Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/30/there-are-a-surprising-number-of-unsolved-murders-involving-grateful-dead-fans.html
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Would have thought that was more of a Blue Oyster Cult thing.
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"There are a surprising number of unsolved murders involving Grateful Dead fans "
Is it really so surprising? There are a lot of reactionary rich kid Deadheads, like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter.
I’m not saying that amoral BMW driving freaks like them are necessarily responsible for murders that seem to fit a pattern of thrill kills. Maybe they’re not. Just seems like a question that should be asked. People are talking, that’s all.
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A lot of this is correlation–people hitchhiking, a body found in downtown Atlanta, etc etc. Makes for a good story, though.
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Especially when a good percentage were women.
I honestly thought this was going to be about the two(?) guys found dead at arenas, maybe they were solved, but for a long time they were nysteries. So I thought they’d found more cases like that.
Sunday it’s the fiftieth anniversary of “American Beauty”, an anniversary release today that is nothing special except two added CDs of live material. I decided to splurge, it’s supposed to arrive on Thursday.
Adam Katz in 1989 was the first mysterious death I remember reading about. And from a story elsewhere abiut this podcast, he’s apparently included.
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And I’m sitting here listening to Barton Hall '77. Happy Friday.
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Deadheads dying in a VW van crash to me doesn’t sound mysterious so much as extremely on-brand.
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Yes. When they played Highgate, Vermont towards the end, there was some accident involving a car, I want to say VW but I’d forgotten all about it until your comment. Someone showed me a clipping at the time.
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there’s nothing inherent to Deadheadness that makes them susceptible to being murdered
I don’t know. Not more than other politically weak subgroups, but I feel like there’s a combination of itinerant lifestyle (real or assumed), animosity towards “dirty hippies”, and higher than average participation in more dangerous activities like hitchhiking, interactions with dealers, trusting strangers, that might have made deadheads more attractive targets to murderers and less interesting to investigators.
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But were they grateful?
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Spring '77 has some of the finest energy of any tour segment, IMO. That one’s among the best. I actually have the 2/26/77 show playing right now. Happy Friday, indeed.
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Yeah, I think they are at least slightly more likely to be targets because of lifestyle, though the “less interesting to investigators” is a big part of them being unsolved. Killers targeting marginalized people get away with it with alarming frequency. (America’s most prolific serial killer went undetected because the deaths of many of his victims weren’t even classified as murders.) Although also, to be fair, itinerant lifestyles also makes it incredibly difficult for police forces, with local jurisdictions, to investigate, as all the likely suspects will probably be gone before the investigation even starts. That means there’s no local suspects to randomly pin it on, either. (I think we tend to underestimate how much of American policing isn’t finding the perpetrator, but just finding someone to blame.) It doesn’t help that small town and rural police forces are more incompetent, too.
So, yeah, not so much surprising.
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Maybe they can do a bit on “Linda and Groovy”, killed in 1967 in the East Village. A search says the killers were found, but it was a big hippie story at the time, included in a book that I read later. But maybe the prototype of the later murders.
Just some added benefits from joining the Angels fraternity.
I think you could come up with the same podcast about any band that has millions of fans and toured for decades.
Ah yes, the Dreadful Grapes. My daughter pissed on Jerry Garcia and yet she and I still live. OK, so she was an infant, and he was cuddling her, but still…
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