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Hey, bingers, and welcome back to the pod. Now, I am a little sick, but I'm okay. And of course, I would never let you down. There is always going to be an episode coming as long as everything goes accordingly. So this is Binged, and I'm Peyton Moreland. Why is it that men rape and kill? Now, that's a rhetorical question, at least in this context. There are answers to this question, but I'm not here to play psychologist or sociologist.
because I'm not one. But I'm selecting as my theme for this week's episode and next a topic that may sound salacious. It may sound to you like I'm really scraping the scummy bottom of the true crime barrel. Because the theme for this week and next is sexualized stabbings.
Men stabbing women is often sexualized, but consider what stabbing is about for many men. It's about power. What is sex about for many men? It's also about power. Sex is about power for some women too, but I think it's fair to say, and not just an empty generalization, that for most healthy-minded women, sex is about closeness and safety. So rape is a violent invasion of our bodies.
And stabbing is that taken to the next level. It's essentially the ultimate act of rageful sexual violence perpetrated by a man against a woman.
But in this week's story and next week's, the stabbing is explicitly sexual. And just to be clear, I don't intend for these stories to be cautionary tales. I'm here to tell yet another story of honestly why being a woman is so dangerous. That's really what most true crime stories are about, which is probably the reason majority of listeners are women. And here's yet another.
28-year-old Roseanne Quinn was the quintessential all-American nice girl. She grew up among a family of six in a strictly Irish Catholic household in the Bronx and then New Jersey where her family moved when she was 11. She was a Catholic schoolgirl graduating in 1962 from Morris Catholic High School where she was described in her yearbook as, quote, easy to meet and nice to know.
She had a terrific sense of humor and was down to earth, according to her friends, and extraordinarily generous even at times when she had next to nothing in her bank account. But her childhood wasn't the fairy tale these generic outline details might lead you to think. Her family's strict Catholicism was repressive and oppressive.
and she had back issues that left her feeling broken and othered. At 13, she, according to some sources, contracted polio and spent a year in the hospital. It left her with a subtle limp she never fully recovered from. But maybe it wasn't polio. According to other sources, Roseanne had scoliosis, a progressive curvature of the spine, and a back surgery to correct the condition is what caused her limp.
It's hard to know for sure. Accurate information on Roseanne's life is hard to come by. But either way, her back problems and her limp had a lasting effect on her self-image. One that may have led her to seek out validation in the form of sexual attention from men. Or not.
But her sex life was something she kept carefully guarded and filed away from view. She studied elementary education at Newark State College and then became a school teacher. In 1969, she was teaching eight-year-old students at the St. Joseph School for the Deaf, which was in the Bronx, and she sought independence by moving to New York City and living on her own.
In 1972, she moved into an efficiency apartment at 253 West 72nd Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side, which was closer to where many of her friends were and to some of the night spots that she frequented. On the morning of January 2nd, 1973, Roseanne's students at St. Joseph's waited in confusion for their teacher who had failed to show up for work that morning.
When school administrators walked into the classroom and found the students unattended, they knew something was very wrong. Roseanne was never late for work and never absent and certainly wouldn't miss school without calling first. They phoned Roseanne's apartment, but the call just rang and rang. No one picked up. They hired a substitute to fill in for the day and the very next morning, Roseanne again failed to show up.
That's when the school's principal asked one of Roseanne's fellow teachers, Richard Green, this is a pseudonym, to go by her apartment in Manhattan and check if she was alright. So Richard got into his car and drove into Manhattan to Roseanne's address on West 72nd. He took the elevator to the seventh floor where Roseanne lived and knocked on her front door.
When she didn't answer, after he knocked repeatedly, he tracked down the building's superintendent and asked to be let into the apartment. The super got the key, and once the door was open, the two men were aghast at what they saw. The one-room apartment was in shambles and awash in blood.
the source of which was Roseanne Quinn's dead and naked body lying across her fold-out bed with six stab wounds in her neck, 12 stab wounds in her stomach, and we're about to get graphic so please skip ahead if you don't want to hear, but there was a red candle that was jammed into her. I think you know where. She had also been bludgeoned and it would soon be learned that she had been raped and strangled.
Inches from her cold hand was a smashed statue. A statue, they would learn, was a likeness of her sculpted by a friend. A likeness that her killer had used to beat her. After her death, her killer placed a blue bathrobe over her body before departing. The apartment was in such disarray that made it clear an extraordinary struggle had taken place. Roseanne didn't go down without a fight.
When the news reached her family in the Bronx, they were thunderstruck by shock. It made no sense to them. Who would have wanted to kill their bright, responsible, independent, and good-hearted eldest daughter? The family priest went to visit and stay with Roseanne's parents and her brother and sister to console them during their grief. Meanwhile, the investigation was just getting started.
As they summoned detectives and CSI units to process the apartment, police talked to the two men who found Roseanne's body: her super and her colleague at St. Joseph's, Richard Green. Her super remembered Roseanne as a quiet and respectful young woman who always paid her rent on time and had no known enemies.
But the neighborhood at the time was rough. He acknowledged this. There were plenty of unstable people who roamed the nearby streets. He theorized that maybe Roseanne was killed by a burglar or a junkie who wandered in and attacked her in a blind, drug-fueled haze. According to Richard, her coworker, Roseanne didn't have a steady boyfriend that he was aware of. He didn't know the names of any men she was involved with.
After taking these statements, investigators began pouring through the many personal belongings inside Roseanne's small one-room efficiency. Her address book, personal letters, notebooks, photographs, some caricature drawings made by an unknown artist, probably not Roseanne as she wasn't known to draw. They recorded every name of every friend and acquaintance they found and made plans to track each one down and interview them.
Around midday, after Roseanne's body had been taken to the medical examiner's office, one of the crime scene technicians approached the police lieutenant on the scene to break some bad news. Not a single foreign fingerprint was recovered from the apartment. The killer had apparently either worn gloves or wiped down everything he touched before leaving.
and the front lock hadn't been jimmied or picked, so whoever killed Roseanne, it looked as though she had let him into her apartment willingly. Detectives began interviewing Roseanne's neighbors, and it was at this early point in their investigation that the picture of Roseanne that began to emerge was very different from the way her family and colleagues had described her.
Her neighbor next to her informed police that Roseanne often brought home strange men from bars. Her efficiency apartment hosted a revolving door of late night pickups and one night stands, most of whom would never be seen again. One night, the neighbor recalled hearing screams coming from Roseanne's apartment, and when she went to investigate, she found Roseanne sobbing in the hallway with a black eye.
The neighbor said she didn't see the man who gave it to her, however, and could offer no additional information. Investigators fanned out and began canvassing the neighborhood, talking to local business owners to see if any of them knew Roseanne or if she frequented their establishments. A shop owner next door to Roseanne's building recognized her and could only offer that she was, unlike a lot of the weirdos who populated the area, very nice, quiet, and shy.
Employees at a bar at the far end of the block named Copper Hatch also recognized her. The bartender had seen her there frequently, he said. Some more names of friends and acquaintances surfaced during interviews with the bar staff, and detectives jotted them down, adding to the growing list.
Investigators asked the bartender if he could pinpoint when he last saw Roseanne, and the bartender remembered her coming in on New Year's Day in the evening, joining a group of girlfriends who had come over from WM Tweeds, a singles bar. So that's where the investigation headed next, to Tweeds. Inside this bar, they found Tweeds empty, except for the owner, Steve Resnick, who was busy behind the counter keeping the books.
When questioned, Steve revealed that he had known Roseanne for seven years and had become close friends with her over that time. He described Roseanne as a friendly and hardworking young woman and sometimes moody. She was outgoing. Other times she kept to herself. He almost never saw her without a book.
On some nights, she'd come into the bar, order a glass of wine, and sit off in the corner by herself and read. Other times, she'd order whiskey and mingle. Steve appeared shocked to learn his friend had been knifed to death inside of her apartment. He offered to help the investigation as much as he could. On New Year's Day, on the night she was last seen, Steve recalled seeing Roseanne drop in around 9 and stay for a few hours before leaving with some people to go to Copper Hatch nearby.
She was in an upbeat mood and she chatted with a number of people, but he couldn't recall anyone in particular. However, there was one guy, Steve said, that police should definitely look into. The guy's name was Freddy, and one time he beat Roseanne up pretty badly. In fact, he was arrested and charged, but the case was later dismissed.
Investigators wondered if this was the same time that her neighbor had seen her in the hallway with a black eye. Then there was another guy, Steve said, whom he'd seen her talking with the night she was killed, but he wasn't sure who he was or what their relationship was. He suggested talking to Jack, the bartender, when he came into work later.
Investigators returned to her apartment to tie up some loose ends and make sure all potential evidence was being properly documented and collected, which was a challenge because of how messy the apartment was, due both to Roseanne's housekeeping and the bloody struggle that took place there. While the detectives were at her apartment going over their notes, Roseanne's phone suddenly rang. "Is Roseanne there?" asked a male on the other end.
She's gone out for a while, one of the detectives replied. When will she be back? The man asked. By about four or five. Can I take a message? No, the man replied. I'll call back. Then he hung up. He never called back.
News of Roseanne's death hadn't hit the papers yet, but once it did the following day, and as the story spread throughout the city, Manhattan residents speculated that Roseanne was killed by an insane street dweller, as this was a time where New York City was overflowing with unhoused people with severe mental and behavioral disturbances. But for investigators, the most likely scenario was that Roseanne had been killed by a man who knew her,
either someone like Freddie, whom she may have dated off and on and who had beat her up at least on one occasion, or some other guy who she brought home with her like the man she was last seen with.
Investigators were learning that Roseanne had a presence at a lot of neighborhood watering holes. She frequented all types of bars, from single bars like Tweed's to high-end places. A couple of the bars Roseanne frequented were genuine crap holes, there's no other way to put it. And one such place was the Green Oaks Bar on Broadway, a place whose rotating menu of regulars included pimps, bikers, and junkies.
Hardly the place investigators expected a nice Catholic school teacher to be visiting several times a month. Now, I just want to pause here for a second before we continue on. Roseanne is allowed to visit wherever she wants to visit and bring home whomever she wants to. I just want to be clear that we are in no way victim shaming here. We are just telling the story as it's unraveling to investigators.
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Let's get back into the episode. Detectives, like the neighbor they interviewed, like the reporters covering the murder, indulged in a touch of judgment toward what they viewed as Roseanne's sexual promiscuity. So unlike us, they are judging her for this. And
And her friends actually took care to guard this in the aftermath of her murder. Because Roseanne was so private, her friends wished to protect her from judgment and from slander. And also to protect her parents, who didn't know much about their eldest daughter's love life.
because Roseanne wanted it that way. In the sexually liberated era of the early 1970s, when Manhattan singles bars like Tweed's were crawling with young singles nearly every day of the week, women like Roseanne, whose repressive Catholic upbringing kept them insulated from sex, found freedom in sexual freedom.
Rapid changes in both American culture in the late 1960s, as well as in their lifestyles as they reached adulthood, allowed young women to explore their sexuality without shame. This is the time period we're in.
But because of society's persistent double standard, Roseanne kept her life pretty compartmentalized from her family and her bosses at St. Joseph's School. Although Roseanne read a lot of romance novels and her life with one foot in a world of fantasy, she kept her other foot grounded in reality, enough to keep her work, social and sexual lives comfortably balanced and comfortably separate.
But Roseanne's filtration system may have had some flaws, as she had apparently let herself get too close to some very dangerous men. But which among them was her killer? Investigators interviewed staff at Green Oaks Bar and learned nothing new about Roseanne herself. It was the same descriptions that came up.
She was respectful, polite, never overdrank, never did anything aggressive or indecent. If she took men home, she was discreet about it. She was the sort of person who would just slip out quietly and unnoticed. Police did, however, manage to obtain the names of two more men she was known to have dated. Claude, this is a pseudonym, a pilot, and Alan, another pseudonym, a lawyer. Later that evening, detectives headed back to Tweeds, where Roseanne was last known to have visited, and talked to the bartender, Jack.
Jack said he remembered Roseanne coming into Tweeds that evening, sitting at the corner of the bar and drinking whiskey. Alone, at first.
Then, as the alcohol began to loosen her inhibitions, she began to mingle. Ultimately, Jack's account of that night was in agreement with that of the owner, Steve Resnick. The last time he saw Roseanne, she was talking to some guy he didn't know and hadn't seen before, and he didn't know if she left with him or not. All he knew about the guy was that he was from out of town somewhere, or so he had claimed.
The guy had initially come into the bar with another man, an older man, a man he had assumed was gay. But the older man left and his younger companion stayed. And that's all he recalled. The detective asked how he knew the guy was from out of town. Jack clarified that he'd overheard the guy saying he was from Chicago and he was in New York looking for work. I think he said his name was Charlie Smith.
He was young, well-built, blonde. Jack again made it clear that he hadn't seen if the man left with Roseanne or not. He suggested investigators talk to a regular named Rafe. In the meantime, detectives wanted to track down Freddie, the guy who reportedly beat Roseanne up.
but they were having as difficult a time tracking him down as they were in identifying Charlie Smith. Then they returned to the Copper Hatch bar, this time around midnight, and went around to the various bar flies. And that's where they found the man known as Rafe. He said he'd been at Tweed's on New Year's night and was hanging out with Roseanne. He didn't seem to know the man she'd been seen with, the man calling himself Charlie Smith, the man from Chicago,
He said he didn't remember, he had a bad memory and wouldn't even have remembered talking to Roseanne that night had she not been murdered. Yeah, blonde, well-built, said his name was Charlie Smith. This wasn't ringing any bells. It's like this guy who called himself Charlie Smith was a true non-entity. And maybe he wasn't even Roseanne's killer. Their number one suspect was still Freddie, who had an established history of violence toward the murder victim.
But good investigators dot their I's and cross their T's. Investigators went back to tweeds yet again and began interviewing regulars. One of them was Oliver, a pseudonym, a caricature artist who remembered talking to the guy who called himself Charlie Smith on the night Roseanne was last seen. He said that Smith had an accent that sounded like it was from the Midwest somewhere. Oliver said he drew Smith two caricature drawings that night and gave them to the man calling himself Charlie Smith.
One was a drawing of Mickey Mouse and the other of Donald Duck. And that is when Charlie Smith became suspect number one, as it was these drawings that were found in Roseanne's apartment after her murder.
So this established that she had gone home with Charlie Smith. He had been inside her apartment. Whether or not he killed her was another matter. Maybe Freddie had dropped by, became aware she was with another man and returned later to kill her. Who knows at this point? But Charlie was now confirmed the last known person to see Roseanne alive. So it was urgent police find him right away.
Long before social media, it was especially challenging tracking down a guy with a name like Charlie Smith, if that was even his real name, in a city of 8 million people when he may not even have been a permanent resident there and may have already skipped town.
The only thing police felt they could do at this point was have a composite sketch made, which they did with the help of the bartender and the caricature artist at Tweeds, who had seen Charlie Smith up close. And after the sketch was made, police released it to the press on January 6th, four days after Roseanne was believed to have been killed.
The newspapers ran the sketch in their Sunday editions and one of the millions of New York City residents who saw the sketch was a man named Jerry Guest.
Jerry recognized the composite immediately, and it confirmed his worst fears, that his friend and roommate, John Wayne Wilson, had been telling him the truth earlier that week, when Wilson came home and breathlessly told a story of a murder he'd just committed, a woman he'd stabbed to death in her apartment, which at the time, Jerry dismissed, hoping it was just a bunch of hogwash drunkenly cooked up by his young, somewhat volatile friend.
Jerry Guest was a gay 42-year-old finance executive who had met John Wayne Wilson three years earlier when Wilson was just 20 years old. Wilson was originally from Indiana. He left home at 16 to travel the country and find himself. He panhandled and hitchhiked his way across the Southwest, doing day work and odd jobs along the way, learning how to survive for himself and score dope when he wanted it.
After a couple years, John ended up back home, but he quickly became restless and flew the coop again, this time heading southeast toward Miami, where he enrolled back into high school, which he had dropped out of in the 10th grade. Without means to support himself, John slept on the beach and kept his school books in a locker at the bus station.
But this kind of structure was oppressive for him, much the way Roseanne Quinn's Catholic upbringing was oppressive. And much as Roseanne Quinn had sought independence and freedom in a way that some found unorthodox, so did John Wilson, who again dropped out of school for the second and final time and returned to the streets. This time he hitchhiked his way up to New York City where he quickly learned to hustle, scavenge, and steal in order to survive.
When he arrived in New York in 1970, John Wilson was desperate, a financially strapped young drifter and hustler. And he wasn't adverse to earning money by picking up strange men who were willing to pay for 10 or 20 minutes of his company.
He met Jarrett Guest at a cruisy Times Square bar where after having a few drinks, they went home together to Guest's penthouse apartment on West 69th Street on the Upper West Side. And he ended up moving in with the older man. Over time, the sexual relationship between the two men dissipated, but they remained friends, perhaps because Guest was still attracted to the handsome young boy.
19 years his junior, who was living with him, a sort of trophy roommate, while Wilson was able to keep his overhead low, traveling back and forth from Florida freely to see his teenage girlfriend, whom he eventually married and who was too young and too naive to see through John's empty bluster and big promises. Now that just like...
became a lot there. So just know that they were kind of living secret lives and they're living together and they're roommates. John Wilson was a guy who'd had ambitions to be a salesman, to be a college graduate, despite being a two-time high school dropout.
to be a successful high earner but he just couldn't get it together couldn't hold a job and couldn't stop committing burglaries in 1972 he was a suspect in over 50 burglaries in the miami area and he was sentenced to a year in the dade county stockade while there he wrote letters to jerry writing of his plan to buy a volkswagen bus and travel the country with his young wife
Over time, the tone of his letters darkened as he hated being locked up. I'm trying to do this like a man, he wrote, and keep being treated like a dog. Things had better change or I'm going to change them. He wrote, keeping my spirits up is a constant ordeal. I'm so horny it hurts.
Finally, it all became too much for young John Wilson. On July 16th, 1972, while he was working in the laundry, he walked outside and slipped over a fence. After escaping, he found a pair of pants in a garbage dump and tossed away his jail clothes before calling Jerry from a payphone in downtown Miami. Soon after, Jerry bought two one-way tickets for John and his wife under assumed names and they flew to New York to live in Jerry's penthouse apartment. So they're back together.
On New Year's Day 1973, Wilson's wife, now back in Florida, was five months pregnant. And Wilson's mental stability was as rocky as ever. That night, Jerry Guest and John Wayne Wilson went to dinner and then on the way home walked by tweeds. On a whim, they decided to go in for a couple of drinks. But this was not Guest's scene, and after half an hour, he found himself bored and decided to split, leaving young John Wilson to his own devices.
Early the next morning, Wilson returned to the apartment he and guests shared and breathlessly told the older man what had happened. He said he started talking to a woman, a woman named Roseanne Quinn, and after getting acquainted, they left for another bar and eventually she brought him back to her seventh floor apartment. There, already quite drunk, they smoked some weed and began making out. The making out progressed and they started to have sex.
but wilson found himself too drunk to perform and then he said the woman said something he found insulting and he just lost it he flew into a rage and killed her afterward he said he took a shower to clean off the blood put his clothes back on and carefully wiped down everything in the apartment so he wouldn't leave behind any fingerprints and then he bailed
Guest was shocked and in disbelief. He couldn't wrap his head around John, whom he'd known for three years, doing something like what he was describing. And John, you know, was a hustler and a teller of tall tales. So Jerry tried to talk himself into believing that this was just another cock and bull story while his friend went to bed to sleep through the afternoon. When John awoke, he maintained his story and Jerry gave him a couple hundred bucks so he could board the next bus to Florida and get out of town.
After Wilson left, Guest went to a payphone, looked up his roommate's alleged victim in the phone book, and called the number. When a man answered, he asked to speak to Roseanne and was told she'd gone out for a while. So surely she was still alive and Wilson's story was a figment of his overactive imagination. But little did Guest know, the man who answered the phone that afternoon was a homicide detective. Over the next few days, Guest and Wilson talked a few times by phone as Wilson made his way south.
Wilson stopped in Miami, his stomping grounds, collected his pregnant wife, and then flew home to Indiana to stay with his brother in Indianapolis. It was only after Guest saw the composite sketch in the paper along with the story that he realized there wasn't a speck of fiction to John Wilson's story. He picked up the phone and immediately called his lawyer. After hearing the gist of Guest's concerns, his attorney urged him to come right over and meet him at his apartment.
Inside his attorney's living room, Guest said he was afraid of getting involved. He was afraid that police would view him as an accomplice.
His attorney argued that by not going to authorities, it would be more likely police would file charges against him. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things, and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder.
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Weighing the options, Guest agreed that going to the authorities was the best one, and his attorney contacted the Manhattan Assistant District Attorney on his behalf. He told the assistant DA that he had a client with relevant information about the Roseanne Quinn murder, and that if his client were granted immunity, he'd be willing to discuss it.
The DA's office mulled it over and then agreed to the arrangement. So Guest came in and told them everything and then left feeling a bit hollowed out because he felt he had betrayed his friend and ex-lover who had trusted him and didn't expect him to go to the authorities and also didn't expect that his phone calls with his friends would now be listened in on and Jerry Guest's phone line was immediately tapped. And when Wilson next called, Guest got him to clearly state his current whereabouts
which were his brother's house in Indianapolis. After which, detectives in Indiana were dispatched to the address the very next morning, and Wilson knew exactly why they were there. He looked up from the couch and stated simply, "Let me put my shoes on." Wilson was taken into custody in Indianapolis and extradited to New York a few days later, where he was held at the Manhattan Detention Complex, a grim, imposing structure known around town as the Tombs.
Jail psychiatrists who evaluated him diagnosed Wilson as schizophrenic as well as homicidal and suicidal. But he was nevertheless found competent to stand trial as his attorneys prepared for a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Jerry apologized to John for turning him in and John forgave him. "I know you had to do it," he said. He asked his friend not to come visit him at the tombs and he made the same request to his young pregnant wife and his mother.
Much like what he experienced at the Dade County Stockade in Florida before he escaped, John's morale deteriorated the more time he spent at the tombs. Despite being on suicide watch and contrary to orders from doctors who evaluated him at Bellevue Hospital, Wilson was placed in a regular cell with another cellmate who never spoke. On the morning of May 5th, Wilson got into an argument with one of the correctional officers. As the argument with the guard escalated, John threatened to kill himself.
In response, the guard offered to get him some bed sheets to make it easier. Minutes later, the guard returned with a pile of bed sheets and handed them to John Wilson. Within hours, John Wayne Wilson was dead.
An investigation was conducted by the City Board of Corrections, but it ultimately found no one at fault and the matter was laid to rest. Wilson's body was returned to his family in Indianapolis. The very afternoon he was laid to rest, his wife gave birth to a baby boy who was stillborn. And Jerry Guest died in 1979 from injuries he sustained in a fire that started inside his apartment.
Now, before we end, in 1975, a novel called Looking for Mr. Goodbar by novelist Judith Rossner was published, and it was based on Roseanne Quinn's murder, and not loosely. The details were all very close, and only the names were changed to protect the publisher from legal ramifications, and also to protect Roseanne and her family given the nature of the crime and the circumstances around it.
Another book about the case called Closing Time, written by Lacey Fosbur, was published in 1977, but that book also changed names and key details out of sensitivity to the people involved. Enough time has passed that I've tried to make this telling as accurate as possible, but it's possible that a Detailer 3 may contain some embellishments or inaccuracies due to the source material, and some of the names we've used may have been pseudonyms, may have not.
Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar became an instant bestseller and was adapted into a 1977 movie of the same name starring Diane Keaton. And it's a slippery slope sort of topic because the movie and the book seem to warn against the dangers of sexual promiscuity, which is hard to do without reinforcing society's double standards that allow for men to sleep around but not women. But looking at this from a more practical angle, a healthier conclusion one can draw from this is
Men can be dangerous. And while there are dangers to both men and women in becoming sexually intimate with strangers, it's mostly women who have to worry about being murdered in this scenario. And also to some degree, so do gay men, because it's other men gay men become involved with. And again,
the men are dangerous period not all men obviously not even most men but enough men are dangerous that it forces us to keep our guard up at least at first for long enough to feel assured that we're safe and while john wayne wilson may have been young good-looking charming free-willing nice to talk to he was a man with profound character and psychological defects and a long trail of baggage baggage that was invisible to roseanne quinn until it was too late
She was already naked, defenseless, and alone with him inside her apartment. That'll do for this week's episode. Join me next week for another story that begins and ends with a stabbing. This one from across the pond, but closer in time. I'll see you next week.
