Candyman: The True Story Behind The Bathroom Mirror Murder - Based on a True Story: 4

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

While the suspects for Ruthie Mae McCoy's murder wait in jail, a British director is on the hunt for his next film. Host Dometi Pongo finds out how a murder similar to McCoy's ended up in Bernard Rose's 1992 Candyman and discovers just how many details stem from a fateful trip the director took to the Chicago projects.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.Subscribe to 48 Hours+: https://apple.co/4aEgENoSubscribe to Wondery+: https://wondery.com/plus/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and ad free on Wondry Plus. I'm not a fan of horror movies. Reporter Steve Baguera didn't know how details from his stories made their way into the original Candyman film, until after it was released. His first article came out in 1987. They came in through the bathroom mirror,

a murder in the projects. The two suspects, John Hondras and Edward Turner, had been arrested. Years passed before they finally got their day in court. And while they were awaiting trial, a British director was developing a new movie. We're going to step away from the pursuit of justice in Ruthie Mae McCoy's case and focus for a moment on how her story made it to the big screen. I had actually gotten either a phone call or a letter back when people wrote letters from somebody in Hollywood saying, we're doing this movie that's based in a housing project in Chicago. Back in the early 90s, reporter Steve Baguera got an ask from Hollywood.

He doesn't remember the person's name, but the Hollywood rep asked Steve to be their guide when they visited Chicago. We understand that you're an expert on the projects, and could you show us around when we come to town to film? And we'll give you, I don't remember what it was, but it was like a couple hundred dollars in a screen credit. The last thing Steve wanted to do was support a movie that made light of the project's living conditions or that trivialized the murder of Ruthie Mae. He'd been pitched before about turning Ruthie Mae's story

into a movie, but at that first meeting, Steve was told that the main character of the film couldn't be Ruthie May or someone in the projects. The person making the pitch thought that the protagonist would have to be white for the film to even have a chance at getting made. Steve wasn't a fan of that idea. He'd gotten to know Ruthie Mae's family and spent years trying to hold the police and the Chicago Housing Authority accountable for her death. He wasn't going to trust just anybody. So when the second Hollywood hype reached out, I said, send me the script. And if it's not an exploitive movie, I will probably help you out.

Ultimately, Steve never helped anyone put Ruthie Mae's story on the big screen. But her story still became part of a cult classic. What Steve didn't know was, while he was following the prosecution of the two men arrested for killing Ruthie Mae, production on the first Candyman film was already in gear. It must have been a couple of years after Candyman came out. Somebody told me, hey, you know, there's nothing here that seems to be from the story you wrote. That's when I watched the movie. He noticed that a young Virginia Madsen with curly blonde hair was the lead. She ended up playing the curious graduate student who parachutes

into the projects. The main character was a white woman, and this story I had done in the East was about a black woman. How did a movie about the horrors of a black housing complex end up centering on a white outsider? And how did elements of Ruthie Mae's story end up in the Candyman film? This period, after her death and before the trial, is when writer and director Bernard Rose

started working on Candyman. He was the only person who could really answer my questions. We reached out and waited. Then, one June afternoon, we finally got the chance to talk. It's always a pleasure to talk about Candyman from a different angle. Rose told me how he found out about Ruthie Mae's story and didn't shy away from defending himself to critics.

I can see why people think, oh, why are they taking these details from this? But you know, I mean, that's what fiction is. I'm Dometi Pongo. From 48 Hours, this is Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder Episode 4 based on a true story. I Wasn't trying to make a thesis I was trying to make an entertaining art film

Bernard Rose wrote and directed the original Candyman that came out in 1992 He's talking to me on a zoom from West Hollywood Wearing glasses and an all-black shirt Rose has a grain goatee and an easy-going vibe. He told me he would have never predicted that his Candyman would still have an audience decades later. It feels like it has a much bigger shadow now than then. Before I asked him about Ruthie Mae McCoy and how parts of her story ended up in his movie, I wanted to know how he got the idea for Candyman in the first place.

You'll remember, the movie's primary source material, and the work that's officially credited in the film, is Clive Barker's short story called The Forbidden. I knew Clive Barker. I knew him socially, actually, when I'd been doing another film at Pinewood Studios. According to Rose, he met Barker for lunch while they were both working at the same production studio. Critics liked Rose's first feature film, Paperhouse. It was a dark fantasy, and he was looking for a new project

when he came across Barker's story, The Forbidden. I read that and I thought, you know what? This actually really works as a story. This is a great and interesting story. Rose, now in his 60s, is originally from London, if you didn't catch that accent. He told me that he'd always thought that a horror film needed a supernatural element. That's what appealed to him about The Forbidden, which is about a graduate student named Helen who investigates urban legends.

It's set basically in a district just outside of Liverpool called Kirby, which is very full of low-income housing and what they call in England council housing. As Helen visits the council housing, she conjures up supernatural forces while working on a research paper. I liked the fact that it's heroin was an intellectual and she wasn't a kid.

All of this sounds familiar to anyone who has seen Candyman. But what I found really interesting was the reason Rose took a liking to this story. The director told me that he loved how Helen approached this undertaking from an analytical perspective, not an emotional one. She was interested in this phenomenon of urban legends and what was going on in this housing project, but her interest wasn't to help people. It was to write a study. I liked the kind of arrogance of that.

He actually liked that Helen had little empathy for the community she was researching. He thought that arrogance made the story work. You know I think it's much more interesting to follow somebody who's flawed and I think there's always an element of punishment in a horror film that she gets into trouble and it's like there has to be something that she's done wrong in a sense and the film that she gets into trouble. And it's like, there has to be something that she's done wrong in a sense. And the thing that she's done wrong is she's poked her nose in where it wasn't really wanted, you know?

For his movie, he kept this aspect of Helen. The character Virginia Madsen plays is a middle-class woman, essentially parachuting into a low-income neighborhood. It was exactly the opposite of what they would have made you do in a kind of movie of the week TV film, to a low-income neighborhood. It was exactly the opposite of what they would have made you do in a kind of movie of the week TV film, where she would have been trying to help people. She's never trying to help people.

She makes no effort to help anybody in the film. You said that's a big part of the conflict. She didn't understand and was actually, in a weird way, exploiting the interaction. She just wants to write a paper and get praised for it, you know? Rose was inspired and thought this could be his next movie. His original plan was to keep the setting the same as Clive Barker's story, until the author himself suggested otherwise.

Barker had also directed the film Hellraiser, and he had learned that American movie distributors sometimes balked at movie stars with thick accents. The film was set in Liverpool, and Liverpool accents were just like beyond the pale for them. So they decided to make the characters American. So according to Rose,

if Hellraiser hadn't had a distribution problem, then Rose might never have set Candyman in Chicago. And in a way, I wouldn't be here talking about Ruthie Mae McCoy today. In his first draft, Rose hadn't thought of Chicago yet. He hadn't even set Candyman in any particular city. Was just a Midwestern city. It was just a midwestern city. It could have been anywhere. It could have been St. Louis.

I don't know. It could have been Milwaukee. His approach to the story changed after he decided to actually visit locations. I wanted to go scout somewhere and do some research and I ended up going to Chicago mostly because I'd been there and I remembered how spectacular the buildings were. I mean it was that shallow. You know. It's a spectacular looking city, right? And it's biased but I agree. It's a city of architects, really. It is. And it's a city where architecture is very important. His interest in the architecture stood out

to me since how the projects were designed is so crucial to how Ruthie Mae died and to the movie itself. Rose might not have clocked that yet, but when he went to Chicago, he started on a journey that would lead him to hearing about the murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy. Rose wanted to visit the projects. The people from the Illinois Film Office were nervous about taking me there. See, they weren't just nervous. They were downright terrified.

And their fear would end up becoming a big part of the original Candyman movie. In 2014, Laura Hevelin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter Erin Corwin was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. For people who have seen Candyman, it's odd to think Bernard Rose's first script didn't mention race at all.

The conflict was just about class originally, which might make sense for someone writing from a British perspective, where race and class might not be as inextricably linked. But in America, you can't talk about class inequities without talking about race too. And definitely not in the highly segregated city of Chicago. In the final version of Rose's script, Helen has a black friend who is also middle class that goes with her to visit the projects. She feels as alienated from the people in the projects as Helen does, except that she's more embarrassed to Helen's behavior because she understands that it's embarrassing to behave this way. Race takes center stage in Rose's movie whether he intended it that way or not. Janet Maslin of the New York Times put it this way in her review. She writes, the horror unfolds inside a housing

project and plays out provocatively against a backdrop of racial injustice. In the movie, the killer is a reincarnation of a well-to-do black man who was tortured and lynched by a mob in the 1800s. Daniel Robitaille's crime was dating a white man's daughter. The mob hunts him down, beats him, chops off his hand, and smears his battered body with honey before bees sting him to death. The lynching is graphic. But all of those plot details were only added after Bernard Rose went to Chicago. I contacted the people who were at the Illinois film office

and certainly in that era, if you said you wanted to come in and potentially shoot a film in a city, they would show you around and they would always ask you for a list of locations As to what your film needed and you know, I top of the list was housing projects The first place they took me was Cabrini Green He said they also took him to another project but not Grace Abbott where Ruthie May had lived I know I don't think I ever went there He said they also took him to another project, but not Grace Abbott, where Ruthie Mae had lived. I know, I don't think I ever went there.

Rose was surprised by how nervous the people from the Illinois Film Office seemed as they took him to visit Cabrini Green, which was the closest project to downtown. No project is more notorious than Cabrini Green. The 23 high-rise buildings of Cabrini, with their 15,000 residents, are described as a chamber of horrors. The occupants are terrorized day and night by vandals and teenage gangs. 7,000 families are on a waiting list for public housing in Chicago, but 400 units at Cabrini Green have been vacated by families trying to escape the lawlessness.

Those CBS News reports were from 1970. By then, between media attention and its depiction in TV shows, Cabrini began to have quite the reputation. In Cabrini Green at the time, there was a police station in the middle of the project. And I think we had to go there and then we were escorted around the place by an officer, you know? And they didn't think it was safe to go there otherwise that was their attitude were you taken aback by that yeah extremely to be honest with you I was shocked and of course when somebody has that kind of drama around going so into what is basically just an apartment block I mean it's not really any more

complicated than that. It's a bunch of apartment blocks. He said the upper floors were empty and he had to admit the buildings were creepy. There was an atmosphere there of fear but the fear was not from the people who lived there. The fear was the people from the Illinois Film Commission and the cops and that really kind of shocked me. I thought, wow, there's something here because one of the first key tenets of making a successful horror film

is having a scary setting. I thought, these people are scared of going here. Did they tell you anything about what, about why they were so scared of this community? They basically said there were groups of gangs that held the neighborhood hostage. During his visit, Rose was able to talk with cops who policed the buildings on a day-to-day basis.

I learned that actually the danger was exaggerated and that that in itself was part of the racism that surrounded the place. And what is the primary component of racism is fear, right? Outsiders were afraid of the people who lived there, afraid of what could happen there. Their prejudice stoked their fear. What the cop said to me is,

if you're a white person walking around here, they're not actually gonna bother you at all because they're gonna assume you're a social worker or a cop. Rose worked these details from his own experience into the script. In Candyman, Helen gets mistaken for a cop when she's seen in the projects. When I rewrote it, I rewrote it set as about Cabrini-Green and I just used everything I'd seen and heard. That decision to replicate these fears on screen

is a choice that has sparked debate. Debate from scholars like Robin Means Coleman. What, 30 or more years that we've been having a conversation about race and class in this movie. Coleman is a professor at the University of Virginia and a media study scholar. She's written two books on black people in horror films and turned one into a documentary. Both books, Horror Noir and The Black Guy Dies First, mention Candyman.

There are two films that I watch a lot. It's The 92 Candyman and The Thing. She's been debating Candyman for the last 30 years, and she understands that not everyone gets the controversies around this movie. We've got to address the skeptics who are like, it was just a movie and he saw a headline and it was, you know, a narrative vehicle to get her into Cabrini Green. How else are we going to do that? But Ruthie Mae McCoy is a real life person.

Her family are alive and out there. And what we have are entertainers who snatch someone's story, real life horrific murder for entertainment purposes. Back when she was writing the first edition of her book, Horror Noir, Coleman wanted to pick a real life story turned into film. She wasn't sure whether to write about Ruthie Mae or Jeffrey Dahmer. And if you read the first edition of the book, I go with Jeffrey Dahmer. Ruthie Mae felt, I think at that time I was writing it, it felt too close to home.

It felt like Ruthie Mae, Ms. Mae, as they called her. That could have easily been me, my mother, my grandmother. Coleman and I talked about how Candyman doesn't actually grapple with the horror of people's lives in the projects with nuance. I mean, even without knowing the director's intentions, a lot of Black folks watching this movie could tell that the conversations about race

were a bit of an afterthought. Back in 1992, when the film was released, Coleman said critics' reviews were mixed. There were two responses to Candyman, and one I remember was from Carl Franklin. Carl Franklin is a black filmmaker, famous for the Denzel Washington movie, Devil in a Blue Dress. And Carl Franklin said, seriously, we're doing the black boogeyman, brutal buck trope

in this movie, again, where the obsession is over this white woman who we're sort of putting on a pedal stool. In this critique, Candyman is, of course, the Black Boogeyman. It's a trope that seizes on fear by perpetuating a portrayal of Black men as violent and menacing, often chasing white women, like the Candyman chases Helen.

The trope goes all the way back to Hollywood's first blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation, which depicts the KKK and is blamed for inspiring a spike in real-life lynchings and race riots. Do we need yet another movie that glorifies that kind of stereotype, that kind of trope? Roger Ebert, who was white, had a different opinion. Based in Chicago, Ebert was a well-respected movie critic. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, said,

you know, like, if you have to do horror, this is the kind of horror you want to see, right? Ebert is saying, I do like the sort of social issues, social consciousness horror, something that leaves me thinking and reflecting. What's interesting is that Bernard Rose told me he didn't go into this film wanting to send any kind of message,

but there were signs that he knew that what he was making touched a nerve. I was in post-production on County Man at the time. It was April 1992. Parts of Los Angeles were on fire. In Los Angeles, the deadly aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, violence, arson, and anguished cries. Riots broke out across the city after white police officers were acquitted of excessive force. The public outrage stemmed from the fact

that these officers were caught on videotape brutally beating this black motorist. His name was Rodney King. We were supposed to have a test screening somewhere that week. And the riot started happening, and people got very frightened. And I was mixing in a stage in Hollywood and the mixer was grinding through the scene with the dog and the blood and all this.

Rose is describing a gruesome scene where Candyman had cut off a dog's head in a project apartment. And I said, oh, I'm not happy with that. You need to go back and change something anyway. He said, no, I'm not going back. I'm not changing it because I'm not looking at this film anymore. Rose was warned that the film might be, quote, a bit too much. And that test screening never happened.

And then the film got released without it, which is probably a good thing, because who knows what they might have made me take out. What he did include, he told me, largely came from his visits to Cabrini-Green. During his first visit with the Illinois Film Office, he connected with the woman who lived there. We bumped into a lady who had her kid in a stroller whose name was Henrietta Thomas, who was like asking us what we were doing, basically.

He explained how he was working on a movie. I told her it was about this sort of mythical kind of monster that haunted the place kind of thing. And she was basically saying, oh yeah, well, you know, that's true, by the way. And what was she talking about? She said, oh, there are like ghosts and demons that haunt this place. The director realized Candyman could hunt a place like this too. This idea went back to something from Clive Barker's The Forbidden. So really the whole thesis that Clive had, that people who live in situations which make

them uncomfortable, it's not uncommon for them to create something that's worse and more uncontrollable, because in a weird way, it makes them feel safer. During his visits to the projects with the Illinois Film Office, Rose asked the tenant he'd met, Henrietta, if he could come back to Cabrini-Green on his own.

I thought, okay, I'm gonna just call her after we've left and just-Green on his own. The two had dinner and he got to see Cabrini-Green from a tennis perspective. Rose decided to hire Henrietta to be a consultant on the film and based a character on her too. The character's name is Anne-Marie and in the movie a major plot point is when Candyman steals Anne-Marie, and in the movie, a major plot point is when Candyman steals Anne-Marie's child. As for the real person, Rose said that she was actually the first person to bring up the details of Ruthie Mae's murder. It was she who told me the story about the medicine cabinets and that somebody had been killed in another home that had a similar design with the floor

with the medicine cabinets, and you could get in and out of the apartment. And if someone had broken in and killed somebody, she told me that story and said that that was something that disturbed her. It was the kind of that that was something that disturbed her. It was the kind of violation that was visceral and memorable. I thought all this detail is so rich and it just it grounds the film and you know if you want to make something scary it has to be recognizable.

scary it has to be recognizable. But when the art is that recognizable, when the art represents real trauma, it has to be handled with care. We might be having a different conversation even if at the end of the film, it said, in memory of Ruth, you may, right, or read more about, and we've got models for this.

She pointed to Steve Bagheera as one of those models. When he's writing his article and he writes subsequent articles, he doesn't point back to his own journalism. He says, learn more about housing projects, learn more about how this happened. He says, learn more about housing projects, learn more about how this happened. Meanwhile, the director wanted to unnerve people and knew that he was parachuting into the projects, just like his movie's protagonist, Helen.

I was essentially doing what Helen does in the film. I was like walking around, gathering things for my own benefit. But where did he gather so many details about Ruthie Mae's murder? He said Henrietta told him that someone came in through a medicine cabinet and killed a woman. But that's not how he learned Ruthie Mae's name. What does he have to say to folks who believe

that his film exploited Ruthie Mae's killing? It's not the same murder as that murder. That was an entirely unrelated event. It's just that really the only thing that's taken is the detail of the bathroom cabinets. It was one of those weird pieces of kind of kismet. I think I was in the hotel and I literally opened the Chicago Reader and there was an article about it.

Director Bernard Rose had come to Chicago to visit Cabrini-Green and a tenant had told him about this murder where a killer, or killers, came in through a medicine cabinet. He happened to be visiting the city just when Steve Beguera's second article about Ruthie Mae McCoy's life and murder was published, July 1990. If you missed that issue of the reader, unless you had gone to a library and looked it up on a microfilm, you would never find it. So in his movie, that's what Helen,

the blonde grad student, does. She goes to the library and looks it up on a microfilm. Do you remember the title of the article that you read, that caught your attention? I mean, it's very similar to the depiction in the movie. It's something like, what killed, whatever the lady's real name was, life in the projects with a question mark.

I think that was it. That lady was, of course, Ruthie Mae McCoy. I reached out to her granddaughter, Keely, but she declined to talk to us for this podcast, based partly on her past experiences with media. Keely had seen her family's story misrepresented in the news before. She said while the film was being made

that mentioned Ruthie Mae's killing, her mom, Vernita, was dealing with the real life aftermath of Ruthie Mae's death. And I mean, obviously the actual murder itself has nothing to do with Candyman. Somebody came in and shot her, right? Yes, yes, but there is the character of Ruthie Jean that is the name of the film,

which is obviously very similar to Ruthie Mae. Was that a conscious decision? I mean, it probably was, yeah. It's always very complicated when something's a true story. I look at these parallels with Ruthie Mae's story, and, you know, you think about the family, or Ruthie Mae's daughter, and they looking at the film

and feeling like these elements are reminiscent of what happened to Ruthie Mae, but they felt like they weren't a part of the process. What would you say to that critique? I mean, I think that's valid. Rose said that he never considered making one of Ruthie Mae's relatives a consultant on the film and points out that his movie is about Candyman, not Ruthie Mae.

It's not about that person, not about the real person at all, you know. And it is ultimately a fictitious fantasy. They use some authentic details in parts, but it's not about any real person at all. I'm gonna push back a little bit and forgive me, Bernard, but when you go back and look, we went and checked out Anne-Marie in The Forbidden, her last name isn't McCoy, so McCoy comes only in the Candyman film,

and that seems part of the lineage of Ruthie Mae, who, again, the movie is Ruthie Mae, Ruthie Jean, and then you got Anne Marie, the resident, who's Anne Marie McCoy, so then you see these names kind of play into it. And I know, you know, that's, I assume you would describe it as a dotted line, not a straight line connection between the real murder,

but if I'm the family, I'm looking and I'm seeing these connections, and I feel as though I should at least be a part of the process. I mean, I can see how you could feel like that, if it was a film about what happened to her, you know, the real person. But this clearly is not. To be honest, he's right in some respect.

I mean, this movie isn't solely about Ruthie Mae. She's a plot point to get to the story of Candyman. But I'm not sure that he understands why turning her into a plot point can be considered by some as dehumanizing. Instead, he tries to argue that that's how movies like his get made. You take things from the world around you and put them into new forms. That's really what fiction is. It's not any cleverer than that.

Rose didn't have any memory of ever reaching out to Steve Baguera either. He said it's possible the producers contacted him, but he was never made aware. I have no direct memory or knowledge of that because as I said, I had already hired Henrietta as the consultant. So it's entirely possible that someone suggested him. Rose didn't set out to make a racially charged movie that included inspirations from real people and events. It just ended up that way.

The film has been criticized at different times over the years for saying, you know, it's this, it's that, it's got the wrong perspective, blah, blah, blah. He's talking about the criticisms Coleman mentioned, about how the movie feeds into anti-black stereotypes. I think that yes, it is uncomfortable in places. And I think if it wasn't, it wouldn't have lasted. If something ceases to create debate, it dies.

I asked how he decided the line between inspiration and exploitation. His answer, again, reminded me a little bit of how he described the character Helen's approach. Well, I think that if you take anything, whatever you do with it, there's an element of exploitation. And you have to just accept there's an element of exploitation and you have to just accept it's what you're doing. The only way to really be non-exploitative is not to do anything because we're all to some degree, you know, driving past car accidents and staring at them. His argument is that this is the messy part of making art. Rose thinks anyone who claims to feel guilty for taking their inspiration from the real

world is probably lying. Do they feel guilty about it? And they might pretend they do. I don't think they do. I think there is a little difference when you're dealing with actual victims of actual crimes, that that's really what you're talking about. But even then, I don't know. They'd never have sold a newspaper if it wasn't for crime. The true crime genre gets a lot of criticism

for exploiting other people's tragedies for entertainment. Some of the same reasons we've been challenging Rose. And in true crime, like this podcast, we are sharing the details of Ruthie Mae's life. In fact, we're sharing more than Bernard Rose ever did. But the key difference to me is that our ultimate goal is to inform and to help people understand how tragedies like these can happen. To put them in their proper context. So I try to ask myself whenever I'm reporting, how would this victim's family feel? How would I feel?

In fact, a lot of times I'm reporting on my own community. I may even be connected to the victims in some way, so I do my best to be accurate and respectful. That said, I have to admit that a part of me feels like Candyman does a disservice by not properly acknowledging these real tragedies. Coleman wasn't surprised by what the director told me. He's a filmmaker. He's like, look, I did, I made an entertaining movie. He's, you know, this is what he does. But I mentioned it's important to go back to Steve, Steve But I mentioned it's important to go back to Steve, Steve Bouguera. She brought back up the story about Steve meeting with an actor who told him the protagonist

would have to be white for the film to get made. And they do exactly what Steve cautions them against doing. At times, Steve felt strange in general about being a white man writing about people of color. I totally understand the feeling that it's wrong that people who are poor and in this case black, at that time at least, the stories were told by white people. But he also knew these stories were being overlooked by mainstream outlets. I always felt like it was better that it was told by someone and that I would do my best to faithfully represent

what their experience was like. For Rose, keeping Ruthie Mae's story alive is now part of the film's legacy. So there is a memorializing effect, and that's got to be positive. But, you know, look, I can't imagine how traumatic it is for family members to have to deal with Someone in their family that's murdered. It's it's it's almost like what the canny man says What's worse is is it worse to be forgotten or to be remembered? Well, the canny man

He kills so as not to be forgotten. That's his whole Motivation not to be forgotten. That's his whole motivation. He sheds innocent blood to keep people talking about him. If people remember what happened, that can never be bad in my opinion. I think when things are forgotten or denied, that seems the unhealthy thing to me. Keeping Ruthie May's memory alive also means that the failed housing policies of Chicago's past can't be swept under the rug. The heart of any problem was that the housing authority had allowed these

buildings to rot. To Rose's point, there is a chance I wouldn't be talking about Ruthie May's murder if not for this film. And while Candyman turned me on to the case, her murder and the trials of the two men arrested for her killing are what we'll cover next. Edward Turner and John Hondras pleaded not guilty to the charges of murder and robbery. Their names had come up repeatedly as police talked to the residents of the project building where Ruthie Mae was killed.

I can understand that from a detective's point of view that you would hone in on the two people who are mentioned regularly. But of course, that doesn't mean that they did it. Steve McGeara attended the trial. The state's attorneys had a little bit more evidence against Turner, so they made it technically a death penalty case. Prosecution's case relied heavily on a six-page statement from a witness named Tim Brown.

Their plan was to have him take the stand and repeat the chain of events the state's attorney wrote down when they interviewed him. But suddenly Tim Brown wasn't so sure what he saw that night. He got on the stand and flipped on the state's attorneys. That's next time on Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder. From 48 Hours, this is Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Domotee Pongo. Judy Tigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours.

Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio, and Maura Walls is the senior story editor. Development by 48 Hours field producer Morgan Canty. Recording assistance from Marlon Policarp and Alan Payne. 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 Schumann. Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch.

Our associate producer is Summer Tamad. Theme and original music composed by Cedric Wilson. He sound designed and mixed the episodes. We also use music from APM. Fendel Fullerton is our fact checker and our production manager is Tamika Balanskalasny. Don't wanna miss the next episode of Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder.

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