Crime tales often can’t match depravity of true stories they’re based on
H’wood
Whenever Hollywood wants to make a killing, it turns to murder.
Ever since 1903’s violent “The Great Train Robbery,” moviemakers have found true crime pays — the grimmer, the better. Real-life serial madmen and murderous wives have been the basis for decades of bigscreen classics.
Harold Schechter’s “Ripped From the Headlines! The Shocking True Stories Behind the Movies’ Most Memorable Crimes” explains how truth isn’t just stranger than fiction — it’s often far scarier.
Movie buffs may remember “Arsenic and Old Lace” as a 1944 comedy, with Cary Grant trying to keep his two dotty aunts from being exposed as murderers. A frantic farce, it featured corpses hidden in window seats, and an uncle convinced he was Teddy Roosevelt.
The real story wasn’t as amusing.
Born poor, Amy Archer-Gilligan had buried two husbands by the time she was 42. The last one left her a little money, and she eventually prospered, running the Archer Private Home for Elderly People in Windsor, Conn.
Lifetime care was $1,000, and she even threw in the burials for free. There were an awful lot of burials.
Finally, a suspicious mourner demanded her brother’s body be exhumed. It tested positive for rat poison. Other autopsies were ordered, including one of the late Mr. Gilligan. They all had the same result. When the local druggist revealed the landlady bought arsenic by the pound, her real business was evident.
She pleaded insanity, and spent the rest of her life in the Middletown asylum, gaily playing funeral marches on its piano.
“Double Indemnity” also cleaned up the ugly facts of a real-life crime. Onscreen, it was classic ’40s noir, with venetian-blind shadows She slipped poison into his and Barbara Stanwyck seducing prune whip and mercury into Fred MacMurray into a his whisky, and piped gas into complicated murder-for-profit his bedroom. Her spouse stubbornly plot. survived everything.
The real story was more So, one night, she persuaded straightforward. Party girl a boyfriend, Judd Ruth Snyder had accepted the Gray, to help. marriage proposal of a dull After he slipped into the magazine editor in 1915, but house, they bashed her husband almost immediately regretted over the head, strangled it. She thought of backing out, him with a wire and stuffed but as she told a girlfriend, “I chloroform rags up his nose. just couldn’t give up that ring.” When he finally expired, Gray
Instead, she decided to left. Snyder called the police, keep the ring and get rid of the claiming jewel thieves killed husband. her husband.
First, she talked him into The police were unconvinced, taking out a $100,000 accidental-death particularly after they policy. Then she found Snyder’s jewelry hidden started arranging accidents. under the mattress.
She and Gray were arrested, and after a headline-grabbing trial, quickly sentenced to death. A photographer sneaked a tiny camera into Sing Sing in 1928 and snapped a picture of Snyder’s electrocution. The day it ran on the Daily News’ front page, circulation doubled.
Twisted love has driven plenty of murderous pairs, one of which inspired the 1970 cult classic “The Honeymoon Killers.”
Long before dating websites, there were matrimonial agencies. They charged lonely women to list their names and addresses. Perfect preying grounds for gigolos like Ray
Fernandez, a sleazy Brooklyn seducer. Initially, he contented himself with just ripping off the women.
Then he realized that there was even more money in murder, once he persuaded them to write a new will.
He had already bumped off one lover when he went to Florida to pursue Martha Beck, a lovelorn, morbidly obese nurse. But surprisingly, instead of killing her, he fell for her, and she for him. Beck abandoned her two kids at the Salvation Army and ran off with Fernandez, becoming his partner in love and death.
They killed as many as 17 people in a bloody spree that stretched from Valley Stream, L.I., to Grand Rapids, Mich. In their last, most gruesome crime, they shot a woman, Deliphene Downing, and drowned her 2-year-old daughter in the sink. Fernandez and Beck then buried both bodies and went to the movies.
Relatives, worried they hadn’t heard from Dowling, asked the police to stop by her house. There, cops found the suspicious couple and a stilldamp cement floor in the basement. It quickly gave up its gruesome secrets.
The couple was defiant in interviews.
“What the hell does the public know about love?”