The other sixties Murders
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
--H. P. Lovecraft
I was absentmindedly folding my laundry on an ordinary Wednesday, listening to podcasts, when I heard the hosts of My Favorite Murder, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark mention my hometown of Muskegon...and then the University of Michigan, the college where I was a senior. The college where a law student named Jane Mixer, was murdered after putting up a bulletin in the student union, asking for a ride two and a half hours west to Muskegon, Michigan. Jane was thought to be a casualty of the Co-Ed killer.
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I felt instantly close to the girl. The story of her murder and the murders of the six other girls hers was connected to had a bigger impact on me than any of their other stories had. Jane and I share a university and a hometown. I'm turning 23 this year, the age she was when she was killed. I saw my mortality through her death and couldn't help but think of all of the things I still need to do. I'm not done living, and neither was she.
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I pictured the ride I had taken back and forth to Muskegon countless times since I started school in Ann Arbor. I pictured the time my dad dropped me off at my dorm for my first year and how we both cried. I remembered my tearful ride back after winter break sophomore year, not ready for another difficult semester.
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Jane Mixer should have had these kinds of memories to share.
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Oddly enough, her story ended up not being connected to the others after DNA recovered in 2005 linked another man to Jane's murder. Her niece, Maggie Nelson, wrote a book about attending the retrial for her aunt's murder in her book, The Red Parts. Nelson and I have similar thoughts about the ways in which the media portrays young women who are victims of unspeakable violence. When talking about the difference between how newspapers reported on her aunt's murder in the sixties and how newspaper reported on the retrial in 2005, she said:
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"Although over thirty years apart, the Detroit News and Hartford Courant articles kept to a similar script. They both paired a “she had so much to live for” sentimentality with quasi-pornographic descriptions of the violence each girl had suffered. The main difference was that the ‘60s articles used a more modest lexicon: “violated,” “co-ed,” etc.-and that they were sandwiched in between articles about the war in Vietnam instead of the war in Iraq." (p. 77, The Red Parts)
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I have included photos of articles from The Michigan Daily and the Detroit Free Press as well as some photos I took while exploring the places where the victim's bodies were found. I included a shot of the woods where Maralynn Skelton's body was found on the landing page, but the pictures of the other sites can be found by clicking on the More tab. Click the photo below to continue on to the introduction.
