Left High and Dry | "Candyman" | "48 Hours" Podcast (Episode 1) | Forensic Files

when I was a kid I was scared of Candyman he was the killer from this old horror movie from 1992 that became a
cult classic Candyman had a hook for a hand and he gut you with it for no other reason than that you said his name five
times into a bathroom mirror candyman candyman candyman and there was something about Candyman that seemed
more real like more dangerous than any other movie villain I mean there were no white guys
that looked like the slasher from the Halloween franchise walking around my Southside Chicago
neighborhood like I didn't see a lot of dudes with hockey mask either so those weren't as scary to me but
Candyman he looked like somebody I might actually bump into his brother was 65 with this Eerie
baritone deep voice what's blood for if not for shedding and he wore this Creepy
Black trench coat and one of my big cousins knew I was scared of him so he used to try to
lock me in the bathroom with the lights off to prank me so needless to say I avoided watching this movie for years
even though it set in my hometown but not too long ago I finally sat down to watch it and when I did I realized
Candyman is about so much more than a murderous Urban Legend see this movie is actually about a dark chapter in the
history of Chicago it low key shows us what happens when a city refuses to care for its own residents and it's about who
gets to feel safe in their own homes in this country even today Candyman is set in a public
housing project called Cabrini Green there's this graduate student named Helen who is studying urban legends and
she's dead set on finding out more about this one in one of the early scenes Helen is in an empty classroom at her
University listening to a tape recording someone's describing one of the candyman's
murders a janitor who's cleaning the room overhears the recording in True Hollywood fashion the
janitor just so happens to know someone who can tell Helen more about Candyman I
think her name was Ruthie Jean and and she heard this banging and smashing like somebody was trying to make a hole in
the wall so Ruthie called 911 and she said there's somebody coming through the walls and they didn't believe her they
thought the lady was crazy right Helen does some research and found out that a woman was killed by someone who came in
through her bathroom mirror so she and another grad student visit the high-rise apartment in the
projects they go upstairs to the murder victim's apartment it's unlocked they both walk in and go into
Ruthie Jean's bathroom it's Eerie after all whoever killed her got into the apartment this same way Helen
opens the medicine cabinet killer or killers they don't know which smashed their way to the back of this cabinet
see there's no wall there the story of Candyman is fictional of course we all know that saying
Candyman five times in the bathroom mirror doesn't actually conjure up a killer ghost but the murder of Ruthie Jean in
the movie shares horrifying similarities to the killing of a real person that woman's name wasn't Ruthie
Jean but Ruthie May McCoy it must have been a couple of years after Candyman came out somehow I hadn't heard of it
and people told me hey you know there's there's stuff in here that seems to be from the story you wrote that's Steve
begira he's a reporter who followed the case of the real murder for years in the
movie The they showed a Chicago dispatch headline what killed Ruthie Jean life in
the projects which was almost identical to the headline of the story I wrote Steve wrote a series of investigative
pieces about Ruthie May McCoy's murder for a weekly newspaper called the Chicago Reader
[Music] in 1987 after she died he visited Ruthie May's apartment it was on the 11th floor
of a highrise in one of Chicago's housing projects there happened to be a janitor who was cleaning up in her
apartment uh the door was open and I was able to go in whoever murdered Ruthie May McCoy somehow entered her apartment
through her bathroom mirror she had heard The Intruders coming and it called 911 in this podcast we're taking another
look at the true nightmare that inspired a major film franchise they just cast her like she
was nobody they didn't care it was just like another black person just got murder oh okay we go to the next one now
when we talk about crime we talk about violence there's this thing where we do a presumption that the people and not
the conditions are responsible but what if the conditions in the projects and Ruthie May killers are both
responsible you're supposed to feel safe at home but back then and even now that's not always the case and sometimes
the danger in our own homes comes from the very people who are supposed to protect
us why didn't 911 get her the help she needed and how had ruy May's medicine cabinet become a point of
entry I'm Dom Pongo from for 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror
[Music] murder episode one left high and dry on April 22nd 1987 Ruthy May McCoy called 911 it was 8:45 at night Ruthie
May was a 52 2-year-old grandmother who lived alone when she called police to report and attempted Breakin we're told
the original recording no longer exists but we do have a transcript so we've asked actors to read
it I'm alone and I I live at 1440 was 13 Street and some people living next door
have pulled their cabinets out what are they doing they they want to break in on
this side where I live at Ruthie May tried to explain they want to break in yeah they they throw the cabinets down
they threw the cabinets down where I'm in a project they come on the other side but you can reach my bathroom and they
want to come through the bathroom now it's unclear if the dispatcher got this part of what Ruthie May was saying she's
telling them that The Intruders were coming in through the bathroom 1440 West 13th Street Apartment 11:09 okay the
elevator working 11:09 uhhuh all right what's your name ma'am Ruth McCoy all right I'll send you the police okay the
dispatcher assigned a patrol car car but classified the call as a disturbance with the neighbor not a
robbery that crucial difference likely impacted what happened next Ruthie May when she's making the 911 call she
sounded very scared back in 1987 Steve buira had listened to Ruthie May's actual call for help but together enough
to report to the police that she's in the projects the elevators are working so you know there're kind of underscores
the fact that the elevators often aren't working police may not come if the elevators aren't working Steve was 33
when Ruthie May was killed at that time he focused his reporting on telling the stories of low-income black residents
who lived on Chicago's South and West sides he'd covered plenty of stories in the projects but for Ruthie may he wrote
two long stories 22,000 words in total for the Chicago Reader I tried to not just write about murder but about um
other aspects of people's [Music] lives the night Ruthie may call 911 dispatchers also talked to two of her
neighbors one after the other had called to report gunshots so three calls for help were made when police came they got
there in about 20 minutes and were there about a half hour they knocked on her door and called out to her got no answer
they tried to open the door it it wouldn't open it was locked they asked uh for a key to the apartment they
secured the key that was supposed to be to the apartment it didn't work officers
wrote in the police report that the door was locked and that there didn't appear
to be any signs of a Breakin despite the two neighbors calling and Ruthie May herself the officers made a controversal
decision to not break the door down so after about a half hour they just left it took another neighbor's call the
next day to get someone to take action the next evening they got a call police got a call from 11th floor neighbor
named Deborah lley yeah I'm the one they got them to open the door Deborah lassley lived down the hall from Ruthie
may we recently caught up with Deborah on the phone you'll hear the connection was a little rough and at times you can
hear children in the background but this was the only time she was available and
she knew Ruthie May well we had to talk to her Deborah lived in apartment 1101 and Ruthie May was in 11:09 they looked
out for one another she was my best friend in the building cuz I had never lived in the project neither and me and
her to get the hang of it together when they met they were both new to the 11th floor of the Grace Abbott homes which is
a part of a public housing complex Deborah in her 30s was a mother of seven and her living situation was cramped but
she may do as best she could Ruthie may help helped her manage and would keep an
eye on her kids sometimes we both ATT each other every day all during the day she watched my kid and we stand in the
hallway and talk Ruthie may had one daughter and two grandchildren she never married and lived on her own in Abbott
Holmes her daughter Vita was in her mid 20s by Van according to her autopsy Ruthie May stood 5'9 and weighed a
little over 250 lb she had black hair mixed with a little gray Deborah said Ruthie May was sweet but
that she was also the kind of woman who wasn't scared to keep the kids in the building in line so she was like a
grandmother to my kids and my kids they know the respect her cuz she tell them to get in the house that me get in the
house the night Ruthie may call 911 Deborah heard gunshots but didn't think anything of them yeah we heard it but
over there you heard shots all the time there was a lot of territoriality so gangs fighting over Turf that led to
more violence that led to more guns um and that was the situation in the Abbott homes uh at the time Ruthie
May was killed Steve wrote that Abbott homes was the territory for a gang called the black Gangster Disciples at
the time the bgds they monitored the Halls elevators and the stairs and the buildings often turned into a
Battleground between the bgds and another game gang the Vice Lords Steve found that in
1986 a year before Ruthie May's murder residents in the projects experienced killings rapes and attacks more than
twice as often as the rest of the city gangs fighting over Turf that led to more violence that led to more guns
that's why Deborah didn't question the gunfire until the following morning when Ruthie May didn't come to visit like she
normally did and I kept saying it's something wrong but she would have knocked on my door and told me she was
going Ruthie May normally stopped at Deborah's apartment at least twice a day she let Deborah know when she was
leaving and when she got home but that day she never knocked it was shocking cuz she's going to go to the store every
day she's going to go to that store for the first time Ruthie May didn't follow her routine this was a bad sign and I
knocked on her door and I didn't hear nothing and then I just sh that said something's wrong it's not like
her Deborah marched downstairs out of the building and down the block to ask the building's management if they could
check on her friend see they would have a key and she didn't the Chicago Housing
Authority known as cha managed Abbot I went to housing and told me I had to see again you know check again and see do
she come she might be went somewhere she's hard to understand stand here but she's saying that the cha told her to
check on her friend again that maybe she stepped out Deborah said the manager warned her that they could get in
trouble for opening Ruthie May's apartment without her permission when she couldn't get through the management
she called the cops I didn't feel like nobody car cuz it took me all day long to get the police to come it took me all
day long the police hadn't come back on their own since the night before Deborah's calls convinced them to
try again the security guards from the Sha Housing Authority met them at Ruthie May's door Steve said officers came
ready to break down the door this time the police wanted to go in they say U and check on Ruthie May and the chag
Housing Authority security Force said well if you break down that door the tenant May sue you
for whatever reason the police and ch again disregard that the tenant herself had called 911 afraid because Intruders
were breaking into her apartment through the mirror despite that Steve said that
the guards only offered reasons not to break in also if you break down that door somebody's going to have to secure
it we don't want to do that so they kind of talked the police out of entering the
apartment of course the police could have entered the apartment then it wasn't up to the cha security staff for
a second time the Chicago Police left without checking to see if Ruthie May McCoy was okay we wanted to know why so
we reached out to the current cha spokesperson they told us that due to how long it's been since this happened
they have to refer us back to how the cha answered these questions at the time back then when Steve called the
Cha's head of security to ask why they advised police not to break down the door the director said quote I don't
have any answers two days after Ruthie May was shot Deborah finally got someone from the
Chicago Housing Authority to open her friend's door it was somebody from cha who did
break into the apartment and found Ruthie May lying on her side in a pool of blood
decomposing and when they open the door you could smell it was so bad the man from the Housing Authority asked
Deborah to wait by Ruthie May's door out in the hallway but then they came and told me we had to call the police Ruthie
May was found in a bedroom according to the medical examiner she'd been shot four times and one of the gunshots one
of the bullets had severed her pulmonary artery so he didn't believe she would have lived
long we all want to believe that when we call authorities help will be on the away Ruthie May was left high and dry
and why that happened would be the subject of a lot of debate for months and even years after her murder murders
reportedly happen so frequently in the projects that it wasn't always newsworthy Ruthie May's murder would
have fallen Into Obscurity or it would have been overlooked like so many others if not for one curious detail the fact
that she had been killed by someone who came in through the hole in the wall where her medicine cabinet usually was
the Chicago Tribune wrote a short news story a few weeks after the murder it was amazing to me that people had access
to other apartments through the medicine cabinet in the adjacent apartment Steve buira
saw that brief article in the Tribune and had a bunch of questions I thought how could the Tribune not be intrigued
enough to ask more about these circumstances Steve worked for the prestigious Tribune out
of college before shifting to a legendary weekly paper the Chicago Reader it's kind of like Chicago's
Village Voice and had a reputation for solid journalism I wanted to be downwardly
mobile but seriously because uh I felt the Tribune was more interested in stories that appealed to the kinds of
people they wanted to advertise to people who lived along the lakefront in healthier neighborhoods and in the
suburbs but at the Chicago Reader Steve was free to write the kinds of stories he wanted to write about folks like
Ruthie may mcoy I was interested for for one thing in whether this medicine cabinet Breakin was unique and I was
also interested in how police could leave like they did more than a month after Ruthie May
McCoy's murder Steve beira drove to Abbot homes the project building was massive in the center there was this big
open area with some trees lining the sidewalk seven 15-story highrises surrounded the oversized
Lawns made of brick they all look the same Abbott homes were first built in 1955 and while they might have been nice
then by the late 80s residents said maintenance rarely fixed anything burnt out light bulbs broken elevators
and backed up toilets this was all a part of life when Ruthie May moved in many of the walls and ceilings were
crumbling Steve was used to visiting Chicago's projects for his stories but as a thin white guy in his early 30s who
obviously wasn't from the neighborhood Abbott's residents who were 90% black would give him the side
eye this guy must be a social worker or a cop or look looking for drugs and eventually they would believe me that I
was a reporter Steve stopped at Ruthie May's building I went up to the 11th floor not knowing if I'm going to be not
thinking I'm going to be able to get into her apartment you said a janitor happened to be in the apartment cleaning
up the door was open and I was able to go in just like Helen the graduate student in the first Candyman movie
Steve wanted to see the hole in the bathroom wall for himself I do remember going into the bathroom and looking at
where the medicine cabinet was supposed to be and there was a rectangular hole in the
wall why wasn't her cabinet even on the wall after Ruthie May was killed her family and friends realized that there
have been clues that there was something about her apartment that scared her her
brother had visited her a couple of months before and she said that her medicine cabinet was loose and he had
put a couple of pieces of wood in there to try to fortify it she didn't tell him
anything about medicine cabinet break-ins he says if she had he would have you know done he what what he could
to get her out of the project Ruthie May's friend Deborah has a daughter named Mary they live down a hall from
Ruthie May and Mary used to hang out in Ruthie May's apartment not long before the murder Mary noticed that Ruthie May
kept a stick on him one heavy enough to be a weapon she had a stick that that was sitting from her door her be door to
the bathroom door right there Mary remembered that one particular day when she was visiting she went to use the
bathroom but Ruthie May stopped her she like no no no touch it though don't touch it though get back over here she
like use right here she pointed to a bucket that's when Mary realized she been using a bucket to relieve herself
that's how scared she'd been in her own home it was a little [ __ ] bucket she had
page bag sitting there and she used it and every day we never know that we see her walk from house to the CER she was
throwing that bag away neither Ruthie May's best friend her daughter or Steve said they knew of Ruthie May ever
explicitly told anyone why she was afraid here's Steve again I was struck by both how spooky it was but also how
outrageous it was I mean I knew from other stories I had done reporting in the projects in high-rise projects
that uh people were living with great insecurity great fear but usually it was of uh you know people could break
through my front door the idea that people could also break into their apartment through their bathroom I mean
that was really that that really seemed awful to me for people to have to live with that Deborah and Mary both remember
seeing young men coming in and out of the apartment next to Ruthie Mays Steve learned there was a connection between
that apartment and the murder hers was apartment 1109 the adjacent apartment was
1108 and the State's Attorney's Office had confiscated the medicine cabinet in the other apartment as evidence the
medicine cabinet in Ruthie May's apartment was never found when he visited Ruth May's
apartment Steve picked up some of the papers that had been left on the floor in disarray of course I looked at them
and found the connection to the Mount siai Psychiatric Center that's when he learned more about why people might not
have believed Ruthy May apparently she had struggled with her mental health in the past but lately
she'd been responding to treatment and started pursuing her GED it was a tragedy what happened to
her regardless but it seemed to be especially tragic considering that she was making really good steps with her
life Ruthie May went to a year of high school and quit after that and she started
showing signs of mental illness in her early 20s so could have been schizophrenia that was never totally
clear uh but she was definitely paranoid and she would be heard talking to herself in the
street Steve said this was in 1986 a year before Ruthie May's murder her treatment at the Psychiatric Center was
outpatient which means she still lived at home while receiving care she was known in the project as Miss May and she
was she would like curse strangers sometimes but uh she got connected with this Psychiatric Center at Mount Si
after going to the Psychiatric Center Ruthie May was taking high school equivalency classes it was a sign that
she was looking toward the future she was in arts and crafts projects group therapy most of the other clients in
this Center were also project residents the director of the center said they were all dealing with the stress and
deprivation of living in that project the conditions that Steve learned about and the system's failure to help Ruthie
May led him to pose a provocative question in one of his headlines it read what kill K Ruthie May
McCoy a bullet in the chest or life in the projects that headline is very close to
the one that shows up in the Candyman movie in 1992 in the movie they showed a Chicago dispatch headline what killed
Ruthie Jean life in the projects Steve noticed how close it was to his own headline but he didn't overthink it
after all in the movie's credits it says that Candyman is based on a fictional story called The Forbidden written by
Clive Barker in 1985 Clive Barker's story depicts a graduate student named Helen
investigating an urban legend who haunts a dilapidated housing project in Liverpool England it wasn't like they
were doing a movie that was totally about the story I wrote they had a different
agenda they were tying this real story to urban legend Bernard Rose who wrote and
directed Candyman decided to set the story in the Chicago housing projects instead race didn't play a role in Clive
Barker's story but Rose made it a central theme of Candyman in the movie Candyman is actually Daniel robati a
black man from the late 1800s who was lynched for having a relationship with a white woman here's the director himself
Bernard Rose the candy man is kind of a Golem you know he's he's in a avenging Angel as much as he's anything how did
that backstory become a part of his narrative the point was that he was wealthy and then he thought he was
assimilated and he thought he was accepted but he wasn't and they killed him and so now he's he's he's there out
there not exactly looking for vengeance but looking for something looking to just haunt them it's visceral and maybe
that's why Candyman still has this whole on us it is served as the basis for four
films honestly I didn't watch the 1992 movie until after I saw the newer 2021 Candyman movie this is Morgan KY she's a
field producer at 48 hours and she's actually the one who came up with the idea for this podcast and after watching
that movie I was just really hooked so I decided to do a little bit of research and I learned that Ruthie may had
suffered this horrible fate and I just wanted to know more about why yeah her death sounded crazy to me too the first
time I heard it it kind of pissed me off to be honest with you right it just felt
like she didn't have to die exactly and and that's what I want to do this podcast just to understand how The
Intruders could have killed Ruthie may get to the bottom of why she died and how her circumstances contributed to
what happened so domati when you were a kid in Chicago how large did Candyman loom for you I mean it was huge I was
scared of Candy Man I mean the fact that all you had to do was say a name into a
bathroom mirror and they pop up to be honest I didn't even watch the film in it in full until you brought it to me
really I didn't realize that no facts facts and Steve buir is like me he didn't see the film until much later not
because he was scared of Candyman like a young Doma but it was because he wasn't
a fan of horror films he said that his biggest takeaway when he finally did watch the movie wasn't the commonalities
between the history and parts of the film I was struck by the fact that what is a nightmare to white people was
reality to people who were living in in the projects I'll admit that sounds dramatic but let me tell you he is
really not exaggerating here I'd find out that a lot of that first Candyman film came from real life not just Ruthie
May's murder Ruthie May lived in taxpayer funded housing with conditions bad enough to inspire a horror film but how
is it that people's living conditions were ever allowed to get this bad in America why weren't residents better
protected and why weren't Ruthie May's calls for help taken more seriously good part of my reporting dealt with the
police response or lack of response which as many residents in the project told me was not
surprising there were all kinds of factors that Steve and those close to Ruthie May believed contributed to the
trag maybe if police came in right away there was nothing they could do for her anyway
we'll never know while they didn't break into the apartment police did start a hunt for who killed Ruthie May and Steve
went on a search of his own to find out how unusual it was for an intruder to come through the bathroom mirror at
Abbott Holmes there hadn't been another murder through this kind of an entry but there
had been numerous burglaries through the medicine cabinets this wasn't the first time criminals had
prayed on residents like this coming up we're going to look at the conditions residents like Ruthie May we're living
in if you really believed in tough on crime then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill
our women what explanation did authorities have for not immediately helping Ruthie May there are a lot of
calls to 911 from the projects that are hoax calls phony calls what made her a Target in the first place if people
think you have money yes they will try to rob people we'll follow the murder investigation and talk to one of the
lead detectives and I said Jesus Christ look at this and there was no medicine cabinet on the other side and we'll talk
to the writer and director of Candyman who has long downplayed the connection between Ruthie May's death and the story
that made it to the big screen you take things from the world around you and put
them into new forms that's really what fiction is from 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the
bathroom mirror murk I'm your host and co-executive producer domati punga Judy igard is the
executive producer of 48 Hours Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount audio and Mora walls is the
senior story editor development by 48 Hours field producer Morgan KY recording assistance from from Marlin
polycart special thanks to Paramount podcast vice president Megan Marcus Candyman the true story behind the
bathroom mirror murder is produced by Sony Music Entertainment it was reported written and produced by Alex
Schuman our executive producers are Katherine St Louis and Jonathan hirch our associate producer is summer
tamod theme and original music composed by Cedric will he also sound designed and mixed the
episodes fle fton is our fact Checker our production manager is tamama balance kassi special thanks to Ariana roach for
playing Ruthie may she also played Trina in the 2021 Candyman if you enjoyed this podcast
please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
[Music]

Calling 911 didn't get Ruthie Mae McCoy help. The night she was shot, police didn't even break down her apartment door to check on her. Her body was discovered days later. The bizarre detail that McCoy was killed by someone entering through her bathroom medicine cabinet caught the attention of reporter Steve Bogira who decided to investigate the crime himself. His 1987 Chicago Reader article: https://shorturl.at/scu3P

Get early, ad-free access to episodes of "Candyman: The True Story Behind the Bathroom Mirror Murder" by subscribing to 48 Hours+ on Apple Podcasts or Wondery+ on the Wondery app. The series is widely available everywhere else you get your podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/candyman-the-true-story-behind-the-bathroom-mirror-murder/id1769281333

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

The episode examines Ruthie May McCoy's murder and its connection to the Candyman film, highlighting systemic neglect in Chicago's housing projects.

Key points

The Real Story Behind Candyman. Candyman isn't just a horror film; it reflects a dark chapter in Chicago's history.
The Medicine Cabinet Murders. Ruthie May's murder revealed shocking truths about safety and neglect in housing projects.
Ruthie May's 911 Call. Ruthie May McCoy's desperate call for help went unheard, leading to tragedy.
Ruthie May's Struggles. Ruthie May faced mental health challenges but was making progress before her tragic death.
The Connection to Candyman. The story of Ruthie May inspired the Candyman film, highlighting real-life horrors.
Systemic Failures. The conditions in which Ruthie May lived raised questions about systemic neglect and violence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

What's blood for if not for shedding?

Candyman's eerie line that haunts the narrator.

0:58WatchOct 3, 2024

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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