Was a Plotline in Last Week's "Mad Men" Inspired By the Real-Life 1967 Groovy Murders?

Possibly.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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On last week's episode of Mad Men, there was a plotline Betty (January Jones) searching for a 15-year-old violin prodigy named Sandy - a friend of her daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka). The search took Betty to a East Village flophouse, where she eventually found Sandy, who told her: "All I wanted to do was go to New York. There are people in the Village... I read about it, and I even visited them. I visited this building right off St. Mark's Place, and the kids are just living, and it's beautiful. You know?"

The plotline seems perfectly typical of the time - 1967-1968 was, of course, the height of the hippie/free love movement - but according to Gothamist, that may not be all there is to the plotline. Apparently, a tipster pointed out to the site that the storyline is also extremely reminiscent of the real-life 1967 "Groovy Murders," which involved a young girl from a rich Connecticut suburb running off to NYC, only to be bludgeoned to death in an East Village apartment building along with her boyfriend, a hippie who called himself Groovy. The story, of course, received ample coverage in the press. 

The tipster points out that because of the timeline of the series - the episode takes place at the very end of 1967 - "this incident...is clearly the basis of Betty Draper's concern for Sandy. In 1967 it got set up as the diametric opposition to the Summer of Love." 

Mad Men: Doing historical continuity better than your faves since 2007. 

RELATED: Don Draper's Pretty Face Is Going to Hell (A "Mad Men" Recap)

[via Gothamist]

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