Candyman: The True Story Behind The Bathroom Mirror Murder - Left High and Dry: 1

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

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/scu3PGet 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 starting September 26th. The series will be widely available everywhere else you get your podcasts starting October 3rd. Subscribe to 48 Hours+: https://apple.co/4aEgENo Subscribe 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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from one of television's most watched true crime shows, and then go behind the scenes with Postmortem, a weekly deep dive from the team at 48 hours. Listen to 48 hours early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. 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 got 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 South Side Chicago neighborhood.

Like, I didn't see a lot of dudes with hockey masks either. So those weren't as scary to me. But Candy Man, he looked like somebody i might actually bump into his brother was six five 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's 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 Candy Man'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 Candy Man. I think her name was Ruthie Jean, 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, smash their way through 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 Mae 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 stuff in here that seems to be from the story you wrote. That's Steve Bagheera. He's a reporter who followed the case of the real murder for years. In the movie, 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 Mae McCoy's murder

for a weekly newspaper called the Chicago Reader. In 1987, after she died, he visited Ruthie Mae's apartment. It was on the 11th floor of a high-rise in one of Chicago's housing projects. There happened to be a janitor who was cleaning up in her apartment. The door was open and I was able to go in. Whoever murdered Ruthie Mae McCoy somehow entered her apartment through her bathroom mirror. She had heard the intruders coming and had called 911.

In this podcast, we're taking another look at the true nightmare that inspired a major film franchise. They just cast her out like she was nobody. They didn't care. It was just like another Black person just got murdered. Oh, OK, we'll 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 Mae's 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 9-1- 911 get her the help she needed? And how had Ruthie Mae's medicine cabinet become a point of entry? I'm Dometi Pongo.

From 48 Hours, this is Candyman. The true story behind the bathroom mirror murder. The Bathroom Mirror Man. Episode 1. Left High and Dry. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind

the bathroom mirror murder, early and ad-free on Wondery Plus and the Wondery app. On April 22nd, 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy called 911. It was 8.45 at night. Ruthie Mae was a 52-year-old grandmother who lived alone when she called police to report an attempted break-in. We're told the original recording no longer exists, but we do have a transcript, so we've asked actors to read it. Ruthie Mae tried to explain. They want to break in. Yeah, they throw the cabinets down. They threw a cabinet 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 Mae was saying. She's telling them that the intruders were coming in through

the bathroom. 1440 West 13th Street, apartment 1109. Okay, the elevator working. 1109? Uh-huh. 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, but classified the call as a disturbance with a neighbor, not a robbery. That crucial difference likely impacted what happened next. Ruthie Mae, when she's making the 911 call, she sounded very scared. Back in 1987, Steve Bagheera had listened to Ruthie Mae'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 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 Mae 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 Mae, he wrote two long stories, 22,000 words in total for the Chicago reader. I tried to not just write about murder, but about other aspects of people's lives. The night Ruthie Mae called 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 wouldn't open. It was locked. They asked 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 break-in. Despite the two neighbors calling, and Ruthie Mae herself,

the officers made a controversial 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 Lasley. Yeah, I'm the one that got them to open the door. Deborah Lasley lived down the hall from Ruthie Mae. 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 Mae well. We had to talk to her. Deborah lived in apartment 1101, and Ruthie Mae was in 1109. They looked out for one another. She was my best friend in the building, because I had never lived in the project neither, and me and her could get to hang out 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 Mae helped her manage, and would keep an eye on her kids sometimes. We both would have each other every day. All during the day, she watched my kids, and we'd stand in the hallway and talk. Ruthie Mae had one daughter and two grandchildren. She never married and lived on her own in Abbott Homes. Her daughter Vernita was in her mid-20s by then. According to her autopsy, Ruthie Mae stood 5'9 and weighed a little over 250 pounds. She had black hair mixed with a little gray. Debra said Ruthie Mae 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 because she told them to get in the house. That means get in the house. The night Ruthie Mae called 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. And that was the situation in the Abbott Homes at the time Ruthie Mae 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 gang, the Vice Lords. Steve found that in 1986, a year before Ruthie Mae'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 Debra didn't question the gunfire until the following morning when Ruthie Mae didn't come to visit like she normally did. And I kept saying, is something wrong? But she would have knocked on my door and told me she was gone.

Ruthie Mae normally stopped at Debra's apartment at least twice a day. She let Debra know when she was leaving and when she got home. But that day, she never knocked. It was shocking because she's going to go to the store every day. She's going to go to that store. For the first time, Ruthie Mae 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 shouted, I 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 Abbott.

She's hard to understand 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 Mae's apartment without her permission. When she couldn't get through to management, she called the cops. I didn't feel like nobody cared. Because 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. Debra's calls convinced them to try again.

The security guards from the Chicago Housing Authority met them at Ruthie Mae's door. Steve said officers came ready to break down the door. This time the police wanted to go in, they say, and check on Ruthie Mae. And the Chicago Housing Authority security force said, well, if you break down that door, the tenant may sue you. For whatever reason, the police and CHA 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 Mae 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 Mae 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 Mae lying on her side in a pool of blood, decomposing. And when they opened the door, you could smell it. It was so bad.

The man from the housing authority asked Deborah to wait by Ruthie Mae's door out in the hallway. But then they came and told me we had to call the police. Ruthie Mae 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 way. Ruthie Mae 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 happened so frequently in the projects that it wasn't always newsworthy. Ruthie Mae'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 Bolgera 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 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 wealthier 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 Mae McCoy. I was interested for one

thing in whether this medicine cabinet break-in was unique. And I was also interested in how police could leave like they did. More than a month after Ruthie Mae McCoy's murder, Steve Bagheera drove to Abbott Homes. The project building was massive. In the center, there was this big open area with some trees lining the sidewalk. Seven 15-story high-rises surrounded the oversized lawns.

Made of brick, they all looked 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 Mae 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 looking for drugs. And eventually they would believe me that I was a reporter. Steve stopped at Ruthie Mae's building. I went up to the 11th floor, not knowing if I'm going to be, I'm not thinking I'm going to be able to get into her apartment. He 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 Mae was killed, her family and friends realized that there had 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 what he could to get her out of the project. Ruthie Mae's friend, Deborah, has a daughter named Mary. They live down the hall from Ruthie

Mae, and Mary used to hang out in Ruthie Mae's apartment. Not long before the murder, Mary noticed that Ruthie Mae kept a stick on him, one heavy enough to be a weapon. She had a stick that was sitting from her door, her bedroom 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 Mae stopped her. She pointed to a bucket. That's when Mary realized she'd been using a bucket to relieve herself. That's how scared she'd been in her own home. It was a little shaggy-allem bucket.

She had a garbage bag sitting there, and she had used it. And every day, we'd never know that we'd see her walk from my house to the center of it. She was throwing that bag away. Neither Ruthie Mae's best friend, her daughter, or Steve said they knew if Ruthie Mae 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 people were living with great insecurity, great fear. But usually it was of, 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 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 Mae's apartment was never found. When he visited Ruthie Mae'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 Sinai Psychiatric Center. That's when he learned more about why people might not have believed Ruthie Mae. 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 Mae went to a year of high school and quit after that. And she started showing signs of mental illness in her early 20s.

So it could have been schizophrenia. That was never totally clear. 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 Mae'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 Mae,

and she would curse strangers sometimes, but she got connected with a psychiatric center at Mount Sinai. 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 Mae led him to pose a provocative question in one of his headlines. It read, what killed Ruthie Mae 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 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 Robitaille, 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 Candyman is kind of a golem, you know? He's an 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 that he thought he was assimilated, and he thought he was accepted. But he wasn't. And they killed him. And so now he's there out there, not exactly looking for vengeance, but looking for something. Looking just to haunt them. It's visceral.

And maybe that's why Candyman still has this hold on us. It has 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 Canty. 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 Mae 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 that's why I want to do this podcast, just to understand how the intruders could have killed Ruthie Mae, get to the bottom of why she died, and how her circumstances contributed to what happened. So, Domiti, when you were a kid in Chicago, how large did Candyman loom for you?

I mean, it was huge. I was scared of Candyman. I mean, the fact that all you had to do was say a name into a bathroom mirror and they could pop up. To be honest, I didn't even watch the film in full until you brought it to me. Really? I didn't realize that. No, facts, facts.

And Steve Bagheera's like me. He didn't see the film until much later. Not because he was scared of Candyman like a young Domothee, 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 his story and parts of the film. I was struck by the fact that

what is a nightmare to white people was reality to people who are living 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 Mae's murder.

Ruthie Mae 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 Mae's calls for help taken more seriously? A 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 Mae believed contributed to the tragedy. 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 Homes. There hadn't been another murderer through this kind of an entry, but there had been numerous burglaries through the medicine cabinets.

This wasn't the first time criminals had preyed on residents like this. Coming up, we're gonna look at the conditions residents like Ruthie Mae were 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 Mae? 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 Mae'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 murder. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Jometi Punga. Judy Tigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio, and Maura Walls 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 Policar. Special thanks to paramount podcast, vice president Megan Marcus candy man. 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. Fendall Fulton is our fact checker. Our production manager is Tamika Dallas-Kalasny. Special thanks to Ariana Roach for playing Ruthie Mae. 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, you can listen to the next episode one week early and ad-free by joining 48 Hours Plus on Apple Podcasts or Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.

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