which had been found stuffed deep inside the vagina
of her dead body.
John had been the only one in the house
while the family was gone;
he had been feeding the dog.
A year later, at his trial, the assistant-prosecutor
closed his argument by saying
Collins made “one stupid mistake...he sprayed black paint
on that basement floor to cover up
what he thought was blood.”
Or, another way to put it:
the imaginary is what tends
to become real, and when it does
there’s no paint black enough
to cover it up.
COLLINS’S STATEMENT
“I have two things to say, your honor. One, I honestly feel that this community tried to give me a fair trial and that the jury did not take this matter lightly. But in view of the prevailing mood of the community, I feel that the events presented during the last six or seven weeks have been blown all out of proportion. I think this was a travesty of justice. I hope someday that error will be corrected. Second, I never knew a girl by the name of Karen Sue Beineman. I never held a conversation with Karen Sue Beineman. I did not take the life of Karen Sue Beineman.”
-New York Times, August 29, 1970
JOHN COLLINS
“Collins was implicated, at least superficially, in fifteen murders.... Conversely, there is some doubt that Jane [M.], the third presumed victim, was actually slain by Collins.”
Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us:
Public Reactions to Serial Murder
His name sounds like a drink.
He looks a little like a guy I used to know.
He was handsome, and once posed half-naked
for Tomorrow’s Man, a quasi-pornographic magazine.
Looking for his “dark side,” one book notes that he had “unusual
tastes”—
i.e. sometimes “dressed with a flair to stand out in the crowd.”
In retrospect, some girls said that he could be “moody” or
“sexually aggressive.”
That maybe he liked riding motorcycles more than he liked them.
Others recalled that he hated women with pierced ears, because
“the holes defiled their bodies.” Psychiatrists told an old story:
“boundless rage against the female sex, a particular coldness
to his mother.” Some traced his “psychopathic ideology”
to one of his college English papers, in which he wrote:
“If a person holds a gun on somebody-it’s up to him to decide
whether to take the other’s life or not.... It’s not society’s judgment that’s important, but the individual’s own choice of will and intellect.”
Nothing ties him to Jane’s death except
some shells of a .22 found in his room;
a rumor that he used to do target practice
near Denton Cemetery, where she was found;
and the fact that the murders stopped
once he was no longer around.
FILTHY
My grandfather thinks
they got the right guy.
For years my mother thought
the police gave him reasons why
that no one else could know. But
when we ask him now what they were
he tells us a story about visiting Jane
several years before her murder
in a filthy dorm, with long-haired guys
gunning their motorbikes outside.
It was a filthy place, he says. Just
a filthy dive. And John Collins,
one of those filthy guys.
CONVERSATION
I ask my mother if she thinks
John Collins killed Jane.
I really don’t know, she says,
but I don’t like to think it through.
If he didn’t, she says, I come back
to the more terrible thought:
It must have been someone we knew.
CONVERSATION
I imagine us talking
somewhere safe, like
the afterlife.
It’s just casual conversation, so I say,
John, level with me.
Didyou kill her or not?
He looks out the window
and sighs. Does it
really matter anymore?
Or maybe he smiles coyly,
lights a cigarette, and says,
What do you think?
Or maybe he looks me straight in the eye
and says, Yes, Maggie, I killed her.
I killed them all.
Then it’s my turn to sigh,
Now John, what did you go
and do a thing like that for ?
“I’m in the middle of my seventeenth read of this book, having first acquired a copy about ten years ago. [...] I have been trying to find out more about the background of John Collins that would cause him to hate women so much that he would murder seven of them, but have been unable to find anything.”
-A reader’s online comment about The Michigan Murders at Amazon.com
(1966)
Perhaps we’re all fools,
none of us able to see-
Down with people, dammit.
MAIL ORDER
I order a copy of Collins’s jail admission card,
made when he was twenty-three.
Prisoner number, right thumbprint.
Build: Slender. Complexion: Ruddy.
Religion: C. Term: LIFE,
for Murder, 1st Degree.
I wish it did, but none of it seems
all that extraordinary to me.
Instead I feel a space growing
between this man
and Jane, a space
like a windy corridor.
This corridor exists
to separate murder
from murderer. From here I see
it is Jane’s murder
that interests me.
His crimes do not.
CONVERSATION
Hello, a man says. I’m calling from the Michigan State Police. I’m just checking out your Freedom of Information Act request for your aunt’s file.
They check out all inquiries about the Collins murders, he explains, because they could fill their basement with requests about them.
There are a lot of freaks out there, he says.
Look, he says. If you put the entire Michigan State Police in a room and asked them about your aunt’s murder, 95% of them would say Collins is your guy.
5% seems a rather sizable dissent, I say, after a pause.
Well, he says, that’s why we still have suspects.
Oh, I say.
Yeah, we brought in a guy for questioning just last year. A local guy, he says. A dentist.
Oh, I say again. I hadn’t expected him to say that.
He promises to send more information, but I never hear back. When I call to check, a woman says someone has scribbled, “no longer needs the information” across my request.
About a month later, I find an elaborate site on the internet posted by some guy who is intent on solving Jane’s murder.
He sends and posts letters to officials enumerating the reasons why there’s no way Collins did it, insists the public is still in grave danger.
He seems to think her murderer was most likely a police officer.
His theory is that whoever killed Jane is “really a decent guy,” whose only problem is that he is a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
He mentions details I haven’t heard before-granules of detergent? A towel used to catch her blood? Strange handwriting back in her room at the Law Quad?
My interest seriously wanes, however, when he starts using the terms “cold cucumber” in her “vaginal vault.”
I know this talk, just like I know police talk-
She probably hadn’t been a bad-looking girl,
but that stocking round her neck could’ve choked an ox.
I lock my door and go to bed. For the time being, the case is closed for me.
(1960)
If only life and death were better understood by me.
I dread and fear death and yet am uncertain of life and the why of it.
I have yet to have real faith, believe and follow without question.
When I can accept time, life, and death,
I will be ready for the responsibilities of adulthood
and will step into them easily and with confidence.
Now I am but a wondering, confused individual.
TWO ECLIPSES
TWO ECLIPSES
1.
We don’t really live
in stories or scenes,
not at all.
The fan whirs,
the tea boils,
old men shout
outside a Puerto Rican social club.
Inside the loop of
the mind, it’s
a different story.
The detective and the dreamer
cobble things together
from whatever lies
nearby, like
plumbers fixing pipes
with rags and string
in a poor country.
Inside the loop of
my mind, I find
a lone egret
standing on one leg
at the edge of a lake, preternaturally
still, listening
for something.
2.
The lake is round and quiet-
just a few small waves
crested with sugar
when suddenly a stone
is thrown
into the fresh-
water. Gloop.
Then another,
gloop. And another,
gloop, gloop.
Rings grow,
shudder through
the cattails, come widely
toward shore. I can’t see
the stones sinking
to the deep, but I know
that they are.
MY MOTHER STILL DREAMS
of her sister. Jane appears,
always holding her head.
My head hurts, she says.
What happened to my head?
It’s too late to help her;
my mother wakes with a start.
It’s too late to help her, but the want
still cripples the heart.
BARRICADES
It was in the summer of 1969
that my mother began barricading doors.
It started in Europe.
She and my father had gone ahead with plans
to spend the summer abroad, just as Phil, broken,
had gone on to New York alone.
Throughout the summer, they found short paragraphs
about the murders in English-language papers.
It was news, even in Paris or Rome.
By August, the case was eclipsed
by another killing spree, the one eventually tied
to the Manson Family.
When they returned from Europe
they moved to California, and from then on
whenever my father went away on business, my mother
would flit around the house, moving the furniture, saying,
It’s no big deal, girls. It’s just time to barricade the doors.
I remember barricade being a new word for me,
one I was proud to have in my vocabulary.
And she made it seem like fun, explaining how
you have to wedge the chairs tightly below
the doorknobs, how you have to place
the breakables on top, so they can crash
to the ground like an alarm.
EMILY
My grandfather was a small-town dentist
famous for his cleanings-
thorough, and rough.
He’d been a dentist
in the war, put men’s faces
back together. Said
he learned then
if your bowels are moving
and you don’t have a fever
you’re pretty much fine.
That doesn’t hurt, he’d say
while working on our mouths.
That can’t hurt at all.
Six months after Jane died
my mother sat reclined
in his chair. Suddenly
he said, I hope
all that has happened
hasn’t made you decide against
having children. The truth was,
she hadn’t planned on it
before. Two years later,
her first daughter
was born.
STACEY AND TRACEY
Whenever we visited Michigan,
Emily and I would lie
in that same yellow room
in those same twin beds
each clutching
a doll. I got Tracey
(who had been Jane’s)
and she got Stacey
(who had been Mom’s).
Stacey’s hair was a lush,
curly red-brown;
Tracey was a stringy
platinum blonde.
Hard little bodies
with sad, shellacked faces,
black eyes, daubed mouths.
I’d give anything to know
where they are now.
LIES
I told my first real lie to my friend Courtney, because she wanted to play in the basement of 31 Palm, the big house where I lived. We were seven years old, and sitting at the top of the basement stairs, looking down into the dark brown pit of rafters and passageways that terrified me. So I told her that we couldn’t play down there because I had a younger sister who went down there to play years ago and never returned.
It worked-it scared Courtney enough that she never asked about it again. Unfortunately it also scared her so much that she went home and told her mother. It wasn’t long before her mother was on the phone to mine, greatly concerned about the fate of my younger sister.
I don’t even know if I knew about Jane yet. The imaginary younger sister I had in mind was a small brown elfish thing named Hillary. And I can still feel her with me, even though I created her and murdered her in the same instant.
(1960)
I am lately childish and immature. I make so many resolutions, but they are always easily broken, leaving me with a sense of frustration.
Lately I’ve been tired and easily irritated for no reason, especially with my friends.
Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Page 6