The year 1970 marked the beginning of what true crime aficionados call “the golden age of serial murder.” With the vast majority of serial killer activity in United States History occurring in the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, countless cities across America have buried history just a Wikipedia article or Youtube video essay away from discovery — including Ann Arbor. Back in the time when female college students were still colloquially referred to as co-eds in newspaper headlines, seven students’ lives were taken.
Over a two year period from 1967 to 1969, seven women were murdered in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area with five of the killings spanning a short four month period in 1969. Three Eastern Michigan University students, two University of Michigan students, a sixteen year old and a thirteen year old were the victims. In the spring of 1969, female students began arming themselves with tear gas spray and switchblades. They ditched their hippie hitchhiking habits and instead sought out a man they trusted to accompany them home or huddled in packs of three or more to avoid walking dark streets alone. In July of that year, days after the seventh and final murder, news broke that the Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies botched a stakeout which could have led to the capture of the culprit. A vigil was held in the Diag for all of the victims followed by a march from campus to the county jail protesting the sheriff’s administration. Following the arrest and arraignment of a 22 year old EMU education major in August of 1969 and his subsequent conviction the following year, the murders ceased.
Nearly every piece of true crime media I’ve consumed about this series of killings, called the Michigan Murders, (also dubbed the Co-ed Killer, Ypsilanti Ripper or the Rainy Day Murders as Time Magazine called it) prefaces the story by stating this was “a time before” the infamy of figures like Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. The term “serial killer” had yet to enter the public vernacular. But was it truly a time before serial killers? During the course of the Michigan Murders, Manson was gathering followers and hanging with The Beach Boys. Ten years later, Bundy had escaped from prison for the second time and just as the local news cycle was catching up, he spent a night in an Ann Arbor student bar watching Michigan play in the Rose Bowl.
While the Michigan Murders lay outside of the nominal serial killing heyday, mass murder had been on the national consciousness for years. In 1968, the true crime film “The Boston Strangler,” which followed the string of thirteen murders in the Boston area in the early ‘60’s, appeared on Ann Arbor cinema screens. The EMU student convicted was rumored to have seen the film twice in succession when it came to town, several months after the discovery of the second body in his string of killings.
Most true crime media attempts to discern why killers did what they did. I, however, am concerned with why I can’t look away. I would not call myself a fan of the true crime genre. Although I had a JCS Criminal Psychology phase in 2021, I still know as little about Dahmer, Manson and Bundy as pop culture will allow. I know the important takeaways: don’t stop to help strangers, don’t do psychedelics and don’t join a cult. Aside from that, I just don’t have the stomach for it. In high school, when my friend’s dad turned on a true crime podcast at the start of a road trip, I looked at her parents’ impassive profiles from the back seat and wondered how we were expected to sit through the details of a horrific kidnapping for the next three hours.
However, I do love fake crime. Gimmicky procedurals like “Monk,” “Psych” and “Poker Face” are my TV binging go-tos. It’s the only comedy and crime cocktail I’ll take because I know to the left of Dulé Hill, off-screen, is a boom mic and craft services table.
Even though I’m not a fan, I have a sort of rubberneck effect whenever true crime crosses my social media feeds. I tap one thumbnail and hours later I’m still stuck watching, unable to look away. Two months ago I lay in bed trying to fall asleep when the thought occurred to me: “Has there ever been a serial killer in Ann Arbor?” Opening my eyes, I rolled over to grab my phone and quickly found two Wikipedia articles about mass murders which occurred in the greater Ann Arbor area. The first followed a series of killings around the year 1980, and the second detailed the aforementioned Michigan Murders. I did not get much sleep that night.
Thinking back now, I realize these are the only serial killings I’ve read more than a peripheral tidbit or factoid about. While perhaps mundane affairs to true crime lovers, I was shocked by the brazenness of the EMU serial killer; returning to the body, harboring keepsakes, picking up victims in front of numerous witnesses. How was he getting away with something so horrific while hardly trying?
Despite the article’s matter of fact tone, I found myself tearing up often as I read that night. Both saddened for the victims and disturbed by the details, my eyes filled as I read the most I ever had about a serial killer. I lay in the dark in my apartment with acid in my stomach, but my thumb scrolled upwards ceaselessly nonetheless. Skin crawling, I read that a woman working at the funeral home holding the first victim’s body in 1967 reported that a young man came in to ask to take a picture of the victim, introducing himself as a friend of the family. She sent him away, reporting the incident to the police afterwards, but her tip didn’t provide enough of a lead for the investigation to follow. The killer’s seeming complete disregard for his own culpability chilled me, in this instance especially, and a week after reading it I recounted the story to my sister while we drove to Trader Joe’s. “If she’d been a Veronica Mars, she would’ve pretended to go in the back to help him and called the cops while he waited at the front desk,” was her response.
“If” seems to be one of the clauses motivating the true crime genre’s biggest demographic of listeners. Women make up the majority of true crime fans and an often cited justification for this skew is the fact that women use true crime to learn how to protect themselves against violence. Listening along, they ask themselves: “What would I do if I was in this situation? How would I come out alive?” The implication I take issue with in these introspective questions is that the victims of these serial killers were harmed due to a lack of resourcefulness. In reality, they did as much to protect their own safety as they could with the information available to them. They repeatedly declined the offer of a ride home from the man trailing them. After missing the last bus, they told their friend they’d call them when they got to where they were heading after deciding to hitchhike the fifteen minutes into Ann Arbor with three male students. However, these precautions did not prevent them from ultimately facing danger at the hands of psychopathic misogyny. It will always be important to know how to protect yourself, but it is not womens’ responsibility to create safety — something which shouldn’t have been taken away in the first place.
I listened to three different podcasts which covered the Michigan Murders. The first pair of hosts read from the Wikipedia page, pronounced the “y” in Ypsilanti and got a handful of details wrong. The next was a dramatized account of the crime, weaving in narrative speculation of the killer’s interiority, accented with awkward car screech sound effects. Despite the episode being produced as a collaboration with a large team of creators, the hosts asserted that the EMU student convicted of the final murder in 1970 was responsible for all seven murders despite evidence to the contrary. Decades before this episode aired, DNA analytics in the early 2000s confirmed the 1970 conviction for the murder of the seventh victim. When investigators went looking into the other six cold cases, however, the DNA evidence taken from the scene of the third victim was not a match to the EMU student. Instead it matched and indicted another man, ultimately leading to his arrest and imprisonment. The third victim’s death had never been a perfect match to the profile established for the other six murders, and this evidence confirmed detectives’ suspicions of an additional killer in the area.
“My Favorite Murder,” the last podcast I listened to covering these events, dedicated half of their 33rd episode to the Michigan Murders. Although I rolled my eyes when they called the suspected EMU serial killer hot, I ended up enjoying the episode. While others left this second killer out of their retelling, the hosts gave airtime to this part of the story which had bothered me when I first read about it two months ago.
When the second man was convicted of one of the Michigan Murders in 2005, the key evidence which put him behind bars, a DNA match to a sweat sample taken from the scene in 1969, was suspected to be contaminated. Two DNA samples were taken from forensics for testing: the sweat sample which matched the man on trial, and a drop of blood from the victim’s hand. The blood sample was a match for another man entirely who was currently in prison for matricide; He was also four years old at the time of the murder. The fact that this third man had been a match at all led the defense to question whether there had been lab contamination when handling the DNA samples as it was highly unlikely the child would’ve been anywhere near the crime scene, let alone bleeding onto it. However, the lab did not concede there was any contamination and after just minutes of deliberation the jury found the defendant guilty.
The host of “My Favorite Murder” maintains the convicted man could still very likely have been guilty, however, she doesn’t believe the evidence which convicted him was enough for the jury to be confident in their decision beyond all reasonable doubt. This is one of the vital functions of the true crime genre. Keeping legal systems and police activity accountable through journalistic investigation and reporting is one of the most beneficial outcomes of the rise of true crime.
The true crime podcast, “Serial,” is one of the, if not the most famous and successful in this endeavor. Its influence not only led to the overturning of a 23-year-old case, but also kickstarted the popularity of true crime podcasts we see today. While the host of “My Favorite Murder” was not conducting the same kind of investigation in the half hour devoted to the Michigan Murders, these questions are important. The man convicted in 2005 passed away in 2019, three years after the episode’s airing. Despite this, others still question the verdict of his case.
True crime serves another vital purpose in that it allows for women who have suffered intimate partner violence to find community and advocacy. Women are most likely to be murdered by an intimate partner as opposed to a stranger, family member or other friend or acquaintance. While much of the anxiety surrounding violence against women pins it on the male stranger in the dark parking lot or on a hike in the woods, that stranger is the least likely demographic posing a risk to womens’ safety. This is a double-edged sword because, in one vein, true crime can bring awareness to intimate partner violence and help women recognize and escape abuse, but at the same time, it increases the perception of the prevalence of serial crime — the category which comprises the majority of true crime’s content.
I’ve always felt safe in Ann Arbor when walking home alone from my friend’s house across town or riding the bus after dark. I love that I can go for a walk in the evening and be surrounded by passing groups of friends walking together, rubbing their light-hearted confidence off on me. My oldest sister shipped me pepper spray during my first week of classes, but I usually forget I have it and only carry it with me on nights out because she would want me to. After I read these stories in March, however, I was suddenly hyper-aware of cars driving alongside me on the road. While I’d always dismissed my friends’ fears of random male strangers, I found myself clutching my house keys tightly when passing one on the street. I still believe Ann Arbor is a safe place to live, but now I get an eerie feeling when I wait at a bus stop on Washtenaw Avenue and think about the backroads between our twin college towns.
As far as I can tell, the Michigan Murders are not common knowledge among U-M students. At such a large university, a four year turnover of students may be too quick to keep the folklore alive, which may be for the best. I chose not to use any of the relevant names of these crimes because even though it’s public information, I want to respect the rights of the victims’ memories to remain at rest as these events near their sixtieth anniversary and the tragedy wanes from community consciousness.
Conceivably the first true crime media published about these events, “The Michigan Murders,” written in 1976 by Edward Keyes, changed the names of both the victims and the convicted EMU student. Perhaps because of the three years the author spent with the families and surrounding community members while conducting his research, Keyes felt infamy was neither a gift or curse he wished to bestow. A second edition of the novel was published in 2010 with an introduction which addresses Keyes’ decision to omit the pertinent names, calling it an “anachronism” considering the ease of access to public information afforded in the twenty-first century. Whether or not it’s futile in the age of the internet, I think this practice should be one true crime content creators consider when invoking the names of the dead who deserve ownership of their own names and stories.While I am not a fan of true crime, I acknowledge that the genre can do good in bringing scrutiny to police practices and raising awareness about patterns of abuse. However, when it comes to serial killers, I think the abundance of docuseries, podcast episodes and Netflix originals give them too much credit. Those losers were not uniquely cunning or clever. They were just lucky enough to be born in a time before DNA profiling, CCTV and unleaded gasoline.
Statement Correspondent Juliana Tanner can be reached at jntanner@umich.edu.
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