In the summer of 1967, a palpable sense of unease began to creep into the idyllic college town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, a feeling that would soon escalate into full-blown terror. The unsettling saga began with the disappearance of Mary Fleszar, a 19-year-old white female and a student at Eastern Michigan University. On the sweltering evening of July 9th, she told her roommate she was going for a walk to get some fresh air. It was the last time she was seen alive.
A neighbor later recalled seeing a young man in a blue-grey Chevrolet slow down and speak to her, but Mary shook her head and walked away. Her parents reported her missing the following day when they learned she never returned to her apartment.
For nearly a month, there was no word on Mary's whereabouts. The community held its breath until August 7th, when two teenage boys made a gruesome discovery near an abandoned farmhouse in Superior Township. They found the badly decomposed body of a young woman, later identified through dental records as Mary Fleszar. The scene was horrific; she had been stabbed approximately thirty times in the chest and abdomen. In a brutal act of post-mortem mutilation, her feet, one forearm, and the thumb and fingers of one hand had been severed and were never recovered. Investigators determined that her body had been moved at least twice after her death, suggesting the killer had returned to the scene. An unsettling incident occurred two days after the identification when a young man arrived at the funeral home and asked to take a photograph of her body as a keepsake for her parents, a request that was denied.
The murder of Mary Fleszar marked the beginning of a series of slayings that would haunt the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area for the next two years, attributed to a serial killer who would become known as the 'Ypsilanti Ripper' and the 'Co-Ed Killer.' The victims were all young women, and their deaths shared a brutal and sadistic pattern of abduction, rape, and murder, often with post-mortem mutilation.
Investigators eventually zeroed in on a suspect named John Norman Collins, a student at Eastern Michigan University. Collins was a neighbor to both Mary Fleszar and a subsequent victim, Joan Schell. In fact, he worked in an office at EMU directly across the hall from where Mary had worked. Eyewitnesses also placed him with some of the other victims. Following the final murder in the series in July 1969, Collins was arrested.
John Norman Collins was ultimately charged and stood trial for the murder of the last victim, Karen Sue Beineman. In a trial that became the longest in Washtenaw County's history at the time, he was found guilty on August 19, 1970, and sentenced to life in prison. Although investigators firmly believe him to be responsible for the murder of Mary Fleszar and the other young women, he was never tried for those crimes. His conviction for the Beineman murder brought an end to the reign of terror that had held the community in its grip, though the haunting memories of Mary Fleszar and the other victims would forever linger.
