On March 28, 1970, Joyce Taylor, a 29-year-old woman, was killed in New York City during a burst of violence that authorities quickly treated as both a shooting and an arson case tied to the same suspect. She was identified as the “common-law wife” of Eugene Everett, and police alleged she was shot to death across the street from her Brooklyn tenement.
Investigators said the attack didn’t end with her.
After the shooting, Everett was accused of wounding a store manager and then setting a fire that turned lethal, killing four additional people—described as three children and a young woman—so that the tally associated with the spree rose far beyond Joyce Taylor alone. In the early reporting circulated with his capture, Everett was described as a plumber, and the case against him was framed in stark terms: the shooting death of Joyce Taylor and arson deaths that followed.
A multi-state manhunt followed. By March 31, Everett was in custody in Boston, where he was presented as the man New York authorities had been seeking in connection with the killing of Joyce Taylor and the fatal fire. The contemporaneous account emphasized that police believed they had their man—an arrest that abruptly ended the flight and shifted the story from pursuit to prosecution.
Later summaries of the incident place Everett among rampage killers linked to New York City in late March 1970 and report that he received a life sentence.
