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The police investigation had proved fruitless until last week. Friction among some of the five police agencies working on the case impeded progress, causing Governor William Milliken to observe that the departments had displayed only "passive cooperation" with one another. He ordered the state police to take over. The state cops played an important but unanticipated role in the first major break in the case. State Police Corporal David Leik returned from a vacation to find his house "disturbed." Leik's nephew, John Norman Collins, 23, had a key to the house. Going on Leik's report and other evidence, police arrested Collins, an Eastern Michigan senior, and charged him with the first-degree murder of Karen Sue Beineman. At week's end police were investigating to see if Collins, a student in good standing, could be tied to any of the other murders.
* Aside from Karen Beineman and Jane Mixer, the victims were Mary Fleszar, 19, Joan Schell, 20, Maralynn Skelton, 16, Dawn Basom, 13, and Alice Kalom, 23, An eighth girl, Margaret Phillips, 25, was shot to death in her Ann Arbor apartment July 6, but a suspect has been arrested and police do not connect her death with the others.