Original subtitles

In 1967, a monster came into my life.

In the years to come, we'd meet more like him.

Names you'd recognize --

Gacy, Bundy, Dahmer.

But back then, in a Michigan college town?

No one could imagine that such a beast could exist.

For years, he'd stay a phantom.

His only mark -- a trail of dead girls.

And this, right here -- just the beginning.

I know most people get nostalgic

about their college years.

I get it. It's a time when you're young.

Anything is possible, and for most people,

nothing really bad has happened yet.

But I'm different.

I had a friend in college

to whom something terrible happened --

something hideous.

And after that, life was never the same.

The first body was found by friends of my brothers.

They had heard a car door slam,

which is what drew them to the area,

and then saw this --

you know, the car drove away.

They didn't get a good look at it,

but they smelled something.

They immediately went running

for the Ypsilanti Police to tell them.

What those boys found was unrecognizable.

They weren't sure at first if it was even human

until they saw an ear.

The feet are missing, a hand is missing,

the head is all mushed up.

They call the medical examiner.

Wow. This is a mess.

They weren't absolutely positive,

but it looked like she had been stabbed.

But not only stabbed -- stabbed multiple times.

Major decomposition.

They called the crime lab in,

did not find anything in the way of clues

other than the body itself.

In 1967, they really wouldn't have had

a lot of sense of forensic science.

You know, obviously fingerprints,

but not much else.

They look all through the area,

and there should have been a lot of blood, and there wasn't,

so they know the woman has been killed somewhere else

and moved to this scene.

It was the deliberateness of it that was alarming.

It meant that somebody had planned this.

If it was an accident, they could have handled it,

but it wasn't an accident.

They found an orange dress

with white polka dots.

It's kind of torn down the middle.

The dress --

that orange-and-white polka-dot dress.

I remember when it was brand new.

So, what do you think?

This one or the orange one?

Now, that's Mary. She was my friend.

We met at that very beginning of freshman year.

It's so short, though.

No, it's not, it's fine.

She hadn't wanted to buy that dress,

but I convinced her to.

I thought it made her look like twiggy.

Mary Fleszar was 19.

A very studious girl --

she got a four-year scholarship to E.M.U.

She was from a tight-knit Polish-German family.

She was not known to be a partier.

Faye Dunaway?

This was her first experience away from home,

it had only been less than a month.

They're just a little too high.

Why would you wear something with that much heel?

And I certainly don't think of her

as living any kind of a high-risk lifestyle.

Decades have passed since that day.

Look, you can see my whole knee!

It looks fine!

And I still think about

all the things that I could have done

that would've changed what happened.

When she's first reported missing,

her family and friends know this is

really out of character for her.

But the police, you know --

this is 1967, this is a college student,

it's the summer.

Kids went missing all the time,

and they always turned up --

they ended up going to a friend's house,

they hitchhiked a ride across town,

they stayed late to a party.

So when Mary's roommate reported her missing,

nobody really thought a lot about it.

So, it stays just a pure missing-persons case

for almost a month,

until her body's found.

They knew the body in the field was Mary

because of her teeth.

It was the only thing left of her

that wasn't destroyed.

We needed some clues, which there was none,

other than we found a body.

Where was she last seen? Who's seen her?

The amazing thing was a few people had seen Mary.

Right before she disappeared, they noticed her.

Maybe it was that dress.

Hey, there! You need a ride?

No. It's okay.

She was walking around her neighborhood,

and people reported seeing a blue-and-gray car

pull up to the side of the road,

and she walked to the window and talked to someone inside.

She shook her head "No", and went walking on.

Well, he took his car

and went around the block and came back.

And Mary seems to be saying, "No, thank you. No, thank you."

I'm sorry!

He hit the gas and took off.

This was the last that the witness had seen of her.

The first thing the police did was

to find out if she had any boyfriends,

if she had any problems with anybody.

They asked all of us -- all of her friends.

I kept wondering what they meant.

She was nice, sweet Mary.

What kind of problem could she have had

that made someone want to kill her?

Hi. It's me.

She had been dating somebody that nobody really knew.

Yes, I'm sure.

So, what do I do?

She had gone to a doctor

and was worried that she was pregnant.

It's true --

the part about her being worried.

We all worried about that.

Getting pregnant was the worst thing

any of us could imagine happening back then.

They thought whoever the father of this child was

might have been the perpetrator.

They asked me about the boyfriend,

and I told them the truth.

She had been seeing a boy,

but none of us had ever met him.

We didn't even know his name.

So, after she died, there was no way to find him,

or even know if he'd run.

Police are at a loss.

And, at the autopsy,

they find out she wasn't pregnant,

and they had all these kind of vague rumors

and no clear leads.

Then, prior to the funeral,

something extremely odd happened.

Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?

Somebody showed up and asked if he would open the casket

so he could take a photograph.

Well, of course, they said,

"No, you can't take a picture of the body."

And the person who was there was so overwhelmed

that he didn't even get a description of him.

They wondered if this was the killer coming back

to take some sort of gruesome souvenir picture.

He turned around, went out to his car...

...a dark-blue-color car.

The police went out,

and anybody who had a car that remotely matched that --

they interviewed at least a half a dozen people.

We were hoping that, you know, we could come up with something.

And every one of those cars

checked out to be clean.

It wasn't fair.

I didn't understand it.

This awful thing had happened,

and whoever had done it had gotten away with it.

The police wanted to believe

that a transient had come through,

had picked up the girl, accosted her in some way --

that this was an isolated incident

and he's gone and our problem is solved.

They could believe what they wanted,

but the problem wasn't solved.

It was just beginning.

The monster liked what he'd done,

and he was gonna come back for more.

It had been almost a year since Mary was murdered.

Whoever had done it had gotten away with it,

and it seemed like everyone had just moved on.

And then, 20 miles away, another girl was found dead.

Her name was Joan,

and she reminded me a lot of Mary.

Joan Schell was found at a construction site.

She had a bunch of puncture wounds

in her upper chest area,

and she had three in the back.

And it looked like she had been raped.

The police were perplexed.

There were no clues whatsoever.

Joan was Mary's age.

She went to E.M.U., like Mary,

and she had long, brown hair, like Mary,

but there was another similarity, too.

This was not where she had been killed.

She had been moved there.

Joan was going from Ypsi

to Ann Arbor to see her boyfriend.

A friend of hers walked her to the bus stop.

They stood there and they waited for the bus.

But the bus never came.

Hey, there. Hi!

But what does show up is a car with three men inside.

We're headed that way, too. You need a ride?

Um...

Okay, hold on one second. Okay.

Okay, these guys are going in the same direction.

No, we'll just wait for the bus.

The bus is not coming.

Yes, it will come.

I'm going.

Please be careful.

Okay.

Okay.

So she gets in the car and takes off.

Well, she never got there.

Williams.

The police have a solid clue.

Joan Schell got into the car with three young men,

one of them wearing

an Eastern Michigan University T-shirt.

So, the police start questioning every male

that they feel is within a certain profile.

I, myself, was even interviewed by the police.

How are you today? All right.

You drive a red car?

I don't even own a car.

Where were you at?

My Uncle's a cop.

He can vouch for me.

Did you pick her up?

No.

How do you know Joan Schell?

I don't know her.

But no one had any information --

not a single one of those E.M.U. Boys

said that they knew anything about Joan Schell.

And so they talked to her friends,

they talked to her family.

She had this boyfriend

that her family was not super fond of.

They thought it was like a little bit

of an obsessive, young romance.

You know why you're here today, Mr. Schultz?

Because I'm AWOL.

Anything else?

And Joan?

Dale was AWOL from the military.

The police found him three days after they found Joan's body.

He had been looking for her himself, he said.

Do you know where the last place you saw her was?

She was at my house three weeks ago.

What are you talking about?

He was interrogated and given several polygraph tests.

What if I told you we found a body?

When they told him Joan was dead,

he was described as kind of just dissolving into tears.

Very quickly they realized that he was not responsible.

This point, it was a complete and utter mystery

what was going on.

We have two students around the same age,

but nobody at that point

is doing any kind of linkage analysis.

And the police officers

are not even aware of each other's cases.

Joan is found in a completely different jurisdiction

than Mary.

And the connection isn't made.

It's easy to look back now and to criticize,

but the police were doing everything they knew how to do.

They were going by the book.

The problem was that the monster

was writing a new book with different rules.

They did not really have a category

for serial killer at the time.

This was a pre- "Silence of the Lambs" era.

The term "serial killer" had not captured the public imagination.

In March 1969, a third murder victim...

A third jurisdiction...

A third set of new detectives.

Four days after that, another body showed up.

We were up against a wall.

Like there was nothing -- nothing to go on.

We kept telling students, "Don't hitchhike.

Please don't hitchhike. Walk in pairs."

We have, like, this supernatural creature in our midst

who can kill these girls and not be seen.

What is happening to our daughters?

What is happening to our babysitters,

our college students?

What is happening to these young women?

It was terrifying.

And then to add, you know, fuel to the fire,

we had the public pressure.

We're police officers, we're not miracle men,

and we can only work with what we've got,

and when we get out to a scene

and find nothing but a dead body,

and then start working from there,

it's just not that easy.

And we're afraid, you know, we might be the next one.

You never know.

Now, we've got four young women,

all of whom were either hitchhiking

or walking or out alone in some way,

who now are dead.

And now, they're beginning to say,

"This could be the same person."

But glimpsing a pattern is one thing.

Being able to make out the big picture is another.

And in 1969, the police had no training,

no experience that would prepare them

to make sense of what was in front of them.

DNA testing was 20 years ahead in the future.

Hair, fiber, blood evidence

was only good to a point.

There just wasn't the ability to quickly exchange information.

If you wanted to go look at someone else's evidence,

you had to get in a car, go to the place,

sort through the box.

As far as files went, there was cards,

and it was put into a file cabinet.

You know, we didn't have the deal

where we could go into a database.

They told themselves my friend Mary's murder

would be the only one,

but now they knew she was just the appetizer.

Now four girls were dead.

The monster had come to Michigan 18 months ago,

and he'd taken up residence here.

But until the police could find him,

he would make himself at home and do what he pleased.

It was 1969,

but for me, it wouldn't be the Summer of Love.

It was the Season of Death.

Four young coeds had been murdered

in my Michigan college town.

And then there were five.

In March 1969, another body turns up.

This time, it's a teenager.

Dawn Basom's body is found by a man driving to work.

She's right at the edge of the road where anybody could see her.

So, it's pretty clear

that this person's feeling pretty immune.

"I'm doing this exactly right,

and I can keep doing it for as much as I want."

Sheriff Harvey's the first one on the spot.

We found her beaten about the face.

There was slashes on her breast, slashes on her stomach.

It's one thing to find a body that was killed

because of a gunshot wound,

but the mutilation of these bodies was just --

it was gruesome.

It was devastating for all of us.

The girl was strangled with a 37-inch length

of double-insulated electrical cord.

I want you guys to go up this road, both sides,

about a mile up.

His men come in,

they call in the State Police Crime Lab,

and they go to work.

And they go further and further and further afield...

...until they come upon an abandoned farmhouse.

The barn was 30x40 feet

and it had a basement.

Looks like we got some blood.

They also find a piece of an electrical cord,

and it matches the electrical cord

that was used to strangle Dawn.

So they were very, very sure that, for the first time,

they had a murder site.

So finally, police have a place that actually has evidence,

but it turns out that this break in the case

lasts only two weeks.

The house was set on fire -- burned it down.

Their only evidence literally went up in smoke.

The papers said that the police had been watching the farmhouse

from the moment they discovered it,

and they couldn't figure out who could've gotten past them.

And what they found in the smoldering mess

was just chilling.

So, what do you make of this?

Somebody had laid five lilac blossoms on the driveway,

trying to say, "I've gotten five now,

and here's some flowers to designate each one."

The killer was taunting them

to just sort of play this cat-and-mouse game.

You know that last-straw feeling?

When you look back and you see

how completely out of control things have gotten,

and you realize it's time to grab the reins?

That was this.

I says, "No, we're not gonna tolerate this."

All right gentlemen.

Let's bring it down a little bit, okay?

I know we've all got stuff on our mind, but it's not a social event.

We got to take care of business here.

All right, so the governor has seen fit

to set us up with this little clubhouse,

and my intentions are to make sure it works out.

The police rented a vacant seminary,

and that was their command center.

We've got a lot of different bits of information here,

a lot of different resources.

And at that point,

everything went through that center.

So, we've got the four here clustered.

Most of them, as you said,

are closer to the E.M.U. Campus.

We definitely have one now -- South Pioneer.

Now the police are working in coordination

between the City Police, the Sheriff's Department,

and the Michigan State Police.

Each officer was following different leads,

but they would come back,

and then they would talk about it.

"Here's what we got." "Here's what we found out."

"This looks significant."

But you know how it is when you're young.

You think you're invincible.

Even as my friends and I scared each other

with every new detail we heard on the news,

we kept taking walks, going on dates, being girls.

Karen Sue Beineman was no different.

Who knows about this?

Nobody.

Nobody?

So, working with

all the different police departments,

they come up with a theory

that criminals come back to the scene of the crime.

There has been evidence

in a couple of the murders that this has happened.

And they decide this might be an opportunity

to trap the killer.

None of the officers are allowed to talk about it on the radio.

They'd get just a few police officers

to respond to the scene.

The man who found the body --

they swear him to silence and to not tell anyone.

And they decide that they were

going to go to J.C. Penney at the Arborland Mall...

You got it guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

...and borrow a mannequin.

We had our men staked out.

The State Police, Sheriff Department --

we had them staked out around the area.

There were seven or eight people strategically placed.

So around midnight or so,

a lone jogger comes running down the street --

walked over to the body.

I see someone.

Permission to move?

Come again?

Permission to move?

Permission to move?

I see someone.

Permission to move?

Come again?

Permission to move?

There was no communication.

There was no chase car. There was nothing.

And he disappeared. He was nowhere.

This killer of six women

was just right within their grasp,

and he got away.

The press printed the story.

Boy, they blasted us.

"The Keystone cops screw up."

It was terrible.

The police discovered that the body in the gully

was Karen Sue Beineman,

an E.M.U. Student who had been missing for four days.

She was last seen getting onto a motorcycle with a young man.

So, I understand a young lady came by your shop the other day.

Short brown hair, very slim.

Yes, yes! She's about 5'6".

Yes, she came in.

So, what do you think?

I think it's a little dark.

Yeah? Try this one.

Okay.

It's a lovely day.

Karen is walking to pick up a wig

at a shop called Wigs by Joan.

I'll take it. Okay.

Wrap it up? No, no, no.

I have somebody waiting for me outside.

Making small talk with the shop owner,

she says, "I've done two things today

that I've never done before."

I'm buying this wig,

and I'm riding on a motorcycle

with this guy that I just met.

The two women in the shop --

their hair just went up on the back of their necks.

You shouldn't get on that motorcycle.

No, this guy --

he seems really nice, believe me.

Did you happen to get a good look at him?

I saw him over there.

And she got on the motorcycle with him.

Both of the women have pretty good memories,

and they remember what he looked like.

Young, good-looking.

Not hippy-type -- well-groomed.

He doesn't at all look like the fiend or the monster

that had started to live large in the public's consciousness.

He just looked like the boy next door.

He was the boy in my Psych class.

He was the football player down the hall.

He was the frat brother who escorted me home at night.

He was everybody and nobody.

I thought, "How in God's name are they gonna find him?"

They're looking through everyone in this area

who has a motorcycle,

who's a tall, dark-haired guy around the same age.

They're going through all of them.

I was with the Eastern Michigan University Police Force,

and I had to get the license plate numbers.

That was the directive --

to get everybody's license plates.

Hiya. Hey.

How are you? I'm Officer Mathewson.

I'm over at the University.

Sorry.

Any friends of yours ride a bike

who happen to know Karen Sue Beineman

by any chance?

No, I don't know who Karen Sue is.

Okay.

Do you recognize this gentleman, by any chance?

Nah, I don't know him.

And, he says, "No,

I've been here all the time, working on my bikes."

The one thing there

that really triggered my thought process was

his plate was creased underneath those two bolts,

as if you didn't want someone to be able to read your plate,

you would pull it up parallel to the ground.

What are you doing?

I'm just taking down your license plate number.

And then it got, like,

"I think it's time to leave" --

that I've outstayed my welcome.

He thought that the composite sketch

looked just like him.

I knew he was a student.

I've played inter-fraternity sports against him.

I went to the fraternity house,

talked to a couple of guys there that I knew,

and they told me his name.

So, he visited a former girlfriend

and asked if she could give him a picture.

So I had the picture,

and I knew that she was at a wig shop.

Well, I'm not real sure.

I didn't see him from the front like this.

That's him.

That's really him.

Two years and seven dead girls.

All that time, the monster had been just a shadow.

Now, they had something real.

It wasn't everything, it wasn't proof,

but it was something.

His name was John Norman Collins.

Okay, what am I looking at?

Well, it's hair.

All right.

It's not her hair.

As it turns out, they actually have a clue.

And they find a pair of Karen Sue's panties

inside of her.

There's also pieces of hair attached.

But it's not just regular hair,

it's hair as if from a barber shop.

It's hair that's been cut.

It wasn't Karen's hair.

It wasn't artificial hair like from a wig.

It was someone else's hair.

It had been almost two years since my friend, Mary,

had died at the hands of this monster.

He had taken six other girls and remained in the shadows...

...until now.

Michigan Police.

Police start to pick apart John Norman Collins' life.

They talk to his roommates. They talk to his family.

They talk to his ex-girlfriends.

What they discover is a success story.

John Norman Collins is a student at Eastern Michigan University

and he's studying to be an elementary-school teacher.

And he's outgoing, he's personable,

and he has a lot of friends.

Good to see you, Leik. Hi, detective.

Good to see you. Thank you.

And he had an uncle

at the Ypsilanti State Police Post, Sergeant Leik.

A lot of things happened all at once.

David Leik comes home from vacation,

at the same time that that composite

is making the rounds within the police.

Hi, Connor.

I see they've got a sketch on this guy already?

A fellow policeman reaches out to David Leik

and tells him that John Collins is a suspect.

My nephew, John Collins?

Yes.

Leik started thinking, "That's interesting."

While he was on vacation, his nephew, John Collins,

has been looking after their dog and taking care of the house.

David?

Yeah?

What's on the floor down here?

When he come home and went down to the basement,

he says there was something wrong.

What the heck is that? It looks like it's paint or something.

There's these spots of black paint

on the floor and kind of up on the wall.

Seven women are murdered.

He knows the killer is at large,

and it doesn't sit right with him.

Right here are the spots I was talking about.

And so the crime lab came down immediately to the basement.

David's there, I believe it's two other technicians,

and they go to work on the black paint.

And they drop it into this liquid which,

if it's human blood, will turn blue-green.

Well, it's not blood.

Thanks for coming out. I'm sorry.

And they're packing up to go...

...and as they go,

one of them happens to look down and spot something

and freezes,

gets down on his hands and knees...

What a second, guys.

Wait a second, guys.

What do you got?

By the washing machine, there was some hair.

David Leik's wife had cut her two sons' hair

down there under the light in the basement.

And, right away, this technician recognizes the hair

that was found on the torn underwear of Karen Sue.

They did a visual inspection under a microscope.

The hairs looked exactly alike.

And they also search his car.

And what they find in his car are drops of blood,

a button, and pieces of fabric.

They found hair and some flesh --

some scalp evidence -- in the trunk of his car.

We want to announce that one John Norman Collins,

age 23, of 619 Emmet Street, Ypsilanti,

has been arrested and charged

with the murder of Karen Sue Beineman.

And the trial started, and we waited the entire summer.

And finally, people had what they wanted,

and it was guilty.

They gave him a life sentence.

We're all familiar

with convicted people who like to talk,

and John Norman Collins is not one of them.

He says very little.

And that silence continues to taunt.

And that kind of adds to the eeriness, I think, of the case.

We have our who, but not our why.

And believe me when I tell you,

silence is more agonizing than any scream.

After 40 years, I still want to know...

Why my friend? Why Mary?

This is a guy who was hours away from graduating.

It became clear you didn't have to be living

in this kind of teeming metropolis

with a lot of crime for this to happen.

You could be living in a small town in the Midwest,

and you could still be the victim of a sociopath.

He's a good-looking, all-American boy.

Who would've ever suspected him?

I ran across a lot of people who met him.

I ran across a nurse, just last month, and she says,

"I met John. I was 16 at that time.

And he wanted me to go for a ride on his motorcycle."

She says, "Consequently, I didn't go."

I says, "Yeah, you're alive today."

In those days, everybody trusted everybody,

unfortunately.

Williams.

You'd like to think that you can always tell

the monsters from the men,

but I learned early on that often, you can't.

Some of them are impossible to spot,

even when they are right in front of you,

and have been all along.

Where were you at?

My uncle's a cop.

He can vouch for me.