The mystery was solved forty years later, when a fifty-eight-year-old Canadian woman named Beverly Markowitz confessed to the Oshawa Times.
In 1964 Beverly had been living with her parents in Silver Spring, Maryland, and dating a local disc jockey. Though she had heard ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ a couple of times on the radio, it had made little impression: ‘I just thought it was another rock’n’roll band with a cool hairdo. They were all cute, though.’
Beverly’s boyfriend had managed to buy tickets to the Beatles’ first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum, and she had agreed to come along: ‘He told me that the Beatles were going to be really big.’ After the show he told Beverly that the Beatles would be at a party at the British embassy. Why didn’t they try to crash it? Beverly was reluctant: ‘We were in the parking lot. It was cold. It was snowy. It was late and dark and everything, and I had to get home or my dad was going to kill me.’ But her boyfriend wouldn’t take no for an answer. After all, they looked the part: ‘I had a dress and heels on. My hair was all done up, and my date was in a suit.’ Finally, she agreed.
It was much easier to get into the embassy than they had imagined: ‘This white-haired drunk guy walked out, and when he went back in, we just walked right in with him. We got to go past the press and the velvet rope and right into the party.’
But the Beatles were upstairs, in a roped-off area. It was getting late. Beverly asked her boyfriend to take her home, but ‘he said we weren’t going anywhere until the Beatles came down’.
So they waited, and soon the Beatles came downstairs. Beverly approached them and asked for their autographs. ‘They were all very nice, except for John. He wouldn’t sign anything for anybody at all. I kept saying to him, “What is the matter with you?” Very arrogant.’
Her boyfriend still refused to take her home, even though she insisted her father would be furious. ‘I kept saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” and my boyfriend just didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t figure how to get out, so I thought we’d just get thrown out.’
She worked out that the quickest way to be ejected was to cut some hair off a Beatle. She picked Ringo: ‘He’s kinda short, and I had on heels, so I could kind of get to him easier than the taller ones … I pulled out those little scissors from my purse. I just went clip, clip, clip, clip, clip all around the side, and he didn’t feel it at first.’
Beverly remembered Ringo turning round and grabbing her by the shoulder. Just as she planned, she was immediately thrown out of the embassy, and returned home bearing a lock of Beatle hair.
Shortly afterwards she taped Ringo’s hair into her autograph book, where it remains to this day, alongside his autograph.
Others were to find the process of harvesting Ringo’s hair less irksome. Back in England, a thirteen-year-old Beatles fan, Katie Riggins, and a friend wrote letters to the mothers of Ringo and George asking for something belonging to their boys. Nearly a year later, Katie received a lock of Ringo’s hair through the post, accompanied by a letter from Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ Northern Fan Club secretary, saying that Mrs Starr wanted her to have it. Her friend received a similar envelope, containing George Harrison’s old toothbrush.