Gerald Anthony Grice was an unemployed man and petty criminal who lived in New York City during the 1970s. He also became Rorschach's first murder victim, as well as just one of many criminals that he would kill instead turning over to the authorities.
Biography[]
In the summer of 1975, Gerald Anthony Grice kidnapped Blair Roche, a six-year-old girl whom Grice believed to be the daughter of a wealthy family. Grice intended to collect a heavy ransom from the family, but in actuality Grice was mistaken: Roche's family was not wealthy and her father was merely a bus driver.
Rorschach, promising the Roche family he would return Blair alive, interrogated several informants and traced Grice to his seedy Brooklyn home, a former dressmaker's shop called Modern Modes. In the back yard, Rorschach observed two German Shepherds (Fred and Barney) struggling over a large bone. Though Grice was not home at the time, Rorschach broke in and began his search of the house, finding a scrap of cloth from the young girl's dress in a wood-burning stove and several butchering tools such as knives, hooks, a hacksaw and a large cleaver. Rorschach also noticed that the large cutting board in the kitchen had been recently used and quickly surmised that the bone the dogs had been fighting over was a child's femur. Rorschach then realized that Grice had butchered the Roche girl, burned her clothes and fed her remains to his dogs.
The revelation of the girl's murder caused a significant psychological break in Kovacs and he killed the two dogs with Grice's cleaver, then waited for their owner to return home. Hurling the dogs' corpses at Grice, Rorschach then handcuffed the man to a pipe and doused the room with kerosene. After handing Grice a hacksaw and stating that it would be futile for Grice to attempt to cut through the handcuffs (implying that he would have to cut off his hand), Rorschach set fire to the room and exited the house. He watched outside for over an hour in the unlikely event that Grice might free himself in time; Grice did not survive.
His dealings with Grice represent Walter Kovacs' final descent into the identity of Rorschach and the extreme methods he would adopt in his vigilantism. Kovacs related this tale to his psychiatrist Malcolm Long, after being arrested by the police and incarcerated at Sing Sing.[1] Kovacs recalled that upon killing the dogs, his transformation to his costumed identity was complete.
Snyder Timeline[]
In the 2009 film adaptation, Grice's death is altered: he is killed when Rorschach not only kills the dogs with the cleaver, but also splits Grice's skull open after Grice admits to the murder instead handcuffing him to a pipe and him leaving to burn alive, with Rorschach saying, "Men get arrested; dogs get put down." Also, the film version of Grice admits to being driven by pedophilia while the comic version was simply driven by greed and never actually confesses to the crime. Furthermore, while the comic portrays Grice as terrified and desperately pleading for Rorschach to let him go while claiming that he is innocent, the film portrays Grice as showing no remorse for Blair Roche's murder and mostly unfazed by Rorschach's presence.