Murder in the Backyard
Twenty-four years ago, I read a book and it scared me half to death. That's what'll happen, when you read about gruesome murders that took place right in your own backyard. The book was titled "Michigan Murders," by Edward Keyes, and it chronicled---sometimes in gory detail---the killing spree of one John Norman Collins in and around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti in the late-1960s. Collins, who's still in prison up in Marquette, was only convicted of one of the murders---that of Karen Sue Beineman---but it's widely believed that Collins was responsible for the deaths of up to six girls, mostly college students from Eastern Michigan University. What made the book so stark in its reality was that I was foolish enough to read it while attending EMU, in my senior year. Many of the events took place in Ypsilanti, near the EMU campus, and Keyes describes them in detail---sometimes with addresses---so it was damn near impossible not to get the creeps reading it, consideri