[SPEAKER_00]: Warning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: April 1987, Chicago, Illinois, a woman in a high rise called 911 and said her neighbor was crawling into her apartment from her bathroom mirror.
[SPEAKER_00]: Home is supposed to be the one place we're always safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: You lock the door, you close the blinds, and you trust that the walls around you mean
[SPEAKER_00]: But this woman Ruthie Namakoy learns that the walls can lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: What she was saying to 911 sounded unbelievable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe even a rational.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: In two days later, Ruthie Namakoy was found dead in her apartment.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to her is not just the true story that helped inspire the iconic horror film Candyman.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a real case of terror inside a home and shows that you can't fully trust the people that built the walls that you think provide safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of... strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the podcast, I'm your host, Michael.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a fan of the show, first, thank you for listening and supporting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if you're new here, I recently made an announcement that I'm gonna continue to do for a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm looking for true scary stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: This could be a paranormal experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had it could be that you went on a date with the creepy person that was really frightening and scary.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't really matter what it is as long as it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's your story.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm looking for content for a future Halloween episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess I'm kind of prepping this a little early, but that's what I like to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you would like to be on the show and share your story, reach out to me at a study of strange at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now let's get into the true events that inspired Candy Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll find the circumstances are not as unique as you might think.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we talk about fear, we usually talk about the outside world, but some of the deepest fear people can feel as nothing to do with the outside at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes from the moment a person realizes that the place they trust most, the apartment, your home, the bedroom, it's not as secure as you think it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barrier between your safe space.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the outside world is thinner than what you imagined.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s in Chicago, and one of the city's public housing towers, a true horror story took place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the real story is far more unnerving than the film version of Candy Man, which was inspired by these events, because this was not supernatural.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no hook-handed ghost, there was no curse, no urban legend, just real people inflicting violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ruthie Namicoi was 52 years old in the spring of 87.
[SPEAKER_00]: She lived alone in apartment 1109 at 1440 West 13th Street in the Grace Abbott Homes on Chicago's West Side.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Abbott was part of a larger ABLA complex Adam's Brooks Loomis and Abbott, a public housing development that had its height held thousands of residents.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Grace Abbott section had opened in 1955, and included seven 15-story hi-rises and rows of smaller buildings.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1980s residents and reporters described a place shaped by neglect.
[SPEAKER_00]: and out hallway lights, broken elevators, crumbling walls and ceilings, rats backed up plumbing and gangs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a sense that basic maintenance and basic safety were both in short supply.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bruce E. May's death did not happen in some random apartment with one freak structural work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It happened in a building where the people living there already knew that things were broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes literally, sometimes, institutionally, sometimes both.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the most sinister things about the habit buildings was hidden behind the bathroom mirrors.
[SPEAKER_00]: In some of these apartments, the bathroom medicine cabinet was not set against a wall or a solid divide, instead the cabinet opened into a narrow, maintenance space or pipe chase, essentially a service space between neighboring bathrooms that gave workers access to plumbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: In practical terms, what this means is you had a shallow mirrored mounted cabinet,
[SPEAKER_00]: on the bathroom wall and then right behind it if you remove it there's an opening to about a two-foot wide space and then the back of the medicine cabinet of your neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if those cabinets are both removed you have this opening where one person can travel from one apartment to the next through this space.
[SPEAKER_00]: reporter Steve Buggira of Chicago Magazine reported that this is a design flaw that criminals had been exploiting for about a year before Ruthie May was attacked.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was to break into neighboring apartments to steal things.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the way, it's worth mentioning that Steve Buggira is the reporter that picked up on the story instead of writing about it and that directly led to the inspiration for the movie Candyman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's a quote about the dangers of this design quirk in these buildings from the Chicago Reader magazine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ellis Johnson, not a real name, who lives on the fifth floor of the building in which McCoy lived, was watching TV one February evening with a friend, which she saw a figure dart head of her bathroom and race out the front door.
[SPEAKER_00]: Noises in the bathroom alerted her to a second intruder, a 13-year-old boy who's girth slowed him, as he attempted to squirm out of the opening where Johnson's medicine cabinet had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: Johnson's friend held the 13-year-old while Johnson called the police.
[SPEAKER_00]: The 13-year-old confessed that he and the first boy had climbed up the pipes in the chase from a vacant department below.
[SPEAKER_00]: For several months, Johnson tied a rope to the bathroom door at bedtime, pulled the door shut, and tied the other into her kid's bunk bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: She put out a pale of water for her kid's to use as a nighttime toilet, other Abbott residents position furniture in front of their bathroom doors before going to bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a really frightening realization that it's so easy for somebody to break into your home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ruthie may appear to have known that there was something unnerving or unsafe about how the bathroom mirror medicine cabinet was set up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because according to some reports, she was paranoid.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had her locks changed often.
[SPEAKER_00]: She would talk to neighbors about making sure to be safe and lock their doors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the 9th of April 22nd, 1987,
[SPEAKER_00]: at fear turned into a very real emergency.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ruthie may call 911 and she said, quote, some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know, the dispatcher asked some questions and also asked if they want to break in to which Ruthie said, yeah, they throw the cabinet down, they want to come through the bathroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dispatcher said the police would be sent, but later reporting indicates the call was treated as a disturbance with a neighbor, not the same as at home invasion.
[SPEAKER_00]: That phrase, disturbance with the neighbor, sounds...
[SPEAKER_00]: So ordinary, it's like you're arguing about parking spaces or potted plants in the hallway.
[SPEAKER_00]: With the neighbor, it doesn't have the urgency.
[SPEAKER_00]: that was needed in this situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Soon after this 911 call, two neighbors called the authorities to report gunshots.
[SPEAKER_00]: Police arrived in about 20 minutes and they stayed for about half an hour in the buildings.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knocked on Ruthie May's door, they called out, they didn't get an answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they tried to get in, but the apartment was locked.
[SPEAKER_00]: A janitor or building employee supplied a key in the key didn't work, which may have to do with the fact that she changed her locks so often.
[SPEAKER_00]: Officers noted that there was no obvious signs of forced entry at the front door, so they
[SPEAKER_00]: Left.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, after all, this is just an argument between neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do they need to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that decision would become one of the most infuriating parts of this case.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Ruthie May had done what people are supposed to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: She called for help.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then neighbors called for help because they heard gunshots and yet police came to the door and just kind of knocked and then left when no one answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next day, Concern kept building.
[SPEAKER_00]: A neighbor named Deborah Lassley, who lived down the hall in apartment 11 at one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Later said that she was the one that pushed to get the apartment opened from the authorities.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ruthie May had been a friend of hers, and she hadn't been seen, and obviously neighbors had also heard gunshots, so there was worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: When authorities finally came back to the apartment, they found Ruthie Mae dead on the floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: The medical examiner said she had been shot four times, and one of the bullets had severed from pulmonary artery.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not think she lived long after that wound.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the bathroom,
[SPEAKER_00]: The medicine cabinet was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I trust what I've been reading about the case, they never found the medicine cabinet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the bizarre sets of details about this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: The case did lead to criminal charges, two men, John Hendron, Edward Turner, were charged in connection with the murder, but the case was weak.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was not a lot of evidence that pointed in their direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were ultimately acquitted, leaving Ruthie Mamacois murder effectively unsolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, this story directly inspired Candy Man, although that took place at Cabrini Green, another set of projects in Chicago.
[SPEAKER_00]: This story is very strange and very frightening, yet it's not the only one we're going to talk about today because Ruthie Namicoi's story belongs in this larger category of unsettling crimes, crimes that turn private homes into places of fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: take Daniel Lepland.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most people know about Daniel Lepland, mainly from a phrase or a nickname, The Boy and the Walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that phrase is not tabloid exaggeration.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1986 and Pepperel, Massachusetts, Lepland terrorized the Bowen family after becoming fixated on one of the daughters, Tina Bowen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't say that the Bowen family began hearing noises and noticing strange disturbances at the house, minor things it didn't set off any mental alarms, but it just created a sense of unease and they tried to explain it away.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in December of 1986, Frank Bowen and his daughters discovered Daniel the Plant inside the house, armed with a hatchet and a wrench, hiding in a closet after apparently using concealed spaces between walls and the home.
[SPEAKER_00]: After he escaped, the family returned to find messages and family photographs to face with knives driven through them.
[SPEAKER_00]: one message reportedly read, I'm still here, come find me.
[SPEAKER_00]: That case is different from Ruthie Mae McCoy's in obvious way, and that is this was in suburban Massachusetts, it's not in the projects, a single family house, and a stalking teen, not some burglars just breaking through a wall to try to steal something, but psychologically
[SPEAKER_00]: That feels impossible until it happens to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the plant story became even darker.
[SPEAKER_00]: In December 1987, he murdered Priscilla Gustafsen and her two children in towns and Massachusetts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Priscilla was shot twice at close range through a pillow, in her children, or found drowned in separate bathtubs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The details are of course horrifying, but what matters for tonight's larger theme
[SPEAKER_00]: is that before the plant became known as a murder, he had already shown how terror can begin not with an attack from the outside but with the realization that someone has been inside the home all along.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the pattern continues.
[SPEAKER_00]: An Austin Texas burglary suspects broke through a duplex ceiling to steal from neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: The case reportedly ended in SWAT, showing up, and having a standoff when one of the suspects hid in the attic, similar to the bathroom mirror murder, using a ceiling and a residential building to break into a neighbor's home.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fear of home invasion is old and common.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we all experience it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But these stories live in a stranger category because they're not just about someone entering your home.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are about someone entering your home through shared walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pipe chase behind a bathroom cabinet, a hollow space in a family's home, or a ceiling,
[SPEAKER_00]: To me, once you really sit with that idea, you understand why Ruthie Mamekhoi's case won't go away and inspired a very famous horror story.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a father, it's really interesting to see my son experiencing the same kind of fears that I think we all go through as kids where when it's time to go to sleep, he's afraid of something being in the closet or he's afraid of someone or something being underneath the bed getting scared of noises in the wall or hot water heater make some noise and he sometimes get frightened by that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as adults, we tend to write off these little fears.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to sort of push them away and say that they're ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's frightening to hear these true stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where there's things that we thought were frightening as a kid that we tell ourselves not to be scared of now, are real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Should we all be afraid of somebody in the closet or under the bed or behind our bathroom mirror?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminating the unexplained by subscribing to our sub-stack, just head to the support tab at a study of strange.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.