Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1796yuq/a_serial_killer_is_copying_horror_movies/
First and foremost, I’d like to thank you all for sharing your comments, insights, and theories. For the people saying that my daughter is acting suspicious, I think it’s just because you don’t know her. She really is a sweet girl. She’s never gotten in trouble at school, with her friends, or at home. She likes horror movies, that’s not a crime.
As for her boyfriend, she hasn’t told me about him but I’ll try to get more information out of her but, again, if you knew Vivi you’d know that being suspicious of her doesn’t make any sense.
Okay, now for the update.
With Paul missing, a different Medical Examiner handled the scene. He didn’t tell me much at the scene, but he said enough to make my stomach flip.
“There are bruises on her wrists and ankles,” he said. “He bound her tight, probably to keep her still while he twisted her head around.”
“He?” I asked.
The ME shrugged. “Things like this? Usually a man that does it. Look up the statistics. Plus, you’d need a lot of upper body strength to twist someone’s head around like this. Even a young girl’s.” He mimed the act and made a “crack” sound with his mouth.
“That’s a dead kid right there,” I said. “You make a sound like that again, I’ll crack your fucking jaw.”
He held up his hands in a “sorry,” kind of way.
Asshole.
I questioned the parents as best I could. They’d gone out for a movie, the same sci-fi one I saw with my son Chris. Their daughter didn’t want to go. At 13, she was right at the age where family outings were no longer mandatory. They wanted to give her a bit of freedom. They’d never get the chance to make that mistake again.
The girl always locked the door and there was a doorbell camera. Unfortunately, there were no cameras in the rear of the house, no alarms, and no locks on the girl’s bedroom window on the second floor.
The killer used a ladder from the tool shed in the backyard, set it against the wall and climbed up to the girl’s bedroom window. She must’ve been downstairs, in the kitchen. There was a broken plate on her bedroom door and some uneaten avocado toast. He ambushed her as soon as she walked into her room.
The mother said the nightgown the girl was wearing wasn’t hers. The killer changed her clothes so that she looked more like Regan, the girl from the film. I looked up the movie on my phone, the victim was wearing screen-accurate clothing. Just like Dylan’s letterman jacket, or the white dress Samantha, the The Ring victim was wearing.
Whoever the killer is, they have an obsession for accuracy.
The asshole ME also revealed that the Exorcist victim had a “nasty” wound to the back of the head, probably to knock her out. I hoped that, like Dylan, the girl had passed away from it long before the killer twisted her head around.
Before I left, the asshole ME said something that gave me goosebumps.
“He tried to keep her eyes and mouth open,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Superglue on her eyelids, here,” he said. “But he didn’t use enough and it ran. Kept the eyes closed instead. Why’d he want them open, right? Weird. There’s something else too.”
He pointed to a plastic ring on the floor. I picked it up with my pen. I didn’t know what it was.
“My girlfriend’s studying ortho…orthodontry.”
“Orthodontology,” I said. “If your girlfriend’s studying it, you should know how to say it right.”
“Okay,” he said. “Point is that’s one of those mouth-opener things, you know? The creepy ones that give a creepy mouth? Again. Why?”
“Finding out why isn’t your job,” I said. “It’s mine.”
But I knew why. I hadn’t seen Scream or The Ring, but I had seen The Exorcist. The scene where the little girl’s head turns around is burned in my memory. Her eyes were open in that scene. She was smiling too.
On my way back to my car, I threw up in the bushes.
“That bad?” Vivi asked.
I told her the details on the way to the station.
Now, you may have noticed that I don’t talk about the deputies much. There are ten of them, not including Jordan and Monica, who have pretty much moved up to administrative positions along with me. Because our town is so small, the deputies are considered officers of the court and mostly do things like see to warrants, collect payments for fines, hand out parking tickets, patrol the town, collect property taxes, and act as courthouse security.
I’m both the county sheriff and the chief of police in our small town. Most of the towns around ours are small and rural, so it makes sense for the chief of the biggest town to oversee the other little ones in our tiny county. We have very limited resources, after all. It’s just the way it’s always been done. The sheriff and chief of police before me held both positions for over 50 years. I’m the first woman to occupy both roles. I think I was elected only because that man was my father.
Monica and other deputies help me oversee the county as a whole, speak to local law enforcement, manage cases and permits and fines, etc.
I don’t want to bore you. I don’t want to give my location away, either.
All our deputies wanted in on the murders. They’re the talk of the town, after all. So I put most of them to work securing the crime scene, looking into the victims, and patrolling the area.
That leaves only Monica, Jordan, and I to act as a homicide detective would.
Now that Jordan’s out of the picture, it leaves Monica and I. But Monica talks. More than once, I’ve discussed private county matters with her, financials and such, and then heard her talk about them on the phone.
No.
I’m keeping this one close to the chest. We can discuss everything except the horror movie references. That’s how I’ll crack this. If I mention it, then everyone in town will become a horror movie expert and it’ll be impossible to find someone who knew these movies well before the murders.
I only know Vivi so, for now, she’s almost like an acting deputy.
We sat in my office, drinking shitty coffee, eating cookies from the vending machine. Despite everything, it was nice.
“There has to be some kind of pattern,” Vivi said.
“What do you mean?”
“All the movies have to have something in common.”
“You think there’s a pattern?” I asked, taking a sip of the awful coffee and cringing. We really need to invest in a good coffee machine. “Something all the movies have in common?”
“Probably. But I don’t think it’ll help us right now. If this was the nineties, we could check blockbuster or the library and see who checked out these movies recently.”
“There’s no way to see who rented them online, right?”
Vivi shook her head. “Maybe if we were the FBI or the CIA or something.”
“Do you know anyone else who loves horror movies?” I asked. “Maybe a friend at school? Or someone your boyfriend knows.”
Vivi gave me a knowing glare. “I don’t and he doesn’t.”
She set her coffee down and looked me in the eyes.
“Liking horror movies isn’t a crime and having a boyfriend isn’t suspicious.”
“What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Jacob.”
I sighed. “That’s it? No last name?”
“We were having such a good time,” Vivi said. “Now you’re interrogating me about my boyfriend? Hell, he isn’t really my boyfriend like officially. We just went out a few times.”
“In his truck?”
Vivi looked confused. “He drives a Prius.”
“Your brother said he drove a truck.”
“Maybe he was high,” Vivi said, shrugging. “Car, truck, whatever. His name’s Jacob Marino, by the way.”
“God,” I said. “His dad asked me to prom.”
“How many people asked you to prom? Mike. The guy who owns the sports store—”
“Dan Robar.”
“Dan Robar, yeah. Now Jake’s dad.”
I shrugged. “I guess I was hot back then. I don’t know.”
We got a good chuckle out of that.
“Tell Jacob I want to meet him.”
“Fine,” Vivi said. “When all this is over, we’ll all have coffee together like adults. Sound good? Now let’s get back to the freaking serial killer obsessed with horror movies? I think that’s a little more interesting than a guy who’s not even really my boyfriend.”
“The killer took Jordan and Paul Warren,” I said. “Two people again, like Scream. They can’t kill them both, right? Two for Scream, one for The Ring, one for The Exorcist. There have already been four victims and four movies, if we count Seven. If they kill Jordan and Paul for the next one, it’d put the count at six, but there’d be three movies left.”
“Maybe they won’t kill Jordan and Dr. Warren,” Vivi said.
“But seven movies, seven bodies, seven days,” I said.
“Yeah but seven bodies in total,” Vivi said. “They could reference a movie without killing someone, then kill two for the next one, or even three. They never said one victim per movie. The whole thing is a reference to David Fincher’s Seven anyway…there was one scene in that movie. Lust.”
I nodded. Vivi and I saw it the night before. She forced me to watch it. It was a good movie, I guess. Didn’t like the ending, though.
“That one had two people but only one of them died,” Vivi said.
“But it was a guy and prostitute.”
“Right,” Vivi said. “I don’t think they’d reference Seven again either. Whatever it is, it’s a movie where two guys are the victims.”
“They had to take them somewhere else, too,” I said. “They killed Becca Campbell and Dylan Russell at Becca’s house.”
“Probably because her house had sliding glass doors, a patio, and a tree in the front lawn. They’re a stickler for details.”
“They killed Lena McCarthy, the Exorcist victim, at home too.”
“But they kidnapped the Ring victim and brought her all the way out here.”
“There was a well in her town. A few of them actually,” I said.
“They must’ve wanted you to find her, then.”
I put my coffee down. My stomach seemed to twist into a tight knot.
“You’re the expert,” I said. “Are there any movies where two guys get kidnapped?”
Vivi scrunched up her brow. She closed her eyes.
“A horror movie where two guys get kidnapped,” she muttered. “It has to be a famous one too. Scream, The Ring, The Exorcist, Seven. Pretty mainstream, so far. No deep cuts. But maybe they’ll throw one in there? Something from the 70s? Very crowded decade. Lots of Giallo stuff. Maybe a weird slasher from the 80s. No.”
Vivi looked at me.
“The references have been pretty obvious so far,” she said. “You could plug a description of the way the victims were killed into Google and you’d get the movie every time. So this one has to be obvious too. Two male victims…Becca and Dylan were dating, like the victims in Scream’s opening scene. The two girl victims looked like the horror movie characters they were referencing. There must be a reason why they picked Dylan and Dr. Warren.”
“Probably to punish us,” I said. “To disrupt the investigation. They’ve helped me so far.”
“Maybe,” Vivi said. “But I think they want the victims to be pretty similar to the ones in the movies. Dylan was blond. Drew Barrymore’s boyfriend in the movie had dark hair. So Dylan was killed because of the role he filled, not what he looked like. Jordan and Dr. Warren must have been picked for their roles too. A cop and a doctor? Practically every horror movie has a cop and a doctor in it.”
Vivi shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“We haven’t gotten the call yet and it’s late,” I said. “Maybe they haven’t killed them yet. Or maybe they just haven’t been found, like the girl in the well. She was there for a day at least. Maybe they put Jordan and Paul somewhere hidden too. Like a barn or an abandoned house.”
“Two guys,” Vivi said. “A cop and a doctor. Hidden somewhere. Not at their home or a public space, because they would’ve been found there…somewhere remote…”
Vivi’s eyes drifted across my desk and stopped at the department’s camera. I’d used it to take photos of the crime scene.
“Jordan usually takes the crime scene photos, right?” Vivi asked. “You called him a photographer.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“It’s not a cop and a doctor, then,” Vivi said. Her eyes were wild with the excitement that only comes from putting a puzzle together. “It’s a photographer and a doctor! Both of them kidnapped. It’s obvious!”
“What?” I asked. “What movie is it?”
“Saw,” Vivi said. “They’re referencing the first Saw movie. Are there any big, creepy, public bathrooms in town? Like maybe an underground one? Or something in a factory? It has to be a rundown one too. Abandoned.”
“Vivi I don’t know every bathroom in the county.”
“They’d pick one we could get to quickly,” Vivi said. “One we’d know. In the movie, a cop rushes to the bathroom…ah shit, but he did it by following a suspect there. But it’s gotta be a bathroom. A really big one. Grimy. Tiled walls.”
“The only big, underground, abandoned bathroom I know is the one at the old bus station. We had to board up the whole building because squatters kept sneaking in. It was a drug den.”
“That has to be it,” Vivi said.
I was skeptical. She’d solved it too easily, too quickly. She was probably wrong. Then again, Vivi has always been smart. All her teachers say she’s ahead than her classmates. She reads at a grad-school level, at seventeen.
We pulled up to the old bus station. It was an eyesore, one that the town council had been trying to tear down for years. But our town’s Historical Society had put a stop to it. The building was nice. Art deco. Built in the 1930s. But they’d screwed up when they put in the water pipes. Most of them burst at the same time, one summer. Damn near flooded the entire building. Rotted the wood floors and wood stairs and platforms. Not it was a gutted, decaying mess.
“You’re staying the car,” I said, opening the passenger’s side door and then one of the rear doors too.
“But—”
Vivi started.
“You’ll be safe in the car,” I said.
“I won’t,” Vivi said. “In horror movies, the killer always targets the detective’s family.”
“I’m not a detective,” I said.
“Sheriff/police chief, whatever,” Vivi said. “It’s so obvious. You go in there by yourself. I stay in the car. The killer breaks the window and chloroforms me. You come out and find an empty car. Cliffhanger.”
I sighed. “Fine. I said. But you stay behind me and use this.” I gave her an extra flashlight.
“I should get a gun too,” Vivi said. “In case they try to get me from behind.”
“This isn’t a horror movie, Vivi,” I said.
“It sure as hell feels like one.”
I handed Vivi my taser. The kind that shoots out prongs.
“Just don’t hit me with that thing,” I said.
Vivi nodded, grabbing the taser and then pointing it around like a gun.
“It’s not a toy,” I said.
“Yeah. I know. But it’s fun.”
Vivi and I walked up to a side door. The front doors had been boarded up and covered in chains. The windows were covered with thick sheets of wood. The town council wasn’t messing around. But there had to be a easy point of entry, by law, in case the building caught fire or something. Not that this moldy, soggy wreck could catch fire.
The side door was covered in locks and chains, but we had hidden the keys under one of the art deco statues near the entrance. We wouldn’t be needing the keys, do. The side door was wide open.
“Shit,” I said.
“Language,” Vivi whispered. She was pale. Scared.
“Stay behind me,” I said.
As soon as we walked into the building, I was hit by the stench of decades of mold and rotten wood.
I tied my handkerchief around Vivi’s nose and mouth and pulled my shirt over my own.
We walked carefully, testing out the rotten floorboards before putting out with delicate steps before putting our full weight on them.
We found the stairs leading down to the bathrooms.
The way forward was easy from there. I could see drag marks on the floor where the mold and dust had been wiped away by someone dragging something…or someone else.
There was a light on in one of the bathrooms. Strange, seeing as how the building didn’t have power. I saw how the killer had done it almost instantly. There were thick power cables snaking out of the bathroom doorway and slinking away through the darkness, leading deeper into the station. I could hear the hum and churn of a generator in that direction.
They’d planned this. Had put a lot of work into it. That scared me more than anything else. Suddenly, I remembered a line Morgan Freeman said in Seven. “This guy is methodical, exacting, and worst of all, patient.”
I stepped through the doorway into a moldy, grimy, tile-covered bathroom. A set of new, bright, unforgiving fluorescent lights had been fitted on the ceiling. Underneath them was a giant bloodstain. I could see the imprint of a body on it, as if someone had been lying in it for hours as it dried.
“Ana!” Jordan shrieked.
He was on the other side of the room, lying in another pool of blood. He had a shackle around one of his ankles. A thick chain led from it to a series of rusted pipes in the corner.
Then I saw Paul. Jordan was holding him, hugging him. Paul’s head was in Jordan’s lap. I could tell, from where I stood, that Paul was dead. He was pale. Blue. And I didn’t need a medical degree to see why.
Paul’s right foot was gone. In its place was a bloody stump.
Jordan’s eyes shot to the corner of the room, next to me.
I turned around and my breath hitched in my throat.
Paul’s foot was lying in another pool of blood, with the shackle still around it. There, lying near it, was a hacksaw.
“Holy shit,” Vivi said.
Part 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17dd21c/a_serial_killer_is_copying_horror_movies_part_5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf