48 hours plus and Wondery subscribers can listen to new episodes of Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, one week early and ad free right now. Join 48 hours plus on Apple Podcast or Wondery, in the Wondery app. Listen to the 48 hours podcast for shocking murder cases and compelling real life dramas from one of television's most watched true crime shows. Go behind the scenes of each episode with award winning CB's news correspondents and producers in post mortem, a weekly deep dive. Listen to 48 hours wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror. Murderous early and ad free on Wondry and the wondry app when I was a kid, I was scared of Candyman. He was the killer from this old horror movie from 1992 that became a cult classic. Candyman had a hook for a hand and he gut you with it for no other reason than that you said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. Candyman, Candyman, Candyman. And there was something about Candyman that seemed more real, like more dangerous than any other movie villain.

I mean, there were no white guys that looked like the slasher from the Halloween franchise. Walking around my south side Chicago neighborhood, like, I didn't see a lot of dudes with hockey masks either, so those weren't as scary to me. But Candyman, he looked like somebody I might actually bump into. His brother was six'five with this eerie baritone, deep voice, what's blood for if not for shedding? And he wore this creepy black trench coat. And one of my big cousins knew I was scared of him, so he used to try to lock me in the bathroom with the lights off to prank me. So needless to say, I avoided watching this movie for years, even though it's set in my hometown. But not too long ago, I finally sat down to watch it. And when I did, I realized Candyman is about so much more than a murderous urban legend. See, this movie is actually about a dark chapter in the history of Chicago. It low key shows us what happens when a city refuses to care for its own residents and its about who gets to feel safe in their own homes in this country, even today, Candyman is set in a public housing project called Cabrini Green.

There's this graduate student named Helen who is studying urban legends, and she's dead set on finding out more about this one. In one of the early scenes, Helen is in an empty classroom at her university, listening to a tape recording someone's describing one of the Candyman's murders. A janitor who's cleaning the room overhears the recording in true Hollywood fashion, the janitor just so happens to know someone who can tell Helen more about Candyman.

I think her name is Ruthie Jean. And she heard this banging and smashing like somebody was trying to make a hole in the wall. So Ruthie called 911, and she said, there's somebody coming through the walls. And they didn't believe her. They thought the lady was crazy, right?

Mm hmm. Helen does some research and found out that a woman was killed by someone who came in through her bathroom mirror. So she and another grad student visit the high rise apartment in the projects. They go upstairs to the murder victim's apartment. It's unlocked. They both walk in and go into Ruthie Jean's bathroom. It's eerie. After all, whoever killed her got into the apartment this same way Helen opens the medicine cabinet. Killer or killers, they don't know which, smashed their way through the back of his cabinet. See, there's no wall there. The story of Candyman is fictional, of course. We all know that saying Candyman five times in the bathroom mirror doesn't actually conjure up a killer ghost. But the murder of Ruthie Jean in the movie shares horrifying similarities to the killing of a real person. That woman's name wasn't Ruthie Jean, but Ruthie Mae McCoy.

It must have been a couple of years after Candyman came out. Somehow I hadn't heard of it. And people told me, hey, you know, there's stuff in here that seems to be from the story you wrote, bets.

Steve Bagheera. He's a reporter who followed the case of the real murder for years.

In the movie, they showed a Chicago dispatch headline, what killed Ruthie Jean? Life in the projects, which was almost identical to the headline of the story I wrote.

Steve wrote a series of investigative pieces about Ruthie May McCoy's murder for a weekly newspaper called the Chicago Reader. In 1987, after she died, he visited Ruthie May's apartment. It was on the 11th floor of a high rise in one of Chicago's housing projects.

There happened to be a janitor who was cleaning up in her apartment. The door was open, and I was able to go in.

Whoever murdered Ruthie Mae McCoy somehow entered her apartment through her bathroom mirror.

She had heard the intruders coming and had called 911.

In this podcast, were taking another look at the true nightmare that inspired a major film franchise.

They just cast her act like she was nobody. They didn't care. It was just like another black person just got murdered. Oh, okay. We'll go to the next one. Now, when we talk about crime, we talk about violence. There's this thing where we do a presumption that the people and not the conditions, are responsible.

But what if the conditions in the projects and Ruthie May's killers are both responsible? You're supposed to feel safe at home. But back then and even now, that's not always the case. And sometimes the danger in our own homes comes from the very people who are supposed to protect us. Why didn't 911 get her the help she needed? And how had Ruthie May's medicine cabinet become a point of entry? I'm Domati Pongo from 48 hours. This is Candyman. The true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, episode one, left high and dry. On April 22, 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy called 911. It was 845 at night. Ruthie May was a 52 year old grandmother who lived alone when she called police to report an attempted break in. We're told the original recording no longer exists, but we do have a transcript, so we've asked actors to read it.

I'm alone, and I live at 1440 where 13th street and some people living next door have pulled their cabinets out.

What are they doing, ma'am?

They want to break in on this side where I live at.

Ruthie may tried to explain. They want to break in?

Yeah, they throw the cabinets down.

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 want to come through the bathroom.

Now, it's unclear if the dispatcher got this part of what Ruthie May was saying. She's telling them that the intruders were coming in through the bathroom.

1440 West 13th street, apartment 1109. Okay. The elevator working?

1109.

Uh huh.

All right. What's your name, ma'am? All right, I'll send you the police.

Okay.

The dispatcher assigned a patrol car, but classified the call as a disturbance with a neighbor, not a robbery. That crucial difference likely impacted what happened next.

Ruthie May. When she's making the 911 call, she sounded very scared.

Back in 1987, Steve Bagheera had listened to Ruthie May's actual call for help.

But together, enough to report to the police that she's in the projects. The elevators are working, so, you know, there kind of underscores the fact that the elevators often aren't working. Police may not come if the elevators aren't working.

Steve was 33 when Ruthie May was killed. At that time, he focused his reporting on telling the stories of low income black residents who lived on Chicago's south and west sides. He'd covered plenty of stories in the projects, but for Ruthie May, he wrote two long stories, 22,000 words in total for the Chicago reader.

I tried to not just write about murder, but about other aspects of people's lives.

The night Ruthie May called 911, dispatchers also talked to two of her neighbors. One after the other had called to report gunshots. So three calls for help were made.

Of when police came. They got there in about 20 minutes and were there about a half hour. They knocked on her door and called out to her. Got no answer. They tried to open the door. It wouldn't open. It was locked. They asked for a key to the apartment. They secured the key that was supposed to be to the apartment. It didn't work.

Officers wrote in the police report that the door was locked and that there didn't appear to be any signs of a break in. Despite the two neighbors calling and Ruthie may herself, the officers made a controversial decision to not break the door down.

So after about a half hour, they just left.

It took another neighbor's call the next day to get someone to take action.

The next evening, they got a call. Police got a call from 11th floor neighbor named Debra Lasley.

Yeah, I'm the one that got them to open it up.

Deborah Lasley lived down the hall from Ruthie Mae. We recently caught up with Deborah on the phone. You'll hear the connection was a little rough, and at times you can hear children in the background. But this was the only time she was available, and she knew Ruthie may well. We had to talk to her. Deborah lived in apartment 1101, and Ruthie Mae was in 1109. They looked out for one another.

She was my best friend in the building because I had never lived in the project. Neither and me and her could get the hang of it together.

When they met, they were both new to the 11th floor of the Grace Abbott homes, which is a part of a public housing complex. Debra, in her thirties, was a mother of seven, and her living situation was cramped, but she made do as best she could. Ruthie may helped her manage and would keep an eye on her kids.

Sometimes we supposed to catch each other every day. All during the day, she watched my kiddies, and we stand in the hallway and talk.

Ruthie May had one daughter and two grandchildren. She never married and lived on her own in Abbott homes. Her daughter, Vernita, was in her mid twenties by then. According to her autopsy, Ruthie may stood five foot nine and weighed a little over 250 pounds. She had black hair mixed with a little gray. Deborah said Ruthie May was sweet, but that she was also the kind of woman who wasn't scared to keep the kids in the building in line.

So she was like grandmother to my kids. And my kids. They know the respect. Cause she tell them to get in the house. That means get in the house.

The night Ruthie May called 911, Deborah heard gunshots, but didn't think anything of them.

Yeah, we heard it, but over there, he heard shots all the time.

There was a lot of territoriality. So gangs fighting over turf, that led to more violence, that led to more guns, and that was the situation in the Abbott homes at the time Ruthie May was killed.

Steve wrote that Abbott homes was the territory for a gang called the black gangster Disciples. At the time, the Bgds. They monitored the halls, elevators, and the stairs, and the buildings often turned into a battleground between the BGDs and another gang, the vice lords. Steve found that in 1986, a year before Ruthie May's murder, residents in the projects experienced killings, rapes, and attacks more than twice as often as the rest of the city.

Gangs fighting over turf, that led to more violence, that led to more guns.

That's why Deborah didn't question the gunfire until the following morning, when Ruthie May didn't come to visit like she normally did.

And I kept saying, if something wrong, but she would have knocked on my door and told me she was going.

Ruthie may normally stop to Debra's apartment at least twice a day. She let Debra know when she was leaving and when she got home. But that day, she never knocked.

It was shocking. Cause she gonna go to the store every 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 knocked on her door, and I didn't hear nothing. And then I decided, I said, something's wrong. It's not like her.

Deborah marched downstairs out of the building and down the block to ask the building's management if they could check on her friend, see, they would have a key, and she didn't. The Chicago Housing Authority, known as Cha, managed Abbott.

I went to housing and told me I had to see again, you know, check again and see. Do she come. She might be linked somewhere.

She's hard to understand here, but she's saying that the cha told her to check on her friend again, that maybe she stepped out. Deborah said the manager warned her that they could get in trouble for opening Ruthie May's apartment without her permission. When she couldn't get through the management, she called the cops.

I didn't feel like nobody cared. Cause it took me all day long to get the police to come. It took me all day long.

The police hadn't come back on their own since the night before. Deborah's calls convinced them to try again.

The security guards from the Chicago Housing Authority met them at Ruthie May's door.

Steve said officers came ready to break down the door.

This time, the police wanted to go in, they say, and check on Ruthie May. And the Chicago Housing Authority security force said, well, if you break down that door, the tenant may sue you for whatever reason.

The police and cha again disregard that. The tenant herself had called 911, afraid because intruders were breaking into her apartment through the mirror. Despite that, Steve said that the guards only offered reasons not to break in.

Also, if you break down that door, somebody's going to have to secure it. We don't want to do that. So they kind of talked the police out of entering the apartment. Of course, the police could have entered the apartment. Then it wasn't up to the CHA security staff.

For a second time, the Chicago police left without checking to see if Ruthie May was okay. We wanted to know why, so we reached out to the current CHA spokesperson. They told us that due to how long it's been since this happened, they have to refer us back to how the CHA answered these questions at the time. Back then, when Steve called the chas head of security to ask why, they advised police not to break down the door. The director said, quote, I don't have any answers. Two days after Ruthie May was shot, Debra finally got someone from the Chicago housing Authority to open her friend's door.

It was somebody from Cha who did break into the apartment and found Ruthie May lying on her side in a pool of blood, decomposing.

And when they opened the door, you could smell it so bad.

The man from the housing authority asked 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 May was found in a bedroom. According to the medical examiner, she'd been shot four times.

And one of the gunshots, one of the bullets had severed her pulmonary artery, so he didn't believe she would have lived long.

We all want to believe that when we call authorities, help will be on the way. Ruthie May was left high and dry and why that happened would be the subject of a lot of debate for months and even years after her murder. Murders reportedly happened so frequently in the projects that it wasnt always newsworthy. Ruthie Mays murder would have fallen into obscurity, or it would have been overlooked like so many others, if not for one curious detail, the fact that she.

Had been killed by someone who came in through the hole in the wall where her medicine cabinet usually was.

The Chicago Tribune wrote a short news story a few weeks after the murder.

It was amazing to me that people had access to other apartments through the medicine cabinet in the adjacent apartment.

Steve Boguera saw that brief article in the Tribune and had a bunch of questions.

I thought, how could the Tribune not be intrigued enough to ask more about these circumstances?

Steve worked for the prestigious Tribune out of college before shifting to a legendary weekly paper, the Chicago Reader. It's kind of like Chicago's Village Voice and had a reputation for solid journalism.

I wanted to be downwardly mobile, but seriously, because I felt the Tribune was more interested in stories that appealed to the kinds of people they wanted to advertise, to people who lived along the lakefront, in wealthier neighborhoods, and in the suburbs.

But at the Chicago reader, Steve was free to write the kinds of stories he wanted to write about folks like Ruthie Mae McCoy.

I was interested, for one thing, in whether this medicine cabinet break in was unique. And I was also interested in how police could leave like they did.

More than a month after Rufie Mae McCoy's murder, Steve Baguira drove to Abbott homes. The project building was massive. In the center, there was this big open area with some trees lining the sidewalk. 715 story high rises surrounded the oversized lawns made of brick. They all look the same. Abbott homes were first built in 1955. And while they might have been nice then, by the late eighties, residents said maintenance rarely fixed anything. Burnt out light bulbs, broken elevators, and backed up toilets. This was all a part of life. When Ruthie May moved in, many of the walls and ceilings were crumbling. Steve was used to visiting Chicago's projects for his stories. But as a thin white guy in his early thirties who obviously wasn't from the neighborhood, Abbott's residents, who were 90% black, would give him the side eye.

This guy must be a social worker or a cop or looking for drugs. And eventually they would believe me that I was a reporter.

Steve stopped at Ruthie May's building.

I went up to the 11th floor, not knowing if I'm gonna be, not thinking I'm gonna be able to get into her apartment.

He said a janitor happened to be in the apartment cleaning up.

The door was open, and I was.

Able to go in, just like Helen, the graduate student in the first Candyman movie. Steve wanted to see the hole in the bathroom wall for himself.

I do remember going into the bathroom and looking at where the medicine cabinet was supposed to be, and there was a rectangular hole in the wall.

Why wasn't her cabinet even on the wall? After Ruthie May was killed, her family and friends realized that there had been clues that there was something about her apartment that scared her.

Her brother had visited her a couple of months before, and I. She said that her medicine cabinet was loose, and he had put a couple of pieces of wood in there to try to fortify it. She didn't tell him anything about medicine cabinet break ins. He says if she had, he would have, you know, done what he could to get her out of the project.

Ruthie May's friend Deborah has a daughter named Mary. They lived down the hall from Ruthie Mae, and Mary used to hang out in Ruthie May's apartment. Not long before the murderous Mary noticed that Ruthie may kept a stick on him, one heavy enough to be a weapon.

She had a stick that was sitting from her door, her bedroom door, to the bathroom door right there.

Mary remembered that one particular day when she was visiting, she went to use the bathroom, but Ruthie May stopped her. She like, no, no, no, touch that.

Don't. Don't touch that door. Get back over here. She, like, use it right here.

She pointed to a bucket. That's when Mary realized she'd been using a bucket to relieve herself. That's how scared she'd been in her own home.

It was a five gallon bucket. She had garbage bags sitting there, and she'd use it. And every day, we never know that. We see her walk from her house to incinerate. She was throwing that bag away.

Neither Ruthie May's best friend, her daughter, or Steve said they knew if Ruthie may ever explicitly told anyone why she was afraid. Here's Steve again.

I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. I mean, I knew from other stories I had done, reporting in the projects, in high rise projects, that people were living with great insecurity, great fear. But usually it was of, you know, people could break through my front door. The idea that people could also break into their apartment through their bathroom, I mean, that was really. That really seemed awful to me, for people to have to live with that.

Deborah and Mary both remember seeing young men coming in and out of the apartment next to Ruthie Mays. Steve learned there was a connection between that apartment and the murder.

Hers was apartment 1109. The adjacent apartment was 1108. And the state's attorney's office had confiscated the medicine cabinet in the other apartment as evidence. The medicine cabinet in Ruthie May's apartment was never found.

When he visited Ruthie May's apartment, Steve picked up some of the papers that had been left on the floor in disarray.

Of course, I looked at them and found the connection to the Mount Sinai psychiatric center.

That's when he learned more about why people might not have believed Ruthie May. Apparently she had struggled with her mental health in the past, but lately she'd been responding to treatment and started pursuing her GED.

It was a tragedy what happened to her, regardless, but it seemed to be especially tragic considering that she was making really good steps with her life. Ruthie May went to a year of high school and quit after that. And she started showing signs of mental illness in her early twenties. So could have been schizophrenia. That was never totally clear, but she was definitely paranoid, and she would be heard talking to herself in the street.

Steve said this was in 1986, a year before Ruthie May's murder. Her treatment at the psychiatric center was outpatient, which means she still lived at home while receiving care.

She was known in the project as Miss May, and she was. She would, like, curse strangers sometimes, but she got connected with a psychiatric center at Mount Sinai.

After going to the psychiatric center, Ruthie May was taking high school equivalency classes. It was a sign that she was looking toward the future.

She was in arts and crafts projects, group therapy. Most of the other clients in this center were also project residents. The director of the center said they were all dealing with the stress and deprivation of living in that project.

The conditions that Steve learned about and the system's failure to help Ruthie May led him to pose a provocative question. In one of his headlines, it read, what killed Ruthie Mae McCoy? A bullet in the chest or life in the projects? That headline is very close to the one that shows up in the Candyman movie in 1992.

In the movie, they showed a Chicago dispatch headline, what killed Ruthie Jean? Life in the projects.

Steve noticed how close it was to his own headline, but he didn't overthink it after all, in the movie's credits, it says that Candyman is based on a fictional story called the Forbidden, written by Clive Barker in 1985. Clive Barker's story depicts a graduate student named Helen investigating an urban legend who haunts a dilapidated housing project in Liverpool, England.

It wasn't like they were doing a movie that was totally about the story I wrote. They had a different agenda. They were tying this real story to urban legend.

Bernard Rose, who wrote and directed Candyman, decided to set the story in the Chicago housing projects instead. Race didn't play a role in Clive Barker's story, but Rose made it a central theme of Candyman. In the movie, Candyman is actually Daniel Robitaille, a black man from the late 18 hundreds who was lynched for having a relationship with a white woman. Here's the director himself, Bernard Rose.

The Candyman is kind of a golem. You know, he's an avenging angel as much as he's anything.

How did that backstory become a part of his narrative?

The point was that he was wealthy and that he thought he was assimilated and he thought he was accepted, but he wasn't, and they killed him. And so now he's there, out there, not exactly looking for vengeance, but looking for something, looking to just haunt them.

It's visceral, and maybe that's why Candyman still has this hold on us. It has served as the basis for four films. Honestly, I didnt watch the 1992 movie until after I saw the newer 2021 Candyman movie. This is Morgan Canty. Shes a field producer at 48 hours, and shes actually the one who came up with the idea for this podcast. And after watching that movie, I was just really hooked. So I decided to do a little bit of research and I learned that Ruthie May had suffered this horrible fate. And I just wanted to know more about why. Yeah, her death sounded crazy to me too. The first time I heard it. It kind of pissed me off, to be honest with you. Right. It just felt like she didn't have to die. Exactly. And that's why I wanted to do this podcast, just to understand how the intruders could have killed Ruthie Mae, get to the bottom of why she died, and how her circumstances contributed to what happened. So, Domiti, when you were a kid in Chicago, how large did Candyman loom for you? I mean, it was huge. I was scared of Candyman.

I mean, the fact that all you had to do was say a name into a bathroom mirror and they could pop up. To be honest, I didn't even watch the film in full until you brought it to me.

Really?

I didn't realize that. No, facts, facts. And Steve Baguira's like me. He didn't see the film until much later. Not because he was scared of Candyman like a young domiti, but it was because he wasn't a fan of horror films. He said that his biggest takeaway when he finally did watch the movie wasn't the commonalities between his story and parts of the film.

I was struck by the fact that what is a nightmare to white people was reality to people who were living in the projects.

I'll admit that sounds dramatic, but let me tell you, he is really not exaggerating here. I'd find out that a lot of that first Candyman film came from real life, not just Ruthie May's murder. Ruthie May lived in taxpayer funded housing with conditions bad enough to inspire a horror film. But how is it that people's living conditions were ever allowed to get this bad in America? Why weren't residents better protected? And why weren't Ruthie May's calls for help taken more seriously?

A good part of my reporting dealt with the police response, or lack of response, which, as many residents in the project told me, was not surprising.

There were all kinds of factors that Steve and those close to Ruthie may believe contributed to the tragedy.

Maybe if police came in right away, there was nothing they could do for her anyway, we'll never know.

While they didn't break into the apartment, police did start a hunt for who killed Ruthie May. And Steve went on a search of his own to find out how unusual it was for an intruder to come through the bathroom mirror at Abbott Holmes.

There hadn't been another murder through this kind of an entry, but there had been numerous burglaries through the medicine cabinets.

This wasn't the first time criminals had preyed on residents like this. Coming up, we're going to look at the conditions residents like Ruthie May we're living in.

If you really believed in tough on crime, then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill our women.

What explanation did authorities have for not immediately helping Ruthie May?

There are a lot of calls to 911 from the projects that are hoax calls, phony calls.

What made her a target in the first place?

If people think you have money, yes, they would try to rob people.

We'll follow the murder investigation and talk to one of the lead detectives.

And I said, Jesus Christ, look at this. And there was no medicine cabinet on the other side.

Ann. We'll talk to the writer and director of Candyman, who has long downplayed the connection between Ruthie May's death and the story that made it to the big screen.

You take things from the world around you and put them into new forms. That's really what fiction is.

From 48 hours this is Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder. I'm your host and co executive producer, Jomati Punga. Judy Tighaard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio, and Maura Walls is the senior story editor. Development by 48 hours field producer Morgan Canty recording assistance from Marlon Polycarp Special thanks to Paramount podcast vice president Megan Marcus Candyman the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder is produced by Sony Music Entertainment. It was reported, written and produced by Alex Schuman. Our executive producers are Katherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirschde. Our associate producer is summer Tamad. Theme and original music composed by Cedric Wilson. He sound designed and mixed the episodes. We also use music from APM. Findal Fulton is our fact checker. Our production manager is Tameika Valens Kalasny. Special thanks to Ariane Roach for playing Rufie May. She also played Trina in the 2021 Candyman. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, you can listen to the next episode one week early and ad free by joining 48 hours plus on Apple Podcasts or Wondery plus in the Wondery app.

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