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 made headlines and the ensuing case quickly evolved into a cultural phenomenon, spawning both a #1 New York Times–bestselling novel and a film adaptation starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, and sparking debates about the sexual revolution and the perils of the “pickup scene” at what were popularly known as singles bars.

In this groundbreaking true crime tale, Lacey Fosburgh, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story, utilizes an inventive dramatization technique, in which she gives the victim a different name, to veer between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty details of its aftermath, including the NYPD investigation and the arrest of John Wayne Wilson.

An Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime, this classic of the genre is “more riveting, and more tragic, than the Judith Rossner novel—and 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (Men’s Journal).
 

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.