True Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Part VII

Murder of Roseann Quinn

Roseann M. Quinn (November 17, 1944 – January 2, 1973) was an American schoolteacher in New York City who was stabbed to death in 1973 by a man she had met at a bar. Her murder inspired Judith Rossner's best-selling 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was adapted into a 1977 film directed by Richard Brooks and starring Diane Keaton, and its follow-up fact-based semi-sequel for TV, Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer, released six years later in 1983. Quinn's murder also inspired the 1977 account Closing Time: The True Story of the "Goodbar" Murder by New York Times journalist Lacey Fosburgh. The case was the subject of Season 3 Episode 2 of Investigation Discovery's series A Crime to Remember in 2015 ("Last Night Stand").

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 (due to scoliosis), 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 at Newark State College (now Kean University) where she majored in elementary education and graduated in 1966. She was on the staff of Independent, the college's student-run newspaper.

Later life

After graduating, Quinn 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 have heard.

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.

Quinn reportedly developed a habit of meeting men and taking them home. 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.

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 studio apartment at 253 West 72nd Street on the 7th floor, 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.