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

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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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