Documents on the Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs

11 thoughts on “Documents on the Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs”

1. Wonderful resource here, Jed. That last cuttng mentions it’s a .38 … as I understand it this .38 was a Star and if not made in Spain then licenced from the Spanish manufacturers to a Mexican company for production over there. Either way I have read that this model was well known for being ‘faulty’.
   I also read in an auto-bio by an English writer living in Mexico around then that Mexican law required that any witnesses present at the time of a homicide had to be arrested there and then. This would account for the rapid disappearence of all those present. It was safer to re-appear later.

2. Good stuff. Personally, I don’t believe it was an accident. Burroughs wanted a divorce and got one. Doesn’t that last Burroughs biography by Barry Miles admit as much? If not, why call the gun a ‘murder weapon’ in one of the photos posted here?

   Just a thought.

   An absolute tragedy from start to finish.

3. Have the Mexican police investigation files re Joan’s death ever been
   made public? Did the FBI at the time gain access that might thus be
   relevant to an FOIA Request?

4. No, William S. Burroughs May have been a lot of things; including being in a room where several people ODed (simply didn’t stick around to answer useless cop questions). But a cold blooded murderer … on purpose killing Joan? Absolutely NO WAY!!
   Speaking as a woman, and I’m well aware of how odd it is to hold this man as one of my heroes, seeing he didn’t particularly care for females. I guess that makes me even more fascinated by this man. I can’t stand women either.

   “After all women are a different species than men, but you already know this instinctively, Bill.”
   NAKED LUNCH

5. I don’t think it was a murder… read the Grauerholz’s article, if you haven’t already. The whole situation was so crazy!

6. “Accidentally went of When he dropped a newly purchased pistol on a table”.

   That’s the first time I hear of that.

   So that is the statement he himself made.

   Interesting.

7. No doubt he purposely murdered her. Go read all the newspaper accounts.
   Putting it all together I get that he wanted a divorce going on a year at that point. It appears she may have been romantically involved with the guy who lived at the apartment, Johnny Healy. Healy claimed to have no friendship with the couple but according to others Joan had visited him in his apartment plus he was good friends with her and her husband. Burroughs had just returned from Ecuador 3 days ago to reunite with his wife in Mexico.
   Burroughs tells 3 different versions of the event.
   The gun dropped and fired.
   He tried to shoot a glass off her head.
   The one the witnesses affirm and he also said; he stood up to check if the gun was loaded and accidently fired.
   I go with the witnesses one of whom affirmed that that would not be a way to shoot someone if that was the intent.
   However………….Burroughs was a well known gun enthusiast and quite adept at their use.
   No everyone over 8 years old should be able to figure out the rest of the story.

8. I heard that toward the end of his life he broadly hinted that he deliberately killed her.Of course by that time he was pretty much free and clear of it,had nothing to worry about.

9. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg said it:

   On September 6, 1951, Burroughs had made arrangements to meet someone about selling a gun at the apartment of John Healy, an American who was part of the Bounty. Vollmer was with Burroughs, and Healy was at work downstairs, in the bar. [Burroughs] told them about his plan to move his family to South America to live off the land, killing and eating the plentiful wild boars. Joan said that if Bill was their hunter, they’d starve to death. Burroughs took the bait, and dared her to “show the boys what kind of a shot old Bill is”–to put a glass on her head, for him to shoot it off, a la William Tell. She put the glass on her head, turned a little sideways, giggled and smiled, and said, “I can’t look; you know I can’t stand the sight of blood….”

   Time stood still for the two drunken boys as the watched the skinny older man rause his pistol, too proud or too ashamed to back down, and aim at the glass on his wife’s head. He fired before they sould raise any protest–but he missed, and Vollmer’s head jerked back, then slowly tilted forward onto her chest, bright red cranial blood oozing from the wound. In the ensuing silence, Marker said, “I think your bullet has hit her, Bill,” and Burrtoughs moved to his wife’s chair and took her in his arms, calling her name disconsolately. Her drinking glass lay unbroken on the floor.

   Joan Vollmer breathed her last at the nearby Red Cross station in Colonia Roma, while Burroughs waited outside.

10. re: the shooting incident = what was the distance between the gun and the glass?

11. roy.. 8′. Most accounts say Joan was sitting across from Bill who was on a sofa with one other person who said he held back from leaning over to stop him in case he put his aim off. Pictures show a room that wasn’t pokey nor was it vast… big enough for that sofa and an armchair and a ‘coffee’ table between .. kind of like the back room at my place .. so what do you reckon? 6 foot minimum ..more like 9 max. He couldn’t lean across to put the glass in place… and he was so pissed it would have fallen off … so pissed too he didn’t really know wtf he was doing. Other than firing a gun – a thing he’d done a thousand times before. As he says in the Farson TV interview~:
    “I was careless with a gun, that’s what it amounted to. errr… I’d had a lot of alcohol.
    …. it’s something that would not have happened if I hadn’t’ve been drunk.”