The Death of David Kammerer: 80 Years Later

The story of Lucien Carr killing David Kammerer is well-trodden ground in Beat circles, but like so many Beat stories, there is a degree of mystery around it. It is becoming increasingly common to question the old narrative of Carr stabbing to death his long-time stalker in a moment of desperation, with various interpretations now suggesting that Kammerer may not have been the aggressor.

Today marks the 80^th anniversary of the killing and so I wanted to look into the events surrounding the killing in depth as a means of trying to determine what really happened. I do not intend this as a definitive study of the Kammerer killing, for precise details of what happened on August 14, 1944, will most likely always remain a mystery, but I hope that by examining a wider range of sources than have been previously consulted and asking a few tough questions I can perhaps provide some degree of clarity.

Although my aim is to remove the mystery and confusion surrounding the killing, this is going to be a fairly long and complicated essay. That is simply because it is not an easy case to analyse. Too many biographers and scholars have looked at the available information and jumped to conclusions, but in doing so they have made assumptions or overlooked important facts. Their erroneous conclusions have then been used as the basis for subsequent conjecture. To write this essay, I have explored the relationship between Carr and Kammerer, as well as their New York social scene, and also examined many media accounts of the killing, in order to better understand how the two men really viewed each other prior to that fateful night. There will never be a way of knowing what the two men said and did in the minutes before Carr stabbed Kammerer, but it is possible to get a clearer picture of their relationship, and that allows us to make more intelligent assumptions about the killing.

This essay will be very long (more than 14,000 words), so I’ve divided it into sections for people to more easily navigate it.

An Overview

The killing of David Kammerer is mentioned in several hundred publications (and is the subject of one very heavily fictionalised film), and in each case it is put forth as an event instrumental in the creation of the Beat Generation. The basic story goes like this:

Without Lucien Carr, there would have been no Beat Generation, for he was the one who introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the three core members of the literary movement. He was an intelligent but rather troublesome young man, who had a stalker fourteen years his senior. Carr may or may not have encouraged Kammerer, but he certainly seemed proud of having this man fawn over him and liked to tease him.

Kammerer’s obsession with Carr seems to have worsened and, when he made a move on Carr one night, the younger man responded by stabbing him to death. Carr disposed of the body, then went to see Burroughs and Kerouac. With the latter, he spent a day watching movies before turning himself in. He served two years for what a court decided was an act of self-defence.

The killing temporarily scattered the Beat group, but they remained close friends. Importantly, it was something they all wrote about, including a key collaboration between Kerouac and Burroughs. The killing was mentioned in various literary works, and so it became almost a creation myth for the Beat Generation.

Despite this event having been widely covered in the media and then referenced in several hundred books, there is a degree of mystery surrounding it. Our sources for the history of Carr and Kammerer are almost exclusively provided by Carr’s friends and family, and the only account of that night comes from Carr himself, who very obviously had an interest in presenting himself as a victim. Historical facts, such as the date of the killing, come from newspaper reports that were rushed and thus contained errors that have been repeated.

Whilst most people seem to agree that Kammerer was a stalker and Carr killed him in self-defence, there are suspicions that the story has been substantially distorted and that perhaps Kammerer was not the monster that is commonly depicted. This perspective seems to date back to a dubious source and has been resurrected by well-meaning people in the 21^st century as a means of highlighting an issue called “gay panic defence.” Certainly, these alternate views have cast a significant degree of doubt on the accepted narrative, and some of them contain compelling ideas, so in this essay I want to look in as much detail as possible at the story, hopefully providing a modicum of clarity.

Carr, Kammerer, and Burroughs

In order to understand why Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer, it is important to go further back. Specifically, we will look at three friends living in St. Louis in the decades prior to Kammerer’s death.

Born in 1911, David Kammerer was three years older than William S. Burroughs. Both men grew up in relatively affluent St. Louis families and attended the same schools. Burroughs initially knew Richard Kammerer, David’s younger brother, but they did not get along well. They came to know one another, according to Burroughs’ biographer, Barry Miles, at the John Burroughs School, which Burroughs attended from seventh grade onwards.[1]

Shy and awkward, Burroughs was a bit of an outsider (but probably less so than he later claimed). People felt there was something strange about him, and so he struggled to get along with others. He did, however, get along with Kammerer, who would have been around seventeen when they met. It was to Kammerer that an old woman supposedly remarked, “if you want to get ahead socially, get rid of him, it’s a walking corpse!”[i] Burroughs repeated that line often.

In July 1933, aged nineteen, Burroughs went off to Europe on a trip paid for by his parents. Kammerer, who was by now studying at St. Louis’ Washington University, accompanied him. It seems they were good friends, but Miles speculates that Kammerer may also have been “trusted to take care of Bill.”[ii] In any case, they visited London and Paris and had a great time together. Burroughs knew Kammerer was gay and may have confided in his friend that he was too, but they were not romantically or sexually involved with one another. They were merely good friends. Burroughs said of him: “He was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality. No conventional behavior at all. He was very witty, very charming.”[iii]

School records show that Kammerer began his studies at Washington University in 1930, earning his BA in 1933, and then his MA in English in 1938.[iv] He worked as an English instructor there from 1938 until 1941, when he seems to have been fired for a prank, possibly involving a fire hose. It is often said he was a P.E. teacher, but I can see no evidence for this. He was a puppeteer, and until the numerous articles about his 1944 death, Kammerer’s name most frequently appeared in newspapers whenever he put on a marionette show.

From St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 21, 1936.

Whilst working as an instructor at Washington University, Kammerer ran some sort of youth group at the John Burroughs School. The exact nature of the group remains unclear. It is most often said that he was the leader of a Boy Scout group, but it may have merely been a weekend activities group for teenage boys, similar to but distinct from the Scouts.[2] In any case, it was here that he first met Lucien Carr.

Carr was only thirteen years old when he met Kammerer, who was then twenty-seven. In Burroughs’ rather creepy words, he “was a beautiful boy, he was blond, he had perfectly molded features, slender and wiry, just a beautiful young upper-class kid.”[v] This made him very much the opposite of Kammerer, who by most accounts was quite unattractive. Miles reports:

David was fourteen years older than Lucien, tall, with rangy features and a big nose. He was not good-looking. He had long muscular legs and wherever he went he almost ran, rushing along with his thick, curly red hair flying, his red beard jutting forward, and his coat undone and flapping. He took stairs two at a time and arrived breathless, wringing his hands in anxiety. He had a high-pitched, fluting voice that got quieter as he spoke until he was barely audible.[vi]

It has been suggested that Kammerer fell in love with Carr immediately because he closely resembled someone Kammerer had been attracted to in Paris. Whatever the reason, he certainly seems to have taken an instant and intense interest in the boy. It was such an overwhelming attraction, accompanied by such leering behaviour, that Burroughs remonstrated with him, saying “This is silly, this is awful. It’s also completely selfish, you’re not really interested in him, you’re interested in some idea of him that you have. And what you’re trying to do is not at all to his advantage.” Kammerer replied, “Oh well, it’s my obsession.”[vii]

Barry Miles, in Call Me Burroughs, refers to a story that is not cited in his notes but which seems to originate with Ted Morgan’s earlier biography, Literary Outlaw. He claims that once a week, Kammerer would fill his car with “six to eight grade-school boys” and take them out to the countryside, and that on one occasion he ended up in hospital after getting a burst blood vessel in his penis from “romping around in a hayloft.”[viii] Obviously, this is a very serious claim, but Morgan’s book is unclear in terms of referencing, and so it is not known where this story originates. The possible sources are each limited in their authority, so it may be a case of hearsay.

On the subject of Kammerer’s apparent paedophilic proclivities, it is of note that he wrote a master’s thesis entitled “The Boy in English Fiction to Defoe,” which includes the startling claim that he was a “literary paedophile” and admits an interest in “pretty” and “beautiful” boys. However, as Dustin Griffin notes, this is not quite the smoking gun that one may think:

Given the reputation Kammerer later acquired in New York as a homosexual pursuer of Lucien Carr, it is tempting to assume that Kammerer’s sexual interests in young men led him to the topic. But his discussion in the master’s thesis of literary representations of “the boy character” will mostly disappoint anybody looking for hints of a homosexual sensibility. His manner of proceeding is scholarly, and his prose reproduces the style of literary histories of the early twentieth century: artificial and elevated diction, a leisurely pace, mostly quotation, plot summary, character description, and not much close analysis, which did not become academically fashionable until a decade later. His work is thoroughly grounded in English prose fiction from the Middle Ages into the seventeenth century.[ix]

He also notes that the term “paedophile” (or “pedophile” in American English) was not coined until about a decade later and so “it’s possible that he was making a learned philological joke, intending by the made-up pseudo-Greek word simply ‘one who delights in the literary representation of children, esp. boys.’”[x]

(On the horrendous topic of paedophilia, readers may be interested in this long essay from 2023 about Allen Ginsberg and NAMBLA.)

Although it does seem that he was a hebephile with a sexual interest in Carr, Kammerer made no obvious sexual advances towards the boy during the first months they knew each other, and he earned the trust of Carr and his parents. When Lucien was fourteen, he and Kammerer (with Carr’s mother’s approval) went on a trip to Mexico, where they saw bullfights, rode horses, and went fishing. The trip came to an end when Kammerer dislocated his neck, and Carr travelled home alone.

Miles and Morgan both report that it was in Mexico that Kammerer told Carr of his feelings for him, and that Carr was unhappy about this, feeling that the older man had merely acted as his friend, which he saw as a betrayal. However, it is hard to know whether this version of events is really true. As is so often the case here, there is little evidence for it except that it has been repeated often. Morgan draws upon an interview with Burroughs and Miles cites an interview with Allen Ginsberg, who both seem to be recalling conversations with Carr. Following the Mexico trip, however, the two seemed to be close friends. It is not impossible that Carr brushed off Kammerer’s affections and continued their friendship, but given other uncertainties, one must be sceptical.

It seems that not long after Kammerer allegedly admitted his feelings, Carr began toying with him. When he was around fifteen or sixteen, he let Burroughs grope and kiss him under a rug while Kammerer looked on, dismayed. “Lucien was just taunting him,” Burroughs said. “We didn’t really make it, but it just drove Dave crazy. If you give a young boy an opportunity to be cruel, he’ll sure as hell take it all the way.”[xi]

It is not obvious how “cruel” Carr was at this stage in his life but certainly he was a difficult and troublesome boy. Perhaps his intelligence made him feel smarter than those around him, or maybe it was due to the fact that his father had abandoned him at two years old.[3] In any case, Carr attended multiple schools and often found himself in trouble for his behaviour. What is most relevant to this story, however, is the fact that whenever he moved to a new school, Kammerer seems to have followed him. At the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Kammerer supposedly stalked him so inappropriately that he was kicked out of town, but stayed nearby and convinced Carr to go on trips with him. Around this time, his mother supposedly found out that Kammerer was in love with him, finding more than fifty love letters in her son’s bedroom. Understandably, she was sickened and sent him to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. However, Kammerer again showed up to be near him.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how true these stories are… As with so much in the Carr-Kammerer saga, the facts come directly from people who had an interest in protecting Carr. According to Griffin, Kammerer only visited Carr at Andover a handful of times and did so with Carr’s blessing. Certainly, Carr’s housemaster commented on the “most unfortunate” relationship between the boy and Kammerer, and obviously it looks like wildly inappropriate behaviour, but it is not clear that Kammerer just showed up and stalked the boy as is usually claimed. As for the love letters, Griffin observed that there were major chronological mistakes in the story, so it is possible that it was partially invented by Carr’s family as a means of protecting him after he killed Kammerer. Then again, the evidence overwhelmingly shows Kammerer to have been in love with Carr and he did write a lot of letters, so it may well be true.

After that, Carr attended the University of Chicago, and Kammerer moved there, too. Here, they renewed their friendships with Burroughs, who was working as an exterminator and studying Egyptian hieroglyphs. Carr and Kammerer showed up at his apartment one day and urinated out his window, then tore up a Bible that came with the room, getting Burroughs evicted. It seems that regardless of the extent to which Kammerer followed Carr, the latter certainly enjoyed the former’s company.

From Chicago, Carr and Kammerer took a road trip to Princeton. When they returned, Carr put his head in an oven apparently as a suicide attempt. He later called this a “work of art” and a “drunken impulse”[xii] but it has been suggested that perhaps he was trying to evade the draft. He had just turned eighteen and the war was raging in Europe and the Pacific. His mother flew to Chicago, reportedly screamed at Kammerer, tracked Carr to his girlfriend’s house, and tricked him into a two-week stay at Cook County Hospital’s psychiatric department.

It is not certain that Kammerer did anything directly to push Carr to suicide, and indeed the suicide attempt seems rather performative. The fact that his landlady smelled gas and ran upstairs to save him suggests that Carr had not made a serious attempt. But still, if it was an act of desperation—even if just a cry for attention—then it is quite likely that Kammerer’s disturbing, predatory behaviour was at least partially to blame.

After being released from Cook Country Hospital, Carr applied to Columbia University and enrolled in November, studying English and anthropology. Unsurprisingly, Kammerer moved to the city that same month, and Burroughs, who considered Kammerer a good friend, moved soon after.

The New York Beat Scene

It was in December 1943 that Allen Ginsberg met Carr. The story is well known, for Ginsberg repeated it often and so it appears in a great many books about the Beats. Both men were staying at Union Theological Seminary on 122nd Street, a location Carr’s mother supposedly believed would keep him safe from Kammerer. One night, Ginsberg heard some music coming from down the hallway. He was unfamiliar with it, but it sounded like Brahms, so he went to the door from which the sound came and introduced himself. The room belonged to Carr and the music was Brahms’ Trio No. 1. Carr invited Ginsberg into his “little oasis in this wasteland,”[xiii] and they quickly became close friends.

Both men were highly intelligent but in terms of personality they differed a lot. Whilst Ginsberg was shy and full of self-doubt, Carr was an attention-seeking troublemaker. Ginsberg’s biographer, Michael Schumacher, wrote in Dharma Lion:

Two years older than Allen, Lucien was every bit as bright, yet far more sophisticated and experienced; he knew his way around the streets nearly as well as he knew his way around the textbooks. Self-confident to the point of arrogance, Lucien was known for his flashy dress, slicing wit, and impulsive behavior. He wouldn’t hesitate to create a scene in a public place if he believed he could make a point in doing so. Gratuitous acts, such as chewing on slivers of glass, were commonplace. On occasion, he had to use his quick mind in order to avoid a nasty barroom altercation with someone he had offended.[xiv]

This description matches most others, so it can be seen as a reasonable overview of Carr’s personality at that time. He was precocious and possessed a destructive rebelliousness, and his callous pretentiousness Ginsberg found intoxicating and others found repulsive. Kerouac thought he was a “mischievous little prick”[xv] when they first met, a view shared by many others. However, Kerouac came to like him and they too became friends. Later, he would often defend Carr’s abhorrent behaviour—the same antics that first turned him off.

Ginsberg liked to quip that “Lu was the glue” for his role in bringing the core Beat writers together. It was Carr who suggested Ginsberg go meet a young man called Kerouac. Although they did not immediately get along, the two men spent a night walking the streets together, opening their hearts and quickly forming a deep friendship. Carr later introduced Kerouac to Burroughs and also introduced Ginsberg to Burroughs, although he was attempting to introduce him to Kammerer, and Burroughs happened to be at Kammerer’s house. Needless to say, they all got along well and the heart of the Beat Generation was established.

These young, bohemian intellectuals had various interests that they keenly shared with one another, expanding their own worldviews and forming an amorphous philosophy called the New Vision. Ginsberg recalled that proto-Beat ideology as possibly originating with Carr:

When we first got together, I think supreme reality was the ideal that we were chasing after as the “new vision.” Kerouac and I both used that phrase, “new vision,” coming probably from Lucien Carr who was carrying around Yeats’s A Vision and coming from the paragraph in Rimbaud’s Season in Hell which goes, “When shall we go beyond the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of fresh toil; fresh wisdom, the rout of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore—as newcomers—Christmas on earth!”[xvi]

Their interests included French literature (Rimbaud, Celine, Baudelaire) and black music (blues, bop, jazz). They obsessed over Spengler’s The Decline of the West and began looking to the East for alternatives to what they perceived as their own dying culture. They were fascinated by intoxicants and crime… anything, basically, outside of mainstream American culture. Eventually, their exploration of these ideas would lead them around the world and into innumerable subcultures, but for now they were not all that different from your typical pontificating, pretentious university students.

Burroughs, despite being older and looked up to by the others, did not seem to have any interest in writing. He read, he learned, he did his best to ingratiate himself in the criminal underground. Ginsberg wrote but he was far from having discovered his voice and lacked the confidence to try anything except imitating others. Carr probably seemed the most likely to become a Rimbaudian poète maudit, but he was too busy running around, causing chaos, to do much writing. It was only Kerouac, perhaps the most serious of the group, who had already devoted himself to writing. It was said that he’d written more than a million words at that point, and looking at his vast archive of work—much posthumously published—it seems a plausible figure. Together, though, they pushed and inspired each other, subtly at first and more obviously later.

Kammerer seems to have been on the edge of the burgeoning literary group. According to Miles, Kammerer and Burroughs had dinner together “almost every night” and Burroughs “regarded him as his best friend.”[xvii] It appears as though he had other friends and partook in various cultural activities but he was not an integral member of the early Beat group and what contact he did have, aside from his friendship with Burroughs, largely came from his obsession with Carr, and that appeared to be an obsession that was growing more and more disturbing.

Returning to Schumacher’s Dharma Lion again, we have a picture of the relationship between these two tragic individuals:

To the people who knew Carr and Kammerer, the situation was sad, pathetic: Lucien was decisively heterosexual, and the tall, red-headed bearded Kammerer, obsessed with Lucien to the point of forsaking his life and self-respect in his hopeless pursuit, became an inescapable shadow, following Carr from place to place, questioning his friends about his whereabouts, occasionally getting Lucien into trouble—even sneaking into his apartment to watch him sleep. Unable to escape Kammerer, Lucien had decided that his only workable alternative was to establish a rather uneasy friendship in which he dominated their relationship by calling all the shots. Lucien decided what they were doing, where they were going—and if, in fact, they were getting together in the first place. Although far from ideal, this type of association gave Lucien more control of his situation than he might otherwise have had.[xviii]

So far, this has been a story about young men, but the largely male group expanded with the inclusion of Edie Parker, Joan Vollmer, and Celine Young. Kerouac was dating Parker; Burroughs, despite being gay, began a relationship with Vollmer; and Carr dated Young.

As we have seen, the fact that Kammerer was homosexual and Carr was heterosexual had been a source of tremendous frustration, but now that Carr was involved with Young, Kammerer seems to have become deranged. He was no longer content to follow Carr’s orders and started becoming abusive. His behaviour—which had previously been viewed as pathetic—now began to alarm everyone in the group. In her memoir of that time, Parker recalled:

I always felt that David was creepy and might as well have had cloven hooves and horns growing out of thick, curly red hair. He was the dark cloud that hovered over our lives. […] He drove us all to silence because all he ever wanted to talk about was Lucien. As a result, it was best to say nothing around him at all. Needless to say, he was uncomfortable to be around so we avoided him, in fact Burroughs was the only person who could tolerate him.[xix]

She goes on to say, “My God, what a pest!”[xx] then gives example of his embarrassing behaviour and demonstrates others laughing at him behind his back. “If it hadn’t turned out so tragically, it would have been comical,”[xxi] she wrote. This matches with other accounts, including this one by Kerouac. (Franz “Swinburne” Mueller is Kammerer and Claude is Carr.)

Then sometimes Mueller would catch me alone and talk to me long and earnestly over beers but always the same intention: to find out what Claude did or said behind his back, that is, behind his knowing, and who he saw, what, where, all the anguished questioning of a lover. […] And he gave me detailed instructions to say this, that, to arrange meetings one way or the other. Claude was avoiding him more than ever.[xxii]

Kammerer’s own letters from that era show a man who was very interested in high culture and who kept up with the news, whilst socialising often. His social group was not limited to the Beat writers, though. He had other friends. He was writing weekly to his mother and whilst obviously he did not confess his obsession for Carr, it comes through nonetheless, and it is clear he was frustrated and depressed. He also struggled with work, finding it difficult to get employment befitting a man of his education, and by March 1944 he was finding it difficult to feed himself.[xxiii]

In late February, Carr may have attempted to get some distance from Kammerer, who wrote to his mother that Carr “felt we were too dependent on each other and might each do better independently. I feel he is perhaps right until I get on my feet, but I miss him terribly.”[xxiv]

Years later, in Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac wrote:

Wherever Claude went, Mueller followed. Claude’s mother even tried to have the man arrested. At the time, Hubbard, Franz’ closest friend, remonstrated again and again with him to go off someplace and find another boy more amenable, go to sea, go to South America, live in the jungle, go marry Cindy Lou in Virginia (Mueller came from aristocrats somewhere). No. It was the romantic and fatal attachment: I could understand it myself because for the first time in my life I found myself stopping in the street and thinking: ‘Wonder where Claude is now? What’s he doing right now?’ and going off to find him. I mean, like that feeling you get during a love affair.[xxv]

Indeed, Burroughs, who had known him in St. Louis, was closer to Kammerer than the others, and he tried to persuade him to either get over his obsession or move to another part of the country. His efforts, however, were in vain. One night, Kammerer broke into Carr’s dorm room and sat watching him sleep, and was nearly arrested when a security guard caught him. Carr had to lie to the police, telling them Kammerer had been in his room all night. He broke into at least one building to gain entry to a party Carr was attending, and perhaps most disturbingly of all, Kammerer attempted to kill Carr’s cat. Thankfully, Burroughs intervened.

Carr appeared to be getting desperate. “I feel like I’m in a pond that’s drying up and I’m about to suffocate,” he said.[xxvi] Kerouac suggested they travel through France together, which at that time was still under Nazi occupation although the war in Europe was rapidly nearing its end. As silly as Kerouac’s idea seemed, the two men were quite serious and they managed to secure their merchant marine papers and found a ship that would take them.[4] However, a misunderstanding at the docks had them kicked off the vessel before it even left port.

The Killing

On August 13, Carr had dinner with his mother on E.57^th Street. She apparently complained about Kammerer and then asked Lucien to burn a certificate saying he had spent time in Cook Country Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Evidently proud of this experience, he was reluctant and demanded she give him $20 to burn it. She refused, but eventually he burned the certificate in an ashtray.

From his mother’s house, he went to the West End Bar, where he met Ginsberg and Kerouac for drinks. Kerouac left at midnight and ran into Kammerer, who asked where Lucien was. He had already been suspicious about Carr fleeing the country and had told Ginsberg he would follow him abroad. Kerouac pointed him towards the West End. Shortly after arriving, Kammerer said something that offended the others at the booth and so Carr—thoroughly hammered by this point in the evening—took him aside. They ended up drinking at the bar and stayed until it closed at 3am. They bought a bottle of booze and left. It was the last time anyone would see David Kammerer alive.

What happened next is unknown except for Carr’s accounts. They walked to Riverside Park, then sat on a bench and talked. Carr supposedly put forth his frustrations. By now, he was utterly sick of Kammerer pestering and now even threatening him. He might once have enjoyed the attention and it seems he liked and pitied Kammerer to some extent, but it had gone on long enough and had to stop. Later, to the police, Carr said that Kammerer had propositioned him. To friends, he said that Kammerer had promised “to go after Celine,”[xxvii] which some have taken as meaning violence and others as seduction. It is impossible to know which version occurred or whether it was all of those things together. Kerouac recalls in Vanity of Duluoz that Carr said, “He jumped me. He said I love you and all that stuff, and couldnt live without me, and was going to kill me, kill both of us.”[xxviii]

Their disagreement resulted in a physical altercation. Initial newspaper reports said that Kammerer lashed out violently and Carr defended himself. At around six feet tall compared to Carr’s five-nine, Kammerer was able to easily overpower him, but Carr managed to pull out his Boy Scout knife and stab him. The knife sunk into Kammerer’s heart. Twice.

After killing Kammerer, Carr tied him up with his shoelaces and weighted him down with rocks. He cut Kammerer’s shirt into strips and wrapped the rocks with these, then dragged him to the river and pulled him out until Carr was chin-deep, at which point he let the body sink.

By now, it was almost dawn and Carr took a taxi to Burroughs’ house. Burroughs had always seemed wise and at the same time reliable, particularly in criminal matters, and he was about the last person on Earth who would call the cops. Ted Morgan wrote the following, based on interviews with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Chandler Brossard (as well as presumably drawing upon Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz):

At dawn the next morning, August 14, 1944, Burroughs was awakened by a knock on his door. He got up, put on his bathrobe, and answered. It was Lucien, wild-eyed and distraught. “I just killed the old man,” he said.

“What?”

Lucien handed Burroughs a blood-stained pack of Lucky Strikes and said, “Have the last cigarette.”

“So this is how Dave Kammerer ends,” Burroughs said, half to himself.

“We were standing on the bank of the river and I stabbed him and threw him in the water.”

“You’d better turn yourself in,” Burroughs said. “You could plead some sort of self-defense.”

“I’ll get the hot seat,” Lucien said.

“Don’t be absurd. Get a good lawyer and do what he tells you to do. Say what he tells you to say. Make a case for self-defense. It’s pretty preposterous but juries have swallowed bigger ones than that.”[xxix]

Burroughs took the cigarette packet and flushed it, then gave Carr five dollars.

From Burroughs’ apartment, Carr took another cab to Kerouac’s place on W.118th Street. “Well I disposed of the old man last night,”[xxx] he said.[5] Here, he produced Kammerer’s glasses and the blood-stained knife. Kerouac helped him dispose of the glasses in Morningside Park, and then they ditched the knife in a drain on 125^th Street. After hiding the evidence, they spent the day together, attempting to find normality with beer, movies, and a trip to the museum. Barry Miles suggests “All the time Lucien was screwing up the courage to go to his mother, confess what happened, get a lawyer, and turn himself in.”[xxxi] That’s exactly what he did the following day.

On August 15, Carr told the police that he had been assaulted by his gay stalker and had killed the man in self-defence. “At first he was nervous, but as he completed his amazing recital he became astonishingly calm and self-possessed,” a newspaper reported.[xxxii] The police did not initially believe him, but later that day Kammerer’s body was found floating in the Hudson River, about seven blocks downriver. Carr also took the police to where he had buried the glasses. He was sent to “the Tombs” along with the copy of Yeats’ A Vision that he had brought to the police station with him.

Thanks to Carr’s testimony, both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested—the former for failing to report the crime and the latter for helping Carr hide the evidence. Kerouac was not only jailed but forced to identify Kammerer’s bloated corpse, which deeply disturbed him. Burroughs was soon bailed by his parents, but Kerouac’s father was too ashamed and left his son in jail.

The Aftermath

Despite the good news coming from France in mid-August 1944, with the Allied forces just thirty-two miles from Paris and declaring their intention to occupy Germany, it was the death of David Kammerer that featured on the front page of the New York Times on August 17.[6] In fact, the news was reported across the country, with the handsome young Carr appearing well-dressed in various photos and numerous flattering remarks made. One headline read “Student Accused as ‘Honor’ Slayer” and the opening line read “The refined and erudite son of a wealthy St. Louis family was arrested yesterday…”[xxxiii] Another called him “intellectual-looking” and some noted that he had chosen to carry a book by William Yeats to his arraignment, which he evidently stared at throughout the proceeding. His various gifts and accomplishments were recounted: popular, athletic, intellectual, literary, etc. Altogether, it was a strangely flattering portrait and it was all very entertaining for the general public.

Kerouac was mentioned in most accounts and Burroughs’ name appeared in some of them.[7] Burroughs, whose family was also modestly well off, and who had turned himself in accompanied by a lawyer, was bailed after just eight hours in a cell, but Kerouac languished in jail when his family turned on him following his arrest. He quickly married Edie Parker so that her family would bail him, and the newspapers made much of this. One headline said: “Murder Witness Freed Starts On Honeymoon.”[xxxiv] On August 22, a police officer escorted Kerouac from jail to City Hall, where he acted as Kerouac’s best man, before taking him back to his “honeymoon” in a cell. He was released on August 30.

Some early accounts of the story seemed—at least if you read between the lines—to doubt Carr’s testimony. His hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was more cynical than most, perhaps under the sway of Kammerer’s family. They noted that he was nervous and unconvincing when first telling police what happened, and that later he was totally unemotional when showing them the buried evidence. They quoted Kammerer’s parents as saying Carr had often shown up at their house and was “a problem child.”[xxxv]

However, there was little doubt that most journalists were rooting for a verdict in Carr’s favour. It was the 1940s, so none of the reports referred explicitly to Kammerer as a homosexual, but they all used coded terms like “improper advances,” which would have been widely understood. Meanwhile, Carr was attempting to convince the police of his heterosexuality and it is clear from the media reports that the journalists understood this and sympathised.

Given that Carr had (eventually) turned himself in and pleaded guilty to manslaughter, the trial did not last long and in fact it did not even go before a jury. Carr’s lawyer could have pushed for a court case and it was possible that Carr would have gotten away with it entirely, but it was also possible that he might have been proven homosexual and therefore guilty of murdering a lover, which would have earned him a life sentence, so they made a plea deal. In the General Sessions Court, Judge George L. Donnellan was tasked with deciding a fitting punishment, with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch predicting a sentence of ten to twenty years.[xxxvi] Carr and his mother, Marion, testified in regards Kammerer’s inappropriate behaviour. Once he managed to convince the judge that he was not a homosexual, it seemed obvious that Carr was an innocent boy predated upon by an obsessive, violent older gay man and a light sentence was always likely.

Both the defence and prosecution agreed that Carr was mentally unstable due to Kammerer’s behaviour, and the judge felt that Carr—who had drunk heavily since his early teens—was an alcoholic with a split personality. The District Attorney said “we’re not pushing for a stiff sentence. Anything that could be done to rehabilitate this young man will be appreciated.”[xxxvii] Thus, Donnellan concluded that Carr “deserves some punishment, but in an institution where he will be under good medical care, not in a prison where he will be constantly associated with hardened criminals.”[xxxviii] Carr was given an indeterminate sentence at Elmira Reformatory, starting October 9, 1944, with the institution allowed to decide when to release him, provided that was no less than one year and no more than twenty, dependent upon his behaviour. He would serve about two years.

When Carr was released from prison in 1946, he seemed to have calmed down. He got a job as a copyboy at United Press. He was soon promoted and he remained with the U.P. for forty-seven years, by all accounts a model employee. He maintained his friendships with Kerouac and Ginsberg but mostly seemed reformed at least in terms of his earlier antics. Occasionally, he would embark on debauched drinking bouts but he always returned sober to work and lived until 2005.

The Killing that Launched a Literary Movement

Prior to the murder of David Kammerer, the nascent Beat Generation—which Ginsberg then called “The Libertine Circle”—had been an exciting and joyous gathering of likeminded friends revelling in a combination of kicks and literature. It had been a stimulating, creative environment, particularly for young Allen Ginsberg, who had less experience than the others and less confidence, and therefore relied heavily upon his friends for ideas, support, and validation.

The death of Kammerer seemed to put an end to it just a year after it had begun. Kerouac disappeared to Michigan with his new wife—the first of several short-lived marriages. He was also branded “an unwholesome influence on the students” and “a lout”[xxxix] by the university and banned from campus grounds. Burroughs made himself scarce, too, going back to St. Louis with his parents. There were many other friends who disappeared in the week following the killing and Ginsberg was left gloomy and confused. He had for a brief time felt at the centre of something important. He wrote in his journal:

Now the omened deed is done. The shadow has closed down on us and engulfed us all. Carr is in prison, Kammerer is dead—wonderful, perverse Kammerer—Burroughs has fled […] The libertine circle is destroyed with the death of Kammerer. If Carr is released, it can never be the same.[xl]

He went on to talk more about his vanished friends and the emptiness of life without them, about sipping beers in bars surrounded by strangers, and the absence of the enthusiasm and love that permeated the early Beat scene. Of course, at that age Ginsberg was hyperbolic in every sense, and the core of the group would soon reform, and he, Kerouac, and Ginsberg would remain friends for many years.

As Steven Watson wrote in The Birth of the Beat Generation, “the horrific event irrevocably branded them as members of the same unsavory tribe.”[xli] Their social group soon began to develop into a literary one, and initially they took for their subject matter the killing of David Kammerer. Although the Beats would develop very different methods of writing and take on very different subjects, they all wrote about the murder of Kammerer. In fact, in 1960, Kerouac went as far as to suggest that the origins of the Beat Generation lay not in New York, as most would place them, but rather “The whole thing really begins in St. Louis”[xlii] with “a St. Louis clique of rich guys […] decadent intellectual types, fin de siècle, enfants terrible types, ugh!”[xliii] By that, he meant that Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr were at that core of the group and that their relationship and their actions helped birth the whole literary movement. Steven Belletto, in The Beats: A Literary History, said “because it was the first event that Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs collectively wrote about [it was] a founding moment in and of Beat lore.”[xliv]

Ginsberg was the first to write about Kammerer’s killing. Just a few months after it happened, he began planning “a naturalistic-symbolistic novel”[xlv] that introduced his friends and their bohemian world. In October, this seems to have grown into a novel called The Bloodsong,[8] which centred around the killing. He planned it out but did not complete it. It started as a work about Kerouac and Burroughs and their New York lives, but grew to focus on Carr, albeit incorporating elements of that earlier work. It is a work of fiction but heavily inspired by reality, with recognisably real characters—Kerouac, Carr, Kammerer, and Ginsberg himself. This shows us that Ginsberg viewed the killing not only as a single event, nor as the inevitable conclusion of Carr and Kammerer’s torturous relationship, but as part of the story of his generation—a story he would tell much more effectively a decade later in “Howl.” For Kerouac and Burroughs, too, the Kammerer killing seemed tied to their generation and its struggles. Kerouac wrote that his book was about “the ‘lost’ segment of our generation,”[xlvi] tying their literary movement to Hemingway’s. Burroughs said, “Certainly I would be atypical of my generation if I didn’t die with my boots on,”[xlvii] suggesting that a tragic end was almost inevitable for people of his age.

The Bloodsong offers some useful but limited insights into the scene. The dynamic between Kammerer and Carr is interesting, and it suggests Kammerer was a paedophile, but it is not entirely clear to what extent Ginsberg fictionalised events and conversations. Ginsberg’s notes for the novel are of more value. Here, he digs into Carr’s character, saying Carr feels sexually inadequate and represses his artistry, which leads to various forms of compensation and fear. He has three “Sadistic tendences: 1.) Exploitiveness 2.) Active hostility (not reactive) 3.) Criticism.”[xlviii] Indeed, we can see a mutually hostile and exploitative dynamic between Carr and Kammerer in certain scenes, with Kammerer leering at the naked younger man while Carr has Kammerer run errands for him. Ginsberg wrote the “Death Scene” but again it is hard to know what details he heard from Carr and whether they were true, and what details came from Burroughs, Kerouac, the media, or general hearsay. Most of the conversation simply appears invented and is more than a little artificial. Carr tells Kammerer to kill himself, with Kammerer saying that would be murder, and then proceeds to more or less draw Carr’s knife into his own body in a weird suicide. It is silly, juvenile writing but it highlights a degree of ambiguity that Ginsberg may have wished to present, and that’s something his Beat peers would aim for in their own versions.

Foolishly, he spoke about it in public and word got around to the associate dean, who called it “smutty”[xlix] and insisted Ginsberg cease work on his project. Even the slightest possibility of it being published and bringing further negative attention to Columbia was a risk he was not willing to entertain. Ginsberg stopped work on his book but referenced the event obliquely in “Howl,” written eleven years later. (In fact, it was started almost eleven years to the day after the killing.) The line is:

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion

Note: This allusion was slightly more obvious in earlier drafts of the poem. In the first draft,[9] he wrote:

Who cut out each others hearts on the banks of the Hudson

lifes a drama on a great lost stage

under the crimson streetlamp of the moon

It is worth pausing for a moment to note that even in 1955 Ginsberg thought of Kammerer’s death as a “suicidal drama,” just as he had suggested in The Bloodsong.

Ginsberg made the reference vague enough that it would be hard for a reader to guess which event was referenced, but Carr was unhappy when Howl and Other Poems was partially dedicated to him. After Kerouac, Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, Ginsberg wrote “And to Lucien Carr, recently promoted to night bureau manager at New York United Press.” This was removed, however, for the second printing, after Ginsberg wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of Howl and Other Poems: “My friend Lucien objects violently to using his name in the dedication. His reasons are varied and personal and real enough for him—I never asked his OK. . . . […] I am bound by honor to Do something about it no matter how much it fucks everything up.”[l] As the Beat writers became famous, Carr wanted his role in their history elided. To Ginsberg, he said:

Isn’t it enough that the past is there without your returning again and again and again to nuzzle, smell, wallow, guzzle and paint yourself blue with it? […] can’t you word bandiers stick to your own ghosts and leave mine alone?[li]

This was all much later, when Carr had begun his new life with United Press. However, whilst in jail and awaiting his sentence, he apparently felt quite differently. Carr wrote to Ginsberg expressing his intention to write a novel about himself, using the pseudonym Claude de Maubri.[10] At that time, he did not seem to discourage anyone else from writing about it, but perhaps he hoped for the sole ownership of what he saw as his literary property.

While Ginsberg held off on writing about the murder (at least after being threatened by his school), Kerouac and Burroughs plunged in, writing the amusingly titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks. In fact, Kerouac had begun writing about the event prior to their collaboration, calling his story I Wish I Were You. After he showed it to Burroughs, the older man was impressed enough that they agreed to a collaborative effort. By this point, Burroughs was well-read but had little interest in writing and Kerouac had written much but it was all juvenilia. Burroughs supposedly told him as much and was not hugely enthusiastic about Kerouac’s contributions to their book, either, saying little more than “It’s alright,”[lii] whenever Kerouac showed him his latest chapter. Still, their mutual influence was key to their literary development. They had little in common stylistically but Burroughs admitted that Kerouac was instrumental in pushing him to become a writer, and Kerouac learned from his older, wiser friend.

They started this collaborative work in the winter of 1944 and finished by the following spring. It was not a particularly good book, but it is an important piece of Beat history. James Grauerholz agreed to hold back on its publication until after Carr’s death, and so it was only released in 2008, three years after Carr passed.

The odd novel centres around the killing of Kammerer but is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters by Kerouac and Burroughs. The extent to which the novel is based on truth is unclear but Burroughs said

We weren’t trying for literal accuracy at all, [just] some approximation. […] Of course, [what we wrote] was dictated by the actual course of events—that is, [Jack] knew one thing, and I knew another. We fictionalized. [The killing] was actually done with a knife, it wasn’t done with a hatchet at all. I had to disguise the characters, so I made [Lucien’s character] a Turk.[liii]

Grauerholz wrote in the afterword to Hippos that almost all readers would “know too much […] to meet the text as it was written” and that “For better or worse, Hippos comes to you now as a ‘framed’ work: The Columbia murder that gave birth to the Beats!”[liv] Of course, readers expecting revelations would be disappointed, but what is perhaps most fascinating is the fact that—like Ginsberg’s Bloodsong—it was always intended to be unclear. It appears that the two authors wanted uncertainty as their theme. One gets the feeling that neither man really knew what happened in Riverside Park and that having two narrators fumble about in search of the truth, with the reader never getting anything more than second-hand information, was a means of examining the unknowable. At no point in the book do readers witness the murder. It is merely recounted second-hand by Carr’s character. However, there are clues in the novel that point to the notion that perhaps Carr had not been acting in self-defence. We should be wary of taking these at face value (as many have done with Kerouac’s novels), but certainly they provide an interesting avenue of discussion. Whilst neither Kerouac’s narrator nor Burroughs’ one ever knows what really happened, Kammerer’s character (Ramsay Allen) comes across as fairly harmless and Carr’s character (Philip Tourian) is a cocktease who enjoys manipulating his admirer. After Allen’s death, Kerouac’s protagonist and Burroughs’ one both encourage Tourian to say he killed Allen in self-defence after an attempted rape. It is also implied that Tourian was not homosexual but had slept with men and might have done something sexual with Allen, killing out of shame rather than self-defence.[11]

Kerouac went on to write about the killing in Vanity of Duluoz and much of what he says matches with the real history of Carr and Kammerer. Whilst he has changed their names and certain locations, the detail in the following paragraph is surprisingly accurate.

His ‘Swinburne’ had been a boy scout master in Texas, name of Franz Mueller, who first saw Claude when he joined the boy scouts innocently, wanted to go out in the woods and have fun with camps and scout knives and something to do, fourteen. The scoutmaster fell in love with the boy scout, as usual. Now I’m not a queer, and neither is Claude, but I’ve got to expand this queer tale. Franz, not a bad guy in himself by the way, had first spent several years in Paris in about 1936 or so and met a young fourteen-year-old French boy who looked exactly like Claude, had fallen in love with him, tried to make him, or corrupt him, or whatever the French or Greeks say, and was deported from France outright after some kind of investigation. Coming back to America and getting a job as a scoutmaster on weekends, while during the week an instructor in a Louisiana college, who does he see but the same kid, only not French but Anjou French aristocrat boy? He goes crazy. Claude is sent by his rich grandmother to prep school at Andover School right outside Lowell Mass., is followed by red-bearded Swinburne, they throw big parties, Claude is ejected from Andover and doomed forever from going to Yale. He then tries another school. Franz follows him. It isn’t that Claude wants Franz to follow him, or that he wants to turn him away, it’s just a lot of fun, like one night in Bangor Maine Claude gets aboard the Whitlaw yacht with Kenny Whitlaw (acquaintance of Johnnie’s) and they, fifteen, simply pull the plug out and sink the yacht and swim ashore. Pranks and stuff like that. A wild kid. A guy in New Orleans lends him his car, and Claude, fifteen, no license, nothing, wrecks it utterly on Basin Street.

A lot of this I have not included previously as it is not entirely relevant, but it matches with accounts others have given, suggesting that Kerouac’s knowledge of Carr’s life and his relationship with Kammerer is oddly faithful. This does not mean we should believe everything in his novel, but it does suggest that his accounts of Kammerer’s disturbing behaviour in New York may be more reliable than other, more obviously biased sources, and in fact his do jive with what others have said—namely, that Kammerer had become unhinged and was following Carr with almost no restraint or self-awareness.

In Vanity of Duluoz, we once again only get Kerouac’s memories of Carr’s version of the killing, and so it is an unreliable source, even if we can trust some of what Kerouac says. For one thing, he says Carr stabs Kammerer twelve times, not two. There are also strange little inconsistencies in Carr’s account and some degree of conflict about whether to turn himself in or evade justice altogether. Was this really what Carr said, being as unstable as he was? Or was it Kerouac adding a thin layer of fiction on top of reality as he so often did?

In the various Beat writers’ accounts of the killing, then, we see some degree of uncertainty. We can scour their works for clues, but ultimately the real value in these early, unpolished literary efforts lies in the fact that they were the works that first pushed the Beat writers from a social to a literary group. But still, one gets the feeling from their various versions that there was doubt among them and that the concept of ambiguity was one they deliberately sought to present for their readers, which is important particularly in light of the problems I will address in the next section of this essay.

Questions, Problems, and Uncertainties

For a half-century there has been uncertainty around the story. To write the above version of events, I had to read many accounts and—as is so often the case with Beat history—I couldn’t help noting that even the best of versions tended to rely on weak sources. Too often, a writer would refer to an interview with Allen Ginsberg, for example, who was remembering a conversation with Lucien Carr, who clearly had a vested interest in protecting his reputation, or would present as truth a story told by Carr’s close friend William S. Burroughs. Again and again, it was friends reporting on friends, relying on memories going back many decades, with details filled in by biographers in order to add colour. Later, another writer would take the first writer’s story as the truth, then add a new layer of story upon that… For all the positives in Beat studies, this is a serious problem that surrounds many important events. And then, of course, we have too many times taken Kerouac’s semi-fictionalised accounts as absolute truth.

But let’s move away from what could be termed “the official story” and move on to an alternate perspective—one sort of hinted at in those early Beat accounts and later trumpeted by a handful of others. In this version of events, we are told that Kammerer has been smeared by the historical record and that Carr was in fact the aggressor.

Let’s begin with a letter written to New York Magazine on June 7, 1976. The author of the letter was a woman called Patricia Healy. In the letter, which can be read here, a website run by her son, she strongly defends Kammerer and makes several bold claims, including:

Kammerer was not peripheral to the Beat group, but it was central and in fact was perhaps the great genius among them, whose ideas were later stolen by the Beats.
He was completely heterosexual.
Carr had followed Kammerer around the country, pestering and bullying him, rather than the other way around. She claims to have witnessed Kammerer even punch Carr in self-defence.
Kammerer did not work as a janitor in New York to be near Carr, but rather because Carr’s antics had gotten him blacklisted and it was the only job he could do.

Healy’s account is interesting for it stands out so strongly against almost everything one reads about Kammerer. Her depiction of Carr is fairly consistent with how other people have described him (i.e. he was a horrible human being), but she presents Kammerer as a wonderful, intelligent man, who was a victim of the sadistic Carr.

It should be noted that Healy was a good friend of Kammerer and therefore her defence has about as much credibility as Ginsberg’s or Burroughs’. But her story suffers from other, more serious problems—namely that Ginsberg and Burroughs at least were fairly consistent, plausible, and had versions of events that more or less matched up with other accounts.

Regarding the first of her claims, it is possible that Kammerer was a more integral part of the group than others have suggested. In fact, certain comments by Ginsberg and others attest to his having been more involved than biographers and scholars would later portray him. However, there were many people on the scene and those later featured in accounts of the early Beat group are typically the ones who either wrote or inspired literary works, or who were simply such outrageous characters that they merit inclusion. But does this really matter? It seems relatively unimportant in this discussion.

As for him being a heterosexual, Healy seems to base this entirely upon his efforts to seduce “a kept woman, with a pretty rounded experience of men.”[lv] This seems more than a little naïve. She believes that one man making a pass at one woman makes him fully heterosexual. Admittedly, there is much evidence of Kammerer having female sexual partners in the early 1930s, and that he even got a woman pregnant and was blackmailed by her on account of this.[lvi] But then Burroughs was also sexually active with women at this time, so this is hardly concrete proof of Kammerer’s supposed heterosexuality. Kerouac also wrote in Vanity of Duluoz that Kammerer “was always after making women so he could get closer to”[lvii] Carr, which is another consideration.

As for whether Carr chased Kammerer or not, it does seem highly unlikely, particularly given that much of their hopping around the country occurred when Carr was a teenager. Whilst it is not impossible that Kammerer fled St. Louis to evade him, then moved from city to city, with a psychotic young boy somehow managing to follow him, securing places at various schools to do so, it is an extremely far-fetched idea. Establishing a reliable chronology of these moves is not easy but it certainly seems as though Carr would move first and Kammerer would follow soon after.

As I shall demonstrate shortly, Healy’s account is dubious at best, but let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment… Let’s imagine that Carr was the predator and Kammerer was his victim. If Carr, as a teenager, tormented and stalked Kammerer, then why did Kammerer repeatedly write letters fawning over the boy? If Kammerer had punched Carr and told him to stop pestering him, then why in March 1944 did he write his mother the very opposite, saying that Carr wanted some space and that they’d been apart for several weeks, something that had clearly depressed Kammerer? A month later, he also wrote of wanting to move to an apartment closer to Carr’s but says that “for some reason”[lviii] Carr did not want him any closer.

What Healy did not know was that Kammerer’s mother had saved dozens of letters from her son. These are preserved partially to show Kammerer’s innocence, but in fact they do just the opposite. They confirm that Kammerer was utterly infatuated with Carr and that Carr wanted some distance from a man who simply could not see how inappropriate his own actions were. They do not detail his stalking or show him to be sexually interested (he was never going to write his mother about such things), but they do show us that he was in love with Carr and this entirely discredits Healy. In fact, Healy’s letter shows her to be rather delusional. In addition to defending Kammerer, she seems to credit him with founding the Beat Generation and giving Kerouac all his ideas about Buddhism:

Consider the pain of it: David, that rarest of rare creatures, a teacher of genius, confined to teaching a chance collection of people from the streets of the Village in a seven-by-nine ground floor room. Genius. Yes, indeed. Of genius. The mere fact that the Beats have been promulgating his ideas – very profitably and without attribution – for almost 30 years is proof of that.[lix]

She also wrote a short and slightly unhinged account of meeting Allen Ginsberg in 1968, telling him that Kerouac’s ideas had been stolen from Kammerer. In both pieces of writing, she comes across as disturbed. This seems to be further proof that she is an unreliable source for this discussion.

If Healy’s account is such nonsense, then why bother grappling with it here? Why waste time refuting such an obviously unreliable source? The fact is that her garbled testimony has actually been taken seriously. Incredibly, Ted Morgan used many quotes from it in Literary Outlaw (without actually citing it) and presented her version of events as partially true. This entire paragraph is paraphrased from her letter:

Then he would go to the other extreme, after seeing Lucien neck with Celine on 118th Street, and vow that he would never see him again. One such time, he was with a friend on Morton Street when Lucien arrived and he barred the door and said, “Stay out of here. I told you never to come here again.” Lucien barged in and Kammerer slugged him and Lucien fell on the floor, and said in amazement, “You never hit me before.” Kammerer threw him out and locked the door, and then said to the friend: “You’re welcome to stay. And come any time you want. But don’t ever bring that little bastard here, I don’t want him around.” Then he added with a laugh, “I suppose he wants me to write a term paper for him.”[lx]

It also appears to be the source of this paragraph in an obituary for Carr that appeared in 2005:

Much of the story [of Kammerer’s killing], however, is doubtful; perhaps now, with Carr’s death, it may be possible to disentangle some of the strands of insinuation, legal spin and lies. There is no independent proof that Kammerer was a predatory stalker; there is only Carr’s word for the pursuit from St Louis to New York; there is persuasive evidence that Kammerer was not gay. Carr enjoyed his ability to manipulate the older man, and got him to write essays for his classes at New York’s Columbia University. A friend remembers Kammerer slamming the door of his apartment in Carr’s face, and telling him to get lost.[lxi]

Is there really “persuasive evidence that Kammerer was not gay”? The only person who seems to have made that claim was Healy, who is also presumably the “friend [who] remembers Kammerer slamming the door of his apartment in Carr’s face, and telling him to get lost.” In other words, she was the source for the assertion that “Much of the story, however, is doubtful.”

How strange that both Healy’s nonsense and the above paragraph from the Guardian obituary appear together on Lucien Carr’s Wikipedia page under a heading called “Dissenting opinions”! Gosh, I wonder if it has anything to do with the myriad references to Healy’s son and his books—as well as links to other pages of his website—that can be found all over Wikipedia…

In 2019, a writer for the Paris Review quoted Morgan in a popular article that again added yet more confusion:

The Burroughs biographer Ted Morgan related that while many believed these moves reflected Carr’s attempt to “get away from Kammerer,” others were dubious, for “when you saw them together, they seemed to be the best of friends, drinking and horsing around.”[lxii]

James Polchin, author of a book about “how popular culture, the media, and the psychological profession forcefully portrayed gay men as the perpetrators of the same violence they suffered,”[lxiii] has taken what appears to be the central thesis of one of his works and attempted to apply it here. In doing so, he has misrepresented Morgan in order to further muddy the waters, for Morgan was very much aware that Kammerer was a hebephilic homosexual stalker who had pestered Carr for years. Polchin omits these inconvenient details:

Carr’s form of homosexual panic not only became a powerful story about the Beats in those early years; it also pointed to an increasingly convincing defense for the murders of queer men in the many decades to follow. Whatever the motive for Carr’s violence, the story of Kammerer’s murder encapsulated a compelling and troubling idea in the popular imagination that took root in the forties and grew in the years after: assertions of heterosexual masculinity were defined by violent reactions against queer men.[lxiv]

It is true, as I mentioned above in the media section, that reporters seemed to support Carr, who they recognised as a victim of a sexual predator, and that this was a message they attempted to convey to the reading public. Their support might have come from homophobia, for it was an appallingly homophobic era. It is true, also, that Burroughs likely pushed Carr to make this defence, likely realising how effective it would be. Yet almost all available evidence—except for that which can be easily dismissed—shows that Carr was the victim of a dangerously unbalanced man.

Still, we must take all available evidence and remember that most of the charges against Kammerer come from Carr and his friends. But what remarks have these people made that cast doubts on the more generally accepted version of events?

I have already cited a quote from Burroughs, who said that the teenaged Carr liked to toy with Kammerer by letting Burroughs grope and kiss him, just to watch the older man suffer. That certainly is in line with the idea of Carr as the manipulative one, but of course it still frames Kammerer as a hebephile and possible stalker. Then there is Carr’s girlfriend, Celine Young, who called Kammerer “charming, helpful, informative.”[lxv] Kammerer was supposedly tormented by jealousy of her and it is often suggested that he was abusive towards her or even threatened violence, which may have been a contributing factor in Carr’s killing of him. So why was she so positive about him? Well, she was not entirely positive, for a start. In the same letter, she wrote that Kammerer was “an incorrigible liar.” Additionally, about a week before Carr was sentenced, Young wrote Kerouac with a very interesting assessment, and one that is seldom quoted:

Had Lucien felt less pride in having Dave dog his footsteps he might have gotten rid of Kammerer before this and in a socially acceptable manner. The chief criticism of Lucien, and his probation officer observed this too, is that Lucien’s values are all intellectual ones. […] If he persists in the idea that he has done a messianic service by ridding the world of Dave, he is becoming too presumptuous a judge. When he loses that pride in doing away with Dave, then I hope he is let out immediately. I know he is very remorseful at times. […] Mrs. Carr has pictured [Dave] to me as a veritable Iago, who at every turn in Lucien’s life, has appeared and dissuaded him from the proper course, as she puts it, “purely for love of evil.” […] His influence on Lucien, this past year at least, was definitely to be destroyed at all costs.[lxvi]

There are several very important statements here. They tell us:

Carr was indeed proud of having a stalker.
He had done little to get rid of Kammerer.
He was proud of having killed him.
Carr’s mother was very much aware of Kammerer’s negative qualities.

To me, Young’s statement helps qualify certain details about the Carr-Kammerer relationship that had previously been somewhat in doubt due to the obvious bias of their sources. That Carr had pride in being followed by Kammerer and that his mother had eventually come to view Kammerer as “evil” had been believed but I feel that it is Young’s testimony here—which seems candid and honest due to it coming from a personal letter to Kerouac—that makes those sources more believable. Yet it is interesting that Carr felt he had “done a messianic service by ridding the world of Dave.” That seems a rather damning quote.

It is also worth noting that Carr was by almost all accounts a very unpleasant person and that the idea of his murdering David Kammerer as opposed to killing him in self-defence is something that should not be easily dismissed. I have made reference on several occasions in this essay to the fact that Carr was not just a quirky, difficult, precocious young man, but that he seemed downright nasty at times. This had been the case since childhood. As a boy, he had been “emotionally very unstable,” according to one person who knew the family, and would “go berserk […] and chase people with his knife”[lxvii] whenever he was angry. A friend of the Beat writers in New York said that Carr was “a bad drunk who insulted people and punched them out.”[lxviii]

The phrase “very unstable” should be highlighted here. Both the district attorney and Carr’s own lawyer used the phrase “emotionally unstable” in describing him, and a psychiatrist called him “unstable but not insane.”[lxix] The descriptions given by those around him, regardless of whether they loved or hated him, were basically the same: He was dangerously unbalanced. Again, one must be careful of relying on fictional or biased sources, but in Ginsberg’s uncompleted novel, The Bloodsong, which he conceived of as an honest character study of Carr (something he’d attempted in non-fictional form a week before the murder), he depicted his friend as violent, sadistic, and destructive, particularly when drunk. “When I get drunk I get pathological,” Carr says before he describes biting off a man’s ear and earbrow for no real reason, then stealing whisky and smashing up someone’s room. “Oh, what a pleasure it is. No inhibitions and all sadism.”[lxx]

His actions could be repugnant and the idea of him deliberately cultivating this admirer of his, then later murdering him, is entirely plausible when considering the various accounts of his character, including those by his best friends. Indeed, the more you learn about Carr, the more you feel he was capable of murder. That is entirely speculation and I do not intend it to be taken as a serious thesis, but rather it is important to consider all angles and there are some unpleasant ones that need to be considered.

Let’s think about the case for Carr as a murderer here:

Most of what we know about the dynamic between Carr and Kammerer comes from Carr’s friends, often passing along information Carr had given them. Thus, it could quite possibly be that they’ve covered up for him by maintaining or exaggerating the story of Kammerer as a deranged stalker.
Then remember that Burroughs was the one who pushed Carr to plead self-defence, and in doing so he said of the self-defence angle, “It’s pretty preposterous, but juries have swallowed bigger ones than that.”
Factor in that Carr carried a knife on him (a Boy Scout knife that he would use to kill his old Scout leader—precisely the sort of romantic but violent act that Carr adored) and then disposed of the body in an elaborate fashion. Would anyone who had killed in self-defence seriously cut the dead person’s clothes into strips and tie these carefully around a large number of rocks in order to weight down the body? It seems rather premeditated…
There’s also Carr’s actions after the killing and the fact that he was oddly calm throughout the whole trial, evidently showing little remorse. Coupled with Young’s testimony that he was proud of killing Kammerer, it does suggest that it may not have been self-defence, but rather an act of aggression.
This would all fit with Carr’s suicide attempt as a “work of art” and his plan to write about the killing whilst in prison. Had he perhaps murdered his friend in order to gain the sort of literary material that would have pleased his French poet idols? Ginsberg wrote before the killing that Carr desperately wanted to produce art but could not, and that this feeling of failure was driving him almost insane and making him act in outrageous, destructive ways.

One final angle to consider is that Carr was a sadistic man who routinely perpetrated acts of violence upon those he loved. His son Caleb, who passed away a few months ago, spoke of this many times. Christina Diamante, daughter of Alene Lee, lived with Carr for the eleven years that he dated her mother, and also spoke of Carr as abusive. This is from the introduction to an interview she gave:

The charismatic Carr was an editor at UPI and a hopeless, violent drunk. The 11 years Christina Mitchell spent on Horatio Street were a harrowing story of domestic violence, where Carr beat Lee almost every day. At one point, he knocked out Lee’s tooth on the sidewalk in front of the house, which forced the police to arrest him. Lee did not press charges.

Most nights were full of screaming fights and the house had no glasses or plates because they were routinely shattered against the wall. After 11 years, the mother and daughter were told to leave when Carr, then in his late 40’s, became involved with a teenage girl, who would become his second wife.[lxxi]

Again, though, it is all circumstantial. We know Carr was violent and cruel and that he was just the sort of person who would kill someone as a lark. We know there are holes in the story and it doesn’t all add up as neatly as it sometimes seems. However, that is not enough to definitively say someone is a murderer. So what is the truth? What really happened that night in Riverside Park?

Conclusion

This essay has probably been a dissatisfying read, for it goes back and forth, showing various possibilities and doubting them all, but I wanted to give as clear a picture as possible. It seems to me that almost everyone who has ever written on this subject has picked a side and chosen the evidence that suits them. That has led to the propagation of unlikely stories, the omission of important details, and other similar problems.

Weighing the evidence, it seems likeliest that Kammerer really was a sexual predator—a hebephile who became a stalker and harassed his victim until it cost him his own life. No matter the bias of the most common sources, almost everything—including Kammerer’s own words—shows that he was obsessed with Lucien Carr and pursued him in a thoroughly unhinged way, apparently perplexed by Carr’s rejection of his inappropriate advances. As for Carr, it looks very much like he was an unpleasant young man, highly intelligent but very unethical, who rather enjoyed the attention of his gay suitor up until it became too much for him to deal with.

The evidence against Carr—which is to say, the version of events that pits him as a murderer who essentially got off lightly due to “gay panic defence”—is a little too thin. Ironically, it is Kammerer’s own testimony that seems to prove him guilty. His letters directly contradict the statements from Healy and conjecture from others that suggest he had not stalked Carr, and that Carr had tormented him instead. We can see in these letters a very confused man who no doubt needed some psychological intervention. He wrote, only a month before being killed, that “for some psychotic reason,” Carr did not want him around and was “afraid to see too much of me.”[lxxii] Though it is impossible to know the whole truth, on balance the evidence shows a disturbed man with a long-term obsession that had driven him beyond reason, into a place of desperation and delusion.

In a sense, then, the commonly told narrative seems to be the correct one. Kammerer had met Carr when the latter was a teenage boy, then to some extent followed him around the country, before his obsession grew out of control. Whatever happened on August 14, Carr was likely acting either in self-defence or out of pure desperation after many years of torment at the hands of his stalker.

Bibliography

Belletto, Steven. The Beats: A Literary History. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2020.

Burroughs, William S. and Grauerholz, James (ed). Interzone. Viking: New York, 1989.

Burroughs, William S. and Kerouac, Jack. And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks. Grove Press: New York, 2008.

Campbell, James. This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999.

Collins, Ronald K. L. and Skover, David. The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, 2019.

Ginsberg, Allen and Morgan, Bill (ed). Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beat Generation. Grove Press: New York, 2017)

Ginsberg, Allen and Morgan, Bill (ed). The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952. Da Capo Press: Cambridge, 2006.

Griffin, Dustin. “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr” in Journal of Beat Studies, Vol. 1. Pace University Press: New York, 2012.

Hayes, Kevin, J. (ed). Conversations with Jack Kerouac. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2005.

Kerouac, Jack. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Penguin Books: New York, 1994.

Kerouac-Parker, Edie. You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac. City Lights: San Francisco, 2007.

Miles, Barry. Call Me Burroughs: A Life. Twelve: New York, 2013.

Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. Henry Holt and Company: New York, 1988.

Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2016.

Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960. Pantheon Books: New York, 1995.

Notes

[1] There is more information on the three men’s family backgrounds in a wonderful essay by Dustin Griffin in Journal of Beat Studies #1. The essay is called “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr.” I actually disagree with some of Griffin’s conclusions regarding the murder and the relationship between Carr and Kammerer, but it is a fantastically researched essay whose background detail about the St. Louis scene is unparalleled. Please take a look if you get the chance.

[2] This story might stem from comments Kammerer’s parents made to the press immediately after the killing. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote on August 17, 1944: “Kammerer’s parents told a Post-Dispatch reporter today that he first met Carr when Carr was a member of a ‘Cub’ Scout pack on which Kammerer was the leader.” Kerouac, in Vanity of Duluoz, says that the two met when Carr was in the Boy Scouts, so that’s another possible origin. It does, however, seem more likely that he was only running a sort of non-affiliated activities group for boys.

[3] It is frequently claimed that his father had died when Carr was young, but in fact Russell Carr lived until 1959. (A handful of details about his life can be found here.)

[4] It is possible that Kerouac was attempting to escape from Edie Parker, who was eager to marry him, so his rather desperate escape plan was not entirely for Carr’s benefit. Griffin also suggests that Carr may have had other motivations for leaving: “Carr’s abortive plan (with Kerouac) to ship out with the Merchant Marine in August of 1944 appears to have been driven primarily by the idea of adventure: namely, reaching Paris in time for the expected liberation and celebration.”

[5] These quotes have been given many times and naturally the wording changes slightly from one account to the next. It is often reported that Carr said, “I got rid of the old man last night.”

[6] This was the first major report. The story had actually been broken on August 16 by the New York World-Telegram in an article titled “Student Admits Killing Teacher.”

[7] Kerouac was typically referred to as “John Kerouac” in the newspapers rather than “Jack,” a name he would go by for literary purposes a decade later. You can read about his various names here.

[8] This can be found in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, pages 88-114.

[9] The history of “Howl” is fascinating and you can learn more about the various versions here. You can also look at the original drafts in this slideshow from Stanford.

[10] When Kerouac wrote about the murder in Vanity of Duluoz, he used “Claude de Maubris” as the name for Carr’s character.

[11] Chandler Brossard, author of Who Walk in Darkness, despised Carr, who he said was “a shallow little prick” who “wouldn’t admit he was homosexual.” There also seem to be clues in the various writings of Ginsberg and Kerouac suggesting that Carr was not entirely heterosexual.

[i] Call me Burroughs, p.36

[ii] Call me Burroughs, p.54

[iii] Call me Burroughs, p.79

[iv] https://libanswers.wustl.edu/faq?gid=216&qid=17924

[v] Call me Burroughs, p.79

[vi] Call me Burroughs, p.91

[vii] Call me Burroughs, p.79

[viii] Call me Burroughs, p.79

[ix] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[x] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[xi] Call me Burroughs, p.80

[xii] Call me Burroughs, p.92

[xiii] Dharma Lion, p.26

[xiv] Dharma Lion, p.26

[xv] Vanity of Duluoz, p.195

[xvi] Best Minds, p.83

[xvii] Call me Burroughs, p.96

[xviii] Dharma Lion, p.28-29

[xix] You’ll Be Okay, p.130

[xx] You’ll Be Okay, p.132

[xxi] You’ll Be Okay, p.131

[xxii] Vanity of Duluoz, p.213

[xxiii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[xxiv] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[xxv] Vanity of Duluoz, p.213

[xxvi] Literary Outlaw, p.98

[xxvii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[xxviii] Vanity of Duluoz, p.221

[xxix] Literary Outlaw, p.104

[xxx] Vanity of Duluoz, p.221

[xxxi] Call me Burroughs

[xxxii] Birth of the Beat Generation, p.46-47

[xxxiii] Daily News, Aug 17, p.4

[xxxiv] Courier-Journal, Aug 31, p.8

[xxxv] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 17, p.3A

[xxxvi] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 15, p.1

[xxxvii] Literary Outlaw, p.109

[xxxviii] Call Me Burroughs, p.113

[xxxix] Birth of the Beat Generation, p.49

[xl] The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.63

[xli] Birth of the Beat Generation, p.49

[xlii] Conversations with Jack Kerouac, p.29

[xliii] Conversations with Jack Kerouac, p.28

[xliv] The Beats, unpaginated ebook

[xlv] The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.82

[xlvi] Hippos, p.199

[xlvii] Interzone, p.85

[xlviii] The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.115

[xlix] The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.115

[l] The People vs Ferlinghetti

[li] Qtd in Dharma Lion, p.742

[lii] Call Me Burroughs, p.120

[liii] Hippos, p.193

[liv] Hippos, p.192

[lv] https://www.chezjim.com/Mom/beatniks.html

[lvi] Various unpublished letters from Kammerer’s archives are cited in “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[lvii] Vanity of Duluoz, p.213

[lviii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[lix] https://www.chezjim.com/Mom/beatniks.html

[lx] Literary Outlaw, p.98

[lxi] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/feb/09/guardianobituaries.pressandpublishing

[lxii] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/27/the-queer-crime-that-launched-the-beats/

[lxiii] https://liberalstudies.nyu.edu/about/faculty-listing/james-polchin.html

[lxiv] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/27/the-queer-crime-that-launched-the-beats/

[lxv] This is the Beat Generation, p.28

[lxvi] Call Me Burroughs, p.112

[lxvii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[lxviii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

[lxix] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 6, 1944, page 3A

[lxx] The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.103

[lxxi] https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchell-diamente-on-her.html

[lxxii] “The St. Louis Clique: Burroughs, Kammerer, and Carr”

The Death of David Kammerer: 80 Years Later

An Overview

Carr, Kammerer, and Burroughs

The New York Beat Scene

The Killing

The Aftermath

The Killing that Launched a Literary Movement

Questions, Problems, and Uncertainties

Conclusion

Further Reading

Bibliography

Notes

About The Author

David S. Wills

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Find Beatdom on Amazon

The Death of David Kammerer: 80 Years Later

An Overview

Carr, Kammerer, and Burroughs

The New York Beat Scene

The Killing

The Aftermath

The Killing that Launched a Literary Movement

Questions, Problems, and Uncertainties

Conclusion

Further Reading

Bibliography

Notes

About The Author

David S. Wills

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Find Beatdom on Amazon