AUGUST 14, 1944, 3:30 a.m.

What to do with the body? He gazed over the dark waters of the Hudson River and then looked down.

One hundred and eighty-five pounds of human flesh lay at his feet, stock still. He had to act soon. Panicked, he struggled to roll the warm body down the grassy embankment to the water's edge. The six-foot-long mass wouldn't budge. He pushed again, and then mightily once more. Finally, he succeeded. At the riverbank, he removed the laces from his victim's shoes and used them to tie the hands and feet. But they weren't strong enough. So he tore off the man's shirt, ripped it into strips, and bound the wrists and ankles with the cloth pieces. That would do it. Tightening a belt around the arms for extra measure, he observed thick blots of blood oozing out of the fresh stab wounds.

Had anyone seen him? Time, precious time, was passing. If he didn't take off soon, surely he would be spotted. Hastily, he inspected his surroundings. Rocks. Stones. Yes, he could use them. He frantically gathered them up and shoved them into pockets and inside the clothing of his victim. More rocks, more stones. Now he was ready. He dragged the limp body along the bank's jagged surface, leaving a blood trail in the muddy cracks. He heaved and tugged until the bulk of bound flesh took to the bouncy waters.

But it wouldn't sink; it just floated. Damn!

Impulsively, he stripped to his briefs, ran along the shore, and waded into the waters, up to his chin. The body had to sink; the evidence had to vanish; gravity had to take hold. He threw his arms around it, forced the body down. No luck. He pressed again, down, down. Still no luck. Maybe, he thought, the corpse would sink later. Surely it would; it had to. Meanwhile, the body drifted off, face down, into the void of the dark distance.

It was done. He would vanish before the dawn, allowing him just enough time to get back and continue reading one of his favorite books—Rimbaud's A Season in Hell.

LUCIEN CARR was a beautiful, bright, privileged, and adventurous boy, charmed by Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious poet obsessed with alienation and symbolism. Lucien (pronounced Looshun) enjoyed quoting Rimbaud and the poet Charles Baudelaire. Although Carr had his poetic side, he sported a riotous and bizarre side as well. A wild partier, the enfant terrible had been expelled from Andover prep school. If he was feeling maniacal, he'd chug Canadian Club whiskey, chew shards of a cocktail glass, and pick the sharp slivers from between his bloody teeth. If he was feeling deviant, he would urinate out of windows. Or if he was feeling devilish, he'd rip up a Bible. Once he put his head into an oven and turned on the gas—an art experiment is how he explained it to the doctor who prescribed psychiatric care. Still, this madcap with a fondness for poetry remained the object of much desire.

Lucien was a young man with a very strange take on life . . . and death. It was that take that made him the center of attraction for those who wished to reinvent their world. Though he appeared demonic to some, in young Allen Ginsberg's eyes he was "the most angelic looking kid . . . romantically glorious." Born into an aristocratic St. Louis family, he was five feet, nine inches tall, handsome, fair-haired with almond-shaped green eyes. The young liberal arts student had met Ginsberg in December 1943 at Columbia University when Allen was a seventeen-year-old prelaw student. Together they penned poems—those wondrous manifestos of their New Vision in which they were seers experiencing "drug-induced visions, breakthroughs in consciousness, freedom to experiment sexually, and a total break from the past." That vision was an extension of Lucien's past—a life given over to alcohol, drugs, sex, and trouble.

Jack Kerouac knew Lucien from the time of his merchant-seaman days, when Jack would come back on leave and hang around Columbia University, where he had once been a student. He had a fatal attachment to the "mischievous little prick . . . prettier than any woman I'd ever seen." In Jack's eyes, they were doomed lovers. Though Edith ("Edie") Parker was Kerouac's girlfriend (of sorts), her buck-toothed grin could not begin to rival the aura of the strikingly attractive Lucien Carr.