Dateline Originals - Killer Role - Ep. 1: In the Dark

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Indie filmmakers cast Wyn Reed as their star. What they didn’t know was that Wyn wasn’t Wyn.This episode was originally published on April 13, 2021. 

The Siskiyou mountain range of southwestern Oregon is a land of misty peaks and deep gorges, dirt roads that lead to nowhere. Wander too far into its thick and rain-drenched forests and you may be lost for a very long time. In these mountains, myths are as persistent as the rain, where stories of Bigfoot or the undead are often told as if they are actually true. These Siskiyous once attracted loggers who came to cut the trees, and later, artists who preferred to live among them. Now, weed farms are nestled beneath some of the pines, tended by those who work to keep the world at bay.

The Siskiyou mountain range is so remote that when trouble comes, help can be a long way off. This is Jackson County 911 emergency. Tell me what the emergency is. All I can tell you is a gun went off. Are you in danger? Yes. Okay, is the person that did the firing of the weapon, are they there now?

Yes. Oh, yes, a lot of trouble, which you'll hear about soon enough. But not quite yet. Best to hear a story first. The 911 call is a special sort of artifact. It'll keep. What matters is what led up to it and what happened after. A tale at once unbelievable and absolutely true. Matthew Spickard and his daughter Trinity live in the Siskiyou range. He, 40-ish, independent, a thinker, bit of a goatee. She, a witty teenage musician with Chuck Taylors and Rip Levi's,

but Heidi-like, blonde braided hair. All right, so this next song. I wrote it, by the way. Yeah, Trinity wrote it. And maybe it was because they were so isolated. They evolved into a talented, maybe quirky little duo. They would go into town, perform as musicians one night, comedians the next, stage actors,

whatever the opportunity presented itself. But this thing here might be strange. I think there's someone behind it. Do you think this could be... Yes, I think it's foul play. Foul play? Who would do such a horrible thing? So maybe it wasn't all that surprising when they decided they had it in them to make a movie. So I was 14. I was going into the ninth grade. I'm 14. I think I'll make a movie. So I was 14. I was going into the ninth grade.

I'm 14. I think I'll write a movie. Yeah. I like creative outlets. And so we would just work on it for a couple hours a night after school or after dinner. And then we just came up with a story outline kind of deal. A cute little father-daughter project. And certain to fail, right?

Well, not the way these two saw it. We're kind of blissfully blind. We're just like, oh, we'll just do it. It'll be fine. Our main goal on site was just to get a story and a script laid out. What kind of story? It was only natural. As locals steeped in mountain lore, dad and daughter decided to write a horror story of sorts. They called it From the Dark. so it ends up being a movie about isolation and a group of people they work together but they don't really really know each other exactly trust each other and then bad stuff starts to happen

and due to reacting out of fear it's kind of a film about the human response to fear i think yes okay yeah but it's it's i'd call it a psychological thriller. And maybe even like a whodunit. Blissfully blind, they described themselves. Oh, and they were back then. Not anymore. This is a story about their soft world of make-believe movie making. Colliding with the hard tip of a.38 slug. Point blank. And I kept thinking, how in the heck did that bullet push him from the front door clear over to the ground?

A bullet fired by a femme fatale who played a femme fatale. And I remember looking at her and she was standing there with it down to her side and I thought, whatever, if you're going to shoot me, do it. It's a story about acting and reacting. Terrorized. Terrorized. We were terrorized. And we got it. We did it. Also about lies and money. About mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters. And all the things that can go wrong in those little units we call families. I don't agree for my brother. I am glad this man is dead. This is Dateline NBC's newest podcast, Killer Roll. When Father Matthew and Daughter Trinity set out to write a screenplay,

they freely admit they didn't quite know what they were doing. What's the plot, essentially? I mean, as much as you can tell me without giving it away. Well, the lead character's name is Valerie Faust, and she's the head tour guide at this cave resort area. So it's her last day on the job, and she's going to move away out of town, out of this small town, and move on with her life. So her co-workers and some of her friends decide to throw a going away party for her.

People perish. Yes. And it's questionable at first who's behind it. So then it becomes a situation of these people are stuck in isolation with each other trying to figure out what is even happening. Trinity's dad, Matthew, is a glassblower by trade. Yes, you can really earn a living doing that. At least in Southern Oregon, you can. Matthew crafts delicate figurines and pipes that retail for hundreds of dollars. He ships them out to customers all across the country. And over the years, Matthew had been socking away money in a midlife fund

in hopes that one day he might buy a Harley Davidson. But then the movie idea came along, which wasn't such an off-the-wall project, really, given where they live. Southern Oregon is unique in many ways. Those forbidding mountains are home not just to Bigfoot, but to the state's renowned Shakespeare Festival, which in turn has spawned a network of community theater troops.

The region is awash in talent. Not just actors, mind you, but directors and writers, stagehands. All the people and skills a person needs to put on a show. So Matthew took his motorcycle money and hired a director, writer, a composer. And then, then came casting. We did an open casting call. You know, you kind of make these characters up in your mind and they don't really have

dimension. Yeah, form. Yeah, because you kind of know what they're about but you don't see the person. And then when the person walks in the room and starts speaking these lines. I love horror movies and so I was, yeah, I was stoked to audition.

What role were you auditioning for? I honestly was auditioning for any role, but the character of Valerie was a great role. That's Meg Windows, a gentle soul with a quick laugh. Meg grew up in Southern Oregon's theater scene, still brims with theater kid energy. Looks the part, too, with her bright red lipstick, blonde curly hair, and navy blue fedora. Meg has had many roles in many plays. But a movie?

Not often a film role comes along, no matter how low the budget. So Meg auditioned for the lead role of Valerie. Of course she did. She knew the competition would be tough. But still. They would call people in to read scenes together. And they had me read for the character of Diane, who in the script was an old housekeeper. Fancy that, yeah. And, you know, I think they had written that role for, like, a woman in her 40s or 50s.

And sure enough, Meg ended up getting the part of Diane the grumpy housekeeper. But the filmmakers, first-timers though they were, knew it was critical to cast the Valerie role perfectly. That character was in nearly every scene. The success of the film would be riding on whoever played her. So naturally, Matthew and Trinity and their crew of filmmakers were looking for a star. Someone big, charismatic. Someone who would pop off the screen. Someone who had the chops to carry the entire production on her own.

They needed someone to be Valerie. But by the final day of casting, they had come up empty. We sat around a table with the whole crew as they recalled the moment. We're like, man, we have not found our Valerie yet. Yeah, Valerie or Damon. We were kind of freaking out. And then, she walked in and just blew it out of the water.

She was named Wynne Reed. Remember that name? Wynne Reed. She was such a phenomenal actor. We absolutely adored her. Wynne was in her late 20s. Slightly built, looked good on camera, sure, but the main thing was her energy, her charisma,

the way her presence filled the room, like there was a spotlight always trained just on her. Meg was there that day, and no doubt in her mind, Wynne Reed was Valerie. There was just something about the way she read, the way they reacted to her reading. She definitely seemed to really nail it. I remember we got to this really dramatic scene,

and I was trying very hard to, you know, use every ounce of my acting training to try to get the scene right. I remember I was like rehearsing with my scene partner and then we could hear Wynne rehearsing with her scene partner and she had absolute panic in her voice. At first we thought something had happened. We thought, oh my God, like, is everything okay over there? Oh my God, no, they're just rehearsing the scene and they're much better than us. Like, they actually sold it so well, we thought that they were in trouble over there. Yeah. And it wasn't just that she had talent, Wynne had discipline too. She was the most responsible, most professional one out of

everybody. She had her lines down. It was just insane. And she encouraged, like, rehearsals with the other actors, and we'd just go over the scenes, alter some dialogue, and it just, it was a collaborative effort that just, it came together so nicely. All good. But there was a tiny, well, call it a paradox. Wynne was such a talent. And people in the local theater scene knew each other so well, and yet none of them had heard of her before. They didn't know a single thing about her. She was telling me, you know, I'm just in between jobs right now.

I'm really trying to focus on the writing that I'm doing. Oh, okay. That was basically it. That was the story that I got. I had no reason not to trust her. She seemed genuine. She seemed kind. She was killing it and doing much better than any of the other actors. So when I did my background checks, which, you know, wasn't a full background check with a lot of low budget, I did a Facebook profile search. I found a Facebook profile that showed Wynne Reed, had a lot of history budget i did a facebook profile search i found a facebook profile that showed win reid had a lot of history had this entire life created with it she had a wikipedia page under that name which revealed that on top of her acting career when was a published author i asked her where she went to school and she told me ucla so why wouldn't we have trusted her? Wait a minute. Still, just kind of odd they'd never heard of her. Oh, well.

With their star now cast, the filmmakers could focus on finding a setting to stage their psychodrama. For Matthew and Trinity, only one place would do. The chateau near the Oregon Caves, a lodge at the end of a switchback-filled dead-end road, burrowed so deep into the Siskiyou it was beyond cell reception. Matthew rented the chateau during the off-season. The cast and crew had the chateau and the caves, the whole area, entirely to themselves. No one else around. So when we wrapped that first day, I'm like, guys, this is going to work.

This is going to happen. We just kept looking at each other and hugging each other and being like, we did it, guys. We did it. What an amazing experience. And it was. The plot, you remember? We are rolling. And ready actors. Three, two, one, action. What the hell are you doing? I was just using the restroom. Did you hear that sound? Yes, and the power is out again, too.

The stranded staff of a mountain lodge slowly realizes one of them is a killer. Did you guys hear that noise? Yes. It sounded like somebody is a killer. Did you guys hear that noise? Yes. It sounded like somebody broke a window. Do you think someone's breaking into the lodge? I don't know. Want me to go check? Ah, it's my job. I'll do it. Wait, I'll go with you.

Cut. What these amateur movie makers couldn't possibly know was that they were now characters in someone else's horror story? Does it have any bullets? Perfect. What do you want me to do with it? They were shooting a psychological thriller at a remote mountain lodge. But as production began and the cameras rolled, the whole thing felt less like a horror show and more a star is born sort of story.

Local girl comes out of nowhere, gets the lead in a feature film. Get back to work, you Saturday! The crew may have been novice filmmakers, but they were all veterans of Southern Oregon's vibrant live theater scene. And one thing they did know was acting. So they watched Wynne Reed on set, and they just knew, every single one of them, that they were in the presence of someone very special. Three, two, one, action. Leon. Hi,

welcome. I'm Valerie. I don't know if you remember my name. Yeah, you're Donald's kid, right? Yeah. Yes, you knew him? They watched Wynne go all coquettish in one scene and tearful and terrified in the next. She could turn it on like that. She could walk into the scene with tears already coming down. Let's do this. Let's go. I don't know what to do. What do I do?

I don't know what to do. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. I don't want this. go. Yes, that's also Wynne having just witnessed a horrific scene. The fear in her voice sounds so real, almost like she's seen something just like it in real life. For a bunch of neophyte movie makers, Wynne seemed like a godsend, came to them from out of nowhere. But along the way, big windows began to think Wynne was more like an apparition from the past. It was a weird feeling. Like maybe she was imagining it, or maybe it was just this strange feeling that Wynne was, well, not Wynne. She couldn't be sure. The hair was very different,

and her face, oh, maybe not. Yet, Wynne reminded me of an old high school classmate, a woman named Tucker, Tucker Reed. It was just so peculiar. Meg and this Tucker had been in high school plays together, but that was a decade earlier, and people, minds, bodies can change a lot from mid-teens to mid-twenties. Wynne's hair, for instance, thick and auburn, it looked nothing at all like this high school friend Tucker's hair, which was all straight and very blonde. But like Wynne, high school Tucker did possess uncommon talent.

And I remember thinking of the people who are doing theater in high school, I could really see her being someone who will succeed professionally. You know, like I remember thinking that. Why would you think that? Well, I just thought that there was just something about her. She seemed to really draw like powerful emotions from a real place, which, you know, especially for somebody that young at the time, was very impressive. I definitely thought that she was going to make it. That girl, the one Meg knew in high school, obviously thought so too back then. Her ambition, at least as recorded

in her 2008 senior yearbook, to marry a well-heeled, well-connected, blockbuster, movie-making Hollywood producer. Preferably with a summer home on the Cape. Cape Cod, we assumed. And there was something else about Tucker, Migg remembered. It was her mother. So obviously ambitious, bigger than life somehow, and so present. Seemed like Tucker's mother was always around. Her mom would come to the theater to help her with her hair and makeup. The woman's name was Kelly, Kelly Moore. more. Her mom would like help her with curling her hair and would bring sort of this big like bag of makeup and hair supplies and kind of the works, you know. She had like a little salon going on there

and I remember backstage during one of the shows, there were some girls who were kind of like making fun of her a little bit for having her mom, like, oh, she needs her mom to do her hair and makeup, you know? And I remember just feeling like, you know, come on guys, that's, that's really rude. And you know what? I kind of wish my mom were here doing my hair and makeup because this is hard. But memories can be tricky. And now years later on the movie set, Mig decided not to mention it. And then it snowed one day, and Wynne, coming to the set by car, was having a little trouble. And when she showed up, she got out of this car, and this woman who looked an awful lot like Kelly Moore was with her. Okay. And I thought to myself, like myself like oh i think that might be her mom but was she portraying herself as as her mom no she introduced herself as win's relative

and would not elaborate on whether that was aunt or like second cousin or like what relative meant. And I saw that her relative had a bag full of hair and makeup stuff to help her with her hair and makeup and costumes. As she always did in high school. And it just, it took me right back to high school seeing that I felt like I was in high school again. Now, Meg was convinced.

Her hunch was right. When really was Tucker. But she decided not to tell anybody. Because Tucker had what those in theater might call a complicated backstory. I wasn't afraid of her. Like, I never thought, oh, she's going to attack me or anything like that.

I was more afraid for her if I mentioned anything. You know, I was worried that that might bring up something for her, that she might go to a dark place or something or, you know, she might, it might interrupt

her process of trying to film. I don't know. I guess I wasn't really sure what would happen, and that was one of the reasons I just didn't really want to bring it up. And she didn't. Until shooting wrapped and they all went back to town. And screenwriter Justin Adams went on a movie date with one of the cast members, someone other than Mig,

who, it turned out, shared Mig's suspicions. And as we were waiting in concessions, she was like, I need to tell you something about your lead actress. I was like, okay, what's going on? She was like, her name is not Winry. Like, Win is not Win. Her name is Tucker. I'm like, that's interesting. And she's like, well,

she's on trial for murder. Oh, the joy of it. The fulfillment of dreams. For Matthew and Trinity and their team of filmmakers to have actually written and produced and shot a feature-length film all on their own well it was more than they could have hoped for when we wrapped on our final day we were just like we were just we just kept looking at each other and hugging each other and being

like we did it guys we did it i mean what an amazing experience and it was that that summer was one of the best summers i've had but before they could even get their film into edit, there was a problem. A big one. It all started unraveling when scriptwriter Justin Adams went on that date and then contacted Matthew. I got like a panic text from Justin after his date was over saying, oh my God, we need to talk. So I meet up with him and our composer and business manager, Kenny,

at Kenny's house. Music composer, Kenny Vibert, has a vivid memory of Justin that night. He's like, I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you right now. He comes straight over to my house and he is just disheveled, completely disheveled.'s not waiting she's somebody else i'm gonna find they are whoa justin it's a what what's what are you talking about then he shows me the article which said

someone named aisling tucker moore reed who looked a lot like winynne, had shot and killed her uncle during a family dispute. So at that point, we were like, oh my God, like, this is absolutely crazy. And it was surreal. It was just like, what? What? Who do we even ask for their opinion or what do we do? So they did some rather belated research into Wynn or Tucker's background. And in there, the filmmakers found, well, a little good news, if you could call it that.

Wynn, Tucker, their star, had not been charged with murder. The charge was manslaughter. Not good, but a very big difference. Murder is, well, murder, the intentional killing of another human being. But manslaughter? That could be nothing more than a tragic accident. That comforted them a little anyway. But here's something that didn't. The movie's cinematographer, who was now dating Tucker, had known her story for a while. He just hadn't mentioned it. Sore subject, as you might imagine, which we won't get into.

But now he told them he knew the whole sad story. And that his girlfriend, Tucker, was blameless. You know, we called a meeting and we talked to him about it. And we got this story that this man had been harassing her, her uncle, that he assaulted her with an oil can and like broke her nose and almost blinded her. And that ended up trying to break into her grandmother's house because they were fighting over the property. And that he basically barged in the door, started, he said, beating Wynne's mother. And then at that point, she went to where she knew her grandma carried her, kept her home defense weapon, and went and got it and told him to leave.

And as he was attacking her mother, he lunged for the gun, and she reeled back and kind of accidentally shot him. So that was the story we were told. That was the story that we were initially told. So, okay, Tucker had killed the man. But it sounded as if she'd done it to protect herself and others. Oh, it's a rough story. This is not fair for her. We thought of her as a victim.

But as they learned more about the shooting, they couldn't help but notice that Tucker's version of the killing sounded an awful lot like the plot of their movie. Eerily so. In the movie, her character defends herself with a firearm and she thinks she's doing it out of self-defense. There's a debate on, oh, no, that was self-defense. No, but no, that's murder. Yeah, it's awkward. Awkward hardly begins to describe it. It was a bigger feeling than that because, they said,

Tucker had to know about all those weird similarities before she took the role. She signed a contract the day after she read the script. And this is when she was out on bail. I don't know why she would do a movie like this that's our big question why did she sign the paper after she read the script yeah and we did a read through it's not like she uh she just went in blind that's actually a great segue because we had the read through and she read the script, and the thing that she told us was, oh, this is fantastic, it sheds a light on mental illness. Well, that got around in a hurry.

It's an insular world, the theater community of Southern Oregon. And when people heard about this, some of them thought the overlap of fact and fantasy had to be more than just coincidence. Gossip turned nasty, on stage, online. Some theater people even accused the filmmakers of hiring a killer on purpose as some sort of macabre publicity stunt for their low-budget thriller. Musician Kenny Vibert was the first to be attacked.

They called out every single post. They're using my name in every single post and just throwing this massive slander at me, which was terrible. Then the scriptwriter, Justin Adams, started getting it too. It's like this person was saying that we were defying a murder

and saying that's so wrong. The triumph they felt when they finished shooting the movie was curdling into doubt and fear. Would any distributor even touch it? And if anyone did see it, wouldn't they get zeros on rotten tomatoes? Once critics and the public found out their lead was a real life killer. I'm afraid people aren't going to watch it because, you know, she's pretty much in every frame of the movie.

And the themes of the movie, too, it's about, like, you know, manslaughter and stuff. And so, like, it's, like, awkward. Parallelism is intense. Yeah, no, it really is. Like, the coincidences are insane. Just, like, I don't think people are going to want to touch it. Like, we were just, like, just trying to make a movie with our friends. And Matthew Spickard, the dad who cleaned out his motorcycle fund to pay for it all, watched the dream he'd shared with his daughter, the dream

they chased together, fade away. I slipped into a depression over like trying something new, having it work out so great during filming, the casting seemingly being perfect, and just so many things working out that I started to believe in myself. And then for that to happen, I was just like, wow, why did I even try? It was pretty earth shattering. It's like a sick joke in a way, like, that I don't get. A joke he didn't get. It's important to understand that at this point, despite the turmoil in the filmmakers' minds and the tempest brewing among the Oregon theater crowd, they didn't know the frightening tale Tucker told the police on the 26th of July, 2016,

just hours after the real-life shooting. Well, hey, just so you know, this room is all recorded. If anybody has to talk to you, there's a video recorder going. Record this audibly and video it. Okay. Quite a story she told that night. And really, just the beginning.

Because, as you will hear, of the other movie. The one in which Tucker played herself. This season on Killer Roll. So my mom was against the door and trying to push the door. And I could see Shane and he was trying to get in. And everyone was screaming. And I'm trying to shut the door and he's shoving it into me, shoving it into me.

And I'm leaning forward trying to shut the door. Take your time. It's okay. And he was trying to come in and he was trying to hurt me. And God only knows what else he was going to do. It was the most scariest thing I'd ever been. And I remember telling myself at one point, if you're going to shoot me, just do it and get it over with. Was the wound visibly fatal? I mean, could you tell?

It was, I mean, it was direct center of his chest, probably like six inches below his head, right in the sternum area. I had that nagging in my mind that this was a lot more. It had a lot of different tendrils that there was more going on here. Killer Roll is brought to you by Dateline NBC. For Dateline NBC, Vince Sterlet is our producer. Linda Zhang is the associate producer. Joe Delmonico is the senior producer. And Susan Knoll oversees our digital programming. Adam Gorfain is co-executive

producer, Liz Cole is our executive producer, and David Corvo is our senior executive producer. From Neon Hum Media, supervising producer is Samantha Allison. Associate producers are Liz Sanchez and Evan Jacoby. Producers are Crystal Genesis and Alex Schumann. Executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. And music by Andrew Eapen. you