In the summer of 1969, seventeen-year-old Roxie Ann Phillips, a high school student from Milwaukie, Oregon, was spending her time in Salinas, California, visiting family friends. On the afternoon of June 30th, she went out for a walk and vanished. For weeks, there was no sign of the young woman. The search for Roxie ended in heartbreak on July 13th when her body was discovered partially buried in a wooded area just outside of Carmel.
An autopsy revealed that she had been brutally strangled to death, and most of her clothing was missing. The discovery launched an intense investigation that would soon connect her case to a string of terrifying murders hundreds of miles away.
The investigation into Roxie's death led detectives to a man named John Norman Collins, a student at Eastern Michigan University who had been briefly staying in Salinas. An eyewitness had seen Roxie getting into a silver-gray Oldsmobile Cutlass with Michigan license plates on the day she disappeared. The car was traced to Collins. Further investigation revealed that Collins and a friend, Andrew Manuel, had traveled to California in a house trailer that was later found abandoned behind the home of Manuel's grandparents. The trailer had been meticulously wiped clean of any fingerprints, but it was suspected to be the scene of the crime. The similarities between Roxie's murder and a series of killings of young women in Michigan, where Collins was the prime suspect in what was known as the "Co-ed Killer" case, were striking. In both instances, the victims were young women who had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Despite the strong evidence against him, including an indictment by a Monterey County Grand Jury for Roxie's murder, John Norman Collins was never brought to trial in California. At the time, he was facing charges for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman in Michigan. A bureaucratic struggle between the governors of Michigan and California ultimately resulted in Michigan refusing to extradite Collins. He was subsequently convicted of the Beineman murder and sentenced to life in prison. While investigators in both states were confident of the connection between the cases, the murder of Roxie Ann Phillips officially remains unsolved. Her case is a tragic example of justice denied, as the man widely believed to be responsible was never held accountable for her death. In a recent development, the Monterey County Sheriff's Office and District Attorney's Office Cold Case Task Force located key evidence from the original investigation in late 2024, offering a glimmer of hope that modern DNA technology might finally identify Roxie's killer and potentially shed more light on the other unsolved murders in Michigan.
