Colorado: Death of a Flower Baby

“The devil is loose,” mourned one young hippie, “and as long as he is loose, there will always be wrong things.” Then a score of hippies in Denver murmured prayers for a “beautiful person” named Carol and a requiem for Carol’s little Billy.

Billy was the darling of the denizens of the crash pad at Provo House, a tarnished brick relic of bygone opulence hard by Denver’s Capitol Hill area. Provo House, named for a group of Dutch student rowdies by a Californian who calls himself “The Strider,” proffered free mattresses and sometimes free food to hippie drifters, dropouts and runaways. The flower children lavished their love on Billy, making sure that the cheerful blond two-year-old always got a generous portion of their meager meals. Only when forced to take a bath would Billy blow his cool.

One morning last week, after Billy was taken by his mother to the bath, there were childish screams followed by sounds of glass shattering, then silence. Two building inspectors who happened to be in the house were told of Billy’s aversion to bathing and left after rattling the bolted bathroom door.

An hour later, two hippies clambered to a porch outside the bathroom window and looked in. They saw Billy’s body in the tub. His wrists had been slashed and a broken wine bottle thrust deep into his chest. Billy’s mother, Carol Metherd, 24, sat silent on the puddled floor, her hands, T shirt and slacks soaked with blood. The two horrified hippies smashed their way into the room. Carol later curled on the floor in a fetal position; her only sign of life was the rolling of her eyes.

Carol Metherd was a loner who lived apart from her husband. She studied horoscopes, Zen Buddhism and the maunderings of a ouija board and, it was said, turned on without drugs. “She was very spiritual,” said a hippie named Mongol. But another recalled that Carol had talked of using “speed” (an amphetamine drug) to control her weight; a prolonged “high” with amphetamines is often followed by an even deeper letdown.

At week’s end Carol was in a hospital while Denver’s district attorney, James D. McKevitt, awaited the outcome of chemical tests for drugs on samples of her blood. “This is just a tragic example of what is going on in that area,” said McKevitt, who has watched Denver’s hippie population swell from almost nothing to an estimated 3,500 inside a few months after the Colorado legislature refused to make possession of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and speed a criminal offense.