrest. In a dramatic last-ditch appeal to the public, the former EMU student stood up in court and calmly addressed Judge John Conlin.

"Your honor, I have two things to say," he said politely and impassively. He wore a green plaid sport coat and striped tie. "The first is that I honestly feel the community conscientiously tried to give me a fair trial."

"But, things were blown out of proportion," he added, in a voice that the Free Press described then as soft and high-pitched. "A travesty of justice took place in this courtroom during the past six or seven weeks. I hope the error will someday be corrected."

The second thing: Collins said he never even knew Beineman.

New clue revives investigation

In the early 1990s, Eric Schroeder was a young and eager Michigan State Police trooper assigned to the Ypsilanti post. He grew up in Romulus, not far from Ypsilanti. When his younger sister, who had cerebral palsy and a speech impediment, tried to say Eric, it came out A-Roc. Roc became his nickname.

As a trooper, Schroeder said, there was one set of cold cases that every one of his training officers had talked about and he couldn't let go of: the Michigan Murders.

"In the basement of the post, we had all the filing cabinets with the files in them," Schroeder, 54, of Lansing, recalled during an interview this summer with the Free Press. "I would spend hours down there in my off time reading through those files."

Then, he said, he started talking to a retired detective who had worked on the case.

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Still, Schroeder said, State Police brass weren't so keen on reopening the old cases. They sent him a message: Let sleeping dogs lie. Their reasoning: Collins was in prison, and the victims' families had made peace with their loved ones' deaths.

In 1970, the Free Press reported the cases were "all but officially closed in the minds of police officers close to the investigation," and "though law enforcement officials will not admit it publicly," police agree Collins "is the only possible suspect."

But, Schroeder didn't stop investigating.

He said he put the files in the trunk of his car and quietly continued to pursue them. The more he studied them, the more he said he realized one slaying didn't fit with the others. Jane Mixer was one of two victims who was shot, and her body was left in a graveyard.

That detail seemed like a big clue. Why a graveyard?

Perhaps, the detective thought, the killer gave his victim a more dignified end, leaving it in a place where the dead rest in peace, for a reason.

"To me, it felt behaviorally different," Schroeder said. "It deserved to be investigated further. It indicated Jane had somehow made some type of emotional connection with her killer, whereas the other victims had been discarded like trash."

Perhaps, Schroeder also considered, Collins wasn't the killer. Then, he found a new fingerprint.

A tech breakthrough

As Schroeder sifted through the old evidence, he also began to see Mixer as more than a victim. The University of Michigan law student had a family, friends and a future that was cut short.

He found a 1968 snapshot of Jane. Schroeder, who was just a child when the photo was taken, gave the picture to Mixer's surviving relatives as a memory. Then, he printed a copy for himself. He carried that photo with him for eight years.

Show caption Hide caption In this photo from July, 2005 Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. Eric Schroeder, 40 of Lansing, is profiled against his computer screen which shows... In this photo from July, 2005 Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. Eric Schroeder, 40 of Lansing, is profiled against his computer screen which shows a photo of Jane Mixer taken in 1968 when Schroeder was only a child. Schroeder found the old picture of Mixer from the evidence collected during the investigation of her March 1969 murder, her body was found in the Denton cemetery. Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press

As it turned out, the fingerprint didn't lead to a breakthrough, but something else did.

In 1998, the state police assigned Schroeder to Lansing. He was now responsible for cataloging evidence in unsolved cases, which gave him access to the Collins cases and sent him to various FBI seminars on profiling and forensics.

Over beers one night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Schroeder talked to some FBI scientists.

They told him about some "groundbreaking FBI technology" involving DNA scraped from stretchy clothing that a victim of violence had been wearing. In a physical struggle, the scientists said, cells can be forced into the fabric.

That gave Schroeder an idea.

DNA raises doubts, hope

Schroeder went back to Lansing, energized with this new knowledge. He had the pantyhose that Mixer had been strangled with checked for DNA.

It came back from the lab as a match to Leiterman.

Leiterman was a nurse in his 60s, living in western Michigan. But, he had lived in the Ann Arbor area.

Gary Leiterman, 62, of Gobles, Michigan, arraigned Nov. 24, 2004 in the 1969 slaying of Jane Louise Mixer, 23, of Muskegon. She was a University of Michigan law student. Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office

Authorities were able to get a DNA match because, in 2001, Leiterman had been arrested for forging prescriptions. He pleaded guilty, went to drug rehab, and as a requirement of his incarceration, submitted to a DNA swab. As a result, his DNA was in a database that could be searched.

In addition to DNA, handwriting from a phone book in a Michigan dorm in which the presumed killer wrote "Mixer" was matched to Leiterman, and his roommate in the late '60s testified Leiterman owned a .22-caliber gun.

A jury convicted Leiterman of murdering Mixer and sentenced him to life in prison.

The new turn of events — 36 years after Mixer's death — solved one case, but also cast doubt on the police's initial suspicions that Collins killed her. And if he didn't kill her, what about the other victims? That, Schroeder said, was another reason to re-examine the other unsolved cases.

So Schroeder, Bundshuh and other investigators began looking for DNA on items from other victims. They started with Alice Kalom, who also was shot; Dawn Basom, the youngest victim, and Mary Fleszar, the first victim.

They turned up new evidence — and even more questions.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

Next: How a series of grisly slayings terrified two Michigan college towns and stymied law enforcement until they arrested an unlikely suspect.

The Michigan Murders team

Frank Witsil is a staff writer at the Detroit Free Press. He spent five months reporting on the state police investigation; reviewing books on John Norman Collins and serial killers; interviewing dozens of detectives, witnesses, experts and others connected with the case; and sifting through hundreds of archived newspaper articles, police photos and records and court documents.

Melanie Maxwell has been a picture editor at the Free Press since 2018. She researched the key suspect’s past, dug through hundreds of evidence photos and newspaper clippings and worked with Witsil to uncover new details in the cases. She also orchestrated the evidence locker.

Kimberly P. Mitchell is a staff photojournalist that joined the Detroit Free Press in 2005. She worked alongside Witsil and Maxwell interviewing key figures into the investigation of the Michigan Murders cold case to produce a documentary video and portraits.

Maryann Struman is Freep Now director at the Detroit Free Press and project leader. A veteran Detroit journalist, she joined the Free Press in 2012.