#AND IT'S THE ONE WITHOUT TOM CRUISE OR DEMI MOORE OR JACK NICHOLSON

[swan2swan]

Most sobering revelation of today is watching the final half-hour of A Few Good Men and realizing that the movie is....certainly a movie...and then having Office Space come on and understanding just how vast the disparity of quality is between them.

[fletchermarple]

Five Real Crime Stories that Inspired Fiction – Part III

(Part I and Part II)

1.Roseann Quinn - “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”:

In the commercially succesful 1977 film, Diane Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a woman who after leaving behind her repressive background starts exploring her sexuality by having one night stands and getting tangled with a dangerous man. The movie is based on a novel, which in turn tells the true story of Roseann Quinn, a 29 year old school teacher who was stabbed to death on January 2, 1973, by John Wayne Wilson. The couple had just met at a bar and gone back to her apartment, but after he was unable to get an erection he claims she insulted him and made him snap. Wilson hanged himself on May 5, 1973, while he was in jail waiting for the legal proceedings.

2. David Cox - “A Few Good Men”: Arguably one of the best legal dramas in film, “A Few Good Men” tells the story of two U.S. Marines who are under court-martialed for accidentally killing a fellow soldier in Guantanamo, while giving the young man a punishment ordered by their superiors. Tom Cruise and Demi Moore play the lawyers defending them, and Jack Nicholson, as the base commander, delivers one of the most quotable lines in movie history: “You can’t handle the truth!”. The movie was originally a play, and its writer Aaron Sorkin got the idea because his sister, a lawyer in the Navy, had to defend a group of Marines who almost killed another one while following orders. One of those accused Marines was David Cox, who ended up suing the studio for using his story without asking or paying him. But Cox never got to see the end of that court case: he disappeared on June 5, 1994, and his body was found three months later. He had been shot four times, execution style. The murder has never been solved, but many believed that David was targeted because he started talking too much about that the U.S. military was doing in Guantanamo while giving interviews about the movie.

3. Dennis DePue - “Jeepers Creepers”: What can a horror movie about an ancient creature that feeds on human body parts have to do with reality? Turns out that the whole opening sequence of this 2001 movie, in which two siblings are driving around when they see a strange figure disposing of bloody sheets, is almost an exact copy of a segment featured in Unsolved Mysteries in 1991. That episode started with a couple who were driving in Michigan in April 1990, when a speeding van passed them. They later saw the van parked in an abandoned schoolhouse, and the man that had been driving it was taking out some bloody sheets and burying them in the ground. The man was Dennis DePue, and he’d just murdered his ex wife Marilynn, pictured with him above. The whole thing was pretty horrible: Dennis had first beaten Marilynn in front of his kids, and then had left the house with her, claiming he was taking her to the hospital. But instead, he shot her in the head, sent a bunch of deranged letters to his relatives and disappeared. When the case came up in Unsolved Mysteries, Dennis was living in Texas under the name of Hank Queen. He was recognized and when police confronted him, he ended up shooting himself. “Jeepers Creepers” writer and director Victor Salva never admitted he had pretty much ripped off the start of his movie from the show, but you can judge for yourself the similarities here. But the real crime in this story is the fact that Salva, a convicted child molester, was allowed to continue working with kids and doing movies.

4. Dr. Sam Sheppard - “The Fugitive”: One of the most infamous unsolved cases in american history is the 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, who was bludgeoned to death in her bed in Cleveland. Her husband Sam, a neurosurgeon, said that an intruder had killed Marilyn and knocked him unconscious. However, he ended up being arrested and tried for the murder and found guilty. He spent 10 years in prison, after which he was retried and acquitted. (If you want to know more, you can check here for the arguments in favor of guilt and innocence, and also these findings in 1998). Sheppard’s guilt has been hotly debated for decades, and it allegedly inspired a popular TV show in the 60s called “The Fugitive”, which in 1993 was adapted into a very successful movie starring Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, who gets wrongfully accused of killing his wife and must escape from custody to prove his innocence. The creators of the original TV show always denied that they had based their story on the Sheppard case, but it’s hard to believe them when you compare the two plots. And after all, F. Lee Bailey, Sheppard’s famous lawyer who got him out of jail, said that the producer himself had confessed to him that it was based on Sheppard.

5. Sarah Winchester - “Winchester” and “Rose Red”: Technically it’s not a crime, but a creepy story. Sarah became the heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company after the death of her husband and used most of her fortune to obsessively build a never ending mansion in California during 38 years. It’s said that she did so because she was convinced she had been cursed by all the people who had been killed with Winchester guns, and a medium had told her that she needed to keep working on the house to appease the spirits, or else she would die. The bizarre house ended up having over 160 rooms and is today a tourist attraction (in case you’re wondering, after an earthquake in 1906, Sarah left the house and didn’t die until 1922). The famous legend inspired Stephen King to write the miniseries “Rose Red”, which follows a group of psychics exploring a house with a similar background, and is behind a movie that was released in 2018, starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester.