341: Roseann Quinn

The confetti from New Year’s Eve of 1972 had been swept away and New York City was grinding back to life. People returned to their desks, their routines, their ordinary lives. But at St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf, one teacher didn’t show up…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:47):
In the early nineteen seventies, New York City was a
metropolis tetering between decline and defiance. The streets were grimy
with neglect, the subway cars were covered in graffiti, and
crime statistics were climbing towards record highs. Despite this, the
city remained electric with possibility. Eight million people compressed into
five boroughs, each one convinced that they were living at

(01:09):
the center of the universe, and in many ways they
were right. This was still New York, after all, the
city that never sleeps, but it did hold its breath.
Sometimes in the small hours between midnight and dawn, when
the bars had emptied and the street lights hummed alone,
even New York could feel fragile. West seventy Second Street

(01:30):
cutstery Manhattan's upper west side, connecting the Hudson River to
Zandral Park. At the intersection of seventy second the Broadway
sat Sherman Square, a small triangular park that locals had
another name for Needle Park. By nineteen seventy three, the
nickname had already become infamous, immortalized in a film just

(01:50):
two years earlier. Here, in plain daylight, heroin dealers worked
the benches while attics knotted off against the trees. It
was an open air drug market, brazen and desperate, the
kind of place where discarded syringes glinted in the gutter
and everybody learned to look away. On New Year's Eve
of nineteen seventy two, the city erupted in its annual

(02:12):
ritual of noise and hope in Times Square. Half a
million people crushed together to watch the ball drop through
At Manhattan, apartment windows glowed with party lights, champagne corks,
ricochetted off sailings, strangers kissed at midnight. The year nineteen
seventy three arrived with fireworks and car horns and a
collective delusion that this time things could be different. By

(02:35):
the first of January, the hangovers had seven The city
woke slowly that Monday morning. Some businesses were closed, their
owners granting themselves one more day of rest. Saint Joseph's
School for the Deaf was one of them, its hallways empty,
its classroom stark. When it reopened the next day, Tuesday,
the second of January, students filtered back through its doors.

(02:58):
Teachers arrived with coffe lesson plants, shaking off the last
traces of holiday indulgence, the building came back to life,
but one teacher was noticeably absent. Roseanne Quinn was born

(03:24):
in November of nineteen forty four into the kind of
Catholic family where faith wasn't just practiced on Sundays, it
was woven into everything. Her parents, John and Roseanne Quinn,
were Irish Americans, carrying with them the traditions and values
that had traveled across an ocean and settled into the
soil of their new country. They had three other children, John, Dennis,

(03:46):
and Donna. The father, John was an executive with Bell Laboratories,
and his career eventually pulled the family away from their roots,
relocating them to suburban New Jersey. It was the kind
of move that millions of American family were making in
the post war years, trading city blogs for cul de
sacs tenements for ranch houses with neat lawns and room

(04:07):
to breathe. Roseanne's childhood unfolded in that suburban landscape, seemingly
ordinary and safe, But it took another turn when she
was thirteen years old. Polio struck what should have been
a year of sleepovers in school, dances, of first crushes,
and friendship bracelets became a year in a hospital bed.

(04:28):
When she finally walked out of that hospital, it was
with a slight limp, a permanent reminder of what her
body had endured, what it had survived. Some kids might
have let that define them, but Roseanne didn't. She finished
her studies at Morse Catholic High School in Denville, graduating
in nineteen sixty two, and she kept going. She enrolled

(04:49):
in Newark State College and graduated in nineteen sixty six
with her degree in hand. But then she set her
sights on somewhere bigger. In her early twenties, Roseanne made
the move that so many young people from the suburbs
dreamed about, the move that felt like stepping into the
real beginning of her life. She came to New York City.

(05:10):
She moved into a small apartment in the Bronx. Nothing fancy,
but it was hers. And in New York City, Roseanne
found work that felt like more than just a job.
She became a special education teacher at Saint Joseph's School
for the Deaf. At the time, it was a one
hundred and two year old institution at one hundred Hutchinson

(05:30):
River Parkway in the East Bronx. There were fifty teachers
for about one hundred and fifty students, and Roseanne was
assigned a class of eight year olds. Children at that
tender age where the world was still taking shape, where
a good teacher really could make all the difference, and
Roseanne was a very dedicated teacher. She often steadiliate to

(05:52):
help children who were struggling. Some morning, she even brought
in breakfast Duke's boxes and muffins serreal in small containers.
She explained to her friend that some of her students
had to get up early to catch the bus, so
they often skipped the first meal of the day. They
arrived hungry, unable to focus, and Roseanne couldn't stand it.

(06:14):
Maybe it was her own experiences with adversity that drear
the children who face their own challenges. Maybe she understood
what it felt like to be different, to navigate a
world that wasn't built with you in mind. Or maybe
she just had a gift for seeing people who felt
them visible, for making them feel valued and heard even
when they couldn't hear it all. Either way, Roseanne threw

(06:36):
herself into it. By nineteen seventy two, Roseanne was twenty
eight and still hungry to grow, still reaching for more.
She was taking night classes at Hunter College, giving away
at a master degree in teaching the death. That same year,

(06:58):
Roseanne moved to Manhattan's Upper west Side. She found herself
a small studio apartment on the seventh floor of two
five three West seventy second Street. The building was once
a hotel, its bones remembering a more elegant era, but
now I had been converted into the west Over Apartments,
studios and one bedrooms that were carved out of what

(07:19):
used to be guest rooms and suites. Rosanne loved the building.
It sat on a tree lined street where the sounds
of traffic mixed with distant laughter from Riverside Park. From
Roseanne's seventh floor window, she could see slices of the city,
the rooftops, the water tors, the endless sprawl of buildings
reaching towards the sky. It felt like being part of

(07:42):
something that was bigger than herself. But the apartment complex
wasn't in a particularly desirable area. The Upper west Side
in nineteen seventy two wasn't the gentrified neighborhood it would
later become. It was still rough around the edges, still
finding its identity somewhere between elegance and decay, and Roseanne's

(08:02):
building was within walking distance of one of the city's
most notorious drug markets, Needle Park. Al Press owned a
dry cleaning store nearby. He knew the neighborhood, saw the
kind of people who drifted through. Years later he would
remember Rosanne. He said, we get some weird people around here,
but this girl was different. She was very nice and

(08:24):
quiet and shy. She wore skirts and blouses, not the
hippie stuff. Roseanne stood out because she didn't fit the
profile of the neighborhood's transient population, the attics, the dealers,
the runaways, the lost souls who congregated in Sherman Square.
Roseanne was clean cut and respectable, the kind of person

(08:45):
you'd expect to see teaching in a suburban school, not
living alone on West seventy second Street. But there she was.
New York City was winding down after New Year's Eve

(09:06):
of nineteen seventy two. The Conferi still littered the straits
of Times Square, ground into a pub by a million footsteps.
Sanitation crews worked through the early morning hours, their trucks
rumbling through intersections, collecting the debris of celebration. The city
was in that strange liminal space between the old year

(09:26):
and the new where time feels elastic and nothing quite
operates on schedule. For many New Yorkers, January first meant
sleeping off hangovers behind drawn curtains. Some ventured out for
walks in Central Park, bundling against the cold, needing fresh
air and movement to shake off the previous night's success.
Other stain in pajamas all day, watching the Rose Parade

(09:48):
on television, making resolutions they'd forget. By February, most of
the city's bars and restaurants, which were usually buzzing with energy,
were dark. On New Year's Day, the storefronts were sh uttered.
By the second of January, life was supposed to return
to normal. The machinery of the city was meant to restart.
People were men to go back to work, back to school,

(10:11):
back to routine. Roseanne was scheduled debate at school teaching
on the second of January, but nine a m. Came
and went, and Roseanne never shoot. It wasn't like her,
The other teachers noticed immediately. Rosanne was punctual, always early,
even she was usually the one aready in her classroom.
When others arrived, so her absence was immediately noticed. When

(10:34):
she failed to show, a substitute teacher stepped in, taking
over her classroom of eight year olds. But the same
thing happened again the next morning, Wednesday, January third, Roseanne
failed to show. Now it wasn't just unusual, it was alarming.
School authorities made the decision to act. They arranged for
a colleague to make their way over to Rosanne's apartment

(10:57):
on West seventy second Street. The colligue arrived at the
West Over Apartments and explained the situation to the building superintendent,
A Medio Guzzy. Something was wrong and he needed to
check on her. They went up to the seventh floor
in the elevator, or Medio carried the spare cat. He
ll knocked the front door, turned the handle, and they

(11:18):
stepped inside. It didn't take them long to see what
had happened to Roseanne. The small studio apartment was spattered
in blood. It was on the floor, on the walls.
Blood was pulling on the bed, soaking into the sheets
and the mattress, and in the middle lay Roseanne. She

(11:38):
was nude and sprawled out on the bed. Stab wounds
peppered her body. She been stabbed six times in the
stomach and twelve times in the neck. Her face had
also been beaten. There was also a large statuette lying
on her face. It was an artistic pace crafted by
a friend, meant to capture Rosanne's likeness in clemplaster. It

(12:01):
had been a gift, something personal and meaningful, but now
it was a weapon. It weighed about sixty five pounds
and it was clear that somebody had lifted it, raised
it above their head and smashed it down onto Roseanne's
face with enough's force to shatter bone. The colleague had
come to check on Roseanne stumbled backwards, hand over mouth.

(12:24):
Medio stood frozen, his mind, trying to process what his
eyes were saying. Detectives quickly arrived at the apartment. They
coordined it off with crime scene tape. The hallway of
the seventh floor became restricted. Uniformed officers stood guard while

(12:48):
crime scene photographers arrived with their equipment. The medical examiner
was called and they began their investigation. Roseanne's body was
documented as it was found. Closer inspection, it could be
seen that there were bite marks on her body. Detectives
needed to figure out how the killer had gotten in sight.
They examined the door, the lock, the frame, but there

(13:11):
was no sign of forced entry. The door hadn't been
kicked in, the lock hadn't been jimmied or picked, and
the apartment hadn't been rifled through. Roseanne's belongings were largely undisturbed,
and nothing was obviously missing. It was apparent that this
wasn't a burglary that had escalated. Roseann's apartment faced a
door to the stairwell just across the narrow hallway. It

(13:34):
was one of the first things you'd see if he
came up those stairs instead of taking the elevator. One
theory detectives were considering was that the killer had climbed
the stairs, perhaps avoiding the elevator, deliberately knocked on the
first door he saw, and then barged his way inside
when it opened, a crime of opportunity. Either that or
there was another possibility, one that felt more likely given

(13:57):
the evidence. Rose I knew her killer and she welcomed
them inside. She'd opened the door willingly and let her
killer into the apartment. The news of Roseanne's murder spread
through New York City rapidly, carried by newspapers and television broadcasts.
It absolutely terrified women, in particular those living alone. Single

(14:21):
women in studio apartments all over Manhattan suddenly felt exposed
and vulnerable. They checked their locks obsessively. They stopped answering
the door after dark. Barbara Mer lived in an apartment
below Roseanne's, just one floored on in the same building.
She probably passed Rosanne in the lobby in the elevator

(14:41):
on the street. Maybe they had exchanged pleasantries, the small
talk of neighbors. Now she gave an interview with the
Daily News and said, we're having an extra lock installed tomorrow.
I know the killer might have been invited upstairs, but
I'm scared all the same. He admitted. She would have
preferred to live over on East Side, where it was safer,

(15:04):
or at least where people told themselves it was safer,
But rent there was much more expansive, often double what
you'd pay on the Upper west Side. Barbara was paying
one hundred and eighty five dollars a month for her apartment.
For many young women trying to make it in New York,
the Upper west Side was what they could afford. Safety
was a luxury, priced out of reach, and indeed the

(15:27):
area wasn't that safe. Rosanne herself had filed a complaint
against a man the year before for punching her in
the face after she rejected him. It was an unprovoked,
violent encounter, the kind that leaves you looking over your shoulder.
He was the first person detectives looked into, pulling its file,
tracking him down for questioning, but he was quickly rolled out.

(15:51):
His alibi was solid. He wasn't their man. At the time,
there was a new rape analysis unit operating within the
NYP day a cutting edge approach to investigating sexual crimes.
Detectives called in their assistance, hoping the unit's resources might
crack the case open. They used computers to detect patterns
and crimes against women, massive machines that filled entire rooms,

(16:15):
fed with punch cards and magnetic tape. Records of attempted
rapes in the area and names of neighborhood residents with
records for violence were fed into the computers. The machines
processed the data searching for connections. However, no suspicious patterns emerged,
but it wouldn't be long until detectives received their first

(16:37):
lucrative tip. Rosanne was a familiar face in the bars
that surrounded her apartment. According to some friends, she had
a habit of dating, not in the traditional sense of

(16:58):
dinner reservations, something more spontaneous. Roseanne liked to sit by
herself and read in the bars on the West Side,
nursing a drink while turning pages content in her own company.
But she also liked to strike up conversations with men.
She was friendly and approachable. They often brought her drinks,

(17:19):
and the conversation would flow about books about the city,
about nothing in particular. Sometimes Roseanne invited these men back
to her apartment. It was a pattern that her friends
knew about, but perhaps they didn't fully understand. This was
Rosanne the teacher who stead lay it to help her
students and brought them breakfast. But it was also Roseanne,

(17:41):
the single woman in her late twenties living alone in Manhattan,
looking for connection in whatever form it took. And on
New Year's Day, Roseanne was seen at a bar named W. M. Tweets.
It was close to where she lived, just a short
walk from the West Over apartments. Three witnesses told detectives

(18:01):
they had seen her there, sitting at the bar with
two men. The trio seemed relaxed. Conversational drinks were ordered
and consumed. At around eleven p m. One of the
men left, gathering his coat and heading out into the
winter night, leaving Roseanne alone with the other. Then, some
time later, she and the other man left the bar together.

(18:25):
They walked out into the darkness, perhaps headed towards her
apartment just blocks away. It was the last time anybody
reported seeing Roseanne Quinn alive. She was killed just stars later.
Detectives announced that they were seeking either of these men.
They would have been the last people to see her.
The witnesses at w N Tweede's had provided descriptions, and

(18:47):
investigators worked with a sketch artists to create a composite.
They held a press conference, standing before a room full
of reporters with no pads and cameras. The composite sketch
was released, distributed to newspapers across the city, posted in
police stations, and shown on the evening news. It showed
a young man with distinctive features. They stressed that he

(19:10):
was in a suspect, just a person of interest who
could offer assistance in the search for Rosanne's killer. They
needed him to come forward. They needed to know what
he knew. He was described as about one hundred and
sixty five pawns, twenty eight to thirty years old, and
around six feet tall. He had light brown hair that
was described as having a wet look, styled slicked back

(19:33):
and not long. He was of slight build and fair complexion,
more Nordic than Latin. One detective noted, Deputy Inspector Richard
Nicastro addressed the cameras directly, we would like for him
to come forward. He might possibly be of some assistance
to us in solving this crime. The implication was clear,
even if unstated, come forward voluntarily in you're helping stay hidden,

(19:58):
and you become something else. In. As the search for
the man and the bar pressed on, Rosanne was led
to rest. Around three hundred people gathered at Saint Mary's
Roman Catholic Church in Wharton, the community where Roseanne had
grown up and where her family still lived. The pews
filled with relatives, colleagues from Saint Joseph's school, former classmates,

(20:21):
neighbors who remembered her as just a girl. The service
was presided over by Roseanne's cousin, Reverend John Waldron. He
spoke of her dedication, her kindness, her commitment to children
who needed her most. Afterwards, Rosanne was buried in the
church cemetery. Her parents stood at the gravesite, John and
Roseanne Quinn, watching as their daughter was lured into the earth.

(20:46):
The days continued to pass, and the man seen on
a date with Roseanne failed to come forward. This led
to alarm bells ringing with the investigators. If he was innocent,
why hadn't he come forward, Detectives wondered, fear was in
every newspaper, the composite was on television. Someone who had
nothing to hide would have called by nou. His silence

(21:08):
suggested guilt. Detectives began to theorize that Rosanne had invited
the man back to her apartment and he killed her.
Either that or he had followed her back uninvited and
then forced his way inside. In an effort to track
him down, detectives approached Rosanne's neighbors with the composite, knocking
on doors throughout the west Over apartments, asking if anybody

(21:31):
had seen him. Had anyone noticed a stranger on New
Year's Day or the early morning ours of January two,
It wouldn't be long before the man in the composite
sketch was identified, but he was identified by somebody very uninspected.

(21:59):
Gary Gah stared at the composite sketch in the newspaper.
His blood ran cold, his hands trembled slightly as he
held the page. He knew that the composite sketch was him.
The wet look hair, the Nordic features, the slight build.
It was unmistakably his own face staring back at him
from the newspaper. On New Year's Day, he had been

(22:21):
drinking at W. N. Twade's with his twenty two year
old friend, John Wayne Wilson. They had struck up a
conversation with a woman there who said her name was
Roseanne Quinn. She was friendly, intelligent, easy to talk to.
The three of them sat at the bar together, drinks accumulating.
So I'm passing in the loose way it does in

(22:42):
bars where nobody has anywhere urgent to be. Gary left
at eleven pm that night because he had worked the
next morning he needed sleep. His friend John said that
he was going to stay out later. He waved Gary off,
turning back to his conversation with Roseanne. The two men
had lived together in an apartment on the West Side

(23:03):
for a round seven months. But John Willam Wilson wasn't
just another young man trying to make it in New York.
He'd come to the city after escaping from jail in
Miami in July the previous year. He was awaiting trial
for breaking and entering when he'd simply walked away, vanishing
into the anonymous sprawl of another city. John had been

(23:23):
born and raised in Indianapolis, and he was the oldest
of four children. His father was a crane operator, and
his mother steed at home to raise John and his
three siblings. She was said to be domineering, and his
father rarely entered family conversations. John's emotional trouble began in
nineteen sixty when he was struck by a car and

(23:44):
knocked unconscious as he left school. He started suffering from
blackout spells and migraines. He struggled to sleep. He started
running away from home when he was just eleven. When
he was fifteen, he woke up with deep gashes on
his arm. He torn out his skin while he was asleep.
This was only the first in a long list of instances.

(24:07):
He told friends that he felt there were two sides
to his personality. He said he was afraid that the
bad might try to do away with the good. John
was committed to the Madison State Mental Hospital for eighteen months,
and then he headed to Miami. By nineteen seventy two,
he was married to a woman named Candy and they
were expecting a baby together. His family were in Miami

(24:31):
while he laid low in New York City, living under
the radar, avoiding anything that might draw attention. He was
drinking a quart of whiskey a day. According to some sources,
he sold sex to men to get by. It was
income that came with no paper trail, no tax forms,
no questions asked. It kept him fed and housed while

(24:55):
he waited for whatever came next. When Gary woke up
on the morning of January two, he found that John
hadn't returned home that night. The apartment was quiet and
John's bed was empty. That wasn't entirely unusual. Sometimes John

(25:17):
stared out, crashed with other people, lived his life in
ways that Gary didn't ask too many questions about. John
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(26:50):
went to work and when he arrived back home later
that day, John was there, but something was wrong. He
was in a state of panic. His movements were jerky
and unfocused, His eyes were wild. He looked like a
man that was coming aparted, the seems. He then told
Gary what happened. He said that he had gone home

(27:10):
with Roseanne to her apartment after Gary left them at
the bar. They'd walked together through the cold straits to
her building, taking the elevator to the seventh floor, where
she had unlocked the door and welcomed him in. They
then smoked marijuana and attempted to have sex, but John
said he couldn't get an erection. According to him, Rouseanne

(27:32):
insulted him. He said she made him feel small and worthless,
and then she ordered him to leave. John said that
an argument broke out, and during the struggle, he grabbed
a knife from somewhere in this small studio. He said.
He then lunged at Roseanne and stabbed her to death.
He stood there for a few moments afterwards, staring at

(27:55):
what he'd done. He said. He then covered her body
with the bath room. He had a shower, washing away
the blood, and then he left the apartment, but not
before wiping his fingerprints off the murder weapon, the door knobs,
and other surfaces he thought he'd touched. He said, he
even wiped the elevator button. Gary didn't believe John. The

(28:18):
murder still hadn't been discovered at this point. It was
still January, second before the school had noticed Roseanne's absence,
before anybody had gone to check on her. There was
no news coverage, no police investigation, no reason to think
that John was telling the truth. Gary thought that John
was making up stories because he wanted to go home,

(28:40):
because he wanted money, because he wanted an excuse to
leave New York and return to his family in Miami.
It sounded like the kind of dramatic fiction some one
might invent to extract cash from a roommate. So Gary
gave him enough money to leave torn. He just gave
it to him, glad to be rid of whatever the
situation was, whatever John was going through, John said he

(29:04):
was flying out to Miami to pick up his wife, Candy.
He packed his things and disappeared. But just a few
days later Gary read about the murder in the newspaper
Teachers laying in Upper West Side apartment. The details matched
what John had told him, the location, the timing, everything.
Then he saw the composite sketch of a man he

(29:25):
knew was him, his own face, rendered him pencil and
distributed across the city. The pieces fell into place. John
hadn't been lying. John had killed someone and Gary had
given him money to escape. Gary was terrified that he
could be charged as an accessory after the fact he

(29:45):
had aided a fugitive, He had helped a murderer leave
torn the legal consequences could destroy his life. He called
up his friend Fred Ebb to ask for some advice.
Fred was a successful lyricist. He'd written Cabaret in New York,
New York. Somebody with connections, somebody who might know what
to do. On the phone, Gary said he couldn't explain

(30:08):
the situation Philly, but said it was the worst thing ever.
He was panicking. He said he was going to fly
out to California, so Gary showed up at Fred's home
in bel Air, Los Angeles. He sat down with Fred
and his personal assistant, Gary Greenwood and told them exactly
what happened. He said he was scared that John had

(30:32):
killed Rosanne. Fred placed a call to Gary's therapist in
New York to ask for advice. She listened to the
situation and said she would contact an attorney who specialized
in criminal matters. Shortly thereafter, the attorney called Fred back.
He said to put Gary on the first plane back
to New York City, and he told Fred and Gary

(30:55):
not to say a word about what Gary had told them.
Attorney client privileged, which didn't extend to them, and they
could be compelled to testify if anybody found out what
they knew. So Gary returned to New York City, but
he was terrified about contacting police. The fear nodded him.
He knew that his information could put his friend John

(31:17):
on death row. He knew that testifying might mean John's execution.
That wey sat heavy on his conscience even knowing what
John had done. His attorney ultimately cut a deal for
immunity with the Manhattan District Attorney in exchange for Gary's
feel confession and testimony he wouldn't be charged as an accessory.

(31:39):
He would walk away clean. Gary agreed to meet with
the detectives, and he told them everything he knew, every
detail of that night, of John's confession of where he'd gone.
He agreed to have his phone tapped. The police installed
recording equipment, waiting for the call they hoped would come.

(32:00):
Later that night, John called Gary. He was calling from
his brother's apartment in Indiana. Within ours, two detectives were
on a play into Indianapolis, Indiana. Their target was twenty
two year old John Wayne Wilson. They arrived outside Wilson's

(32:22):
brothers Maurice's apartment on North Delaware Street in downtown Indianapolis.
They knocked and the door swung open. Standing there was
John Wayne Wilson. He didn't run, he didn't fight, he
didn't even look surprised. Wilson calmly said, let me put
on my shoes. At the Indianapolis Homicide Division, Wilson signed

(32:45):
a waiver of extradition without hesitation. He didn't deny that
he had killed Rosanne. In fact, he made a full
and detailed confession. At a press conference announcing the arrest,
District Attorney Frank Cogan said, the quick solution of this
case is a striking example of how the different arms
of law enforcement can work together. Wilson was extradided back

(33:07):
to New York and he was immediately sent to Bellevue
Hospital for psychiatric observation. On the eighteenth of January, he
appeared in court where he was indicted for the murder
of Roseann Quinn. The psychiatric evaluation had found him mentally competent,
capable of standing trial, capable of understanding the charges against him.

(33:28):
His defense attorneys, John Nicholas Nuzzi and Aaron jaff weren't convinced.
They filed notice with State Supreme Court Justice Gerald Golkin
that they would be mounting an insanity defense, but as
it turned out, there would be no defense, there would
be no trial, there would be no justice. After being

(33:57):
declared competent, Wilson was transferred to the Tombs the Manhattan
Detention Complex, a place with a reputation as grim as
its nickname suggests. Then in April something changed. Defense attorney
Aaron jf grew concerned. He feared that Wilson might be
suffering from brain damage and requested he be sent back

(34:19):
to Bellevue for further testing. The request was granted. Wilson
returned to the psychiatric ward, where everybody anticipated he would
finally receive comprehensive evaluation, but those tests never came. Instead,
Wilson languished weeks passed in limbo, and on the fourth

(34:41):
of May, Wilson was sent back to the Tombs. By
this point, prison doctors had diagnosed him as schizophrenic. They
also flagged him as suicidal. When Wilson had been at
the Tombs before, he'd been housed in a dormitory style
room with other inmates, but now overcrowding had changed the equation.

(35:01):
He was sent to the fourth floor and placed in
a single cell alone with his thoughts. He could have
been placed in a mental observation ward. He should have
been placed in a mental observation ward, but he wasn't.
The next day, just after noon, Wilson got into an
argument with the prison guard. His voice rose to a

(35:23):
scream as he yelled, I'm going to kill myself rather
than raising an alarm, rather than calling for help, The
guard taunted him. He asked him if he wanted bed
sheets to hang himself. Then he disappeared. Moments later, he
returned bed sheets in hand, He threw them into Wilson's

(35:44):
cell and walked off. Twenty minutes passed. An inmate performing
orderly duties made his way along the fourth floor corridor,
moving from cell to cell. When he reached Wilson's cell,
he peered through the bars. What he saw would traumatize him.
Wilson's feet dangled in the air, his body suspended from

(36:06):
a noose fashioned from torn bed sheets, looped through the
ceiling ventilation holes. The inmates screams brought guards running. They
cut Wilson down and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. Minutes
passed before a jail doctor arrived and took over, but
they all knew it was already too late. John Wayne

(36:29):
Wilson was pronounced dead. The Medical Examiner's office, doctor Lavelle Levine,
took an impression of Wilson's teeth. He said they were
consistent with the bitte marks that were found on Roseanne's body.
The Board of Corrections, which his nine community leaders appointed
by the mayor to oversee the prison system, launched an

(36:50):
investigation into Wilson's death. What they found was damning. Wilson
was the sixth inmate to take his life in New
York City that year. It was only May. The board's
conclusion was scathing the courts, the correction Department, the defense attorneys,
every focet of the criminal justice system had ignored Wilson's

(37:11):
suicidal tendencies. His first court appearance had included documentation of
his mental state, yet he was denied adequate psychiatric care.
When he was finally sent back to Bellevue at his
attorney's assistance, he simply sat in the psychiatric ward, untested
and forgotten. One day after returning to the Tombs, he

(37:34):
was dead. Board Chairman Robert said that the handling of
John Wayne Wilson exemplified the apathy and lack of accountability
that permitted a hopelessly overburdened criminal justice system. Everybody had
failed to respond properly to his needs. There was one exception.
Lewis Steele, who was Wilson's original court appointed defense attorney,

(37:55):
had immediately lined up two private psychiatrists to evaluate his client.
Both Steele and Wilson had requested that Steele remain on
the case, but Justice George Postel had assigned two new
defense attorneys instead. John Wilson's body was returned to Shelbyville,
where he grew up. He was buried in the town

(38:16):
cemetery as the service began. His wife gave birth to
a baby boy in Miami. Tragically, he was born sleeping.

(38:36):
The death of Roseanne Quinn didn't fade quietly into the
archives of New York City crime. Her story called the
attention of novelist Judy Rosner. Rossner saw something in the
tragedy that went far beyond the typical crime story. Here
was a young woman, a school teacher, who had led
a double life that challenged the neat categories society liked

(38:57):
to draw. Her murder raised unco comfortable questions about the
changing landscape of the nineteen seventies, about sexual liberation, about risk,
about the dangers lurking in the city singles bar scene.
In nineteen seventy five, Rosner published Looking for Mister Goodbar,
a novel that was inspired by Roseanne's life and death.

(39:20):
Though fictionalized, the book drey heavily on the real case,
the story of a teacher by day who frequented singles
bars at night, searching for connection in all the wrong places.
It struck a nerve in in America, grappling with the
aftermath of the sexual Revolution, capturing both the allure and
the peril of the new freedom's women were claiming. Two

(39:42):
years later, in nineteen seventy seven, the book was adapted
into a film starring Diane Keaton, bringing Roseanne's story, or
at least the fictional version of it, to an even
wider audience. But here's what often gets lost behind the
best seller, behind the Hollywood adoption. There was a real
woman Ruzanquin, had dreams, had students who loved her, had

(40:06):
a family who mourned her. Very little is known about
her actual life. And there was a real killer, a
deeply troubled young man who should have received the mental
health care he so desperately needed, but instead he died
alone in a cell, failed by every single system meant
to help him. The case ultimately became a cautionary tale,

(40:30):
filtered through fiction, reshaped by popular culture, but the truth
remains embedded in the court records and newspaper clippings of
nineteen seventy three. Two lives cut short, a system exposed
as broken, and a story that still haunts us decades later.

(41:16):
Well that is it for this episode of Morbidology. As always,
thank you so much, for listening, and I'd like to
say a massive thank you to my new supporters up
on Paedron, Kelsey, carne Afton, Luisa and Brandon. The link
to Patron is in the show notes if you'd like
to join. I upload ad free and early release episodes
behind the scenes, and I also send out some cool

(41:36):
merch along with a thank you card. I also upload
bonus episodes of Morbidology Plus that aren't on their regular
podcast platforms, and these are also available on Apple subscriptions
for any of you that like to listen on Apple.
I'd also like to say to everybody Happy New Year,
and thank you for all the support the past year.

(41:56):
Everybody that's listened to an episode, commented on an episode,
Garden episode, I really really do appreciate all of your
support and I'm eternally grateful. The past year has genuinely
been the best year of my life, and my little
baby girl, Amber just turned one on the twelfth of December.
It's hard to imagine that I ever existed without her
in my life, and she genuinely is the best thing

(42:17):
that ever happened to me. So I hope that everybody
has had an amazing year and here's to twenty twenty six.
Until next time, take care of yourself, stay safe, and
have an amazing week.