Shortly after midnight on July 7, 1993, a woman left the Comet Tavern in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood following a night out with friends. Around 3:30 a.m., some two miles away in the city’s Central District, a local sex worker discovered the woman’s lifeless body. Investigators determined the victim had been beaten, raped, and strangled to death.
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When the woman was identified a few days later as 27-year-old Mia Zapata, this senseless crime made headlines all over the country. Zapata had fronted the Gits, a band that could’ve been the next big thing to emerge from the Pacific Northwest’s red-hot music scene. At the time of Zapata’s death, the Gits were on the verge of releasing their second full-length album and undertaking a European tour. “A Budding Career Is Strangled,” lamented the Seattle Times in a headline that was clever but perhaps a bit tone-deaf. The New York Times News Service reported: “Her lyrics passionate, her voice powerful, Mia Zapata wrote and sang for a punk-rock band that was attracting a national following for the music’s raw honesty and emotion.”
In death, Zapata attained a level of recognition robbed from her in life. I first learned of her as a teenager swept up in the indie world of the mid-1990s, when you would see ads in Spin for ¡Viva Zapata!, the second album from Seattle’s 7 Year Bitch, or the Zapata-inspired Epic Records benefit compilation Home Alive: The Art of Self Defense, featuring artists like Joan Jett, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Jim Carroll, Jello Biafra, Exene Cervenka, and Lydia Lunch.
A decade would pass before authorities arrested, based on DNA evidence, Zapata’s killer, who was sentenced in 2004 to more than 30 years in prison. (He died in 2021.) Her story has endured as fodder for the true-crime industrial complex, revisited every so often on lurid podcasts or shows like Forensic Files.
Now, more than 30 years after her death, one of Zapata’s friends and former bandmates is reclaiming her narrative.
“Much to the distaste of those who knew and loved Mia, the true crime documentary and dramatization industry has seized on the circumstances of Mia’s passing as a salacious story,” Gits drummer Steve Moriarty writes in the prologue of his new book, Mia Zapata and the Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution, out now from indie publisher Feral House. “If one does an Internet search today for The Gits or Mia Zapata, information about her murder, the investigation to find the murderer, and the conviction of him ten years later predominate the results. The music, the lyrics, the people involved in creating the music are secondary or absent altogether. This cannot stand.”
Moriarty, now a psychotherapist in the Bay Area, began working on the book about a decade ago, after being approached to collaborate with a cartoonist who wanted to create a graphic novel about the Gits. That project never materialized, but it inspired Moriarty to write a memoir. “I just realized that I had too much to say,” he tells me recently. “I went through the gamut of emotions around doing it. It was cathartic, it really was. I mean, I’m a therapist. I work with people that have been traumatized, victims of crime. So I understand how stuff must be processed. It must be brought to the surface.”
Mia Zapata and the Gits discusses Zapata’s murder only briefly in the prologue and epilogue, which describes the moment when Moriarty learned from a journalist that police had finally identified his friend’s killer. (Early on, Moriarty and other members of Seattle’s music community hired a private investigator, and they participated in media interviews over the years to keep the pressure on.) His narrative draws to a close on July 4, 1993, days before the Gits were scheduled to fly to New York on the cusp of a major record deal, their future looking bright. “That’s where the story ended for me,” Moriarty says.
The story began in 1985, when Moriarty and Zapata met freshman year at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They formed the Gits after seeing a life-changing Dead Kennedys show on campus and relocated a few years later to Seattle, just in time for the punk-infused sonic insurgency that would turn the music industry on its head. They toured “up and down the western half of North America,” Moriarty writes, sharing the stage with legends in the making like Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Hole, Tad, Soundgarden, and Beck. “You’re a great fucking singer,” Kurt Cobain told Zapata backstage one night.
I ask Moriarty what he most wanted people to know about Zapata. “Her unique creativity,” he says. In the book, he cites her emotional intelligence, wit, and blues-inspired lyrics. “She wasn’t like what they probably think of as a quote-unquote punk singer,” he continues. “I would hope that they would listen to the band, listen to the music. That would be the easiest way for them to access what Mia was about. Her songs are just very heartfelt, truthful songs.”
By 1993, things were really starting to happen for the Gits. “It was unbelievable,” Moriarty writes, “to think that after such a long uphill struggle for validation we were being mentioned in mainstream music magazines like Spin, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and the Village Voice.” That June, following a Los Angeles show with riot grrrl pioneers Bratmobile at the influential underground rock venue Jabberjaw, an Atlantic Records A&R rep took the band out to lunch on Sunset Boulevard, a meeting that prompted the Gits to sign with the powerhouse entertainment lawyer Rosemary Carroll. “We were being courted by the most artist-friendly, progressive, and innovative ... record company in the country,” Moriarty writes. “We would have the same legal team as Nirvana, Hole, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Jim Carroll, Television, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle, and Willie Nelson. My God, how did we end up there?!”
Fate had other, horrifically tragic plans for the Gits. In a different world, Zapata and her bandmates would have signed to Atlantic and embarked on that next phase of their promising careers. Like so many other bands of the era, they might have transcended the underground scene they were a part of, possibly breaking through on commercial radio and MTV. I wanted to know how Moriarty would rewrite their story if he could.
“I saw X play a couple years ago at a show in San Francisco,” he tells me, referring to the first-wave L.A. punk trailblazers who released their final album this month after 47 years as a band. “I danced my head off, and afterwards, I went and hung out with Exene and John Doe and talked to them for a while. I remember leaving that gig just feeling totally high, and I thought, Man, that could be us.”•
Joe Pompeo is the author of BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime. A former senior correspondent for Vanity Fair, he has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Town & Country, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other outlets.
