Reason First: The Michigan Murders

In any case where science and reason see involvement, what law enforcement should not rely on is the “assistance” of a psychic. To find a resolution to the Michigan or Co-Ed Murders, officials enlisted the “help” of Dutch medium Peter Hurkos.

The evidence of murderer John Norman Collins' vicious acts appeared on the underwear of the victims with strands of his hair. The victims, 19-year-old Mary Fleszar, Dawn Basom, 13, Alice Kalom, 23, Karen Sue Beineman, 18, had been raped, mutilated, dismembered, beaten, strangled, and or stabbed.

The small town of Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1967-69 experienced the horrors of Collins’ actions. But reason and science ruled the day in capturing and processing Collins. The jury all found the murderer to be culpable. The judge sentenced the brute to life imprisonment.

One must remember that forensics officials solved the cases. No seer can hold a light up to the pentrating glow of rationality applied to a monstrous situation. Hurkos should have been sat down in relation to Collins and his murders.

Mysticism doesn’t just apply to faith or organized religion. Psychics, mediums, and seers have no place in solving cases. There’s a link between Collins and Hurkos. They were both attuned to the unknown and unknowable. Collins played destroyer under the impression that he should deny the young women a place in this life.

Hurkos may not have been a murderous miscreant but he still is a kindred spirit of Collins. Both bring to mind what writer and thinker Ayn Rand called a social metaphysician. This person worships society rather than a specific religious sect. Hurkos felt that he could determine the killer through subscribing to the fantastic.

Collins, of course, subscribed to faith. Faith in the unknown and unknowable may be the obvious. His self-absorption rather than egoism prompted him to idealize himself. His disgustingness sprouted from his rejection of thinking. His ideation to carry out these crimes equated to the faith that most people have. He just took it to the extreme. And in essence the potential for absolute destruction is baked into any faith.

Even atheists can use the rejection of adherence to a specific religious sect. Anyone who goes outside of the facts of reality whether going on a murder spree or allegedly foreseeing the attributes of a savage, have too much in common. Of course the former is criminal and the latter is just too weird and false to let go.

Collins stole the lives of these young women as a way of asserting his impotent over them. By disrupting their lives, he treated them as if they had no importance in this life. Collins is a mystic who could not even keep from interrupting their lives permanently.

With Hurkos, he of course represented coincidence as the law authorities didn’t even need him to offer his “services” during the last phases of capturing Collins.

What Collins holds against the world is his willingness to not think. He could have thought before extinguishing the lives of the young women. He had every opportunity to be an upstanding citizen. But his case showed that he wanted destruction for its own sake. He wished to see the women struggle and cry for those last few breaths of air. He wanted to see them perish under the might of his own form of mysticism.

When it concerns the man that placed his faith in his own evil behavior, Collins definitely fits this profile. He may have given prayers to the unknown or unknowable or he might have been irreligious. The idea is that the faith that amounted to the Michigan Murders meant that Collins found drive in his own sense of the mystical. He is the embodiment of the notion of what Miss Rand called “faith and force.”

To take into account ideations to commit heinous crimes involves a special reserve of belief in the alleged “higher power.” Collins must have tapped into this indefinite, shaky, and low sensibility to even dream up committing nightmarish crimes.

And it all came down to the hair. Thanks to the heroics of the forensics team, Collins saw justice. He is, as of this writing, still serving time at Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan. The men of science and the mind used reason to solve this case through neutron analysis. This is the real power. The ability to think out something rather than to just have ideas, in the case of a criminal, is crucial to nabbing monsters like Collins. It is the police and investigators who should be praised for their heroism. They are what help to mitigate and perhaps one day eliminate the forces of wickedness.