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when I was a kid I was scared of Candyman he was the killer from this old horror movie from 1992 that became a
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cult classic Candyman had a hook for a hand and he gut you with it for no other reason than that you said his name five
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times into a bathroom mirror candyman candyman candyman and there was something about Candyman that seemed
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more real like more dangerous than any other movie villain I mean there were no white guys
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that looked like the slasher from the Halloween franchise walking around my Southside Chicago
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neighborhood like I didn't see a lot of dudes with hockey mask either so those weren't as scary to me but
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Candyman he looked like somebody I might actually bump into his brother was 65 with this Eerie
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baritone deep voice what's blood for if not for shedding and he wore this Creepy
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Black trench coat and one of my big cousins knew I was scared of him so he used to try to
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lock me in the bathroom with the lights off to prank me so needless to say I avoided watching this movie for years
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even though it set in my hometown but not too long ago I finally sat down to watch it and when I did I realized
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Candyman is about so much more than a murderous Urban Legend see this movie is actually about a dark chapter in the
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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
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gets to feel safe in their own homes in this country even today Candyman is set in a public
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housing project called Cabrini Green there's this graduate student named Helen who is studying urban legends and
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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
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University listening to a tape recording someone's describing one of the candyman's
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murders a janitor who's cleaning the room overhears the recording in True Hollywood fashion the
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janitor just so happens to know someone who can tell Helen more about Candyman I
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think her name was Ruthie Jean and and she heard this banging and smashing like somebody was trying to make a hole in
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the wall so Ruthie called 911 and she said there's somebody coming through the walls and they didn't believe her they
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thought the lady was crazy right Helen does some research and found out that a woman was killed by someone who came in
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through her bathroom mirror so she and another grad student visit the high-rise apartment in the
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projects they go upstairs to the murder victim's apartment it's unlocked they both walk in and go into
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Ruthie Jean's bathroom it's Eerie after all whoever killed her got into the apartment this same way Helen
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opens the medicine cabinet killer or killers they don't know which smashed their way to the back of this cabinet
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see there's no wall there the story of Candyman is fictional of course we all know that saying
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Candyman five times in the bathroom mirror doesn't actually conjure up a killer ghost but the murder of Ruthie Jean in
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the movie shares horrifying similarities to the killing of a real person that woman's name wasn't Ruthie
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Jean but Ruthie May McCoy it must have been a couple of years after Candyman came out somehow I hadn't heard of it
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and people told me hey you know there's there's stuff in here that seems to be from the story you wrote that's Steve
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begira he's a reporter who followed the case of the real murder for years in the
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movie The they showed a Chicago dispatch headline what killed Ruthie Jean life in
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the projects which was almost identical to the headline of the story I wrote Steve wrote a series of investigative
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pieces about Ruthie May McCoy's murder for a weekly newspaper called the Chicago Reader
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[Music] in 1987 after she died he visited Ruthie May's apartment it was on the 11th floor
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of a highrise in one of Chicago's housing projects there happened to be a janitor who was cleaning up in her
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apartment uh the door was open and I was able to go in whoever murdered Ruthie May McCoy somehow entered her apartment
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through her bathroom mirror she had heard The Intruders coming and it called 911 in this podcast we're taking another
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look at the true nightmare that inspired a major film franchise they just cast her like she
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was nobody they didn't care it was just like another black person just got murder oh okay we go to the next one now
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when we talk about crime we talk about violence there's this thing where we do a presumption that the people and not
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the conditions are responsible but what if the conditions in the projects and Ruthie May killers are both
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responsible you're supposed to feel safe at home but back then and even now that's not always the case and sometimes
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the danger in our own homes comes from the very people who are supposed to protect
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us why didn't 911 get her the help she needed and how had ruy May's medicine cabinet become a point of
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entry I'm Dom Pongo from for 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror
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[Music] murder episode one left high and dry on April 22nd 1987 Ruthy May McCoy called 911 it was 8:45 at night Ruthie
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May was a 52 2-year-old grandmother who lived alone when she called police to report and attempted Breakin we're told
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the original recording no longer exists but we do have a transcript so we've asked actors to read
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it I'm alone and I I live at 1440 was 13 Street and some people living next door
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have pulled their cabinets out what are they doing they they want to break in on
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this side where I live at Ruthie May tried to explain they want to break in yeah they they throw the cabinets down
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they threw the cabinets down where I'm in a project they come on the other side but you can reach my bathroom and they
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want to come through the bathroom now it's unclear if the dispatcher got this part of what Ruthie May was saying she's
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telling them that The Intruders were coming in through the bathroom 1440 West 13th Street Apartment 11:09 okay the
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elevator working 11:09 uhhuh all right what's your name ma'am Ruth McCoy all right I'll send you the police okay the
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dispatcher assigned a patrol car car but classified the call as a disturbance with the neighbor not a
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robbery that crucial difference likely impacted what happened next Ruthie May when she's making the 911 call she
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sounded very scared back in 1987 Steve buira had listened to Ruthie May's actual call for help but together enough
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to report to the police that she's in the projects the elevators are working so you know there're kind of underscores
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the fact that the elevators often aren't working police may not come if the elevators aren't working Steve was 33
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when Ruthie May was killed at that time he focused his reporting on telling the stories of low-income black residents
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who lived on Chicago's South and West sides he'd covered plenty of stories in the projects but for Ruthie may he wrote
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two long stories 22,000 words in total for the Chicago Reader I tried to not just write about murder but about um
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other aspects of people's [Music] lives the night Ruthie may call 911 dispatchers also talked to two of her
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neighbors one after the other had called to report gunshots so three calls for help were made when police came they got
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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
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they tried to open the door it it wouldn't open it was locked they asked uh for a key to the apartment they
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secured the key that was supposed to be to the apartment it didn't work officers
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wrote in the police report that the door was locked and that there didn't appear
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to be any signs of a Breakin despite the two neighbors calling and Ruthie May herself the officers made a controversal
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decision to not break the door down so after about a half hour they just left it took another neighbor's call the
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next day to get someone to take action the next evening they got a call police got a call from 11th floor neighbor
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named Deborah lley yeah I'm the one they got them to open the door Deborah lassley lived down the hall from Ruthie
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may we recently caught up with Deborah on the phone you'll hear the connection was a little rough and at times you can
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hear children in the background but this was the only time she was available and
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she knew Ruthie May well we had to talk to her Deborah lived in apartment 1101 and Ruthie May was in 11:09 they looked
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out for one another she was my best friend in the building cuz I had never lived in the project neither and me and
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her to get the hang of it together when they met they were both new to the 11th floor of the Grace Abbott homes which is
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a part of a public housing complex Deborah in her 30s was a mother of seven and her living situation was cramped but
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she may do as best she could Ruthie may help helped her manage and would keep an
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eye on her kids sometimes we both ATT each other every day all during the day she watched my kid and we stand in the
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hallway and talk Ruthie may had one daughter and two grandchildren she never married and lived on her own in Abbott
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Holmes her daughter Vita was in her mid 20s by Van according to her autopsy Ruthie May stood 5'9 and weighed a
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little over 250 lb she had black hair mixed with a little gray Deborah said Ruthie May was sweet but
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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
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grandmother to my kids and my kids they know the respect her cuz she tell them to get in the house that me get in the
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house the night Ruthie may call 911 Deborah heard gunshots but didn't think anything of them yeah we heard it but
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over there you heard shots all the time there was a lot of territoriality so gangs fighting over Turf that led to
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more violence that led to more guns um and that was the situation in the Abbott homes uh at the time Ruthie
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May was killed Steve wrote that Abbott homes was the territory for a gang called the black Gangster Disciples at
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the time the bgds they monitored the Halls elevators and the stairs and the buildings often turned into a
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Battleground between the bgds and another game gang the Vice Lords Steve found that in
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1986 a year before Ruthie May's murder residents in the projects experienced killings rapes and attacks more than
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twice as often as the rest of the city gangs fighting over Turf that led to more violence that led to more guns
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that's why Deborah didn't question the gunfire until the following morning when Ruthie May didn't come to visit like she
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normally did and I kept saying it's something wrong but she would have knocked on my door and told me she was
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going Ruthie May normally stopped at Deborah's apartment at least twice a day she let Deborah know when she was
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leaving and when she got home but that day she never knocked it was shocking cuz she's going to go to the store every
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day she's going to go to that store for the first time Ruthie May didn't follow her routine this was a bad sign and I
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knocked on her door and I didn't hear nothing and then I just sh that said something's wrong it's not like
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her Deborah marched downstairs out of the building and down the block to ask the building's management if they could
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check on her friend see they would have a key and she didn't the Chicago Housing
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Authority known as cha managed Abbot I went to housing and told me I had to see again you know check again and see do
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she come she might be went somewhere she's hard to understand stand here but she's saying that the cha told her to
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check on her friend again that maybe she stepped out Deborah said the manager warned her that they could get in
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trouble for opening Ruthie May's apartment without her permission when she couldn't get through the management
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she called the cops I didn't feel like nobody car cuz it took me all day long to get the police to come it took me all
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day long the police hadn't come back on their own since the night before Deborah's calls convinced them to
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try again the security guards from the Sha Housing Authority met them at Ruthie May's door Steve said officers came
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ready to break down the door this time the police wanted to go in they say U and check on Ruthie May and the chag
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Housing Authority security Force said well if you break down that door the tenant May sue you
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for whatever reason the police and ch again disregard that the tenant herself had called 911 afraid because Intruders
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were breaking into her apartment through the mirror despite that Steve said that
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the guards only offered reasons not to break in also if you break down that door somebody's going to have to secure
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it we don't want to do that so they kind of talked the police out of entering the
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apartment of course the police could have entered the apartment then it wasn't up to the cha security staff for
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a second time the Chicago Police left without checking to see if Ruthie May McCoy was okay we wanted to know why so
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we reached out to the current cha spokesperson they told us that due to how long it's been since this happened
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they have to refer us back to how the cha answered these questions at the time back then when Steve called the
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Cha's head of security to ask why they advised police not to break down the door the director said quote I don't
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have any answers two days after Ruthie May was shot Deborah finally got someone from the
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Chicago Housing Authority to open her friend's door it was somebody from cha who did
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break into the apartment and found Ruthie May lying on her side in a pool of blood
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decomposing and when they open the door you could smell it was so bad the man from the Housing Authority asked
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Deborah to wait by Ruthie May's door out in the hallway but then they came and told me we had to call the police Ruthie
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May was found in a bedroom according to the medical examiner she'd been shot four times and one of the gunshots one
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of the bullets had severed her pulmonary artery so he didn't believe she would have lived
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long we all want to believe that when we call authorities help will be on the away Ruthie May was left high and dry
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and why that happened would be the subject of a lot of debate for months and even years after her murder murders
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reportedly happen so frequently in the projects that it wasn't always newsworthy Ruthie May's murder would
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have fallen Into Obscurity or it would have been overlooked like so many others if not for one curious detail the fact
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that she had been killed by someone who came in through the hole in the wall where her medicine cabinet usually was
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the Chicago Tribune wrote a short news story a few weeks after the murder it was amazing to me that people had access
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to other apartments through the medicine cabinet in the adjacent apartment Steve buira
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saw that brief article in the Tribune and had a bunch of questions I thought how could the Tribune not be intrigued
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enough to ask more about these circumstances Steve worked for the prestigious Tribune out
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of college before shifting to a legendary weekly paper the Chicago Reader it's kind of like Chicago's
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Village Voice and had a reputation for solid journalism I wanted to be downwardly
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mobile but seriously because uh I felt the Tribune was more interested in stories that appealed to the kinds of
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people they wanted to advertise to people who lived along the lakefront in healthier neighborhoods and in the
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suburbs but at the Chicago Reader Steve was free to write the kinds of stories he wanted to write about folks like
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Ruthie may mcoy I was interested for for one thing in whether this medicine cabinet Breakin was unique and I was
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also interested in how police could leave like they did more than a month after Ruthie May
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McCoy's murder Steve beira drove to Abbot homes the project building was massive in the center there was this big
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open area with some trees lining the sidewalk seven 15-story highrises surrounded the oversized
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Lawns made of brick they all look the same Abbott homes were first built in 1955 and while they might have been nice
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then by the late 80s residents said maintenance rarely fixed anything burnt out light bulbs broken elevators
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and backed up toilets this was all a part of life when Ruthie May moved in many of the walls and ceilings were
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crumbling Steve was used to visiting Chicago's projects for his stories but as a thin white guy in his early 30s who
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obviously wasn't from the neighborhood Abbott's residents who were 90% black would give him the side
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eye this guy must be a social worker or a cop or look looking for drugs and eventually they would believe me that I
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was a reporter Steve stopped at Ruthie May's building I went up to the 11th floor not knowing if I'm going to be not
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thinking I'm going to be able to get into her apartment you said a janitor happened to be in the apartment cleaning
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up the door was open and I was able to go in just like Helen the graduate student in the first Candyman movie
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Steve wanted to see the hole in the bathroom wall for himself I do remember going into the bathroom and looking at
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where the medicine cabinet was supposed to be and there was a rectangular hole in the
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wall why wasn't her cabinet even on the wall after Ruthie May was killed her family and friends realized that there
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have been clues that there was something about her apartment that scared her her
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brother had visited her a couple of months before and she said that her medicine cabinet was loose and he had
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put a couple of pieces of wood in there to try to fortify it she didn't tell him
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anything about medicine cabinet break-ins he says if she had he would have you know done he what what he could
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to get her out of the project Ruthie May's friend Deborah has a daughter named Mary they live down a hall from
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Ruthie May and Mary used to hang out in Ruthie May's apartment not long before the murder Mary noticed that Ruthie May
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kept a stick on him one heavy enough to be a weapon she had a stick that that was sitting from her door her be door to
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the bathroom door right there Mary remembered that one particular day when she was visiting she went to use the
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bathroom but Ruthie May stopped her she like no no no touch it though don't touch it though get back over here she
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like use right here she pointed to a bucket that's when Mary realized she been using a bucket to relieve herself
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that's how scared she'd been in her own home it was a little [ __ ] bucket she had
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page bag sitting there and she used it and every day we never know that we see her walk from house to the CER she was
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throwing that bag away neither Ruthie May's best friend her daughter or Steve said they knew of Ruthie May ever
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explicitly told anyone why she was afraid here's Steve again I was struck by both how spooky it was but also how
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outrageous it was I mean I knew from other stories I had done reporting in the projects in high-rise projects
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that uh people were living with great insecurity great fear but usually it was of uh you know people could break
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through my front door the idea that people could also break into their apartment through their bathroom I mean
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that was really that that really seemed awful to me for people to have to live with that Deborah and Mary both remember
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seeing young men coming in and out of the apartment next to Ruthie Mays Steve learned there was a connection between
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that apartment and the murder hers was apartment 1109 the adjacent apartment was
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1108 and the State's Attorney's Office had confiscated the medicine cabinet in the other apartment as evidence the
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medicine cabinet in Ruthie May's apartment was never found when he visited Ruth May's
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apartment Steve picked up some of the papers that had been left on the floor in disarray of course I looked at them
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and found the connection to the Mount siai Psychiatric Center that's when he learned more about why people might not
00:23:05
have believed Ruthy May apparently she had struggled with her mental health in the past but lately
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she'd been responding to treatment and started pursuing her GED it was a tragedy what happened to
00:23:18
her regardless but it seemed to be especially tragic considering that she was making really good steps with her
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life Ruthie May went to a year of high school and quit after that and she started
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showing signs of mental illness in her early 20s so could have been schizophrenia that was never totally
00:23:53
clear uh but she was definitely paranoid and she would be heard talking to herself in the
00:24:01
street Steve said this was in 1986 a year before Ruthie May's murder her treatment at the Psychiatric Center was
00:24:09
outpatient which means she still lived at home while receiving care she was known in the project as Miss May and she
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was she would like curse strangers sometimes but uh she got connected with this Psychiatric Center at Mount Si
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after going to the Psychiatric Center Ruthie May was taking high school equivalency classes it was a sign that
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she was looking toward the future she was in arts and crafts projects group therapy most of the other clients in
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this Center were also project residents the director of the center said they were all dealing with the stress and
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deprivation of living in that project the conditions that Steve learned about and the system's failure to help Ruthie
00:24:51
May led him to pose a provocative question in one of his headlines it read what kill K Ruthie May
00:24:59
McCoy a bullet in the chest or life in the projects that headline is very close to
00:25:07
the one that shows up in the Candyman movie in 1992 in the movie they showed a Chicago dispatch headline what killed
00:25:16
Ruthie Jean life in the projects Steve noticed how close it was to his own headline but he didn't overthink it
00:25:23
after all in the movie's credits it says that Candyman is based on a fictional story called The Forbidden written by
00:25:28
Clive Barker in 1985 Clive Barker's story depicts a graduate student named Helen
00:25:35
investigating an urban legend who haunts a dilapidated housing project in Liverpool England it wasn't like they
00:25:42
were doing a movie that was totally about the story I wrote they had a different
00:25:49
agenda they were tying this real story to urban legend Bernard Rose who wrote and
00:25:58
directed Candyman decided to set the story in the Chicago housing projects instead race didn't play a role in Clive
00:26:05
Barker's story but Rose made it a central theme of Candyman in the movie Candyman is actually Daniel robati a
00:26:15
black man from the late 1800s who was lynched for having a relationship with a white woman here's the director himself
00:26:23
Bernard Rose the candy man is kind of a Golem you know he's he's in a avenging Angel as much as he's anything how did
00:26:31
that backstory become a part of his narrative the point was that he was wealthy and then he thought he was
00:26:37
assimilated and he thought he was accepted but he wasn't and they killed him and so now he's he's he's there out
00:26:46
there not exactly looking for vengeance but looking for something looking to just haunt them it's visceral and maybe
00:26:56
that's why Candyman still has this whole on us it is served as the basis for four
00:27:01
films honestly I didn't watch the 1992 movie until after I saw the newer 2021 Candyman movie this is Morgan KY she's a
00:27:10
field producer at 48 hours and she's actually the one who came up with the idea for this podcast and after watching
00:27:16
that movie I was just really hooked so I decided to do a little bit of research and I learned that Ruthie may had
00:27:22
suffered this horrible fate and I just wanted to know more about why yeah her death sounded crazy to me too the first
00:27:29
time I heard it it kind of pissed me off to be honest with you right it just felt
00:27:33
like she didn't have to die exactly and and that's what I want to do this podcast just to understand how The
00:27:38
Intruders could have killed Ruthie may get to the bottom of why she died and how her circumstances contributed to
00:27:45
what happened so domati when you were a kid in Chicago how large did Candyman loom for you I mean it was huge I was
00:27:52
scared of Candy Man I mean the fact that all you had to do was say a name into a
00:27:57
bathroom mirror and they pop up to be honest I didn't even watch the film in it in full until you brought it to me
00:28:03
really I didn't realize that no facts facts and Steve buir is like me he didn't see the film until much later not
00:28:10
because he was scared of Candyman like a young Doma but it was because he wasn't
00:28:15
a fan of horror films he said that his biggest takeaway when he finally did watch the movie wasn't the commonalities
00:28:22
between the history and parts of the film I was struck by the fact that what is a nightmare to white people was
00:28:33
reality to people who were living in in the projects I'll admit that sounds dramatic but let me tell you he is
00:28:40
really not exaggerating here I'd find out that a lot of that first Candyman film came from real life not just Ruthie
00:28:48
May's murder Ruthie May lived in taxpayer funded housing with conditions bad enough to inspire a horror film but how
00:28:59
is it that people's living conditions were ever allowed to get this bad in America why weren't residents better
00:29:07
protected and why weren't Ruthie May's calls for help taken more seriously good part of my reporting dealt with the
00:29:14
police response or lack of response which as many residents in the project told me was not
00:29:22
surprising there were all kinds of factors that Steve and those close to Ruthie May believed contributed to the
00:29:27
trag maybe if police came in right away there was nothing they could do for her anyway
00:29:33
we'll never know while they didn't break into the apartment police did start a hunt for who killed Ruthie May and Steve
00:29:40
went on a search of his own to find out how unusual it was for an intruder to come through the bathroom mirror at
00:29:46
Abbott Holmes there hadn't been another murder through this kind of an entry but there
00:29:53
had been numerous burglaries through the medicine cabinets this wasn't the first time criminals had
00:29:59
prayed on residents like this coming up we're going to look at the conditions residents like Ruthie May we're living
00:30:06
in if you really believed in tough on crime then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill
00:30:15
our women what explanation did authorities have for not immediately helping Ruthie May there are a lot of
00:30:21
calls to 911 from the projects that are hoax calls phony calls what made her a Target in the first place if people
00:30:29
think you have money yes they will try to rob people we'll follow the murder investigation and talk to one of the
00:30:35
lead detectives and I said Jesus Christ look at this and there was no medicine cabinet on the other side and we'll talk
00:30:43
to the writer and director of Candyman who has long downplayed the connection between Ruthie May's death and the story
00:30:50
that made it to the big screen you take things from the world around you and put
00:30:56
them into new forms that's really what fiction is from 48 hours this is Candyman the true story behind the
00:31:04
bathroom mirror murk I'm your host and co-executive producer domati punga Judy igard is the
00:31:12
executive producer of 48 Hours Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount audio and Mora walls is the
00:31:20
senior story editor development by 48 Hours field producer Morgan KY recording assistance from from Marlin
00:31:29
polycart special thanks to Paramount podcast vice president Megan Marcus Candyman the true story behind the
00:31:36
bathroom mirror murder is produced by Sony Music Entertainment it was reported written and produced by Alex
00:31:45
Schuman our executive producers are Katherine St Louis and Jonathan hirch our associate producer is summer
00:31:53
tamod theme and original music composed by Cedric will he also sound designed and mixed the
00:32:01
episodes fle fton is our fact Checker our production manager is tamama balance kassi special thanks to Ariana roach for
00:32:12
playing Ruthie may she also played Trina in the 2021 Candyman if you enjoyed this podcast
00:32:20
please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast
00:32:27
[Music]