Roseann Quinn


Roseann Quinn was an American schoolteacher in New York City who was stabbed to death in 1973 by a man she met at a bar. Her murder inspired Judith Rossner's best-selling 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was adapted as a 1977 film directed by Richard Brooks and starring Diane Keaton, and its follow-up fact-based semi-sequel for TV, ', released six years later in 1983. Quinn's murder also inspired the 1977 account ' by New York Times journalist Lacey Fosburgh. The case was the subject of a Season 3 episode of Investigation Discovery's series A Crime to Remember in 2015.

Early life and education

Quinn was born in 1944 in the Bronx, to Irish Americans John and Roseann Quinn. She had two brothers, John and Dennis, and a sister, Donna. When Quinn was 11 years old, her family moved to Mine Hill Township, near Dover, New Jersey; her father was an executive with Bell Laboratories in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. When she was 13, Quinn spent a year in the hospital after a back operation, which left her with a slight limp.
Quinn attended Morris Catholic High School in Denville, New Jersey and graduated in 1962. Her yearbook said she was "Easy to meet... nice to know." Quinn enrolled in Newark State Teachers College and graduated in 1966.

Career

After graduating, Quinn soon moved to New York City and taught 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. She voluntarily stayed after school to help the children often, other teachers recalled. "The students loved her," a spokesman for the school later said.
By May 1972, Quinn had moved into a studio apartment at 253 West 72nd Street in Manhattan. The building had been known as the Hotel West Pierre before being converted to apartments four years earlier. According to her acquaintances and neighbors, Quinn would sit by herself and read at bars on the West Side. Police Captain John M. McMahon later said "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 later spoke to the media said that Quinn had struck up a conversation with him by revealing that she had been reading his lips and following a conversation at the other end of the bar that she could not otherwise have heard.

Alleged double life

Quinn reportedly developed a habit of meeting and taking home men. Her next-door neighbor had previously heard screams coming from Quinn's apartment. One time, she intervened and saw a man dashing out of Quinn's apartment yelling obscenities. The neighbor found Quinn disheveled and bruised, with a black eye, sobbing.
Quinn had been attending night courses at Hunter College, and by December 1972, had completed about half of the requirements for a master's 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.

Murder

On the evening of New Year's Day 1973, Quinn went across the street from her apartment to a bar named W.M. Tweeds, at 250 West 72nd Street, where she met John Wayne Wilson. Wilson's friend, Geary Guest, had left around 11:00 p.m., before Wilson met Quinn. Wilson and Quinn went to her apartment, where they smoked marijuana and attempted to have intercourse. As Wilson later told his attorney, he was unable to achieve an erection. He claimed that Quinn insulted him and demanded that he leave her apartment, and an argument ensued. After a struggle, Wilson picked up a knife and, according to his police statement, stabbed Quinn 18 times in the neck and abdomen.
After the murder, Wilson covered Quinn's body with a bathrobe, showered, and left the apartment. Before leaving, he wiped his fingerprints off the murder weapon, the doorknobs and other surfaces that he had touched. Later that night, Wilson confessed the crime to Guest. Believing that Wilson was fabricating the story in order to get a plane ticket home, Guest gave him enough money to leave town. Wilson first flew to Miami to pick up his wife, Kathy, and they later flew to Indiana.
Quinn's body was not discovered until the morning of January 3. The authorities at St. Joseph's School, alarmed that Quinn had neither called nor shown up for work in two days, sent a teacher to her apartment to check up on her. Amedio Gizzi, the building superintendent, let the teacher into the apartment, where they found Quinn's body. Quinn's 25-year-old brother John later identified the body at the morgue.

Funeral

Quinn's wake was held at Bermingham Funeral Home at 249 S. Main Street, Wharton, New Jersey. Her funeral was held on January 6, 1973, at St. Mary's Church in Wharton, a mile from her family's home in Mine Hill. The funeral mass was led 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.

Investigation and aftermath

In the days before DNA evidence, there was little to connect Quinn to her killer. No one at Tweeds knew the identity of the man with whom she had left, nor could they recall his appearance. The crime scene had been effectively sanitized. Desperate to crack a case that had been on the front pages for days, the New York City Police Department released a police sketch that ran in several New York City newspapers on Sunday, January 7, 1973. The sketch was not of the killer, but was that of Wilson's acquaintance Geary Guest.
Guest was not sure whether Wilson had committed the murder until he saw Quinn's name in a newspaper article. Fearing that he might be charged as an accessory after the fact, Guest first called his friend Fred Ebb and Ebb's personal assistant, Gary Greenwood. Guest told Ebb and Greenwood that he could not tell them what had happened over the phone, but said that it was the worst thing anyone with which one could be involved. He said he was going to California to see them and then hung up. Guest arrived at Ebb's home in Bel Air, Los Angeles the next day and then told Ebb and Greenwood about Wilson and the murder. Guest said that he had been out with Wilson and had left early because he had to go to work in the morning. He said that when he woke up, Wilson had not returned to the apartment, and Guest became worried. Wilson subsequently arrived and confessed the murder to him, and Guest gave him money.
Ebb called Guest's therapist, Hadassah, in New York; she said that she would contact an attorney and would call him back as soon as possible. Shortly thereafter, she and the attorney called back; the attorney advised Ebb to put Guest on the first plane back to New York City. He also advised Ebb and Greenwood not to say a word about what Guest had told them.
In mid-March, Ebb and Greenwood flew to New York City. It took more than two weeks to convince Guest to talk to the police, as Guest agonized over the fact that his information could send his friend Wilson to prison for life or to death row. Guest's lawyer contacted the police and secured his immunity in exchange for revealing Wilson’s location.
NYPD detectives Patrick Toomey and John Lafferty of the Fourth District Homicide Squad flew to Indiana, where, accompanied by Indianapolis Police Sgt. H. Greg Byrne, they arrested Wilson at his mother's house in Indianapolis. Wilson was brought back to New York and was incarcerated in the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs.
After spending some weeks in the Tombs, Wilson was sent to Bellevue Hospital Center on April 19 to be tested for childhood brain damage, which 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 eventually returned to the Tombs. Although he had been diagnosed as suicidal, the cells for the suicide watch were full, so 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 help him commit suicide and later threw bed sheets into his cell. Wilson used those sheets to hang himself on May 5, 1973. An investigation was held into the circumstances of Wilson's death, but no charges were ever filed.

In popular culture

The case has been depicted several times, including: