Speed Kills

Flanked by a sleazy bar and grill and a dusty antique-and-junk shop, the tawdry tenement at 169 Avenue B on Manhattan's Lower East Side is typical of the area. Decaying plaster and peeling paint festoon its dark blue hall ways, and a flight of creaky wood stairs leads down to an oppressively low-ceilinged cellar that reeks of dog droppings and rancid garbage. A single naked light bulb illuminates the grimy heating pipes, the cockroach-scampered walls, and piles of loose, whitewashed firebricks from the building's boiler. It hardly seems the place for a tryst, yet into that foul tomb last week walked a pair of hippie "love children" intent on the pursuit of passion. Instead they rendezvoused with death.

James Leroy Hutchinson, 21, was a whole bouquet by himself to New York's flower people, a tattooed drifter full of love and laughter who turned on to every stimulant--from simple, undrugged fun to crystallized "speed" (methedrine, a high-powered amphetamine), which he occasionally sold for profit. Hippies called him "Groovy." Linda Rae Fitzpatrick, 18, was the daughter of a Greenwich, Conn., spice merchant, a blonde and dreamy-eyed dropout from Maryland's exclusive Oldfields School. Alienated by whatever obscure forces from her parents--both of whom had previously been divorced --she had traded the security of exurbia for the turned-on squalor of hippie life in the East Village.

Somewhere along the way between Greenwich and the odd end of Greenwich Village, Linda took up with Groovy, who introduced her to the never-never world of drugs. Other hippies sensed that Linda was "not really hip." She had been around only since midsummer, and they considered her a newcomer, a "paranoid chick" who was frightened by the scene but was desperately trying to adapt. No one may ever know the full sequence of sordid events that ended her adaptation, but as police and hippies reconstructed the chain of circumstances that led to the murders of Groovy and Linda, it seemed tragically clear that, as the lapel buttons say, "speed kills."

Super Pep. Groovy and Linda apparently entered the cellar--which often served as a clandestine exchange point for drug sales--late at night. They may have been high on speed at the time, or "dropped" (swallowed) it later, preparatory to making love. Three or four other persons were also in the cellar. Possibly they were customers of Groovy's; all of them were turned on. Since methedrine is a super-pep drug whose "flash" generates an instant demand for action, it is likely that the onlookers demanded to "make it" with Linda. Groovy tried to defend the girl and was smashed with one of the boiler-wall bricks, his face crushed. Linda was raped four times and bashed with a brick. Their nude bodies, faces upturned, were found on the dank stone floor; their clothes, including Linda's black panties and Groovy's beat-up jacket, were neatly stowed in a corner.

Police later arrested three Negroes: Donald Ramsey, 26, who wears the fez of the Yoruba sect, a Black Nationalist cult, and whose apartment on the fifth floor of the murder building is decorated with Black Power posters; Thomas Dennis, also 26, a pot-smoking wino who hung out on the hippie fringe and proclaimed a code of racial violence; and Fred Wright, 31, assistant janitor in the building who lived in a small room just off the cellar, and who was held on "related" charges of raping and robbing another hippie girl just hours before the slayings. Wright was reputed to be the key-keeper of the cellar where the bodies were found. Ram sey told investigators that he was "flying" at the time, seeing "lights and colors."

Turned-on Taps. Drug-induced violence is nothing new to the neighborhoods where hippies live. San Francisco's Hashbury had a pair of unrelated murders in a single week last summer (TIME, Aug. 18), and the phenomenon of murder or suicide committed under the influence of LSD is becoming commonplace. But the deaths of Groovy and Linda carried an added burden of horror. They sent a chill through all of hippiedom. In the East Village, the hippies were convinced that it was time to move. The scene would never be the same. "The chick wasn't anything to us," said one wet-eyed hippie girl. "But Groovy, oh, Groovy. It's like our eyes were gone."

Groovy's closest friend, Galahad, who once ran a communal crash pad (dormitory), muttered about revenge and then, at Groovy's funeral in Pawtucket, R.I., played a turned-on taps on his dead friend's harmonica. In Greenwich, Conn., under a chilly autumn rain, Linda Fitzpatrick was buried, after a simple Episcopal service, in a cemetery not far from the rolling, red-leafed bridle paths of Round Hill Stables, where she used to ride.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.