Fosburgh - Closing Time

Closing Time

The True Story of the Looking for Mr. Goodbar Murder

Lacey Fosburgh

To ARTHUR GELB and WALLY TURNER,

for years of support and respect and their own shining examples there ahead of me.

With much love.

As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest living in the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our means.

ALBERT CAMUS

PROLOGUE

I dont remember how I first heard about this murder, but it must have been when Arthur Gelb, then the Metropolitan Editor at the New York Times, called my name and assigned me to cover it. All I know is the murder had just happened and that at that time there was only one side to it: Her name was Katherine Cleary and she was the one who was dead.

It was January in New York City and there had been a lot of murders that winter. This was yet another. But while most of the others were ignored by the media, this was not. There was no very good reason why the case of Katherine Cleary was singled out, except the victim was a classic archetype: She was a young schoolteacher, pretty, Irish Catholic, and decentjust the kind of person who should not end up the way she didand for some reason the media, in its collective sense of outcry, covered her death.

There was another reason the case aroused public interest. It was a mystery. The killer had escaped, and until he was identified and found, the story remained on the front pages. Then, predictably, as soon as the killer was arrested, the media lost interest, and the case of Katherine Cleary vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

But although the case disappeared from the newspapers, the murder itself, from the very beginning, had been the kind of emblematic crime people always remember. It was a story of death and violence, a tale of innocence plucked and life arbitrarily closed, a victim and the slayer, the innocent and the foul. People saw in it the specter of random violence haunting the city streets. The killer was safe, the schoolteacher, the personification of innocence, was dead. It was a mythic tale and it disturbed people who saw in her going an arbitrariness that frightened them, violence unleashed without reason.

At first it was the death of this quiet, compelling womanand the mystery of her deaththat started my fascination with this story. But then, afterward, when public interest in the case was over, and I saw the man who killed her, with his head bent over toward the left and his eyes peering round the sides, I became curious about him, too. I wanted to know why it had happened.

They had known each other less than two or three hours, so why? What had happened? What went wrong?

This has led, three years later, to a book about the lives of these two people. As far as I can tell, everything happened the way Ive written it. I was there at the beginning as a reporter for the New York Times in New York, walking 72nd Street, talking to police, going to the morgue.

I have researched this material on and off for three years, first, of course, for the Times and then for a magazine piece and finally for a book. I have traveled to Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Miami, and since during the intervening years I have moved to San Francisco, I have crossed the country four times in search of more information.

I have talked to virtually everyone mentioned in the story. The family of Joe Willie Simpson cooperated thoroughly. They took me into their house and gave me milk and toast and brought out photographs and letters and talked for hours. They even went back through all the areas of pain and talked about hospitals and money, a rabbit and a cat. I respect them tremendously for this. According to my way of thinking, they honored themselves and their son by telling me what they knew.

Carole Musty, too, on a hot winter night in north Miami, curled up on a couch with a Tab and said as much as she could remember. Steve Levine helped, too, when he leaned back in the shadows of the wooden room where it all started and brought out his memories. He said it made him wish he could travel in the desert.

At first Danny Murray refused to see me. Then he agreed to meet in a public cafeteria, and there he sat in silence and drank coffee and played with his spoon. Ever so slowly he began to talk, and since then, for the last three years, he has shared as much with me as I think he could and my respect and affection for him are boundless. He realized, I think, that a book about Joe Willie and Katherine would, ironically, give Joe Willie some of the dignity and recognition he had not had elsewhere.

There is one major exception in all this. Vincent and Mary Cleary, Katherines parents, refused to see me. I talked to them several times on the telephone, not long, but enough to get a sense of their warmth and kindness. I understand their unwillingness to talk, but I regret it: I know there is more to Katherine Cleary than I was able to discover.

I did catch a glimpse of her, but unfortunately many of the people who really knew her chose not to share that knowledge with me. I wish I could do her more justice in the story that follows because I think she deserved it and because I, as a woman, think her drama was one that many women, myself included, have lived. She and the rest of us are pioneers, of sorts, developing our own role models as we go along, with only our own track records to guide us. Its hard, but the fascination of Katherine, of course, is that this was what she was dealing with. She could have done better, but for my part, I wish I knew more about the options and choices she faced.

Out of all this research and time and travel I have written what I call an interpretive biography. To the best of my knowledge everything here is true. After much thought, though, I have changed the names in the story and altered several identifying features. In some cases, I did this upon request and in others, at my own initiative, because I figured the amount of pain this drama caused everyone was sufficient; let the people have as much privacy as they can.

I have described the wind and the fields; I have recreated scenes and written dialogue and said what people thought and felt, and all this is based on factual accounts of what occurred. In addition, a few times I have stepped in where full and accurate accounts do not exist and created scenes or dialogue I think it reasonable and fair to assume could have taken place, perhaps even did.

What I have done, then, is give myself the liberty to go beyond proven fact to probe the internal and private lives of the people involved in this story. That is why I call it an interpretive biography.

For me this format was essential in order to make Joe Willie and Katherine come alive and tell us, as I think they can, about the violence and loneliness, repression and sadness in all of us. These two people were just trying their best to get to tomorrow, and they didnt always have a lot of luck.

But I dont consider either one of them strange or bizarre. They are, instead, much like the rest of us, and the significance of Katherine Cleary and Joe Willie Simpson is not, therefore, that they are different, or unique, but, rather, that they are familiar.

The one-room apartment where she lived was full of silence and solitude. Every now and then a car passed in the street outside or there was the sound of ships in the harbor or garbage cans blowing along the sidewalk. Otherwise, it was still and lonely and cold.

She lay in bed all morning. She was Katherine Cleary, and not very many people knew her name or recognized her face. It was Monday, January first, and she was twenty-eight years old. She was not going to get any older. She was not going to wake up tomorrow morning, and all the privacy and solitariness of her life was slipping away fast.