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Police later arrested three Negroes: Donald Ramsey, 26, who wears the fez of the Yoruba sect, a Black Nationalist cult, and whose apartment on the fifth floor of the murder building is decorated with Black Power posters; Thomas Dennis, also 26, a pot-smoking wino who hung out on the hippie fringe and proclaimed a code of racial violence; and Fred Wright, 31, assistant janitor in the building who lived in a small room just off the cellar, and who was held on "related" charges of raping and robbing another hippie girl just hours before the slayings. Wright was reputed to be the key-keeper of the cellar where the bodies were found. Ram sey told investigators that he was "flying" at the time, seeing "lights and colors."
Turned-on Taps. Drug-induced violence is nothing new to the neighborhoods where hippies live. San Francisco's Hashbury had a pair of unrelated murders in a single week last summer (TIME, Aug. 18), and the phenomenon of murder or suicide committed under the influence of LSD is becoming commonplace. But the deaths of Groovy and Linda carried an added burden of horror. They sent a chill through all of hippiedom. In the East Village, the hippies were convinced that it was time to move. The scene would never be the same. "The chick wasn't anything to us," said one wet-eyed hippie girl. "But Groovy, oh, Groovy. It's like our eyes were gone."
Groovy's closest friend, Galahad, who once ran a communal crash pad (dormitory), muttered about revenge and then, at Groovy's funeral in Pawtucket, R.I., played a turned-on taps on his dead friend's harmonica. In Greenwich, Conn., under a chilly autumn rain, Linda Fitzpatrick was buried, after a simple Episcopal service, in a cemetery not far from the rolling, red-leafed bridle paths of Round Hill Stables, where she used to ride.