by John Douglas
Among her greatest accomplishments at Millington was membership in the honor deck. As the official description put it, “Only the most motivated students are selected as members of the honor deck, after being recommended by their troop handlers and maintaining an eighty-five percent academic average. Members of the honor deck participate in Color Guard details, formation runs for charity, and various civil functions throughout the Memphis area.”
What this description fails to mention is that before Lance Corporal Collins came to Millington, all members of the honor deck had been male.
Suzanne saw no reason for this and she wanted badly to prove that women could do just as good a job as men. She researched the regulations in the Marine Corps Order, which made reference to appropriate elements of “Marine manpower” for rifle drill and firing. She then convinced the authorities that manpower was a generic term and did not imply “male power.” If women were admitted into the Marine Corps, even if their numbers were specifically and officially limited to five percent, then they were part of the manpower, just like the men.
Like Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, making the team is one thing, being accepted by your teammates is another. For the first several weeks Suzanne was on honor deck, the men gave her a very hard time. Many of them even admitted as much after the fact, clearly defying her to prove herself. They were convinced she’d been assigned because of her striking good looks rather than her ability to cut it with her peers, and it took her some time to win them over. But win them over she did.
Richard Tirrell, a member of the Millington honor deck, reminisced, “I have to admit that for quite some time after Suzanne joined the honor deck I wondered why she would subject herself to the ridicule and harassment that she experienced from other women Marines and male Marines alike. However, it wasn’t long after getting to know her better that I realized that Suzanne had deeply imbedded principles and moral standards that minimized the obstacles in front of her to reach the goals that she set for herself. In all honesty, she brought the best out of me. Her vibrant attitude, zest for life, and sense of humor created an air that was naive and sophisticated at the same time, even though that would seem to be contradictory. For myself, that particular combination helped me to become more effective and more motivated in my work with honor deck.”
As it turned out, her fellow Marines were so impressed with her that they added her name to the physical training—or PT-cadence count which enumerated Medal of Honor winners and other Marines noted for their exploits.
To a former Marine friend of Jack’s Suzanne wrote, “They have a PT chant about Dan Daley and other famous Medal of Honor winners and such. Well, now they have added a couple of lines down here about Lance Corporal Collins. Our honor deck PT is used almost every day, so I hear that many times a day. Every time I hear it I become more inspired and honored that I was able to join the U.S. Marine Corps.” If she hadn’t been famous enough around base before, she certainly was now.
While Suzanne was fighting the battles of honor deck equality, Susan Hand was achieving her own independent fame by winning the title of Navy Relief Queen by the largest margin in the base’s history. Navy Relief is a charity for enlisted personnel and their dependents and the voting for queen is an annual fund drive and major base event. You vote by contributing a dollar in the name of the candidate of your choice. In 1985, it had been twenty-six years since a Marine had won the title and Captain Nowag was determined that the losing streak was going to be broken this year. He approached Susan and said, “You’re going to be the next Navy Relief Queen.”
Out of 200,000 votes, Susan received 125,000. Prizes included a four-foot-tall trophy, a gold chain, and $200 for dresses. Suzanne was thrilled for her friend and arranged to get off school two days before graduation to see Susan crowned.
As graduation quickly approached, the only dark cloud on the horizon was that Suzanne had been assigned back to Cherry Point, while Susan was going to be an air traffic controller at El Toro Marine Air Station in California. Greg Gonzowski was going to California, too. Greg loved her and wanted to start thinking about marriage. Suzanne liked him very much, but according to Susan, she was having too good a time to settle down yet.
For the long term, the two women knew they’d always be close and envisioned ultimately raising their kids together. But they also wanted to figure out a way that they could be together for the short term. The hope seemed to be getting Suzanne transferred to California, and both of them agreed to start working on it as soon as they took up their new assignments. Then, if all went well, they’d both be going to Annapolis together on fleet appointments. After graduation, Susan thought she would transfer into the Navy to become a pilot. Suzanne was convinced the Marines would start letting women fly.
On July 10, Susan’s mother and four-year-old sister came down from Illinois for the graduation. The next evening, Susan and Suzanne were going to celebrate by going to dinner with Susan’s mother at the house of one of Mrs. Hand’s friends in the Memphis suburb of Germantown. But shortly before they were to leave the base, the barracks staff sergeant assigned Suzanne to be Duty NCO for the day, which meant she couldn’t go. She told Susan and her mother to go without her. They arranged to meet in an open green on base the next morning before graduation. Susan was upset by this maneuver, feeling it had only happened because the sergeant was jealous and had it in for Suzanne. She never should have been assigned to duty the night before graduation; someone else could easily handle it.
Duty consisted of sitting at a school-type desk behind a painted red line in front of the barracks building, checking out people who went in. Every hour on the hour she was to circle the barracks to make sure everything was as it should be, then enter in the circuit on a log. At best it’s tedious and boring and Suzanne probably felt she was being punished for her attributes. Susan says they sometimes assigned her friend to duty, knowing it would mean missing honor deck functions.
There wasn’t much Suzanne could do, confined to the base for the evening, but one thing she could do was log out to go running. She’d spent most of the day packing and making arrangements for the next day, so she was restless and itchy for some serious exercise. Shortly after 10:00 P.M., she went to her room, where she saw Patti Coon and her other roommate, Victoria Pavloski. She and Victoria had a minor argument about who was going to clean up the room. Suzanne agreed to clean it up in the morning before graduation. She then changed from her uniform into a red Marine Corps T-shirt and red athletic shorts, put on her white socks and Nike sneakers, a white bandanna around her forehead, and wrapped a blue exercise sweat belt around her waist, then came back out to begin stretching and limbering up for her run. She told Janet Cooper, who had quarterdeck watch duty, that she felt restless and thought she’d run for about a half hour or so. They talked for about ten minutes while Suzanne was stretching and Janet thought she seemed in a very good and happy mood.
She had a lot to be happy about as she went off into the night on her run. She was a beautiful, healthy, and physically fit nineteen-year-old who had proved herself in the toughest regimen a woman can take on in the American military. Her dream of the Naval Academy and becoming one of the first women Marine aviators was well on track, and at Cherry Point she’d get the chance to prove herself yet again. Her parents couldn’t have been more proud, her brother worshipped her, she had a best friend and a man who wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. She had worked hard and played hard and a future of limitless potential was out there, hers for the taking.
CHAPTER 8
Death of a Marine
The morning of Friday. July 12, 1985. Susan Hand looked for Suzanne in the base park where they’d arranged to meet before Susan’s graduation ceremony. When she didn’t show up, Susan became concerned that she might not be feeling well, so after the graduation, she went to Suzanne’s barracks to see if she could find her there.
“Some people looked really strange, but no one would say anything to me.”
Before long, though. Captain Nowag’s aide found her and said the captain wanted to see her in his office. By now it was afternoon, the sun was overhead, and Susan was still in her dress greens. Susan thought it a little strange that the captain had sent for her: she couldn’t think of anything she’d done wrong that would occasion a visit to “the principal’s office.” But Nowag liked her and they’d always been friendly. He probably just wanted to say goodbye personally.
As soon as she was shown into his office, she said brightly, “Hey, what’s up?”
“You’d better sit down,” he said. When she’d obeyed, he said, “You hang out with Suzanne Collins a lot.”
Susan said, “Yeah.”
He came over and put his arm on her shoulder. “I don’t know how I’m going to say this to you, but your friend Suzanne was found in the park in Millington and she’d been murdered.”
“No,” Susan responded. It was halfway between a whisper and a whimper. “No way,” she stated more emphatically. “Are you sure?”
Captain Nowag nodded grimly.
Susan had never had anyone close to her die before. The only death she’d experienced was that of her grandmother, whom she used to see about twice a year. “There’s no way this could happen to Suzanne,” she asserted, now in tears. “She just turned nineteen!”
He pulled up a chair and just sat there with his arm around her.
Steve Collins was home alone in Springfield when the military car pulled up in front of the house in the early afternoon of Friday, July 12. Jack, now retired from the foreign service, was in New York for the day helping his brotherin-law, Ed Wicks, with a patent development issue. By then Trudy’s parents were living with them and she had taken them out to a senior citizens lunch. Steve was home recovering from a foot injury he’d sustained over the Fourth of July holiday.
He’d just gotten out of the shower when he saw the car pull up. His first thought was that it must be Suzanne. She was due home either today or tomorrow, and he figured that with his sister’s resourcefulness and charm, she must have gotten someone in power to give her a ride.
But then the doorbell rang and when he answered it, two men in uniform were standing there. One was a chaplain.
“Mr. Collins,” one of them said. “We have some bad news for you. Suzanne’s been killed.”
At first, Stephen couldn’t completely process the message or deal with the shock. Paul Newton, a neighbor who was a retired Marine colonel, remembers seeing him beating a bush with his crutch and screaming, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Colonel Newton had always been very proud of Suzanne and had told her that when she was commissioned, he wanted to give her his ceremonial sword.
Stephen’s first cogent thought was, “My God, my mom’s coming home.”
A little later, Trudy pulled into the driveway with her parents in the car. When she saw the official car, she also figured that Suzanne must have connived a ride home. But then Stephen came over to her window. “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
“Right here?” she said.
“No. Leave Nana and Poppa in the car and come right in.”
“Parked on a hill?” Trudy responded. “Leave my Mother and Dad in the car?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want you to come right in. Please come right in.”
When she got inside, Stephen introduced her to the two officers. One of them said, “Please sit down, Mrs. Collins.” And when she had, he said, “Your daughter has been murdered.”
Then she went back out to the car, brought her parents in, and sat them in the living room without telling them what had happened. She came back to where Stephen and the two officers were and said, “Let’s go out on the back patio where we can talk without them hearing.”
Out on the patio, her reaction was the same as Susan’s. “You must be mistaken,” she said.
“No, I’m afraid not. We’ll tell you all we know. So far, what we know is that your daughter was running on base last night. Someone came up behind her and grabbed her, then took her off base, attacked her, and killed her.”
Trudy thought to herself, “If I don’t write this all down, it’s not going to register. I’m not going to remember what they’re telling me.”
The four of them talked for a while. Trudy remembers the chaplain being sensitive and very nice. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Can I tell your folks?”
Trudy said she should tell them.
“Well, can I go in with you? Can I be with you in there?” he asked.
“Maybe it would be a good idea if you came,” she said.
“Mother and Dad just sort of sat there, stunned, unable to comprehend what they were hearing,” Trudy recalls. “Then we tried to reach Jack in New York.”
When they finally located him, they had him pulled out of a meeting. Trudy said, “Something bad …something terrible has happened. Suzanne has been killed.”
Jack sat down. “What did you say! How can that be? I don’t understand.” He was thinking, “I’ve got to get home right away.”
Before he left, he went back to tell the men he was meeting with what had happened. Two of them, whom he had come to know quite well, were Jewish. Jack said, “In the Christian Church we pray for people’s souls when they die. I’m not sure exactly what you do, but if you could just pray for Suzanne and for me and my family, I’d be very grateful.” Jack says they were absolutely shattered with grief and shock. They couldn’t have been more compassionate or understanding.
Jack’s brother-in-law accompanied him on the flight back to Washington, D.C. Around 6:30 P.M., Trudy and Stephen met Jack at the shuttle gate at National Airport. The three of them grabbed each other tightly and silently hugged.
When they got home, Jack immediately got on the phone and called down to Tennessee, trying to find out exactly what had happened. They had a suspect in custody. He was the husband of a Navy enlisted woman and lived on base. But Suzanne had been taken off base and killed in a park in Millington, so there was an overlapping jurisdictional issue between the Naval Investigative Service, the Millington Police Department, and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. He couldn’t even find out where Suzanne’s body was.
When Stephen started hearing the details, he said, “It must have been more than one guy. Suzanne was strong. When we wrestled, she could almost beat me. It had to be more than one guy.”
“We’ll know more tomorrow,” Jack was told.
At that moment, Suzanne was lying in the office of the Shelby County medical examiner. The autopsy report, signed by James Spencer Bell, M.D., stated: “Death was due to multiple injuries inflicted by blunt trauma to the head, pressing on the neck and pushing 20½ inches of a 31 inch long, 1½ inch diameter sharply bevelled tree limb up the perineum through the abdomen into the right chest tearing abdominal and chest organs and producing internal hemorrhaging.”
At around 6:00 A.M., sheriff’s deputies had found her nude body lying face-down in the grass with her head turned to the right, under a tree about 150 feet off the road in Edmund Orgill Park in Millington, just east of the Navy base. Aside from the tree limb forcibly inserted between her legs, there were various other wounds on her body and her face had been so badly beaten that an initial identification was difficult. Scattered nearby were her shirt and shorts, socks, underwear, and exercise belt. Together, they formed a red, white, and blue pattern against the green backdrop.
About an hour before, Patti Coon had discovered that Suzanne’s bunk had not been slept in, and worriedly called security. When Suzanne failed to show for morning muster, an all-points bulletin went out to base security, the Millington police, and the sheriff’s department.
The overall elements of what had happened were quickly pieced together.
At about 11:00 P.M., Marine Privates First Class Michael Howard and Mark Shotwell were jogging together, heading north along Attu Road on the north side of the base near where buffaloes are kept in pens, when they saw a female jogger matching Suzanne Collins’s description r
unning toward them. Just before she reached them, she crossed over to the other side of the street to face traffic. Shortly after she passed them, they noticed a car parked ahead of them on the shoulder with its high beams on. Howard thought it looked like a mid-1970s Ford station wagon, dark-colored with wood-grained paneling on the side and a very loud muffler. Suddenly, the car started, swerved onto the road and began heading south, the same direction as Suzanne.
Shortly after the vehicle passed, Howard and Shotwell thought they heard screams coming from about three hundred yards or so behind them. They turned immediately and took off in that direction. When they’d covered about a hundred yards the screams stopped and they saw the station wagon pull back onto Attu Road, heading toward Navy Road. Just then, another car came by in the opposite direction, and the glare of the headlights prevented them from seeing exactly what was happening.
They continued running after the car but quickly lost it, so they ran to the base North Gate 2 and reported the incident to the guard there, David Davenport. Davenport called base security and reported the possible abduction, adding that he had seen the station wagon exit the base through his gate. The driver was male, and he had his arm around the shoulder of a woman in the passenger seat. Though he hadn’t been able to read the license number, he recalled that the car bore Kentucky plates. One security unit went to Davenport’s gate to get additional information, while Richard Rogers, the chief of the watch for base Section 2, went out himself to try to find the car after issuing a “Be on the Lookout” to base security, Millington police, and the sheriffs department.