October 16, 1967

The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick

By J. ANTHONY LUKAS

"Certainly we knew the Village; our family is at 2 Fifth Avenue," said Irving Fitzpatrick, the wealthy Greenwich, Conn., spice importer whose daughter, Linda, was found murdered with a hippie friend in an East Village boiler room a week ago yesterday.

Mr. Fitzpatrick spoke during a three-hour interview with his family around the fireplace in the library of their 30-room home a mile from the Greenwich Country Club.

For the Fitzpatricks, "the Village" was the Henry James scene they saw out Dr. Sklar's windows and "those dear little shops" that Mrs. Fitzpatrick and her daughters occasionally visited. ("I didn't even know there was an East Village," Mr. Fitzpatrick said. "I've heard of the Lower East Side, but the East Village?")

But for 18-year-old Linda--at least in the last 10 weeks of her life--the Village was a different scene whose ingredients included crash pads, acid trips, freaking out, psychedelic art, witches and warlocks.

If the Fitzpatricks' knowledge of the Village stopped at Washington Square, their knowledge of their daughter stopped at the unsettling but familiar image of a young, talented girl overly impatient to taste the joys of life.

Reality in both cases went far beyond the Fitzpatricks' wildest fears--so far, in fact, that they are still unable to believe what their daughter was going through in her last weeks.

It is perhaps futile to ask which was "the real Linda"--the Linda of Greenwich, Conn., or the Linda of Greenwich Village. For, as The New York Times investigated the two Lindas last week through interviews with her family and with her friends and acquaintances in the Village, it found her a strange mixture of these two worlds, a mixture so tangled that Linda probably did not know in which she belonged.

The last weeks of Linda's life are a source of profound anguish for her parents. The forces at work on young people like Linda are the source of puzzlement for many other parents and of studies by social workers and psychologists, as they seek to understand the thousands of youths who are leaving middle-class homes throughout the country for the "mind expanding drug" scene in places like Greenwich Village.

Until a few months ago, Linda--or "Fitzpoo," as she was known to her family and friends--seemed to be a happy, well-adjusted product of wealthy American suburbia.

"Linda is a well-rounded, fine, healthy girl," her mother, a well-groomed blonde in a high-collared chocolate brown dress, said during the interview in Greenwich. Throughout the interview Mrs. Fitzpatrick used the present tense in talking of her daughter.

Attended Good Schools

Born in Greenwich, Linda attended the Greenwich Country Day School, where she excelled in athletics. She won a place as center forward on the "Stuyvesant Team," the all-Fairfield County field hockey team, and also gained swimming and riding awards. She went on to the Oldfields School, a four-year college preparatory school in Glencoe, Md.

A blonde tending to pudginess, she never quite matched the striking good looks of her mother, who as Dorothy Ann Rush was a leading model and cover girl in the thirties, or of her elder sister, Cindy.

At country club dances, Linda often sat in the corner and talked with one of her half-brothers; but, apparently more interested in sports and painting than dancing, she never seemed to mind very much.

According to her family, Linda's last summer began normally. In mid-June she returned from Oldfields after an active year during which she was elected art editor of the yearbook. She spent several weeks in Greenwich, then left with the family for a month in Bermuda.

Vacations With Family

"The family always takes its summer vacations together; we always do things as a family," said Mr. Fitzpatrick, a tall, athletic-looking man in a well-tailored gray suit, blue tie and gold tie-clip. "Sometimes we went to Florida, sometimes to the Antibes, but for the past few summers we've rented a house in Bermuda. This time it was at Paget."

The family included seven children--Linda and 9-year-old Melissa ("Missy") from this marriage; Perry, 32; Robert, 30; Carol, 27, and David; 25, from Mr. Fitzpatrick's first marriage which ended in divorce, and Cindy from Mrs. Fitzpatrick's first marriage, which also ended in divorce. But this time only Linda and Missy accompanied their parents to Bermuda, while Cindy and her husband joined them later for 10 days.

As the Fitzpatricks remember it, Linda spent "a typical Bermuda vacation"--swimming int he crystal ocean; beach parties on the white sands; hours of painting; occasional shopping expeditions in town.

'The Girl We Knew'

On July 31 the family returned to Greenwich, where Linda spent most of August. Again the family insists she was "the girl we knew and loved."

They say she spent most of her time painting in the studio in the back of the house. But she found plenty of time for swimming with friends in the large robin's-egg-blue pool, playing the piano, and sitting with Missy.

"Linda and Missy were terribly close," their mother said, biting her lip. "Just as close as Cindy and Linda were when they were younger."

If Linda went to New York during August, the family said, it was "just a quick trip in and out--just for the day."

The 'Village' Version

Friends in the Village have a different version of Linda's summer.

"Linda told me she took LSD and smoked grass [marijuana] many times during her stay in Bermuda," recalls Susan Robinson, a small, shy hippie who ran away last May from her home on Cape Cod. "She talked a lot about a fellow who gave her a capsule of acid [LSD] down there and how she was going to send him one."

Susan and her husband, David, who live with two cats and posters of Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and D.H. Lawrence in a two-room apartment at 537 East 13th Street, first met Linda when she showed up there some time early in August.

The Robinson apartment served this summer as a "crash pad"--a place where homeless hippies could spend the night or part of the night. Scrawled in pencil on the tin door to the apartment is a sign that reads: "No visitors after midnight unless by appointment please." It is signed with a flower.

"Linda just showed up one evening with a guy named Pigeon," Susan recalls. "She'd just bought Pigeon some acid. We were fooling around and everything. She stayed maybe a couple of hours and then took off."

Flying on Acid

"But we liked each other, and she came back a few nights later with a kid from Boston. She turned him on, too [gave him some LSD]. She was always doing that. She'd come into the city on weekends with $30 or $40 and would buy acid for people who needed some."

David Robinson, a gentle young man with a black D. H. Lawrence beard who works in a brassiere factory, recalls how Linda turned him on on Aug. 22. "We went to this guy who sold us three capsules for $10 apiece," he said. "She put one away to send to the guy in Bermuda, gave me one and took one herself. She was always getting burned [purchasing fake LSD] and that night she kept saying, 'God, I just hope this is good.' We were out in the Square [Tompkins Park] and we dropped it [swallowed it] right there. Forty-five minutes later--around midnight--we were off.

"We walked over to a pad on 11th Street just feeling the surge, then over to Tompkins Park, then to Cooper Union Square, where we had a very good discussion with a drunk. By then we were really flying. She was very, very groovy. AT 8 A.M. I came back to the pad to sleep, and Linda took the subway to Grand Central and got on the train to Greenwich. She must still have been flying when she got home."

That weekend in Greenwich, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was getting Linda ready for school. "We bought her almost an entire new wardrobe," she recalled, "and Linda even agreed to get her hair cut."

For months Mr. Fitzpatrick had complained about Linda's hair, which flowed down over her shoulders, but Linda didn't want to change it. Then at the end of August she agreed. "We went to Saks Fifth Avenue and the hairdresser gave us a kind of Sassoon blunt cut, short and full. She looked so cute and smart. Hardly a hippie thing to do," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said.

The first day of school was only 11 days off when Linda went to New York on Sept. 1. When she returned to Greenwich the next day, she told her mother she didn't want to go back to Oldfields. She wanted to live and paint in the Village.

A Surprise for Family

"We couldn't have been more surprised," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said, fingering her eyeglasses, which hung from a gold pin at her left shoulder.

"Linda said her favorite teacher, who taught English, and his wife, who taught art, weren't coming back. She just adored them--when they went to Europe she just had to send champagne and fruit to the boat--and she couldn't face going back to school if they weren't there.

"What's more, she said there wasn't anything else she could learn about art at Oldfields. They'd already offered to set up a special course for her there, but she didn't want more courses. She just wanted to paint. She thought she'd be wasting her time at school."

Mother and daughter talked for nearly two hours that Saturday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. Then Mrs. Fitzpatrick told her husband, who at first was determined that Linda should finish school.

Reluctant Consent Given

"But we talked about it with all the family and with friends all through the weekend," Mr. Fitzpatrick recalls. "Finally, on Sunday night, we gave Linda our reluctant permission, though not our approval." Linda left for New York the next morning and the family never saw her alive again.

"After all," her mother put in, "Linda's whole life was art. She had a burning desire to be something in the art world. I knew how she felt. I wanted to be a dancer or an artist when I was young, too."

The Fitzpatrick's minds were eased when Linda assured them she had already made respectable living arrangements. "She told us that she was going to live at the Village Plaza Hotel, a very nice hotel on Washington Place, near the university, you know," her mother said.

"'I'll be perfectly safe, mother,' she kept saying. 'It's a perfectly nice place with a doorman and television. She said she'd be rooming with a girl named Paula Bush, a 22-year-old receptionist from a good family. That made us feel a lot better."

A Room at 'The Plaza'

The Village Plaza, 79 Washington Place, has no doorman. A flaking sign by the tiny reception desk announces "Television for Rental" amidst a forest of other signs; "No Refunds," "All, Rents Must be Paid in Advance," "No Checks Cashed," "No Outgoing Calls for Transients."

"Sure I remember Linda," said the stooped desk clerk. "But Paula Bush? There wasn't no Paula Bush. It was Paul Bush."

Ruffling through a pile of stained and thumb-marked cards, he came up with one that had Linda Fitzpatrick's name inked at the top in neat Greenwich Country Day School penmanship. Below it in pencil was written: "Paul Bush. Bob Brumberger."

"Yeh," the clerk said. "She moved in here on Sept. 4, Labor Day, with these two hippie guys, Bush and Brumberger. They had Room 504. She paid the full month's rent--$120--in advance. Of course, she had lots of other men up there all the time. Anybody off the street--the dirtiest, bearded hippies she could find."

"She Was Different"

"I kept telling her she hadn't ought to act like that. She didn't pay me any attention. But you know she never answered back real snappy like some of the other girls. She was different. She had something--I don't know, class. The day she checked out--oh, it was about Sept. 20--I was out on the steps, and as she left she said, 'I guess I caused you a lot of trouble.' and I said, 'Oh, it wasn't any trouble, really.'"

"You want to see the room? Well, there are some people up there now, but I think it'll be O.K."

The elevator was out of order. The stairs were dark and narrow, heavy with the sweet reek of marijuana. A knock, and the door to 504 swung open. A bearded young man took his place again on the sway-backed double bed that filled half the room. The young man and three girls were plucking chocolates out of a box.

Against one of the light green walls was a peeling gray dresser, with the upper left drawer missing. Scrawled on the mirror above the dresser in what looked like eyebrow pencil was "Tea Heads Forever" (a tea head is a marijuana smoker) and in lighter pencil, "War is Hell." Red plastic flowers hung from an overhead light fixture. The bathroom, directly across the hall, was shared with other rooms.

"Would you like to see Linda's room?" her mother asked, leading the way up the thickly carpeted stairway. "That used to be her room," she said, pointing into an airy bedroom with a white canopied bed, "until she began playing all those records teen-agers play these days and she asked to move upstairs so she could make all the noise she wanted."

On the third floor Mrs. Fitzpatrick opened the red curtains in the large room. "Red and white are Linda's favorite colors; she thinks they're gay," Mrs. Fitzpatrick said, taking in the red and white striped wallpaper, the twin beds with red bedspreads, the red pillow with white lettering: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions."

Orange flashed here and there--in the orange and black tiger on the bed ("that's for her father's college, Princeton; we're a Princeton family") and in the orange "Gs" framed on the wall, athletic awards from Greenwich Country Day School.

On the shelves, between a ceramic collie and a glass Bambi, were Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" and Agatha Christie's "Murder at Hazelmoor." Nearby were a stack of records, among them Eddie Fisher's "Tonight" and Joey Dee's "Peppermint Twist." In the bright bathroom hung blue and red ribbons from the Oldfields Horse Show and the Greenwich Riding Association Show.

"As you can see, she was such a nice, outgoing, happy girl," her mother said. "If anything's changed, it's changed awfully fast."

Downstairs again, over ginger ale and brownies that Cindy brought in from the kitchen, the Fitzpatricks said they had been reassured about Linda's life in the Village because she said she had a job making posters for "Poster Bazaar" at $80 a week.

"Later she called and said she'd switched to a place called Imports, Ltd., for $85 a week and was making posters on weekends. She sounded so excited and happy," Mrs. Fitzpatrick recalled.

Nobody The Times interviewed had heard of a store called Poster Bazaar. AT 177 Macdougal Street is a shop called Fred Leighton's Mexican Imports, Ltd, where, the records show, Linda worked for $2 an hour selling dresses for three days--Sept. 11, 12 and 13. On the third day she was discharged.

"She was always coming in late, and they just got fed up with her," a salesgirl said. Although Linda was given a week's notice, she left on Sept. 14 for a "doctor's appointment" and never came back.

A Try at Panhandling

Before she left, she asked the manager not to tell her parents she had been discharged, if they called. The manager said the parents did not call after Linda had left, although there had been one call while she was working there.

David Robinson said Linda supported herself from then on by "panhandling" on Washington Square. "She was pretty good at it," he said. "She always got enough to eat."

Linda may have had some money left over from what her mother gave her before she left ("I gave her something, Mrs. Fitzpatrick said, "I thought she was going to be a career girl"), although she never had very much those last weeks.

Yet, David recalls, Linda frequently talked about making big money. "She had a thing about money. Once she told me she wanted to get a job with Hallmark cards drawing those little cartoons. She said she'd make $40,000 a year, rent a big apartment on the Upper East Side and then invite all her hippie friends up there."

Experimenting With Art

"We're a great card-exchanging family," Cindy said. "Whenever the occasion arose--birthdays, holidays, illnesses--Linda would make up her own cards and illustrate them with cute little pictures of people and animals."

From a pile on the hall table, Cindy picked out a card with a picture of a girl and an inked inscription, "Please get well 'cause I miss ya, love Linda XOX." In the same pile was a Paris street scene in pastels, two forest scenes made with oils rolled with a Coke bottle, several other gentle landscapes. "Linda was experimenting with all sorts of paints and techniques," Cindy said.

"You want to see some of the paintings she did down here?" asked Susan Robinson, as she went to a pile of papers in the corner and came back with five ink drawings on big white sheets from a sketching pad.

The drawings were in the surrealistic style of modern psychedelic art: distorted women's faces, particularly heavily lidded eyes, dragons, devils, all hidden in a thick jungle of flowers, leaves and vines, interspersed with phrases in psychedelic script like "Forever the Mind," "Flying High," "Tomorrow Will Come."

"Linda was never terribly boy crazy," her mother said. "She was very shy. When a boy got interested in her, she'd almost always lose interest in him. She got a proposal in August from a very nice boy from Arizona. She told me, 'He's very nice and I like him, but he's just too anxious.' The boy sent flowers for the funeral. That was thoughtful."

The Robinsons and her other friends in the Village said there were always men in Linda's life there: first Pigeon, then the boy from Boston, then Paul Bush.

Bush, the 19-year-old son of a Holly, Mich. television repairman, described by those who knew him here as "a real drifter, a way-out hippie," He carried a [word missing] lizard named Lyndon on a string around his neck. Bush, who says he left New York on Oct. (?) was interviewed by telephone in San Francisco yesterday.

The Nonexistent 'Paula'

"I met Linda at the Robinsons about Aug. 18--a few days after I got to town," he recalls. "We wandered around together. She said her parents bugged her, always hollered at her. . . . So I said I'd get a pad with her and Brumberger, this kid from New Jersey.

"She said she'd tell her parents she was living with a girl named Paula Bush, because she didn't want them to know she was living with a man. That was O.K. with me. I only stayed about a week anyway, and Brumberger even less. Then she brought in some other guy. I don't know who he was, except he was tall with long hair and a beard."

This many may have been Ed, a tall hippie who the Robinsons saw with Linda several times in mid-September. Later came James L. (Groovy) Hutchinson, the man with whom she was killed last week.

Toward the end of September, Susan Robinson says, Linda told her she feared she was pregnant. "She was very worried about the effect of LSD on the baby, and since I was pregnant, too, we talked about it for quite a while."

Father Inclined to Doubt

"I don't believe Linda really had anything to do with the hippies," her father said. "I remember during August we were in this room watching a C.B.S. special about the San Francisco hippies. I expressed my abhorrence for the whole thing, and her comments were much like mine. I don't believe she was attracted to them."

However, Linda's half-brother, Perry, recalls that during August Mr. Fitzpatrick also read a story about Galahad, a New York hippie leader, and expressed his "disdain" for him. Linda mentioned casually that she had met Galahad and that she understood he was "helping people," but her father let the remark pass, apparently considering it of no significance.

Her friends say Linda was fascinated by the scene in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. In late September she apparently visited there.

Susan Robinson recalls that she did not see Linda for some time in late September and that suddenly, on Oct. 1, Linda turned up at her pad and said she had been to Haight-Ashbury. "She said she stayed out there only two days and was very disappointed; that it was a really bad scene; that everybody was on speed [a powerful drug called methadrine]. She said she got out and drove back."

In the first week of October the Fitzpatricks got a postcard postmarked Knightstown, Ind., a small town 30 miles east of Indianapolis. Mrs. Fitzpatrick did not want to show the card to a visitor because "it was the last thing I got which Linda touched." But she said it read roughly: "I'm on my way to see Bob [her brother, who is a Los Angeles lawyer]. Offered a good job painting posters in Berkeley. I love you. I will send you a poster. Love, Linda."

Also in the first week of October a girl who identified herself as Linda telephoned her brother's office in Los Angeles but was told he was in San Francisco. She never called back.

When Linda saw Susan on Oct. 1 she told her she had two warlocks, or male witches, in California and had driven back with them.

"This didn't surprise me," Susan said. "Linda told me several times she was a witch. She said she had discovered this one day when she was sitting on a beach and wished she had some money. Three dollar bills floated down from heaven.

"Then she looked down on the beach and thought how empty it was and wished there was someone there. She said a man suddenly appeared. She was always talking about her supernatural powers. Once she was walking on a street in the Village with this girl Judy, and she stumbled over a broom. 'Oh,' she told Judy, 'this is my lucky day. Now I can fly away.'"

"Linda told me she met these two warlocks out there and that they could snap their fingers and make light bulbs pop. She said one of the warlocks took her mind apart and scattered it all over the room and then put it together again. Ever since, she said, she felt the warlock owned her."

'That's Not True'

"One of the newspapers said Linda was interested in Buddhism and Hinduism and all that supernatural stuff," Cindy said. "That's not true at all. I don't think she ever even knew what it was."

Last Friday a self-styled warlock who said he was one of the two who drove Linda back to New York was interviewed in the Village. The warlock, who called himself "Pepsi," is in his late 20's, with long, sandy hair, a scruffy beard, heavily tattooed forearms, wire rim glasses and long suede Indian boots.

"My buddy and I ran into Linda in a club in Indianapolis called the Glory Hole," Pepsi said. "We took Linda along. You could see right away she was a real meth monster--that's my name for a speed freak, somebody hooked on speed.

"We were two days driving back. We got in on Oct. 1, and she put up with me and my buddy in this pad on Avenue B. She was supposed to keep it clean, but all she ever did all day was sit around. She had this real weird imagination, but she was like talking in smaller and smaller circles. She was supposed to be this great artist, but it wasn't much good. It was just teeny bopper stuff-- drawing one curving line, then embellishing it.

A Lot of Potential

It sounds like I'm knocking her. I'm not. She was a good kid, if she hadn't been so freaked out on meth. She had a lot of, what do you call it--potential. Sometimes she was a lot of fun to be with. we took her on a couple of spiritual seances, and we went out on the Staten Island Ferry one day at dawn and surfing once on Long Island."

Pepsi saw Linda at 10 P.M. Saturday Oct. 8 standing in front of the Cave on Avenue A with Groovy. She said she'd taken a grain and a half of speed and was "high." Three hours later she and Groovy were dead--their nude bodies stretched out on the boiler room floor, their heads shattered by bricks. The police have charged two men with the murders and are continuing their investigation.

"It's too late for the whole thing to do us much good," her brother Perry said on Saturday after he had been told of her life in the Village. "But maybe somebody else can learn something from it."