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Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.

“The nurse under the bed” became a set piece in scary games girls played during my childhood. The message was clear: If you live by yourself without a husband, you’d better learn how to hide.

By the seventies, and the full blossoming of the bar scene, single murders began to fall into a category of their own. This kind of dispatch was commonplace: In October 1973, Carol A. Hoffman, thirty-one, a publishing assistant, was stabbed and then brutally strangled with panty hose in her apartment. The most shocking aspect of the Hoffman case was that she had let the killer into her apartment because she’d felt sorry for him. He had appeared at her door in distress and told her he was looking for another resident of the building who’d raped his wife. While the man was there, elaborating on this story, Ms. Hoffman’s boyfriend happened to call. He advised her to get the guy out quickly and even spoke by phone to the distraught visitor. He raced over, but by the time he arrived she was dead. Building residents were horrified—but not, it seemed, all that shocked. Here was a “mostly singles” apartment, no doorman, with a history of muggings. One neighbor, identified as Marti, a graphic designer, recalled bringing home a strange man who, after three hours of conversation, attacked her. She’d escaped by racing down the hallway, banging on doors. “How could I report it?” she asked the reporter. “What was I going to report? Oh, hi, I brought a man home with me, and look what he did!”

The women who wrote these stories—Gloria Emerson, Judy Klemesrud, Charlotte Curtis, Nan Robertson, among others—were on their own emerging as singular voices. They had come up the usual journalistic route: from file clipper or researcher, then moving, after a few years, to the 4F sections or pullouts. (4F: “food, furnishings, fashions, family” was still the journalistic female ghetto). Some of them had been quiet forces in the sex desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads in 1967 and had been active in the landmark class-action sex-discrimination suits brought against the Times, Newsweek, and other news corporations during the early seventies. (Without these actions, it’s unlikely their bylines would ever have appeared anywhere outside the 4F cookie/sweater slum.)

Their stories of singular peril began to take on an eerie similarity. Imagine modern Bowery gals, a group of friends dressed up to go out one weekend night, to a place that seemed like a wild carnival midway. It was loud and friendly, but there was also an unmistakably dangerous undercurrent. Patrice Leary, Roseanne Quinn…their names blurred with their stories and photos. Just regular young working girls, in their twenties, hair parted down the middle, found dead after leaving a bar alone or with a man they did not know. Their friends, who resembled them, would be photographed huddled together outside the bar. Sometimes their words made up the captions: “There is no such thing as too cautious.” “To be realistic in this city means to be paranoid.” “I sleep with a baseball