Roseann Quinn

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Roseann Quinn (1944 – January 2, 1973) was an American schoolteacher whose murder inspired Judith Rossner's 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, as well as the 1977 film adaptation directed by Richard Brooks. Her death also inspired the fictionalized 1977 true crime account Closing Time: The True Story of the "Goodbar" Murder by New York Times journalist Lacey Fosburgh.

Contents

[edit] Life and career

Roseann Quinn (1944-1973)
Roseann Quinn (1944-1973)

Roseann Quinn, the daughter of John and Roseann Quinn, was born in 1944. Her Irish American family moved to Mine Hill, a section of Dover, New Jersey from the Bronx when she was 11 years old. John Quinn was an executive with Bell Laboratories in Parsippany, New Jersey. Quinn had three siblings, two brothers, John and Dennis, and a sister, Donna. Quinn spent a year in the hospital with polio when she was 13, and afterwards walked with a slight limp. She attended Morris Catholic High School in Denville, New Jersey, graduating in 1962. Her yearbook said that she was "Easy to meet ... nice to know."

Quinn enrolled in Newark State Teachers College (now Kean University). A classmate said that she had "a terrific sense of humor and was down to earth. She had no phony pretenses. Also, she was very generous. No matter how much she had, if you needed it, she'd share with you." Quinn graduated in 1966 and soon moved to New York City, teaching for three years in Newark, New Jersey.

In September 1969, she began teaching at St. Joseph's School for the Deaf in the Bronx, where she taught a class of eight eight-year-olds. Many times, she voluntarily stayed after school to help them, other teachers recalled. "The students loved her," a spokesman for the school would later say.

Roseann Quinn's apartment building. (Photo taken 2006)
Roseann Quinn's apartment building. (Photo taken 2006)

By May of 1972 she had moved to a studio apartment at 253 West 72nd Street. The building had formerly been known as the Hotel West Pierre before being converted to apartments four years earlier. This was at a time when the Upper West Side was not nearly as gentrified and upscale as it is today. Even with a doorman, it wasn't the safest place for a single woman to live alone.

According to her acquaintances and neighbors, Quinn would sit by herself and read at bars on the West Side. One witness would later comment, "Something about her made me want to cry. She could be the most alone-looking person in the world." Police Captain John M. McMahon, however, would later claim that "She was an affable, outgoing, friendly girl. Her friends were rather diverse. She knew teachers and artists and her circle of friends was a very large, interracial group ... She knew an awful lot of people." One friend who would later spoke to the media said that she struck up a conversation with him by revealing that she had been reading his lips and listening to a conversation at the other end of the bar that she couldn't otherwise have understood.

Not all of her bar acquaintances were so benign. Quinn developed a habit of meeting and taking home men who were, as one writer put it, "rough and unattractive... who weren't her social equal, her mental equal, or her equal at anything."

Her next-door neighbor would hear screams coming from Quinn's apartment. Once she intervened and saw a man dashing out of Quinn's apartment yelling obscenities and found Quinn disheveled and bruised, with a black eye, sobbing.

"What on earth possessed you to bring him up?" the neighbor asked. Quinn didn't reply. The neighbor tried to console her, saying "It's all over now, at least you'll know better." But ten days later the neighbor heard the same sounds emanating from Quinn's apartment.

"After that it happened a lot," the neighbor said. "Every two weeks or so... It always sounded like a fight. I guess it was some kind of rough sex. Some people get off on that and she must have had to be raped or kicked around or something to feel any excitement or thrill. But what could we do?"

Quinn had been attending night courses at Hunter College, and by December of 1972 had completed about half of her work towards her masters degree in her specialty of teaching the deaf. Later that month she attended the faculty Christmas party at St. Joseph's School and a party for the children the next day. "She was a friendly, pleasing personality, not only with the children, but also with the other teachers," a spokesman for the school would later say.

[edit] The murder

The All State Cafe (formerly Tweeds) across the street from Roseann Quinn's apartment building, where she met her killer. (Photo taken 2006)
The All State Cafe (formerly Tweeds) across the street from Roseann Quinn's apartment building, where she met her killer. (Photo taken 2006)

On the evening of January 1, 1973, Quinn went across the street from her apartment to a bar named W.M. Tweeds, after William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, New York City's infamously corrupt 19th Century political boss and head of Tammany Hall (the bar has since been renamed the All State Cafe). At Tweeds she met John Wayne Wilson and a stockbroker Wilson was staying with. After the stockbroker went home by himself at around 11:00, Wilson and Quinn went to her apartment, where they smoked marijuana and attempted to have intercourse but, as Wilson would later tell his attorney, he was unable to achieve an erection.

She demanded that he leave her apartment and an argument ensued. After a struggle, Wilson picked up a knife and, according to his police statement, Quinn said to him, "Kill me, kill me please." He stabbed her eighteen times in the neck and abdomen, then, finding that during the struggle he had somehow managed to achieve an erection, proceeded to rape her corpse.

After inserting a candle into her vagina and smashing a bust of Quinn against her head, he covered her with a bathrobe, showered, and left the apartment. But before he left he wiped his fingerprints off the murder weapon, the door knobs and any other surface he might have touched, effectively santizing the crime scene. In a grisly piece of luck, the killer had been nude at the time of the murder. Had he been clothed, he would have been covered in blood and there would have been no way he could have left the apartment without attracting the attention of the police. Later that night Wilson confessed the crime to the stockbroker, who gave him enough money to leave town. Wilson first flew to Miami and later went to Indiana.

The body was not discovered until the morning of January 3rd, when the authorities at St. Joseph's School, alarmed that she had not shown up for work in two days, sent a teacher down to her apartment to check up on her. The building's superintendent, Amedio Gizzi, let the teacher into the apartment, where they found Quinn's body, which was later identified at the morgue by her 25-year-old brother, John.

Roseann Quinn's wake was held at Bermingham Funeral Home at 249 S. Main Street, Wharton, New Jersey, and her funeral was held at St. Mary's Church in Wharton, only a mile away from her family's home in Mine Hill, on January 6, 1973. The Funeral Mass was celebrated by Quinn's cousin, the Rev. John Waldron of St. Teresa of Avila Church in Brooklyn.

She was buried at St. Mary's Cemetery, a quarter of a mile from the church.

[edit] Investigation and Aftermath

In the days before DNA evidence, there wasn't much to connect Quinn and her killer. No one at Tweeds knew the identity of the man she left with or could say what he looked like, and the crime scene had been effectively sanitized. Desperate to crack a case that had been on the front pages for days, the NYPD released a police sketch that ran in several New York newspapers on Sunday, January 7, 1973. The sketch was not of the killer, but of the stockbroker who had been at the bar that night and had left early. When he saw the sketch in the newspaper, the stockbroker recognized himself -- and panicked.

Fearing he might be charged as an accessory, the stockbroker called his lawyer, who contacted the police and made a deal for immunity in exchange for Wilson’s whereabouts. NYPD Detectives Patrick Toomey and Thomas Lafferty, of New York's Fourth District Homicide Squad, flew to Indiana, where, accompanied by Indianapolis Police Sgt. H. Greg Byrne, they arrested Wilson at his brother's house at 1320 North Delaware Street in Indianapolis. "He offered no resistance, and acted as though he had expected arrest," police sources said. Wilson was brought back to New York and incarcerated in The Tombs.

After spending some weeks in The Tombs, Wilson was sent to Bellevue Hospital Center on April 19th to test for childhood brain damage that his attorney planned to claim as part of an insanity defense. Wilson stayed at Bellevue for several weeks but the tests were never administered, and he was returned to The Tombs. Though he had been diagnosed as suicidal, Wilson was placed in a regular cell on the fourth floor. In May, Wilson got into an argument with a prison guard and threatened to kill himself. The guard taunted him by asking if he wanted sheets to do it with and later threw bed sheets into his cell. Wilson used those sheets to hang himself in his cell on May 5, 1973. He had outlived his victim by 123 days.

An investigation was held into the circumstances of Wilson's death, but no charges were ever filed.

[edit] References

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