Too scary to remember but too hard to forget
- Nancy McArtor
- Dec 10
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
If you were a young woman living in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti in the summer of 1969, you were probably scared. We all were.
Rosie Downer Pannone: “Terrifying time.”
Barb Kendall Souza: “Scary, scary time!”
Barb DeHart Eadie: “I was afraid to go downtown alone at night.”
Cheryl Meyer Sartori: “Remember it well. I didn’t feel safe.”
It was the third summer when a serial killer—some newspapers labeled him “the co-ed killer”—was stalking young women right in our backyard and the frequency of the crimes was increasing. Seven women would die before he was caught.
Ruth Ryan describes him this way: “a clean-cut, Catholic-raised, athletic fraternity boy, wanted to become a cop.” And that was part of the problem.
His name was John Norman Collins and the hunt for him was derailed for two years by jurisdictional rivalries between law enforcement agencies and “a blinding official bias”. The County Sheriff actually announced, “We are looking for the killer among the hippie and radical element”. And that isn’t who Collins appeared to be at all.
Ruth: “They had him in their hands after the second murder and didn’t even check his alibi, figuring he couldn’t possibly be the killer, it had to be a longhaired hippie or radical.” Ruth, a Michigan student at the time, herself was one of those so-called radicals, active in the rent strike, antiwar, civil rights and other causes. It was the 1960’s! The social status quo was being radically rewritten by our generation. But the generally white and male establishment still running things hadn’t caught up, as was all too clear in the Collins case.
A new documentary, “1969; Killers, Freaks and Radicals”, which premiered at the Michigan Theater in May, tells the story and Ruth was interviewed extensively in the film. One of her connections was that the public defender in the case was Richard Ryan — Ruth’s father.
When I wrote up the film and Ruth’s role in it on Facebook, we heard from other classmates who vividly remember that time. Cindy Burke Elder’s next door neighbor was on the jury. Cheryl Meyer Sartori was a clerk at the courthouse when Collins was tried and remembers how unnerving it felt just being in his presence when she delivered some papers to the prosecutor. Collins asked Cheryl Hartwig McConnell’s roommate to go out with him. (She didn’t.) But a girl Damon Hyde dated was one of the victims.
Some other Class of ‘65ers were doing scary stuff. Pamela Purdy Stephens was driving a cab that summer. Lauri Ingber Solomon and Martha Walters Sayre were hitch hiking. Martha said, “I was in a bind for transportation and had to get to work. A nice fella picked me up and gently chastised me all the way for such a dangerous thing to do. I had a firm grip on the door handle and jumped out when we stopped for a light.”
And it wasn’t just our female class members with stories to tell. This one comes from Dave Johnson: “One of the victims posted a request on a message board in the Michigan Union for a ride home to Muskegon. Collins used my name in responding to her request and she circled it in a phone book. I became the prime suspect while investigators were reviewing my alibi.”
And how was Collins finally caught? He killed his last victim in the basement of the home of his uncle, a Michigan State Trooper, while the family was on vacation. There wasn’t DNA matching available in the way it is used now, but he left plenty of incriminating circumstantial evidence and was arrested on July 31, 1969. Although convicted of only the final murder, he is now serving a life sentence without parole about two hours away, in Carson City, MI.
