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What happened in the Lucien Carr case involving Jack Kerouac?

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Portrait of Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet, looking over his shoulder in a collared shirt, circa 1965. — Jack Kerouac American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, c. 1965.

In August 1944, Jack Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr confessed to killing David Kammerer, a man who had been aggressively pursuing him, in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Following the incident, Kerouac assisted Carr in disposing of the knife used in the killing and Kammerer’s glasses.

When Carr eventually turned himself in to the police, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness. He was released only after his then-girlfriend, Edie Parker, and her parents provided bail, with the condition that Kerouac and Parker marry. Shortly after these events, Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a novelization of the case titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which remained unpublished until 2008.1