HUNTER Found WITHOUT HEAD — In the SNOW FOOTPRINTS of a HALF-MAN HALF-DOG: Horrifying in Michigan

🐺 The Scars of Manistee: The Beheading of Richard Collins

The Manistee National Forest in northern Michigan, January 2000. It was here, amidst a fresh blanket of snow, that the border between myth and grim reality violently dissolved. The story of Richard Collins, a seasoned hunter found savagely killed, is not a simple tragedy of the wilderness. It is a chilling account of a police cover-up and an encounter with a creature that moved, impossibly, between the form of a man and the gait of a beast—a creature the whispers of old lumberjacks and Ottawa Indians call the Dogman.

Richard Collins, 47, an engineer by trade but a woodsman at heart, knew Manistee like his own backyard. Hunting was his sanctuary, and on Saturday morning, January 15th, 2000, he set out with his trusty Remington 700 rifle, skis, and survival gear. The conditions were perfect: a crisp $-10^\circ \text{C}$ and fresh, untouched snow, ideal for reading tracks.

When the sun set and Collins’s old pickup remained alone at the forest edge, his wife, Carol,’s anxiety quickly escalated. By 10 p.m., after hours of calling his emergency radio frequency and hearing only dead static, she called the Manistee County Sheriff’s Office. The full search was postponed until dawn, deeming a nighttime search too dangerous for the rescuers.

The Scene of Pure Chaos

The search began at dawn on January 16th. Collins’s ski tracks, smooth and confident, led the search party three miles deep into the woods. The tracks suggested Collins was tracking game, moving at a careful, measured pace.

Three miles in, the first anomaly appeared: the carcass of a large male deer, lying just 20 meters from the trail. It had not been shot. The neck and flank were torn with immense force, but the carcass was mostly uneaten. Veteran hunter Bob, a volunteer on the search, noted that the wounds were ragged, not the multiple, frenzied bites of a wolf pack, but as if huge claws had simply ripped out chunks of meat. It was a senseless, violent rampage, an act of killing without the motivation of hunger.

Collins’s ski track paused near the deer, an evident sign he had seen the slaughter. Then, the pace quickened. He was no longer hunting; he was moving with purpose, on alert.

Another half mile later, the trail ended in a small, snow-covered clearing—a scene one officer would later call one of “pure chaos.”

The Rifle: Richard Collins’s powerful Remington 700 rifle lay in the snow. Its thick wooden stock was snapped in half like a twig, and its hardened steel barrel was bent at an impossible, unnatural angle. A firearms expert later concluded this required a force equivalent to several thousand pounds per square inch, ruling out any accidental impact. The weapon had been broken “as if it had been taken by both ends and bent over a knee. Only the knee was made of steel.”

The Footprints: Amidst Collins’s boot prints, other tracks were visible. They were the clear prints of huge bare feet, about 14 inches (35 cm) long, with an unnaturally narrow heel and long toes that clearly imprinted a deep claw mark at the end of each one. The bipedal stride was enormous, nearly 2 meters.

The Transformation: Most horrifyingly, the two-legged prints suddenly gave way to four-legged prints. The hind foot prints were joined by canine-like front paw prints, yet still marked by those eerie, long fingers and claws. The creature could shift its mode of movement at will.

A deep furrow stretched across the snow from where the rifle lay, marking the trail of a heavy, dragged body, accompanied by the two-legged version of the monstrous tracks.

Fifty yards deeper into the oppressive, silent gloom of the pines, the trail ended at the base of a large, snow-covered boulder. Richard Collins’s body was found leaning against the rock. His orange vest was shredded. His torso bore three deep, parallel lacerations, the wounds jagged, suggesting giant claws had torn through his muscle and broken three ribs.

The most horrific discovery was the mutilation: The body had been decapitated. The neck wound was ragged, the vertebrae shattered, consistent not with a clean cut, but with the head being torn off. Collins’s head was gone and was never found.

Evidence that Defied Science

The arrival of the county sheriff and the coroner, Dr. Alan Fairburn, only amplified the shock. Fairburn’s preliminary assessment was damning: the wounds were not the work of any animal he had studied.

Forensics made dozens of plaster casts of the two-legged and four-legged prints. At a height of about nine feet (three meters) on a nearby pine, an officer noticed three deep, parallel scratches that exactly matched the pattern of the wounds on Collins’s chest.

The plaster casts were sent to the FBI and leading state biologists. The conclusions were unanimous and profoundly unsettling:

Identity: The prints did not belong to any known species. Not a bear, whose anatomy was completely different. Not a primate, which do not exist in Michigan, and whose feet do not possess claws.

Weight: Based on the depth of the prints in the dense, frozen snow, the creature weighed an estimated 400 to 500 pounds (200 kg). This weight, combined with the impossible stride and anatomy, utterly refuted any theory of a human hoax using specialized footwear.

Official Verdict: The FBI’s conclusion was stark: “The origin of the tracks has not been established.”

Dr. Fairburn’s sealed appendix to the official report echoed the finding: “The nature of the damage to the bone and muscle tissue of the cervical spine is incompatible with any known predatory animal in North America, nor does it correspond to damage caused by cutting or chopping instruments.”

The Dogman and the Denial

The official version, hastily constructed, declared the killer to be an “unusually large and aggressive black bear” that had woken early from hibernation. The tragedy was officially written off as a “hunting accident.”

But in the local community, the whispers of the Ottawa Indians and old trappers found a new, terrifying anchor. They recalled the legend of the Dogman: a two-legged creature with the head of a wolf, a local horror story suddenly made terrifyingly real.

An internal memo, written by a detective before his transfer, exposed the official lie, refuting the bear theory point by point: the broken rifle, the 9-foot scratches, the impossible anatomy, and the beheading and theft of the victim’s head. The detective concluded, “All the physical evidence we have indicates that Richard Collins was attacked and killed by a large unknown predator capable of both bipedal and quadrupedal movement.”

The final piece of the mosaic was found by a local journalist: an old trapper named Frank, who had been in the woods on January 15th, 2000. Frank recounted hearing a “furious guttural roar” followed by an abrupt human scream. Hiding, he witnessed a tall, dark figure moving quickly on two legs. Its gait was stooping and inhuman, and its head was an elongated snout, like a huge dog or wolf. Crucially, in one dark, fur-covered hand, it carried something dark and round—a detail that explains the missing head.

The authorities had their answer: admitting the truth would have meant acknowledging the existence of a highly intelligent, deadly apex predator in a popular National Forest, collapsing the entire region’s tourism industry. It was easier, and cheaper, to blame one rogue bear and bury the physical evidence.

The plaster casts were “lost.” The internal memo disappeared. The Richard Collins case was closed.

The tragedy of Richard Collins served as a chilling, unsung warning. The Manistee National Forest, despite its beauty, holds a deeper, primal terror. When the sun sets and the cold wind howls through the Michigan pines, the locals still whisper that it is not the wind they hear, but the Dogman going out to hunt.