Closing Time ― The True Story of the Looking for Mr. Goodbar Murder

The real story behind the murder of a Manhattan schoolteacher that became a symbol of the dangers of casual sex: “A first-rate achievement” (Truman Capote).

In 1973, Roseann Quinn, an Irish-Catholic teacher at a school for deaf children, was killed in New York City after bringing a man home to her apartment from an Upper West Side pub. The crime would not only make headlines, but would soon be fictionalized in the #1 New York Times–bestselling novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar and adapted into a film of the same name, starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere. The case evolved a cultural phenomenon, sparking debates about the sexual revolution and the perils of the “pickup scene” at what were popularly known as singles bars.

In this groundbreaking, inventive true crime tale, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story offers “a meticulous, investigative account of the so-called Goodbar killing” (Los Angeles Times). Using a dramatization technique in which she gives the victim a different name, Lacey Fosburgh veers between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty facts of the aftermath, including the NYPD investigation and the arrest of John Wayne Wilson.

The result is a must-read that earned an Edgar Award nomination for Best Fact Crime, and a classic of the genre that Men’s Journal described as “more riveting, and more tragic, than the Judith Rossner novel—and the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” In the words of the New York Times, “Fosburgh writes with compassion of these sick and shattered lives.”

Lacey Fosburgh (1942–1993) was a journalist, author, and academic best known for Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder. Following her graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, Fosburgh studied in New Delhi under a Fulbright grant from 1964 to 1966. She was a staff reporter for the New York Times from 1968 to 1973. For twenty years, until her death at the age of fifty, Fosburgh wrote freelance newspaper and magazine articles, many of them for the Times, taught journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and authored three books. At the time of her death, Fosburgh resided in California with her husband, the writer David Harris.
?