Review

Abstract

160 Michigan Historical Review Edward Keyes. The Michigan Murders. 1976; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Pp. 340. Cloth, $22.95. Gail Griffin. ―The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010, a Painted Turtle book. Pp. 317. Appendices. Bibliography. Notes. Sources. Paper, $22.95. Both of these books deal with the murders of women students from Michigan. A second academic connection is that both works have been reprinted or published by major university presses, which is unusual for ―true crime‖ books. ―The Events of October‖ was written by a faculty member at Kalamazoo College, who played a significant role in the aftermath of the incidents related in her book. Otherwise the two accounts differ completely, excepting the critical fact that both are well done. Mardi Link‘s new introduction to The Michigan Murders, which sparked her own career as a true-crime writer, compares it to Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer‘s The Executioner’s Song. Although those two classics aimed to stimulate reflection about capital punishment, and provided much in-depth analysis of character and motive, the late Edward Keyes had no such lofty aims, and his book did not so much transcend the genre as exemplify it at its best. A journalist by trade, Keyes simply had a good tale to tell and was confident that readers would be fascinated by stories about murders. For two entire years, between the summers of 1967 and 1969, lawenforcement officers in and around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti were increasingly baffled by the killings of seven young women, four of them students either at the University of Michigan or Eastern Michigan University (EMU) and all but one—whose death was found to be unrelated to the other murders—sexually assaulted and/or sadistically mutilated. Keyes provides detailed portraits of a large cast of principal characters, as the genre demands. And he builds suspense as red herrings are dragged across the trail (parents are frequently suspicious of boyfriends), and apparent leads are dead-ends. (Spoiler alert: Keyes followed an older convention in assigning fictitious names to the killer and his victims, but Mardi‘s introduction reveals that the former name was given to John Norman Collins, who, as is often the case in detective fiction, was questioned early on but then passed over until he was arrested much later.) As the tension escalated, with three of the killings occurring between March and July 1969, much of Michigan was in a state of Book Reviews 161 nervous anxiety hardly assuaged by the failure of what the papers inevitably referred to as ―The Keystone Kops.‖ More publicity, if not help, was provided by the noted psychic Peter Hurkos, who was hired by a citizens‘ group. He amazed observers with his powers but failed to solve the case. Perhaps in order to maintain access to his sources, Keyes does not disparage the many investigators, from several jurisdictions, who also failed to solve these murders until some damning evidence turned up in the basement of Collins‘s uncle, who was, ironically, a state policeman. But no reader can fail to see that lack of cooperation, mistakes, and bad luck—cops placed at the scene of one crime, hoping the killer would return, spotted him but could not catch him—alarmed a public aware that lost time might mean lost lives. Collins, when he was finally apprehended, was an Eastern Michigan University student whose surface charm and boy-next-door good looks had made pickups easy, although a closer look revealed a history of theft, together with some past violent episodes and disturbing attitudes about women. At Collins‘s trial for the murder of EMU student Karen Sue Beineman, his defense team cast some reasonable doubt on both the prosecution‘s eyewitness and scientific testimonies. This was in addition to charges the defense team made of witness harassment and/or tampering, notably by Washtenaw County Sheriff Doug Harvey, whose portrayal as a hotdogging lawman is as close as Keyes gets to direct criticism. The judge, however, after refusing a request for a change of venue, allowed all the evidence. And if Collins‘s conviction...