In New Mexico, in the rugged town of Ruidoso, the set the previous year for the John Wayne picture Chisum, barefoot Nancy Crowe Tapper and bearded Paul Edward Green, both of surburban Wheaton, Maryland, were a young couple living together without benefit of clergy. The town was well sick of hippies; Paul was arrested for falling afoul of Ruidoso’s rarely enforced 125-year-old “lewd cohabitation” law. The statutory punishment for a first offense was supposed to be a verbal warning. The judge—who displayed a sign on his office door reading JUDGE PRITCHETT: THE LAW WEST OF THE RIO RUIDOSO—gave him thirty days instead. Paul didn’t take his confinement particularly seriously; when given a chance to call a lawyer, he allegedly ambled away from the jailhouse. The second of two “warning shots” caught him in the back of the head. They said the hippie was running, yet Green had recently been injured and could barely walk. Charges were never pressed against the officer. This was only the latest in an epidemic of hippie lynchings in New Mexico: the nineteen-year-old heroin addict shot while handcuffed behind the back (ruled justifiable homicide) in Santa Fe; the sixteen-year-old girl who passed a bad check shot by a storekeeper in the parking lot (no charges filed) in Albuquerque; communes razed, vans dynamited—young people, the Washington Post reported on January 16, 1972, “beaten, raped, and killed.”