Richard Mattingly murder case

Richard Mattingly was the 63-year-old director of the Condemnation Board of the District of Columbia in the United States, who was murdered on January 8, 1970, in his home in Arlington, Virginia.

A group of local youths, in the company of his 14-year-old adopted daughter, Debra "Muffin" Mattingly, who had run away from home, came to the Mattingly residence to collect some of her belongings. The group included Ken Hitner, a 21-year-old AWOL Marine who had returned from service in the Vietnam War; Eugene Comeau, a 19-year-old Boston native and aspiring musician and biker; and Patricia "Pegasus" Truax, aged 15, all of whom were allegedly under the influence of LSD at the time.

When Richard Mattingly confronted them, Hitner and Comeau beat and strangled him to death with a hammer and a crowbar, the latter of which Mattingly, enraged by their presence in his house with his daughter, had initially brandished. Debra Mattingly allegedly encouraged the perpetrators, while Truax looked on. After Richard Mattingly failed to report to work, his grown son went to his father's house, where he found his body. Hitner, Comeau, Debra Mattingly, and Truax were apprehended on January 12 after fleeing in the victim's car, which was discovered outside an apartment on N Street in the District of Columbia, where the perpetrators had been staying. A search of those premises revealed the murder weapons and certain items belonging to the victim.

Hitner, Comeau, and Truax had lived in a hippie "crash pad" in an old Brownstone at 18th and N in Washington, D.C., that was frequented by many radical and street youth. Hitner, a high school dropout from a working-class community in Pennsylvania, while AWOL had spent his time frequenting the hippie street culture of Georgetown and Dupont Circle, when he was not volunteering at the national offices of the anti-war movement located on Vermont Avenue. These organizations, the Vietnam Moratorium, the New Mobe and the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC) had just organized the largest anti-war protests and political demonstrations in American history in October and November 1969. (See Opposition to the Vietnam War). Hitner, according to press accounts and stories he had told acquaintances previously, had had extensive combat experiences in Vietnam, and had been involved in certain atrocities.

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