Sometimes personal history can intersect wtih true crime. When I was a child in Ann Arbor, Michigan, there was a serial killer in the area. He murdered seven young women. I remember reading about it in the newspapers. I remember seeing police cars in the area. I remember my parents discussing it. I remember being at a Greek coffee shop and my mother whispering to me that the man at the counter eating the egg lemon was a famous psychic who had come to help with the case.
It was interesting to read this account of that time as an adult. These murders happened in the late sixties. When I read the book, I thought about how much more advanced our forensics methods are today. These killings went on for two years. The police in the book are depicted as hardworking, dedicated, frustrated professionals. A footprint would be washed away by the rain. They would swap a body with a mannequin dummy and stake out the area, waiting for the killer to return, only to lose him in the woods. The newspapers called the police The Keystone Kops. They just did not have the right tools then for this type of investigation.
It was different in the sixties. People did accept rides from strangers. They wandered at night. In one of the cases, the victim had just mailed her family information about the killings, a map where the bodies had been found. She wrote on the map her assurances that she was being careful. But then right after she mailed it, she met John Norman Collins, who asked her if she wanted a ride on his motorcyle, and she said yes. Collins was eventually apprehended and is now serving a life sentence for these murders.
I thought the book was very well written. These were dramatic, lurid crimes, and it would have been easy to have written something sensationalistic about what happened. Keyes writes about the community. He gives a heartfelt, honest account of how it was in that time and place. You wouldn't think it would be fun to read this book, but I found it surprisingly heartfelt and well researched. I thought it was fascinating to go back and fill in the details with an adult brain.
