The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “After that, I went out to the house—but I was very careful, you understand, in case any cops should happen to be around. Lucky for me I’d anticipated them, because not only was there a prowl car parked down the street, but when I sneaked back through the alley and looked in the kitchen window, I could see this detective talking to Ella in the hall. So I got out of there. But it wasn’t necessary to do any more. I could see that. Ella looked like the wrath of God. I don’t imagine she’d had any sleep for two nights. And by today, word must have gotten around. Old Higgins in savings and loan will do his share of talking. So will Doc Vinson, and some of the others. And your wife will keep insisting to the police that she saw this face. Now all you have to do is go back and wrap everything up in one neat package.”

  “What do you mean?” George asked.

  “I imagine they’ll all be calling you. Your only job is to give the right answers. Tell them that Ella has talked about taking a lot of crazy trips. Tell them she wants to hide her money in the house. Tell Doc Vinson she’s afraid he wants to poison her, or attack her, or something. You ever hear about paranoiac delusions? That’s when people get the idea that everybody’s persecuting them. Build up a yarn like that. You know what to tell Ella; she’s so confused now that she’ll go for anything you say. Mix her up a little more. Ask her about things she’s told you, like trading in the Buick for a Cadillac. She’ll deny she ever said anything like that, and then you drop the subject and bring up something else. A day or two—with a few more looks through the window at the mask—and you’ll have her convinced she’s screwy. That’s the most important thing. Then you go to Vinson with a sob story, have her examined while she’s scared and woozy, and you’ve got it made.” Roderick laughed. “If you could have seen her face…”

  George shook his head in bewilderment. Why was Roderick lying to him? He’d talked to Ella Wednesday night and tonight, and she’d been quite normal. Nothing had happened, nothing at all. And yet here was Roderick coming a hundred miles and boasting about all kinds of crazy stuff—

  Crazy stuff.

  Sudenly George knew.

  Crazy stuff. A crazy scheme to drive someone crazy. It added up.

  Roderick was the crazy one.

  That was the answer, the real answer. He was more than cruel, more than childish, more than antisocial. The man was psychotic, criminally insane. And it was all a fantasy; he’d started to carry out his delusions, then halted. The rest of it took place only in his disordered imagination.

  George didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to hear his voice. He wanted to tell him to go away, wanted to tell him he had just talked to Ella and she was okay, nothing had happened.

  But he knew that he mustn’t. He couldn’t. Roderick would never accept such an answer. He was crazy, and he was dangerous. There had to be some other way of handling him.

  All at once, George found the obvious solution.

  “I’m all through here,” he said. “Thought I might drive back tonight. Want to ride along?”

  Roderick nodded. “Why not?” Again the childish giggle. “I get it. You can’t wait, isn’t that it? Can’t wait to see the look on her foolish fat face. Well, go ahead. One good thing, you won’t have to look at it very much longer. They’re going to put her on ice. And we’ll have the sunshine. The sunshine, and the moonlight, and all the rest of it. The tropics are great stuff, George. You’re going to be happy there. I know you don’t like insects, but even they can come in handy. Take ants, for instance. Suppose one of these girls disobeys us, George. Well, we can tie her to a tree, see? Spread-eagle, sort of. Strip her naked and rub honey all over her. Then the ants come and…”

  Roderick talked like that all during the drive back home. Sometimes he whispered and sometimes he giggled, and George got a splitting headache worse than anything Ella could ever have had. But still Roderick kept on talking. He was going to have Ella locked up. He was going to take George to the islands. Sometimes it even sounded as if he meant the island, the one where they’d been in the stockade. And he was going to do things to the girls the way the guards used to do things to the prisoners. It was crazy talk, crazy.

  The only thing that kept George going was the knowledge that it was crazy talk, and if anyone else heard it they’d realize the truth right away. All he had to do was get Roderick into town, stall him on some pretext or other, and call in the police. Of course Roderick would try to implicate George in the scheme, but how could he? Looking back, George couldn’t remember any slip-up on his part; he hadn’t actually said or done anything out of line. No, it was all Roderick. And that was his salvation.

  Still, the cold sweat was trickling down his forehead by the time he pulled up in front of the house. It must have been close to midnight, but the front-room lights were still burning. That meant Ella was up. Good.

  “Wait here,” George told Roderick. “I’m just going in to tell her I’m home. Then I’ll put the car away.”

  Roderick seemed to sense that something was phony. “I shouldn’t hang around,” he said. “What if the cops have a stakeout?”

  “Let me check on that,” George said. “I’ve got an idea. If the cops aren’t here you could give her one more taste of the rubber mask. Then I can deny seeing it. Get the pitch?”

  “Yes.” Roderick smiled. “Now you’re cooperating, George. Now you’re with it. Go ahead.”

  So George got out of the car and walked up to the front door and opened it.

  Ella was waiting for him. She did look tired, and she jumped when she saw him, but she was all right. Thank God for that, she was all right! And now he could tell her.

  “Don’t say a word,” George whispered, closing the door. “I’ve got a lunatic out in the car there.”

  “Would you mind repeating that?”

  George looked around, and sure enough he recognized him. It was the detective he’d talked to after the fire alarm was turned in.

  “What are you doing here this time of night?” George asked.

  “Just checking up,” said the detective. “Now what’s all this you were saying about a lunatic?”

  So George told him. George told him and he told Ella, and they both listened very quietly and calmly. George had to talk fast, because he didn’t want Roderick to get suspicious, and he stumbled over some of his words. Then he asked the detective to sneak out to the car with him before Roderick could get away, and the detective said he would. George warned him that Roderick was dangerous and asked him if he had a gun. The detective had a gun, all right, and George felt better.

  They walked right out to the car together and George yanked open the door.

  But Roderick wasn’t there.

  George couldn’t figure it out, and then he realized that Roderick might have been just crazy enough to pull his rubber mask trick without waiting, and he told the detective about that and made him look around under the front windows. The detective wasn’t very bright; he didn’t seem to understand about the mask part, so George showed him what he meant—how you could stand under the window on this board from the car and look in without leaving any footprints. The detective wanted to know what the mask looked like, but George couldn’t quite describe it, and then they were back at the car and the detective opened the glove compartment and pulled something out and asked George if this was the mask he meant.

  Of course it was, and George explained that Roderick must have left it there. Then they were back inside the house and Ella was crying, and George didn’t want her to cry so he said there was nothing to be frightened about because Roderick was gone. And she didn’t have to be afraid if somebody played tricks on her like imitating her voice because anyone could do that.

  The detective asked him if he could, and of course he could do it perfectly. He was almost as good as Roderick, only he had such a splitting headache…

  Maybe that’s why the doctor came, not
Dr. Vinson but a police doctor, and he made George tell everything all over again. Until George got mad and asked why were they talking to him, the man they should be looking for was Roderick.

  It was crazy, that’s what it was. They were even crazier than Roderick, the way they carried on. There were more police now, and the detective was trying to tell him that he was the one who had made the calls and worn the mask. He, George! It was utterly ridiculous, and George explained how he had met Roderick on the island in solitary and how he looked like the fiend in the Doré book and everything, and how he was a bad boy.

  But the detective said that George’s boss had heard him talking to himself in the office the other afternoon and called Ella to tell her, and that she had talked to the police. Then when George went on his trip they’d checked up on him and found he drove back to town the night he got drunk and also the night he said he was sleeping in his hotel room, and that he was the one who had done it all.

  Of course they didn’t tell him this all at once—there was this trip to the station, and all those doctors who talked to him, and the lawyers and the judge. After a while, George stopped paying attention to them and to that nonsense about schizophrenia and split personalities. His head was splitting and all he wanted to do was get them to find Roderick. Roderick was the one to blame. Roderick was the crazy one. They had to understand that.

  But they didn’t understand that, and it was George whom they locked up. George Foster Pendleton, not George Roderick the naughty boy.

  Still, George was smarter than they were, in the end. Because he found Roderick again. Even though he was locked up, he found Roderick. Or rather, Roderick found him, and came to visit.

  He comes quite often, these days, moving in that quiet way of his and sneaking in when nobody’s around to see him. And he talks to George in that soft, almost inaudible voice of his when George sits in front of the mirror. George isn’t mad at him anymore. He realizes now that Roderick is his best friend, and wants to help him.

  Roderick still dreams about getting his hands on all that money and going away with George to the Caribbean. And he has a plan. This time there won’t be any slip-ups. He’ll get George out of here, even if he has to kill a guard to do it. And he’ll kill Ella, too, before he goes.

  And then they’ll travel on down to the islands, just the two of them. And there’ll be girls, and whips gleaming in the moonlight….

  Oh, George trusts Roderick now. He’s his only friend. And he often wonders just where he’d be without him.

  The Body Snatcher

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Pall Mall Christmas “Extra” for 1884, and again in the Pall Mall Gazette on January 31 and February 1, 1895; first book appearance was The Body Snatcher (New York, The Merriam Company, 1895)

  STILL VERY WELL KNOWN for such iconic adventure stories as Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) may have achieved his artistic pinnacle when he created the character whose names have entered the English language with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a macabre allegory once described as the only crime story in which the solution is more terrifying than the problem. He also wrote such classic crime stories as “The Suicide Club,” “The Pavilion on the Links,” “Markheim,” and “The Dynamiter” (in collaboration with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne), as well as the novel The Wrong Box (1889, in collaboration with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne), that inspired the 1966 star-studded black comedy with John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Peter Sellers.

  Apart from Jekyll and Hyde, his most enduring crime/horror story is “The Body Snatcher” (1884), in which Fettes, an Edinburgh medical student, lodges with a famous anatomist, the anonymously named Mr. K——, who pays for corpses used for dissection in his studies. It is almost certain that the doctor references Robert Knox, who infamously bought bodies from a pair of grave robbers, Burke and Hare, who soon found it easier to kill people than to dig them up. The Body Snatcher in many ways fictionalizes the real-life exploits of the infamous grave robbers, though the horrific ending is pure invention.

  THE FILM

  Title: The Body Snatcher, 1945

  Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

  Director: Robert Wise

  Screenwriters: Philip MacDonald, Val Lewton (writing as Carlos Keith)

  Producer: Val Lewton

  THE CAST

  • Boris Karloff (John Gray)

  • Bela Lugosi (Joseph)

  • Henry Daniell (Dr. Wolfe “Toddy” MacFarlane)

  • Edith Atwater (Meg Cameron)

  • Russell Wade (Donald Fettes)

  The story line of the film closely follows that of the story, though a girl who needs an operation has been inserted. Set in 1831, there are numerous references to Burke and Hare, who had just three years before been caught grave robbing and arrested; their names undoubtedly resonated more for moviegoers of 1945 than they would today.

  Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, both of whom had achieved stardom at Universal Pictures for their roles as Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula, respectively, had tired of their exploitation in lesser and lesser films and moved to RKO to work with Val Lewton, a master of the macabre. After appearing together in eight films, Karloff and Lugosi ended their on-screen relationship after The Body Snatcher.

  The cadavers of executed prisoners had been a primary source of bodies for the medical schools of Great Britain for the purposes of dissecting and lecturing. While well-intentioned judicial reform largely ended the flow of bodies from that source, the proliferation of new medical schools with medieval laws still in force made the legal acquisition of bodies almost impossible. Body snatching arose to fill the need. A year after the events in the movie, the Anatomy Act of 1832 made it legal for the bodies of the indigent dying in poorhouses and hospitals to be given to medical schools for study and dissection.

  A 1957 film titled The Body Snatcher bears no relationship to Stevenson’s story or the 1945 adaptation.

  THE BODY SNATCHER

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  EVERY NIGHT IN THE YEAR, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular arm-chair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the table. He drank rum—five glasses regularly every evening; and for the greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars, we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.

  One dark winter night—it had struck nine some time before the landlord joined us—there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament; and the great man’s still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all proportionately moved by the occurrence.

  “He’s come,” said the landlord, after he had fi
lled and lighted his pipe.

  “He?” said I. “Who?—not the doctor?”

  “Himself,” replied our host.

  “What is his name?”

  “Doctor Macfarlane,” said the landlord.

  Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to awaken, and repeated the name “Macfarlane” twice, quietly enough the first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.

  “Yes,” said the landlord, “that’s his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane.”

  Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear, loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am afraid I have not been paying much attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?” And then, when he had heard the landlord out, “It cannot be, it cannot be,” he added; “and yet I would like well to see him face to face.”

  “Do you know him, Doctor?” asked the undertaker, with a gasp.

  “God forbid!” was the reply. “And yet the name is a strange one; it were too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?”

  “Well,” said the host, “he’s not a young man, to be sure, and his hair is white; but he looks younger than you.”

  “He is older, though; years older. But,” with a slap upon the table, “it’s the rum you see in my face—rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he’d stood in my shoes; but the brains”—with a rattling fillip on his bald head—“the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no deductions.”