Between 1967 and 1969, the bodies of six young women were discovered in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, most of them raped and mutilated. Their deaths — and the subsequent police investigation — are the subject of a new documentary by Ferndale director Andrew Templeton, 1969: Killers, Freaks, and Radicals, which makes its Detroit premiere at The Senate on Dec. 5.
Templeton first learned about the crimes in The Michigan Murders by Edward Keyes, a book he came across by chance at the Ann Arbor District Library. Templeton was struck by several factors associated with the case: To start with, while a young man, John Norman Collins, had been indicted for one of the murders, the rest had gone officially unsolved, though it seemed clear they’d all been performed by the same person — or group of people. Templeton was also surprised that he hadn’t already heard of the crimes. He remembers running a quick search online: Had a documentary already been made on the subject? Not one that he could find. “So I, perhaps foolishly at the time, decided to try to start one myself,” Templeton says.”
It took him six years to finish the film (his debut, as it happens). The documentary draws on original interviews with law enforcement, elected officials, and an expert in criminology; news footage; and boxes upon boxes of redacted documents Templeton obtained from police by submitting requests under the Freedom of Information Act. 1969 links an account of the murders to a broader tale of social change in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area, which Templeton describes as “a kind of microcosm of the country at large.” As he points out, any thorough account of a crime should consider not only the lives and identities of the victims and perpetrator but also “what kind of social norms were affecting the investigation.”
The Washtenaw County sheriff at the time, Doug Harvey (whom Templeton interviewed before his 2023 death), took a negative view of the “hippies” and “freaks” around town. When dead bodies started turning up, Harvey assumed the killer was a member of the counterculture. In fact, John Norman Collins was the personification of the “all-American boy,” in Templeton’s words: an athlete and frat member; a “square-jawed, muscular motorcycle rider [with] good grades”; “a clean-cut guy” with a “supposedly normal upbringing” — all factors that may have prevented police from clearly assessing the person in front of them. At one point in the film, Harvey even jokes, “I wouldn’t mind my daughter going out with that young man.”
As a result, Collins wasn’t seriously considered as a suspect until late in the game. Templeton calls it “hard to believe” that the investigation would’ve played out the same way “had [Collins] been a hippie with long hair and a guitar.” Collins was 23 and studying to become a teacher when he was arrested; he has spent his life in prison, though he has maintained his innocence. And while the murders attributed to Collins are disturbing enough on their own, the secondary horrors of Templeton’s film have to do with gaps left by the police investigation.
Collins’s uncle David Leik was a member of the state police; at least one of Collins’s victims appears to have been murdered in Leik’s basement. How much Leik knew or didn’t know about Collins’s activities is unclear: He claimed not to know anything, but he also had his own reputation to protect. (Leik died in 2019, before Templeton had a chance to interview him.) Whether police stalled the investigation once it became clear one of their own was involved is also uncertain, since Templeton’s last FOIA request was met with a steep bill he couldn’t pay. That information remains unseen.
“There are certain things the state police haven’t been very forthcoming with,” says Larry Mathewson, an Eastern Michigan University policeman who helped find and charge Collins, in the film. “Maybe it’s time to let loose a little bit and let people know what went on.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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