Every Town - The All American KILLER: Michigan's Most Terrifying Man

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Today we have a very dark one for you so strap in cause it’s gonna get intense. And when you hear the details of this case and find out who was responsible, well it’ll make think twice about those people you keep closest to you. So let’s head over to the great lakes state now and check out the insane true story of The Michigan Murders. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/OwoUVOmSZqg 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform.

New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Learning English is hard. That's why I make easy stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn. You can listen to stories full of action. romance and mystery. Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners,

and there's a story for every mood. Whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed, easy stories in English is the podcast for you. Every town has a dark side. Come the summer of 1969, every newsroom across Michigan had fallen into the same grim routine. Another young woman missing, another body discovered days later, another absolutely brutal murder with no suspect in sight. And there was really no gentle way to tell the community that a killer was hunting their daughters and girlfriends,

and that despite the authorities trying their very best, there seemed to be nothing they could do to put an end to it. In just a two-year span, a seven young women were murdered in unsettling ways. Their bodies then discarded with a cruelty that suggested whoever was doing this felt nothing at all except pure exhilaration. And hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to another episode of Everytown War today. We have a very dark one for you, so strap in because it's going to get intense. When you hear the details of this case and find out who is responsible, well, it'll make you think twice about these people you keep closest to you. Let's head on over to the Great Lakes State now and check out the insane. sane true story of the Michigan murders. In 1969, the Vietnam War was raging overseas.

The civil rights movement was reshaping the country. Right here in the middle of it all, life in the college towns of Ipsilante and Ann Arbor was humming along the way it always had. A studious, packed the sidewalks, and motorcycles line the curbs. On any given evening, you could find kids hitchhiking, wandering, and trusting the world around them the way a young person does. when nothing bad's ever happened to them. Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan sat just a few miles apart, and together they gave this corner of the state a kind of easy, youthful energy. And on the warm summer evening of July 9th of that year,

a 19-year-old accounting student named Mary Flesser decided to walk home from campus, and this was the beginning of all the horror that followed. Mary was an accounting student at Eastern Michigan University. She was a good kid, the kind who never missed Sunday Mass and called her parents every single week religiously. There was nothing about that walk that should have been dangerous, but a neighbor watching from outside noticed something that didn't sit right. It was a blue-gray Chevrolet that kept circling the block. They moved slow and deliberate, and each time it passed, Mary, the driver leaned out. and called to her, trying to get her to climb on in.

As she shook her head and kept walking, he came around again, and she refused again. The neighbor actually thought about stepping in, but hesitated, and then Mary turned a corner and was gone, and I mean for good because no one would ever see her alive again. When a roommate filed a missing person's report the following morning, police weren't exactly hitting the panic button. Mary was basically an adult and in college, and people like her took off all the time. In the free-loving 60s, maybe she went on a spontaneous road trip, or met a guy and was having some fun somewhere. The point is that with no real sign of anything bad happening, these were the simplest explanation,

so the police went in that direction. But soon enough, they'd be forced to change their minds. and four weeks passed before a couple of teenage boys stumbled across what was left of her near an abandoned farmhouse and Superior Township. And when investigators found at that scene, told them everything they needed to know about who they were dealing with. See, Mary had been stabbed roughly 30 times, and her feet were those have been cut off above the ankles. All five of her fingers were removed from one hand, and the other hand, well, that had been severed from the forearm. arm down. And none of those removed parts, by the way, were ever found. The pathologist confirmed she'd been severely beaten before she died. But the detail that really stood out to investigators

was evidence at the scene that suggested the killer had come back multiple times. Over the weeks, her body had been lying there while someone had been returning to it, moving it, and revisiting what he had done. That takes a certain type of psychopath, so police know. Police know, and he was that if they didn't find this guy soon, that likely more bodies would turn up. A Mary's funeral was a tragic affair. It's one thing to lose someone so young, but for it to happen in such a brutal way, it was hard to grasp. A young man showed up there claiming to be a family friend, and he had a peculiar request. He asked the funeral director if he could take a photograph of Mary in that casket.

It's that her parents wanted a keepsake. When the director told him no, the man pushed harder, wouldn't they just fix her up enough for one picture? After being turned away a second time, he walked out without another word. It was weird enough that the police were notified. The receptionist tried to help them with a description. Good-looking, dark hair, early 20s. But most importantly, he'd been driving an old blue-gray Chevrolet,

the same kind of car that had been circling Mary the night she vanished. And police logged it, and we have a clearer picture now, so it seems obvious, but back then they didn't have everything lined up in order. As a result, they filed this incident away as some kind of morbid curiosity and moved on, and they had no idea the killer had just shown up to admire his own work. Almost a full year went by after that, and the investigation into Mary's murder had gone completely cold, when 20-year-old Joan Shell stepped out of her apartment on her apartment, on Emmett Street on the evening of June 30th, 1968. She wanted to visit her boyfriend in Ann Arbor,

so her roommate walked with her down to the bus stop on Washington-Awe Avenue. They talked about nothing in particular while they headed there, but Joan missed her bus. Instead of hanging around for the next one while she decided to hitchhike. Her roommate stood there watching as a red-and-black Pontiac Bonneville pulled up with three young men inside. And the driver, he was wearing a green eastern Michigan University shirt, and short dark hair, neatly parted,

and every single thing about him suggested he was just another clean-cut college kid. And he asked Joan if she needed a ride. Well, she looked back at her roommate uncertain, almost asking for permission. Her roommate tried to talk her out of it, but Joan got in anyway, calling back that she'd phone when she got to Ann Arbor safely. Well, that call, it never came. Construction workers found her body five days later off Earhart Road in Ann Arbor, and she'd been stabbed 25 times with what investigators estimated was a four-inch blade.

Her throat had been sliced so deeply that the knife scraped against bone, and whoever did this had tied her own miniskirt around her neck. The pathologist noticed something strange about the way the body had decomposed where her lower half was relatively preserved, but her head and shoulders had degraded significantly, which meant she'd been stored somewhere cool with the upper body exposed to heat. In other words, the killer had kept her somewhere before dumping her. And when he was ready, he'd driven her body out to Earhart Road, made a half-hearted attempt to cover her with some grass and left.

And the connection to Mary's case was kind of hard to ignore. and police tracked down and cleared more than 150 people across Michigan who owned red and black vehicles. And they sketched a composite of the driver based on the roommate's description and plastered across campus. And by August, they had absolutely nothing. A couple of months after Jones murdered, two different witnesses came forward and told police they'd seen her walking with a male student along Emmett Street the evening she disappeared. And both thought the guy looked like John Norman, Collins, an EMU student who lived directly across the street from Joan at 619 Emmett, and his

appearance lined up pretty well with a composite sketch, too. So, police brought him in, and Collins flatly denied knowing Joan Shell at all, and said he'd spent that entire weekend at his mother's house in Centerline, a suburb just north of Detroit, and hadn't returned until July 1st. Investigators simply took him at his word. They never even checked whether the alibi held up, and they let him walk. Now look, I know this is starting to look pretty bad for the authorities, but Collins, he was a clean-cut college kid.

If you looked him in the face, you didn't think he was a psycho killer. And you have to remember this happened at a time before the phrase serial killer was even used by police. There were no true crime podcast, so the world was just more innocent. And on top of that, the murders, well, they went quiet after that. Months passed without another body turning up, long enough that people started allowing themselves to wonder if maybe it was over. If whoever had done this had moved on or stopped or maybe just disappeared. And as it turns out, though, they hadn't.

Because in the spring of 69, well, things got so much worse, so fast that the entire state went into a kind of collective panic. On March 20th, a 23-year-old University of Michigan law student named Jane Mixer pinned a handwritten note to a campus bulletin board. She needed a ride home to Muskegon because she had good news to share with her family back there. It was an engagement and plans to move to New York City, so a whole bright future laid out in front of her. Somebody saw that note and responded. The next morning, her fully clothed body was found on top of a grave and Denton Cemetery in Van Buren Township.

She'd been shot twice in the head with a small caliber pistol, and then strangled with a nylon stocking that didn't belong to her. Ma'am, whoever left her there had placed a copy of the book, Catch-22, beside her body. And she hadn't been essayed like the other two victims, but her clothes had been moved to expose her. And Jane was on her period when she died, and the thinking was that the killer discovered that and it stopped him from going further. As a result, he shot her, strangled her, and placed her body in that cemetery instead.

So here, this case didn't fit so neatly together with the other two. Investigators found out Jane had tried to call a student named David Johnson, and she believed he'd offered her a ride to Muskegon. But Johnson said he never responded to her message, and he had a solid alibi. So, somebody had been impersonating him. Whoever answered that note knew exactly what they were doing. They'd read her bulletin board message, seen an opportunity, and used another student's name to get close to her. It was calculated in a way that was different from what had come before.

Just four days later, well, it all got worse. A surveyor working out on Earhart Road discovered the body of 16-year-old Marilyn Skelton, lying face. face up on a blue jacket behind a vacant house on a wooded hill. As she'd been left in a position that investigators described as deliberately degrading and would have been done to her, represented an escalation so severe that a detective who had worked homicides for 30 years, said it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his career. And Marilyn had been flat out tortured, and the killer used her own shirt to muffler screams while he beat her.

She had been tied down and whipped with a belt. Her skull was fractured, and she had been violated with a tree branch. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, while she fought back. Blood at the scene suggested she actually broke free and tried to run, but she didn't make it too far. Because it had rained recently,

any footprints or tire tracks that might have told investigators something were gone, washed away like they'd never been there at all. Now, Marilyn had a bit of a reputation around Ann Arbor. It was a high school student from Romulus, known as a party girl who dealt drugs and occasionally passed information to police. And when her body turned up,

some investigators initially wondered if her murder was drug-related, rather than connected to the pattern they were seeing. But the details were too familiar to ignore. Her killing was too passionate. On top of what was done to her, while she was dumped only a few hundred yards from where Joan's shell had been found. Same stretcher road, so likely the same killer, returning to a place that meant something to him or he felt comfortable with.

And each time he came back, he was getting bolder. Less than a month later, 13-year-old Don Bassam went missing on the evening of April 15th while walking home from a friend's house. She was taking a shortcut along the railroad tracks, and a boy named Earl Kid walked part of the way. with her before saying goodbye about five blocks from her house. And she was almost there, but never made it. A truck driver the following morning found her body 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 Don's orange sweater inside an abandoned farmhouse near where her body had been dumped. In glass in the basement, matched fragments found on her skin. and so she had been killed there. A week later, a detective went back to that same basement, and he found a piece of Don's blouse. And next to it, a gold earring that had belonged to Marilyn Skelton.

Now, police didn't miss those things on the first go-around. Now, the killer, he had gone back. He left those items there deliberately, like trophies arranged in a place only he knew about. And so that tied every murder together beyond any doubt. And then, get this. On May 13th, someone burned that farmhouse down. When firefighters arrived and went through what was left,

they found five lilac flowers lined up in the driveway, one for each victim. By June of 1969, this once-combed college enclave had completely unraveled. Women were carrying nighs and tear gas, nobody went anywhere alone. Even in the summer heat, the windows they stayed locked. At this point, police had worked through more than a thousand suspects and 800 tips and were no closer to an arrest than the day Mary Fletcher's body was found two years earlier. And then, it got worse.

On June 8th, 21-year-old Alice Callum was seen leaving a party on the back of a motorcycle. And three days after that, her body turned up in a field. When she had been stabbed, her throat had been sliced, and he'd been shot in the head. She also had a bullet wound through her thumb from when she raised her hand trying to protect her face. And the gun sort of changed everything. Only one other victim, Jane Mixer, had been shot, and that detail sent investigators into a spiral. Because if a firearm was involved now, were they even sure all these murders were connected? Or was this one man or maybe multiple killers operating in the same area at the same time?

And the sheriff had to do something, so he went in front of reporters and told them the killer was still out there because of luck, not because police weren't working hard enough. And he promised they'd get him eventually, but behind closed doors, investigators were running out of road, and they knew it. Things got so desperate that on July 21st, the community brought in a Dutch psychic named Peter Herkos to help crack the case. And look, laugh if you want, but Herkos walked in. 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 of the killer, a strongly built white male, under 25 years old, and born outside the United States, who rode a motorcycle.

And then, he made one final prediction. The killer would strike again very soon. Just two days later, 18-year-old Karen Benman walked into a wig shop and downtown Ipsilani. While she was browsing, she noticed a young man waiting outside on a blue Triumph motorcycle. He had short dark hair, striped sweater, he was just sitting there. And 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 even 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, and the moment they did, the man turned his head away. Karen walked out, climbed on the back of that bike, and three days later her body was found near the Huron River. She had been beaten and tortured with a caustic chemical. The fabric had been stuffed into her throat, and her underwear had been forced inside her body. And when investigators examined that underwear,

and what they found inside, they would finally break the case wide open. There was male DNA, but also 509 individual human hair clippings, each one less than three-eighths of an inch long, mostly blonde and carefully cut. And Karen's hair was dark brown, so those hairs had come from somewhere else entirely. Police suspected the killer might come back to the scene the way he had done before, so they smartly replaced Karen's body with a mannequin and then waited. On July 27th during a heavy rainstorm, an officer spotted a young man spreading away from the gully. But the rain had killed his radio, and by the time backup could be reached, the man had vanished into the woods.

And meanwhile investigators brought Joan Gosh in and showed her a photo lineup, and she pointed to one picture without even hesitating. A neighbor from the chocolate shop next door then confirmed it, and then another witness, and then another. And by the end, seven separate people had placed the same man outside that wig shop on the day Karen got on that motorcycle. And three other women came forward saying he had tried to pick them up before Karen had said yes. And his name was John Norman Collins. On paper, John looked exactly like the kind of guy you'd want your daughter to bring home. and it's in par why police let him go all those years earlier based on his word alone. An education student and former high school football captain, handsome, charming, easy with people.

But dig a little deeper, and for those who actually knew him, well, they had seen something darker underneath all that. His fraternity had kicked him out for stealing. He also had a vicious temper that seemed to frighten people. And he had also a particular rage towards women who were menstruating. And there are accounts of him screaming at a girlfriend and storming out the moment he found out she was on her period. And given what investigators knew about every single victim in the case, well, that detail landed hard. At work, he unsettled coworkers by describing the victim's injuries in graphic detail, claiming that his uncle, a police sergeant, fed him inside information. And nobody could prove that was a lie at the time, but they remembered it for sure.

The more investigators dug, the more Collins kept appearing at the edges of every single case. He'd worked directly across from where one victim lived. He dated someone whose apartment was right next to another victim's home. And he'd 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, and Collins told him he was just getting rid of it. And then came the moment that finally unraveled everything.

While his uncle, State Police Sergeant David Leak, was away on vacation. Collins had been given the keys to his house to watch the family dog. When the leaks came home, well, something wasn't right. The basement floor had been covered in fresh paint. Several cleaning supplies were missing as well, and once Leek was told his nephew was a suspect, he looked closer and found what appeared to be blood underneath that paint. But what investigators found when they got into that basement

was the piece that locked it all together. The Leek children, they were all blonde, and Collins' aunt had cut their hair down there just before the family left for vacation, and the clippings have been swept into neat little piles. And those same clippings, tiny, blonde, less than three-eighths of an inch long, were a precise forensic match to the hairs found inside Karen's underwear. So she had been in that basement, and Collins had taken her there,

and then he tried to paint over what he had done. The evidentiary item that convicted him was the hair analysis. They found those hairs on Bideman's body. and they were able to match them forensically, and that's the first case in the nation that had been done with that, so it was very, very groundbreaking stuff back then. On July 30th, 1969, police finally arrested Collins, though the trial, it was a bit complicated.

So on police search Collins' apartment, they found plenty of stolen items, but very little that directly tied him to the killings. The real proof was in that basement, evidence that Karen had been there and the fact that Collins was the only person with a key. That's what the prosecution built its case around. That trial began in 1970 and even though investigators privately believed Collins was responsible for all seven deaths, they only charged him with Karen's murder.

The evidence in the other cases simply wasn't strong enough to guarantee a conviction and they needed one. In court, Joan Gosh pointed straight at him. Forensic experts explained that the hair mask, wasn't a coincidence. The odds of those clippings appearing in two separate locations by accident was essentially zero. Now, Colin sat there through all of it, and he just said nothing. He didn't even flinch when the verdict was read, even as his own family wept around him. If you get somebody admitting something that they denied earlier, not only do you have their own going against each other, which, you know, you take that to a jury and you've got instant doubt is built right in that what they're saying is bullshit.

And he was sentenced to life in prison and later changed his name to Chapman and has been behind bars for over 50 years. Today, John Collins is 78 years old. But here's one last thing to leave you with before we wrap this up. Joan Shell, the second victim. She was last seen getting into a car with three young men. And one of those men was Collins' own roommate, Arnold Davis. Now what Davis told police later was that Collins had insisted on taking Joan in his own car after she got in. The two of them got out of Davis's car together, and 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, and he gave them an alibi, and they took him at his word and never checked it. If they had, really dug in, verified. Karen might have gone to that wig shop and come home safe. Don Bassam might have made it down those railroad tracks. Nowless Callum might have made it home from that party. Instead, that case went cold and the murders continued,

and six more women never came home. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Everytown. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, then you certainly have an interest in true crime, so take a look around at all the other episodes we have. Remember to come on back here next week for another episode filled with strange and mysterious stories because you never know.

Maybe your town will be next.