A look backward look through rose-colored granny glasses suggests that the summer of 1967 in the East Village was all about peace and love.
But then came the fall.
After midnight on Oct. 8, 1967, a janitor who stumbled home to his boiler room cot at 169 Avenue B, a hippie flophouse, found the space occupied by a young man and a teenage girl.
They were naked and dead, their heads bashed with a brick.
He was James Hutchinson, 21, a wanderer from Rhode Island who was known around the hippie haven of Tompkins Square Park by the nickname Groovy. She was Linda Fitzpatrick, 18, a newbie to the scene who had grown up in a cut-stone English manor on posh Doubling Road in Greenwich, Conn.
After midnight on Oct. 8, 1967, a janitor who stumbled home to his boiler room cot at 169 Avenue B, a hippie flophouse, found the space occupied by a young man and a teenage girl.
They were naked and dead, their heads bashed with a brick.
He was James Hutchinson, 21, a wanderer from Rhode Island who was known around the hippie haven of Tompkins Square Park by the nickname Groovy. She was Linda Fitzpatrick, 18, a newbie to the scene who had grown up in a cut-stone English manor on posh Doubling Road in Greenwich, Conn.
Fitzpatrick's father owned Knickerbocker Mills, a profitable coffee and spice importer. Weeks before, she had refused to return to snooty Oldfields boarding school near Baltimore for her final year of high school. Instead, she was determined to move to the East Village to pursue her muse as a psychedelic painter.
"I'll be perfectly safe," she assured her mother.
The "Groovy Murders," as they became known, proved to be a hippie culture buzz kill. Newsweek labeled it "Trouble in Hippieland."
"The love thing is dead," an East Village hippie told reporter John Kifner. "The flower thing is dead."
The Village Voice said the murders were "a reminder to Americans that freaking out in the land of the free and the home of the brave can be fatal."
The press seemed shocked to discover that a suburban rich kid known as "Fitzpoo" to her preppy friends was slumming with East Village counter-culturalists with street nicknames like Cherokee, Gypsy, Pepsi and Groovy.
One newspaper called her "the girl who had everything" - meaning money. Her mother described her as "perfectly normal."
She was said to have dropped acid for the first time that May, when she sneaked away from her parents during a Memorial Day vacation in Bermuda.
Back in New York that summer, she was drawn to the emerging hippie scene downtown, ping-ponging between two worlds. One night, she was cocooned inside her family's 30-room mansion. The next, she was sharing a funky sleeping bag on the sidewalk outside the Psyche-Delicatessen head shop on Avenue A.
She would travel down from Greenwich by train with dad's cash in her pocket and treat a few pals to "hallucinatory revels," as one scribe put it.
She moved into the Village Plaza Hotel on Washington Place on Labor Day, paying $120 cash in advance for a month's rent. But she abandoned the room two weeks later and flopped here and there.
Stick-figure thin with long, dark hair, the flamboyant, harmonica-playing Hutchinson was a magnet for reporters who journeyed into Tompkins Square hoping to capture the hippie ethos that summer. He also attracted Linda Fitzpatrick.
A yearbook photo published after Fitzpatrick was killed shows a proper young Social Register aspirant with a flip hairdo wearing a schoolgirl blouse. That young woman would have been a stranger to her new East Village friends.
Police said she and Groovy were looking to score LSD at Tompkins Square on Oct. 7, a Saturday. Thomas Dennis, a young black man who was a fixture in the park, steered them a half-block away to a five-story Avenue B tenement.
There they met Donald Ramsey, 26, a self-declared Yoruba priest who lived in the building with his wife and newborn son. Thomas Fink, a police boss, said the pair were "enticed into the basement, where they were given the drug."
Cops withheld most of the gory details of the events that night. But newspapers coast to coast carried an Associated Press story two days later that included this sensational tidbit: "Police said it was a wild interracial LSD party that climaxed in the bludgeon slayings of the two young people."
Fitzpatrick had been sexually assaulted. Ramsey and Fred Wright, the janitor who found the bodies, were later charged with robbing and raping another woman, a 22-year-old from Brooklyn, in the boiler room earlier that same night.
In a vivid confession to police detectives, Ramsey blamed it all on a strange acid trip.
"I was really flying," he said. "I saw spots and colors and whirling things."
Police saw rape and murder.
2 окт 2024
