"Well, it's 1969, OK
All across the USA"
—The Stooges, "1969"

John Norman Collins was arrested in Ypsilanti on July 31, 1969, for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, an 18-year-old student at Eastern Michigan University. It made national news because a serial killer had haunted Washtenaw County since 1967, and eventually Collins was under suspicion for five other Michigan murders (as well as one in California).

But the story was knocked out of the country's consciousness just over a week later when Charles Manson and members of his cult killed seven people on August 8-9, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of acclaimed director Roman Polanski.

The Manson murders were a cultural touchstone that some think helped usher out the hippy era, making way for a grittier 1970s where the idea of peace and love were swept into the dustbin of history.

This overall portrait of America in transition is the backdrop for director Andrew Templeton's new documentary, 1969: Killers, Freaks, and Radicals, which makes its Michigan debut on Friday, May 16, at Cinetopia Ann Arbor (Michigan Theater and State Theatre, May 15-18). It features new interviews, vintage footage, and re-creations.

The film focuses on Collins' crimes, but unlike John Keyes' 1974 book The Michigan Murders, Templeton analyzes the story through the lens of social upheaval and how the local police force stumbled through its investigation by targeting the "freaks and radicals" when looking for suspects.

The clean-cut Collins, a former high school football player and a student at Eastern Michigan University studying to become a teacher, was a person of interest by September 1968, two months after a second victim, Joan Elspeth Schell, was found. Collins was interviewed by the police, who cited two eyewitnesses who placed him with Schell the night she disappeared in July. But Collins, who had a reputation for larceny, denied knowing Schell despite living across the street from her at 619 Emmet Street in Ypsi, and the police took his word for it.

By early 1969, the case had gone cold, but the murders continued through July 23, the last time Karen Sue Beineman was seen alive. A series of breakthroughs happened over the next week when police found evidence in the home of David Leik, a sergeant with the Michigan State Troopers and Collins' uncle. The murder suspect had been homesitting for the vacationing Leik, but when the state trooper came home, he and his wife noticed some things were amiss; the case found the break it needed, and Collins was arrested.

I discussed 1969: Killers, Freaks, and Radicals with Templeton ahead of its screening at the Michigan Theater.

Q: You discovered Edward Keyes’ The Michigan Murders at an Ann Arbor District Library branch, and that inspired you to find out more about the case, which led to the documentary. Would you tell us about the discovery?
A: It would have been sometime in 2018. I had recently moved from the Detroit area to Ann Arbor for a job and came across the book in a "Local History" display, I believe at the Downtown branch of the AADL. I was already fascinated by the late 1960s, since I knew the University of Michigan was a hotbed for political activism, but I was surprised I’d never heard of the local murder cases. I literally searched online for a documentary about the cases, assuming a comprehensive one must already exist. It didn’t, and I decided to start researching the topic myself. It seemed baffling that, with the true-crime genre being so popular, these very odd and largely unresolved events weren’t more widely known.

Q: I haven't read The Michigan Murders, but the description on the University of Michigan Press website doesn't indicate that there might be a wider conspiracy, whereas it sounds like your movie goes down this route by asking questions about the distracted sheriff, Collins' uncle being a state trooper, and that a good ol' boy network might be hiding something. Did this theory come about as you started doing research and interviewing people, or does the book explore this, too?
A: The Michigan Murders book was written by a notable Hollywood screenwriter and is a lightly dramatized version of the events. I do think that it broadly tells an accurate and compelling story, but it also was written not long after John Collins was arrested and doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight when considering the cultural atmosphere of the time. I think you can find elements of the questions my film is asking within The Michigan Murders book, but they aren’t deeply examined there.

For example, I noticed that after Collins' arrest, investigators seemed to get a great deal of information out of his close friends. The more I looked into that aspect, through both independent research and numerous interviews, the more it seemed to be a severely under-reported element of these murder cases.

Q: A review of your movie after it debuted at the Indy Film Fest stated, "Multiple witnesses on numerous occasions, along with physical evidence, strongly suggested Collins did not work alone. He was spotted picking up women in his car along with one or two other men, friends and roommates who testified against him in court but were never charged themselves." Has Collins ever commented on whether these friends and roommates had anything to do with this?
A: At a minimum, there were several witnesses with knowledge of the murders who never came forward at the time. I am personally convinced some of the murders involved multiple suspects, but there is currently no definitive proof. DNA testing, for example, was nonexistent at that time, and Collins himself was only charged with a single murder, based largely on circumstantial evidence. It is my understanding that much of the original evidence is still in Michigan State Police cold storage, and there is a decent chance some of it could still be processed using modern DNA testing. The documentary explores this aspect of the case thoroughly and tries to string together a wider picture of what may have happened.

Collins generally doesn’t comment on the cases and proclaims total innocence. Though, as reported in the Detroit Free Press in 2019, Collins did mail a letter to a cousin that blamed the murders on his roommate. My documentary does involve some communication with Collins via letters, and this topic is addressed.

If indeed he had accomplices, I can only speculate on why he might keep quiet. I’ve heard different theories, but it could be as simple as holding onto the hope of being exonerated someday. If Collins ever told the full story, he would immediately be implicating himself in crimes he’s claimed ignorance of for five decades.

Q: The Detroit Free Press did an extensive investigation in 2019. What are some of the details they uncovered that helped inform your film?
A: I read and admired the Free Press reporting from 2019, and it is a good overview of the case details. I wouldn’t say it informed my film in any substantive way. From my understanding, the only truly new information was mentioning Collins' letter to his cousin, alleging another suspect. But that is something I had already discovered in my own interviews for the film.

Much of the information in the documentary comes from my own Freedom of Information Act requests to the Michigan State Police. These files did contain significant details never before made public and helped inform my take on the unsolved cases.

Q: The film uses Collins' case as a jumping-off point to explore the socio-political atmosphere at the time. How did you develop this idea for the overall tone of the film versus focusing more on the crime/s, which is what The Michigan Murders seems to focus on?
A: As I mentioned earlier, I was aware of Ann Arbor’s local history as a hotbed for political activism and have always been interested in the 1960s. To me, it seemed impossible to divorce the crimes from the socio-political atmosphere in which they took place. Doing research and conducting interviews only cemented this.

I also think it was worth trying to paint a picture of the time period beyond the murders, as nearly everyone I talked to also shared positive memories of their youth. The victims themselves were simply young women trying to live their lives when Collins tragically, but quite randomly, intersected with them.

Collins' external appearance and social connections, I would argue, also had a significant impact on the murder investigations.

Collins should have been quite easily captured after the second murder, for example.  At that time in 1968, Collins was even interviewed but promptly ruled out as a suspect, despite several eyewitnesses and a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing clearly in his direction.

To many investigators back then, a handsome All-American athlete like Collins appeared a far less likely suspect than the so-called hippies, radicals, and drug-users on the fringes of society. It also didn’t hurt that his uncle was a corporal in the State Police.

Q: Now that the movie is finished, what's the plan for its release? And what are your future plans as a filmmaker?
A: We are still submitting to and waiting to hear back from other film festivals. We are hoping to keep a schedule of screenings, local and otherwise, going throughout the year. Ideally, we would be seeking distribution and would love the film to find a home on a streaming service. We’d also love to partner with a larger production company to help with marketing and distribution. This was a low-budget passion project with a very small team, and I’m sure we could benefit from that kind of experience.

I’m still pretty engaged with getting this film out there, but I certainly have topics bouncing around my head. I would love to explore other lesser-known local history, including music, and urban exploration also fascinates me as a topic. I’m also developing a short narrative film with a colleague from this project, and it would be fun to switch gears from nonfiction to fiction.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp. 

"1969: Killers, Freaks, and Radicals" makes its Michigan debut at Cinetopia Ann Arbor on Friday, May 16, at 7:30 at the Michigan Theater. Director Andrew Templeton and members of the film's creative team will be there for a Q&A after the screening. Cinetopia Ann Arbor is at the Michigan Theater and State Theatre, May 15-18.

Related:
➥ "John Norman Collins and the Coed Murders" [AADL Archives, June 26, 2018]
➥ Various stories and photos [AADL Archives]
➥ "Evidence locker: What police discovered at 7 Michigan murder crime scenes" [Detroit Free Press, December 3, 2019]