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Five Real Crime Stories that Inspired Fiction

(Read Part II and Part III)

1. Scott and Laci Peterson - “Gone Girl”: Self-proclaimed true crime addict Gillian Flynn, the author of the popular novel that then became a popular movie, has said she didn’t want to base her story on a specific case, but she had to admit that there are strong similarities between it and the real life murder of Laci Peterson… at least in the first half of the plot. Like Laci, the fictional Amy Dunne goes missing, while pregnant, and her husband Nick becomes the main suspect. It doesn’t help that Nick, like Scott Peterson, acts like he couldn’t care less that his wife is gone, has an inappropriate attitude in public and turns out to be a philanderer. While the book/movie takes a turn towards a different path, in reality Laci’s body and that of her unborn son were found on April 2003, five months after her disappearance. Scott was sentenced to death for the crime.

2. Elisabeth Fritzl - “Room”: We know of plenty of tragic real life stories that could match the one told in Emma Donogue’s book, turned into a movie in 2015, which is about an abducted young woman raising her son while locked up for years in a hidden room. But the case that the author mentioned at the time her novel was released in 2010 is that of Austrian Elisabeth Fritzl, who spent 24 years as a captive of her own father, Joseph, and ended up having seven children with him. “The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl (Elisabeth’s son), aged five, emerging into a world he didn’t know about, put the idea into my head”, said Donoghue.

3. Dr. Hawley Crippen - “Rear Window”: The Alfred Hitchcock classic is based on a short story called It Had to be Murder, but the filmmaker has cited an infamous British crime as one of his inspirations for the adaptation. In the movie, a man temporarily confined to a wheelchair after an accident becomes convinced that one of his neighbors has murdered his wife. In the real story, which happened in 1910, Crippen’s wife Cora vanished after hosting a party at her house. The doctor claimed she’d gone to the United States and later that she had died there, but the neighbors became suspicious when his girlfriend moved in and started wearing Cora’s clothes and jewelry. Months later, police found a human torso buried in the basement and Crippen was hanged for the murder of his wife. In recent years there’s been a controversy over Crippen’s guilt; some claim the torso was not even Cora’s, but there’s no consensus about it.

4. The Marcus Twins - “Dead Ringers”: The disturbing real story of Cyril and Stewart Marcus, identical twins born in 1930 who couldn’t do anything apart, inspired a book turned into a creepy 1988 movie by Canadian director David Cronenberg. The Marcus brothers lived together and became renowned gynecologists. Without their patients’ knowledge, they would sometimes take over the other’s procedures. This became even more frequent when Cyril’s drug addiction spiraled out of control. Eventually, Stewart followed his brother’s footsteps and also fell in the grasp of drugs. The pair was found dead at age 45, together in their apartment, their decomposed bodies surrounded by piles of trash. It was thought at first they had died from withdrawal, but later reports disputed that. In the film, Jeremy Irons plays a fictionalized version of the twins.

5. Dennis Rader - “A Good Marriage”: Stephen King wrote his novella, turned into a film in 2014, after reading an article about Dennis Rader, a family man who turned out to be the sadistic BTK, a killer who ended the lives of at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991 and wasn’t arrested until 2005. In the plot of his story, a woman has been married to this seemingly normal, good guy for almost 30 years until she discovers by chance that he’s a serial killer with sadomasochistic tendencies nicknamed “Beadie”. “Paula Rader was married to this monster for 34 years and many in the Wichita area, where Rader claimed his victims, refuse to believe that she could live with him and not know what he was doing”, writes King in his website. He decided to write the story because he did believe Paula was unaware of her husband’s activities.