re: Worst Roommate Ever: the crazy story of Jamison Bachman

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an somebody explain the part about eating a cheese sandwich between the stacks at Tulane and how this caused a feud?

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Creek’s legal name was Jamison Bachman. In 2012, Bachman had shown up at the home of a woman across town named Melissa Frost, claiming to be a New Yorker whose home had been destroyed in Hurricane Sandy. Overcome with pity, Frost let him in — and nearly lost her house. In an expensive and frightening ordeal that dragged on for months, Bachman slowly laid claim to the space, using his intricate knowledge of tenancy laws to stay one step ahead of her. He scuffed up the floors, kicked down the doors, and clogged the toilets with cat litter. “He went from being this cordial, polite person who understood he was a guest in my house,” Frost said in one of the articles, “to someone who was approaching me aggressively and flat-out saying, ‘This is my house now.’ ”

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Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)

After Bachman returned home in the summer of 1976, family and friends found him shaken. He appeared oddly paranoid. He ranted to Friedman about a rising tide of anti-Semitism and threats to the State of Israel. Those close to him worried that Gutzeit’s murder had served as a mental breaking point. (A therapist who later evaluated Bachman noted that he was “excessively dependent on the world” to take care of him and wondered if this indicated a personality disorder, but eventually concluded only that Bachman was depressed.) Clearly distraught, Bachman spent the summer getting high. And then he dropped off the map.

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