by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was quite a good film,
unexpectedly timely given the national debate over sexual assault allegations
and how frequently the women (and sometimes men!) who make them aren’t
believed: Believe Me: The Lisa McVey Story.
Lisa McVey (Katie Douglas) was a 17-year-old woman who had a late-night job at
a doughnut shop in Tampa, Florida when on November 3, 1984 (considerably
farther back historically than Lifetime usually reaches for their stories!) she
was riding her bicycle home when she was driven off the road by a man in a
large Dodge Magnum car. The man kidnapped her and held her in an upstairs room
for 26 hours before finally letting her go. During that time he routinely raped
her (one of the most chilling scenes in the film shows him giving her a shower
and taking her from behind as he’s in the shower with her) and kept her
blindfolded and tied up, though she was able to see a few details under the
blindfold. She had enough presence of mind to remember as many details as she
could discern — including the word “MAGNUM” on the car’s dashboard and the fact
that the upstairs room was up exactly 22 steps that were covered in green
carpet, also that the car was black but the inside carpet was red. We then
learn that Lisa McVey was no stranger to sexual abuse — her stepfather had
regularly molested her, which ironically added to her tragedy but also gave her
some of the remarkable presence of mind that enabled her to endure being
kidnapped and raped by a stranger, detaching herself from the experience long
enough to collect and leave behind evidence, including some of her hairs in her
kidnapper’s bathroom (along with pressing her fingers against the bathroom
mirror to leave prints) and biting her own finger while in his car to leave
blood that could link her to the car even if the kidnapper killed her. Lisa
shuttled back and forth between her mother and her grandmother, both
hard-bitten women who concluded that she was making up her story of being
kidnapped just because she’d stayed out all night at a party.
The Tampa police
don’t believe her either, partly because their attention is being occupied by
the search for a particularly nasty serial killer who targets young women who
are out late at night. Lisa is so traumatized by the awful attitude of the cops
towards her that she ends up curled up literally in a fetal position on a police-station couch, and
the only way she’s talked out of that is she finally meets a detective, James
Pinkerton (David James Elliott), who not only takes her story seriously but
realizes that there’s a possibility that Lisa’s kidnapper is the serial killer the Tampa police have been so
desperately searching for. The initial link between the two is Lisa’s reference
to the car having red inner carpets, since cheap red fibers have been found on
the dead bodies of the victims, and thanks to Lisa’s presence of mind and
attention to detail the cops not only get a line on the killer but find out
what sort of car he drives and even what he looks like, since Lisa was
blindfolded the whole time she was with him but felt his face while he was in bed with her and therefore
got a good idea of what it was like — enough for a police sketch artist to get
a good idea of it. Pinkerton tracks down the car and photographs the driver
(with a Polaroid 600 instant camera, which really dates this story!), and now they have a mug shot
they can give Lisa to see as part of a photo array. She’s able to identify the
kidnapper and he turns out to be 33-year-old Bobby Ray Long, whose pathological
hatred of women led him to kidnap, rape, torture and kill them — only he let
Lisa survive because “she was special,” as he tells the police who arrest him;
as Lisa explained in a later interview, she treated him as if she were a four-year-old
and that apparently disarmed him into letting her go after a bit over a day in
captivity instead of killing her like he had his other victims.
Believe
Me is a quite powerful drama, and I wish I
had the names of more of the personnel involved in this very compelling film —
alas, imdb.com doesn’t have a page on it (though they do for next
week’s scheduled Lifetime “premiere,” The Girl in the Bathtub, starring a middle-aged Jason Patric) and it was
only by watching the opening credits on the repeat showing and doing some
Internet searches that I was able to learn that the director was James Donovan,
the writer Christine Welsh and the lead producer Kim Bondi (there were at least
three other people listed as “executive producers,” since nowadays it takes a village
to produce a movie). Believe Me
is also an incredible acting tour de force for Katie Douglas as Lisa — I’m going to go out on a limb and predict
adult superstardom for her if she gets the right vehicles; she’s astounding in
all facets of this role, coyly playing up to her kidnapper, freaking out when
the cops don’t believe her, grimly determined to be as much help as she can to
them once they realize she’s the only living witness they have who can nail the
serial killer they’re after — and the ironic real-life epilogue is that after
finishing her growing-up period with an aunt and uncle in a Tampa suburb who
seem to be the only sane adults
in her family, she went into law enforcement herself as a career choice and
ended up as a police investigator specializing in crimes against children and
sexual-abuse cases. There’s even a photo of Lisa McVey as she looks now, a
grimly determined heavy-set butch woman with a don’t-mess-with-me grimace on
her face: a testament both to the resilience and drive of the real Lisa and the
power and skill of the actress playing the young version of her.
