Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Read online

which had been found stuffed deep inside the vagina

  of her dead body.

  John had been the only one in the house

  while the family was gone;

  he had been feeding the dog.

  A year later, at his trial, the assistant-prosecutor

  closed his argument by saying

  Collins made “one stupid mistake...he sprayed black paint

  on that basement floor to cover up

  what he thought was blood.”

  Or, another way to put it:

  the imaginary is what tends

  to become real, and when it does

  there’s no paint black enough

  to cover it up.

  COLLINS’S STATEMENT

  “I have two things to say, your honor. One, I honestly feel that this community tried to give me a fair trial and that the jury did not take this matter lightly. But in view of the prevailing mood of the community, I feel that the events presented during the last six or seven weeks have been blown all out of proportion. I think this was a travesty of justice. I hope someday that error will be corrected. Second, I never knew a girl by the name of Karen Sue Beineman. I never held a conversation with Karen Sue Beineman. I did not take the life of Karen Sue Beineman.”

  -New York Times, August 29, 1970

  JOHN COLLINS

  “Collins was implicated, at least superficially, in fifteen murders.... Conversely, there is some doubt that Jane [M.], the third presumed victim, was actually slain by Collins.”

  Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us:

  Public Reactions to Serial Murder

  His name sounds like a drink.

  He looks a little like a guy I used to know.

  He was handsome, and once posed half-naked

  for Tomorrow’s Man, a quasi-pornographic magazine.

  Looking for his “dark side,” one book notes that he had “unusual

  tastes”—

  i.e. sometimes “dressed with a flair to stand out in the crowd.”

  In retrospect, some girls said that he could be “moody” or

  “sexually aggressive.”

  That maybe he liked riding motorcycles more than he liked them.

  Others recalled that he hated women with pierced ears, because

  “the holes defiled their bodies.” Psychiatrists told an old story:

  “boundless rage against the female sex, a particular coldness

  to his mother.” Some traced his “psychopathic ideology”

  to one of his college English papers, in which he wrote:

  “If a person holds a gun on somebody-it’s up to him to decide

  whether to take the other’s life or not.... It’s not society’s judgment that’s important, but the individual’s own choice of will and intellect.”

  Nothing ties him to Jane’s death except

  some shells of a .22 found in his room;

  a rumor that he used to do target practice

  near Denton Cemetery, where she was found;

  and the fact that the murders stopped

  once he was no longer around.

  FILTHY

  My grandfather thinks

  they got the right guy.

  For years my mother thought

  the police gave him reasons why

  that no one else could know. But

  when we ask him now what they were

  he tells us a story about visiting Jane

  several years before her murder

  in a filthy dorm, with long-haired guys

  gunning their motorbikes outside.

  It was a filthy place, he says. Just

  a filthy dive. And John Collins,

  one of those filthy guys.

  CONVERSATION

  I ask my mother if she thinks

  John Collins killed Jane.

  I really don’t know, she says,

  but I don’t like to think it through.

  If he didn’t, she says, I come back

  to the more terrible thought:

  It must have been someone we knew.

  CONVERSATION

  I imagine us talking

  somewhere safe, like

  the afterlife.

  It’s just casual conversation, so I say,

  John, level with me.

  Didyou kill her or not?

  He looks out the window

  and sighs. Does it

  really matter anymore?

  Or maybe he smiles coyly,

  lights a cigarette, and says,

  What do you think?

  Or maybe he looks me straight in the eye

  and says, Yes, Maggie, I killed her.

  I killed them all.

  Then it’s my turn to sigh,

  Now John, what did you go

  and do a thing like that for ?

  “I’m in the middle of my seventeenth read of this book, having first acquired a copy about ten years ago. [...] I have been trying to find out more about the background of John Collins that would cause him to hate women so much that he would murder seven of them, but have been unable to find anything.”

  -A reader’s online comment about The Michigan Murders at Amazon.com

  (1966)

  Perhaps we’re all fools,

  none of us able to see-

  Down with people, dammit.

  MAIL ORDER

  I order a copy of Collins’s jail admission card,

  made when he was twenty-three.

  Prisoner number, right thumbprint.

  Build: Slender. Complexion: Ruddy.

  Religion: C. Term: LIFE,

  for Murder, 1st Degree.

  I wish it did, but none of it seems

  all that extraordinary to me.

  Instead I feel a space growing

  between this man

  and Jane, a space

  like a windy corridor.

  This corridor exists

  to separate murder

  from murderer. From here I see

  it is Jane’s murder

  that interests me.

  His crimes do not.

  CONVERSATION

  Hello, a man says. I’m calling from the Michigan State Police. I’m just checking out your Freedom of Information Act request for your aunt’s file.

  They check out all inquiries about the Collins murders, he explains, because they could fill their basement with requests about them.

  There are a lot of freaks out there, he says.

  Look, he says. If you put the entire Michigan State Police in a room and asked them about your aunt’s murder, 95% of them would say Collins is your guy.

  5% seems a rather sizable dissent, I say, after a pause.

  Well, he says, that’s why we still have suspects.

  Oh, I say.

  Yeah, we brought in a guy for questioning just last year. A local guy, he says. A dentist.

  Oh, I say again. I hadn’t expected him to say that.

  He promises to send more information, but I never hear back. When I call to check, a woman says someone has scribbled, “no longer needs the information” across my request.

  About a month later, I find an elaborate site on the internet posted by some guy who is intent on solving Jane’s murder.

  He sends and posts letters to officials enumerating the reasons why there’s no way Collins did it, insists the public is still in grave danger.

  He seems to think her murderer was most likely a police officer.

  His theory is that whoever killed Jane is “really a decent guy,” whose only problem is that he is a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  He mentions details I haven’t heard before-granules of detergent? A towel used to catch her blood? Strange handwriting back in her room at the Law Quad?

  My interest seriously wanes, however, when he starts using the terms “cold cucumber” in her “vaginal vault.”

  I know this talk, just like I know police talk-

  She probably hadn’t been a bad-looking girl,
but that stocking round her neck could’ve choked an ox.

  I lock my door and go to bed. For the time being, the case is closed for me.

  (1960)

  If only life and death were better understood by me.

  I dread and fear death and yet am uncertain of life and the why of it.

  I have yet to have real faith, believe and follow without question.

  When I can accept time, life, and death,

  I will be ready for the responsibilities of adulthood

  and will step into them easily and with confidence.

  Now I am but a wondering, confused individual.

  TWO ECLIPSES

  TWO ECLIPSES

  1.

  We don’t really live

  in stories or scenes,

  not at all.

  The fan whirs,

  the tea boils,

  old men shout

  outside a Puerto Rican social club.

  Inside the loop of

  the mind, it’s

  a different story.

  The detective and the dreamer

  cobble things together

  from whatever lies

  nearby, like

  plumbers fixing pipes

  with rags and string

  in a poor country.

  Inside the loop of

  my mind, I find

  a lone egret

  standing on one leg

  at the edge of a lake, preternaturally

  still, listening

  for something.

  2.

  The lake is round and quiet-

  just a few small waves

  crested with sugar

  when suddenly a stone

  is thrown

  into the fresh-

  water. Gloop.

  Then another,

  gloop. And another,

  gloop, gloop.

  Rings grow,

  shudder through

  the cattails, come widely

  toward shore. I can’t see

  the stones sinking

  to the deep, but I know

  that they are.

  MY MOTHER STILL DREAMS

  of her sister. Jane appears,

  always holding her head.

  My head hurts, she says.

  What happened to my head?

  It’s too late to help her;

  my mother wakes with a start.

  It’s too late to help her, but the want

  still cripples the heart.

  BARRICADES

  It was in the summer of 1969

  that my mother began barricading doors.

  It started in Europe.

  She and my father had gone ahead with plans

  to spend the summer abroad, just as Phil, broken,

  had gone on to New York alone.

  Throughout the summer, they found short paragraphs

  about the murders in English-language papers.

  It was news, even in Paris or Rome.

  By August, the case was eclipsed

  by another killing spree, the one eventually tied

  to the Manson Family.

  When they returned from Europe

  they moved to California, and from then on

  whenever my father went away on business, my mother

  would flit around the house, moving the furniture, saying,

  It’s no big deal, girls. It’s just time to barricade the doors.

  I remember barricade being a new word for me,

  one I was proud to have in my vocabulary.

  And she made it seem like fun, explaining how

  you have to wedge the chairs tightly below

  the doorknobs, how you have to place

  the breakables on top, so they can crash

  to the ground like an alarm.

  EMILY

  My grandfather was a small-town dentist

  famous for his cleanings-

  thorough, and rough.

  He’d been a dentist

  in the war, put men’s faces

  back together. Said

  he learned then

  if your bowels are moving

  and you don’t have a fever

  you’re pretty much fine.

  That doesn’t hurt, he’d say

  while working on our mouths.

  That can’t hurt at all.

  Six months after Jane died

  my mother sat reclined

  in his chair. Suddenly

  he said, I hope

  all that has happened

  hasn’t made you decide against

  having children. The truth was,

  she hadn’t planned on it

  before. Two years later,

  her first daughter

  was born.

  STACEY AND TRACEY

  Whenever we visited Michigan,

  Emily and I would lie

  in that same yellow room

  in those same twin beds

  each clutching

  a doll. I got Tracey

  (who had been Jane’s)

  and she got Stacey

  (who had been Mom’s).

  Stacey’s hair was a lush,

  curly red-brown;

  Tracey was a stringy

  platinum blonde.

  Hard little bodies

  with sad, shellacked faces,

  black eyes, daubed mouths.

  I’d give anything to know

  where they are now.

  LIES

  I told my first real lie to my friend Courtney, because she wanted to play in the basement of 31 Palm, the big house where I lived. We were seven years old, and sitting at the top of the basement stairs, looking down into the dark brown pit of rafters and passageways that terrified me. So I told her that we couldn’t play down there because I had a younger sister who went down there to play years ago and never returned.

  It worked-it scared Courtney enough that she never asked about it again. Unfortunately it also scared her so much that she went home and told her mother. It wasn’t long before her mother was on the phone to mine, greatly concerned about the fate of my younger sister.

  I don’t even know if I knew about Jane yet. The imaginary younger sister I had in mind was a small brown elfish thing named Hillary. And I can still feel her with me, even though I created her and murdered her in the same instant.

  (1960)

  I am lately childish and immature. I make so many resolutions, but they are always easily broken, leaving me with a sense of frustration.

  Lately I’ve been tired and easily irritated for no reason, especially with my friends.