RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES-Harold Schechter

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These and other cinematic crimes have become part of pop culture history, and each found inspiration and true events that provided the raw material for our greatest blockbusters, indie art films, black comedies, Hollywood classics, and grindhouse horrors. So what's the reality behind Psycho bad Lands? The Hills have eyes a place in the Sun, Arsenic and Old Lace and Dirty Harry.

How did such tabloid ready killers as Bonnie and Clyde, body snatchers, Burke and Hare, Texas sniper Charles Whitman, junior nurse slayer, Richard Speck, and Leopold and Loeb exert their power on the public imagination and become the stuff of movie lore. In this collection of revelatory essays, true crime historian Harold Scheckter takes a fascinating trip down the crossroads in fact and fiction to reveal the sensational, real life stories that are more shocking, taboo, and fantastic than even

the most imaginative screenwriter can dream up. The book that we're featuring this evening is Ripped from the headlines, the shocking true stories behind the movie's most memorable crimes, with my special guest, journalist and author and historian Harold Scheckter. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

true story. That didn't happen so much in the old days. In fact, it was more common for there to be a disclaimer at the end of the movie saying that any resemblance to real people or real events was purely coincidental. But in fact, during Hollywood's Golden Age and before and after, screenwriters often turned to the newspapers and sensational crimes as

the inspiration for their screenplays. And there are a lot of movies ranging from classic films like Anatomy of the Murder and Arsenic and o' Lace to cult films like Toby her Hooper's Eating Alive and The Hills Have and West Cravens The Hills Have Eyes, which you know viewers often don't realize were based on true events. So yeah, so that's what my book does. My book contains looks at forty movies and then recounts the actual crimes that inspired them.

criminal source crime source spawns more than one movie. So just briefly tell us a couple of the directors that you were especially covering in this book just because of some of the numbers of movies that they made concerning or at least were inspired by real crimes, but also that you thought were had done some very memorable movies regarding these true life crimes.

I think Fritz Lang has three movies. There's also Uh, You Only Live Once, which was a Frince Fritz Lang

production might even be a fourth Mutcher or third. But you know, there are a lot of great directors in their auto premeger For example, the director of Anatomy of a Murder, George Stevens, the great American director who directed one of my all time favorite movies, The Western Shane is in there with a Place in the Sun. So again, you know, rangers from classic movies directed by great ou teur directors to some less great movies, although you know the ones that I cover that are you know more

well more less highly regarded, possibly by serious high brassitias. You know, there are still directed by excellent directors. I mean, you know, Wes Craven has two movies in there, The Hills Have Eyes and Scream. Toby Hooper. Yeah, I'm not sure what happened to Toby Hooper. You know, the Texas

Chains of Massacre. I regard, as many people do, as this great masterpiece of horror and then his follow up and pretty much all his subsequent movies were kind of disappointing and so anyway, but so yeah, so there's a range of directors in there.

was then the relat actively little known fact. It was unknown to me that both Psycho and Texas Chang Saw Massacre, which I regarded and probably still regard as the two greatest horror movies ever made, had both been inspired by a real life case out of ed Geen, the midwestern Wisconsin necrofile. And you know that was very fascinating to me. So I began to research that case, and that became

the first of my true crime books, Deviant. And at that time when I published ev And Signs of Lambs hadn't yet come out, And of course Signs of Lambs also threw on the game case and the figure of Buffalo Bill, So in a way, you know, that was

my first awareness of this. I was also until my recent retirement after forty two years, I was, as I think you may not, a teacher of America, a professor of American literature at Queen's College, and I was aware that certain classics of American literature, very notably, for example,

theodorege Reisers of American Tragedy have been based on real crimes. So, uh, you know that fed into this too, especially since the Dreiser movie then became made into that great, the great George Stevens movie Placed in the Sun, So all those things, you know, the the topic of how real crimes get transformed into different forms of literature and popular entertainment. Uh, you know, it's been with me for a while.

notorious murder case where he had been the defense attorney. Ah. And the book Anatomy of a Murder became a big best seller and then was transformed into this very powerful and in many ways for the time kind of radical movie because challenged a lot of the censorship restrictions of what

was called the Hayes Code at that time. Actually, it's an interesting example of what I kind of alluded to earlier, because Volker claimed that his novel was a work of pure fiction, right, but it followed the details of the

true life case so closely. And when the movie came out, both he and Auto Premager got sued by the widow of the victim and the case for the way the movie portrayed the character who is based on her husband, but essentially both the film and the real life case had to do with a tavern keeper who was well.

It had to do with an army lieutenant who shoots and kills a tavern keeper because the husband believes, or has been told by his wife that she was raped by the tavern keeper, that the tavern keeper had offered her a ride home. She had been in the tavern by herself, he'd offered her a ride home, and he had brutally raped her, and the husband after making her This is again both in real life and in the book.

In the film, which followed the case very closely, the husband, after making her swear in a bible if that's what happened, took his service. Revolver went to the bar and just shut this tavern keeper down, and he believed that he would be exonerated based on what is commonly called the unwritten law, which was supposedly a man a husband is

entitled to shoot the man who is his wife. He was promptly informed that there was actually no such thing legally as an unwritten law, and it became again a very very sensational murder trial which Volker got the lieutenant acquitted on the basis of what was called irresistible impulse. And that's what you know, that's what happens in the movies. I mean the movie you know, ads at the end a very surprised kind of Perry Mason like sudden revelation.

But anyway, it's terrific movie, as you say, starring Jimmy Stewart as the as the defense attorney, and was the debut film of both Ben Gazzara as the husband and George C. Scott who plays the rather oily prosecuting attorney who is Jimmy Stewart's opponent courtroom opponent, and Lee Remick at her most beautiful as the life. So h and as I said, I mean, one of the interesting things, kind of a landmark film because you know, the Hayes

code had held sway over Hollywood for decades. You know, the filmmakers weren't even allowed to use the word pregnant. Uh And the movie was considered to be very very very sexually frank at the time. In fact, so much so that supposedly, and from what I've read it was actually true, James Stewart's father took out advertisements in his local papers urging his neighbors not to see the film because it was indecent. Anyway, any of your listeners who

have not seen it, I highly recommend. It's one of the great question dramas of Hollywood.

shat Lolla location where these events really happened. And the other interesting point about the movie is at the presiding Judge, Joseph Welch, has become this kind of legendary during the annals of American judas prudence, and because he was the man who during the infamous Army McCarthy hearings in the nineteen fifties, you know, finally confronted McCarthy, you know, said very famously, at long last, there have you no decency, which many people regard as the beginning of McCarthy's downfall.

And you know, it's largely I think because of arsenic Old Lace, that this image of female serial poisoners as or or the image of that kind of poison murder, you know, has taken on this kind of aura some quaint, old fashioned Victorian way of disposing of people. But It was based on the case of a real life female serial poisoner named Amy Archer Gilligan who opened an old age home in Windsor, Connecticut, and you know, began bumping off her her victims. You know, she would collect fees

from the family members. I think the charge was around the flat feet around thirty thousand dollars.

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But Amy Archer Gilligan was I became very interested in the phenomenon of female serial murder a number of years go when I was researching and writing a book called Fatal about a female, a very prolific female serial killer named Jane Toppin who confessed to thirty one murders at the turn of the twentieth century, and she was regarded. She was listed at one point in kind of Spook of World's Records as America's most prolific serial killer until

she was supplanted by John Wayne Gacy. And in researching and writing that book, I you know, up until then, the standard line was that Aileen Warnos had been America's first serial killer. But you know, but I became aware that there had been a great many of these female serial poisoners who had killed way more people than Aleen Warners did. And also I realized, I came to realize that the way these female serial killers murdered their victims

was in a way far more sadistic. And let's say, what Aileen ware has did, you know, because Alien warned to have got these guys down, whereas Jane Tappen and other people, you know, would subject their victims to these agonized deaths and sometimes very prolonged agonizing deaths because they wouldn't just kill them, you know, swiftly, they would make

them sick and sicker and until they died. So yeah, so I'd become aware of Amy Archer Gilligan as one of America's premiere female serial killers at that point, and it was while doing my research on that subject that I became aware of her connection to the Frank Capra movie. At which I have to say, is you know, again the only case of the book in which your real life sensational murder case got transformed into a beloved comedy.

was a huge case. I mean there was, you know, made nationwide headlines, and you know, Starkweather and Fugate have kind of achieved I would say, you know, among crime aficionados something of the legendary status of some of the you know, Bonnie and Clyde for example, you know, they were this uh you know, and and and you know, they've been the basis of a number of movies I

mentioned in the book. I mean so so yes. The The Terrence Malickville bad Lands, which is one of the most stunning cinematic debuts in the history of movies, you know, is a real masterpiece. I mean, it stars Charlie Sheen as stark Weather and Sissy Spacek is few get I mean they have you know, they have other names in the film, but it's very closely based on them and

follows their crime spree very closely. There's another film, a low budget shocker called The Sadist, which is also based on the stark Weather Foodgate sprint in that movie, although it doesn't match malix film as the work of cinematic art. In a way captures the sociopathic nature of Charlie stark Weather more than Malex film, does you know. Malex film is so beautiful and so aestheticized a little a little dulls the horror of us of what they did. But say, you know, yeah, anyway, yes, I'm sorry.

you know, that follow the cases very very closely. Then there are other films like High Sierra, Scream and one or two others that were inspired by these real crimes, but you know, really are very use them as a springboard, you know, to tell a fictional life story. And that's the case of High Sierra. I mean it uses Dillinger, you know, public enemy number one, one of the you know, legendary gangsters of that period. You know, it's a springboard

for this film. But but but there were a number, but there have been a number of biopics made about Dillinger. It was a nineteen forty five movie h called Dillinger with Lawrence Chierney, who I was just I was just rewatching Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Chierney plays, you know, the who was in charge of the whole thing, you know.

Then there was a nineteen seventy two movie Dillinger, which was the directorial debut of John Millius, you know, the very known for these two fisted, red blooded movies like Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn and who also wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force. And in that one, Warren Oates, the late

great Warren Oates, plays Dillinger. So recommend that. And then there was a John Sales scripted movie called The Lady in Red, and Roger Corman did one in nineteen ninety five. Dollinger compone. Most recently Michael Mann's publicand Enemies with Johnny deppis Dillingsher. So you know, there again, there have been a number of these films out of well advertise themselves

as essentially nonfiction depictions of Dillingsher. But you know what interests me most, as I was saying in the book, were films that, uh, you know, comes a surprise to many people that they were based on real, real criminals. Yeah.

sixteenth century, maybe the seventeenth century. Anyway, quite a long time ago. The leader, which was named Sony sanny Bean, and supposedly this was a you know, a an outlaw family who resided in the wilds of Scotland, and you know, were incestuous and cannibalistic and they were oh, I guess it was. I guess it was towards the latter half of the sixteenth century. You know. They lived in a cave and they would prey on unwary travelers whom they

would rob and murder and dismember and consume. And they were finally finally captured and brought to justice, you know, by a small army led by the King of Scotland himself. So that that story has been long reported again going back to the seventeen hundreds as historically factual. Again, recent scholarship has raised serious doubts as to whether Sawny Bean

and his cannibal clan really existed. But in any case, that was the that was the story that inspired the Hills Have Eyes, which is yeah, I mean a very grueling horror film about this all American family on a road trip that takes a shortcut, always a bad idea in a horror movie. And you know, and their vehicles break down, their trailer, I guess, breaks down in the desert, and they become set upon by this very very creepy feral family of Colt cannibals. So mm hmm, I think uh,

I guess it was remade. Yes, it was definitely remade, Yeah, by the great yeah what's his name? The uh uh, the French guy whose name escapes here right now.

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your first box at fabfitfund dot com. It retails for forty nine to ninety nine, but always has a value over two hundred dollars. That's ten dollars off when you use code murder at fabfitfun dot com. Now we talked about a movie that again was as you say. Historians have said that the sunny bean legend may just be just that and not so factual. And then the hills have eyes have very little I guess connection to that

actual story. But you include a story of which I found was very very interesting called The Hitchhiker from nineteen fifty three with a woman named Ida Lapino. And you say, the only classic film noir directed by a woman, and this book, this film closely based on a real life serial killer. But it's interesting the research that she did into the case herself can tell us a little bit about how far she went into this actual research for The Hitchhiker.

also a very well known actress in her own life. Uh, you know, is one of the most prominent female directors. And uh uh So the case that the movie The Hitchhiker is based on Uh, is a guy named a young psycho named Billy Cook, who abducted a couple of guys who are on a you know, on a on a fishing expedition. Uh. And uh, you know, took him on this sort of nightmarish, nightmarish odyssey and you know, committed these various murders along the way, and you know

it's finally captured. Uh. In in in researching her movie, Lapino actually visited him when he was when he was in prison. I mean, he was ultimately convicted of kidnap murders of five members of a single of a single family, and ultimately he was executed in nineteen fifty two, but Lapino went so far as to go interview him when he was in prison to get, you know, in trying to make her films as authentic as possible. So anyway, it's a film that I was actually not fully aware

of until I began researching my book. And it's definitely you know, I definitely recommend it to your viewers. I mean, the guy who plays the guy who plays the psycho was actually the actor. I don't know if I know. There's a new Perry Mason mini series on HBO. I don't know how many of your listeners recall the great classic Perry Mason series daring Raymond Burr, by the way, also played a great psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's a Window.

But the psycho in this movie, the Hitchhiker, is played by the actor Hamilton Berger, who was Raymond Burr's opponent with you know, perennially losing opponent in all the Perry Mason series. So mhm.

But so tell us what a little bit about the movie and why it is considered classic before we talk about the crimes and murders that inspired it.

such public outrage. Uh. You know that the police, you know, begin to stage all these raids on every criminal hangout and they're basically putting all the criminals in Berlin out of business. So the criminals themselves decide, you know, they got to get the police off their backs and find the sky. So he's Beckett is hunted down and ultimately captured by all the you know, criminals and put on

a kind of kangaroo trial. Uh, you know, which Laurie does this amazing turn and which you know, he gives this very very famous speech, you know, where it says, you don't know what it's like to be me. I mean, even though his crimes are unspeakable, he manages to generate, you know, a certain amount of sympathy because you see

that he's in the grip of this incredible compulsion. But in the beginning of the film, you know, you see, you know, this mother who's in her apartment and all the mothers are waiting for their kids to come home

from school. And you see a little girl on her way home from school, and this pudgy, creepy looking man, you know, Peter Laurie, stops her on the street and buys her a balloon and and you know, takes her for ice cream, and you know, meanwhile the mother, you know, that's intercut with the mother becoming increasingly worried and frantic because her little girl hasn't arrived home yet, you know.

And then there's this there's this cut to you know, the balloon just you know, being caught in some electric wires or telephone wires. You know. You see, oh, you see first you see h you see the little girl, her name is Elsie. He's bought her a rubber ball, and you see the ball rolling out of some shrubbery, you know, and it's clear he's brought her behind the

shrubbery to do something awful to her. And then you see her balloon tangled up in these up in these telephone wires, and you know, the whole impact is shattering, you know, because again you know, often as the greatest you know, filmmakers often know you know, leaving something to the viewer's imagination, you know, can cause you know, more of a more it's going to have a more unsettling effect, you know, then showing some graphic violins. So yeah, I

mean it's an amazing film. And it was based on inspired by the crimes of one of the most notorious what they we call them now serial killers. Back then they called them, well, they call them lust murderers in twentieth century history. A gunnamed Peter Curtin, who was an extreme sadist from youth. Partly he had been schooled in sadism by this depraved neighbor of his, you know, who taught him how to derive sexual pleasure from torturing animals

and so on. And he trayed on men, women, children, animals. You know, he got off, particularly on drinking their blood. He was known as a vampire of Dusseldorf. He was actually the one inspiration for America's one of America's most heinous serial kills, Albert Fish. Albert Fish, you know, cut out and saved articles about curtain. One of the interesting things I found in researching the Curtain case was that the term serial murderer was first used in connection with

the Curtain Case in the nineteen thirties. You know, for a long time Robert Wrestler of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, claimed credit for coining the phrase serial killer, you know, and then earlier instances were found in some British publications going back to the nineteen sixties. But when I was researching the Curtain Case, I found that the head of the Berlin Homicide Division used the term Syrian mortar serial

murderer to describe Hurtin. So as far as I know, that's the earliest use of the terms.

in a one room home, so horrendous upbringing. But they were able to get information from from Curtin himself, some kind of insight into the crimes he did, which was unprecedented at the time, obviously, wasn't it.

and drank the blood that cushed out. So yeah, you know, he even at one point, such was his incredibly depraved appetite that one time he was strolling through a duseledolf park and came upon a sleeping swan and cut off its head, and a drack ejaculated while drinking the blood as it pumped from the swan's neck stump.

her curiosity gets the best of her. She enters the room discovers, to her horror that's full of the dismembered body parts of all his previous lives. It's a very, very gruesome fairy tale. I mean, there are other fairy tales and folks stories of that type around the world.

Folklorus collum bloody chamber stories are forbidden chamber stories. Anyway, in Western culture, blue Beard is the most famous, and the term blue beard has come to be applied to a certain kind of serial killer, men who marry a succession of wives and then and then murdered them. I'm actually in the process of researching the case of a very infamous American bluebeard named Johann haw So. In France, on rie Land Drew was probably their most famous bluebeard killer.

He was actually quite a bizarre looking guy who operated after in the aftermath of the World War One, you know, in which the male young male population of Western Europe was totally decimated, you know, leaving countless widows. And land Drew again, who, in spite of his bizarre appearance, you know, obviously exerted some kind of charm you know, married a series of women and ended up, you know, murdering a

bunch of them for their property. So that case, which got a great deal of international coverage, fascinated actually fascinated both Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells, and uh, you know, the original plan was to make a kind of non

fiction movie very directly based on Landrew. But anyway, what what we ended up with was uh Chaplain's comedy, well yeah, comedy in which again Chaplain plays you know, this very very charming uh uh gentlemen who seduces and then murders a bunch of women and ends you know with the courtroom uh scene in which he you know, he makes an impassioned speech in his own defense, in which he sort of justifies his crimes, you know, as being much less heinous than what, you know, than than the world

than you know, what the world who's just lived through. I'm in terms of the incredible, you know, incredible destruction and devastation of World War One. You know, he says this is a mass killer. I'm an amateur by comparison, you know, to what to what civilization has done to itself. So right.

Winter's Robert Mitcham. And you say, it's one of the most notorious mass murders in world history, yet is barely remembered today. Again another Lonely Hearts type case. Tell us a little bit about this Night of the Hunter in its relation to relation to the true crime that inspired it.

one of the passengers must have committed it. But the connection to real life crime is that the murder victim, the backstory of the murder victim was inspired by the very very sensational kidnapping murder of the Charles Lindbergh Son in the nineteen thirties, you know, which many people even now regard as the crime of a twentieth century. So

that's the connection there. Well, The Knight of the Hunter again, great masterpiece, directed the only movie directed by the famous actor Charles Lawton, with a screenplay written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author James Age, who also wrote the screenplay for African Queen, the Great John Houston movie with Humphrey

Bogar and Kevin Hepburn. So you know, it's about this really scary self proclaimed minister played by Robert Mitchum who has gone around murdering different women, as we learned in the beginning of the film, and then who sets his sights on the widow of a recently executed prisoner who he knows. Prisoner who he shared a cell with, stole

a bunch of money which has never been covered. And the Mitcham character knows this money is somehow with the family, so he tracks down the family, marries the widow, Shelley Winters, you know, murders her. Anyway, It's a very stylized, poetic and terrifying movie. And again it was based on a novel and the direct inspiration for the novel. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, you know, one of the most monstrous mass murderers, but that's how he was

advertised in the tabloids of the time. But nevertheless, he was a a guy named Mary Powers, a vacuum cleaner salesman from West Virginia who would well he was. He was also a kind of blue beard killer, although he never actually married as victims, you know, but he would put these uh. He would he would answer ads or place ads to some of these lonely hearts magazines and then lure widows uh to what was really a torture chamber.

There were ballads and songs created about it. So that became, as I said, the the inspiration for the novel Night of a Hunter, which then got transformed into this classic. Sell them another movie that I your viewer, if your listeners haven't seen it, I very highly recommend.

of the reasons. For example, that ed Geanes Towns people burned down his house after his atrocities were discovered, you know, because they knew it's just going to be a tourist attraction. Yeah. I mean virtually every crime that I've written about you have the same phenomenon. I was just writing about a mass murder that happened in Philadelphia in eighteen sixty six, and after that crime was discovered, same thing. You know, on a Sunday, thousands of people, you know, they're running excursion.

It was the very outskirts of the city, so they're running special excursion trains out there, and you know, people basically, you know, if they hadn't been stopped by the police, they would have basically taken taken the place apart. You know, people were just taking pieces of wood from the barn where their bodies were found and what kinds of stuff.

were successful. So fascinating response by the public in these stories to these what was by the media made a lot of headway with publication and readership with some of these cases that fascinated the public certainly.

Another Fritz Lang movie, you know, is based on a case in which these two kidnapped murderers, you know, we're caught in jailed and you know lynch mob. This is out in California. Lynch mob broke in and you know and lynch them. So so yeah, it's not a not an unusual phenomenon, you know, not to mention all the horrific lynchings that were perpetrated against African Americans.

again crimes of the century, of the twentieth century. They fancied themselves Nietzschean superman, uh, and to prove it to themselves in the world, they were going to commit the perfect crime. So they picked a victim, went out far. They picked a victim at random, turned out to be a fourteen year old named Bobby Franks, who was actually a cousin I can't remember which one I think of, Dicky Loeb, and murdered him and buried his naked body in a culvert outside the city, sent ransom notes to

the family. In spite of their belief that they had committed the perfect crime. They were captured within days, and you know, they were sort of it struck. There's a very very powerful chord in the nation at that time, partly because they were seen as the nightmarish incarnations of what the culture at the time called the flaming youth.

You know, this ad of control while jazz age kids who just lived for three uh, and they were they pled guilty, so they weren't tried, but they had a long sentencing proceeding and they were represented by the great defender, Clarence Darrow. So their trial, we'll call it, you know again,

was covered nationally and internationally. So yeah, I mean, Leopold and Lobe had become you know, kind of entered into the annals of American crime as these you know, kind of quasi mythical characters like Lizzie Borden, and their story has been you know, told various times. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, which is based on a Broadway play which is based

on Leopold and Loeb, is a very interesting film. It's kind of a an experimental film which Hitchcock shot so that it looks as though it was all done in a single take, you know, kind of like the recent movie nineteen seventeen, although this one basically just takes place, you know, inside a single apartment, so you know, it's very very interesting for that reason. And its stars again one of you know, Hitchcock's favorite actors, Jimmy Stewart, as the mentor to the two young thriller killers.

For people that might want to find out more, is there a website or obviously a Facebook page that they might take a look at more information?

it's a physical form or kindle form is Amazon? Yes?