Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” the second in a two-night event paying tribute to the late Ann Rule, one of the most prolific true-crime writers in the genre’s history. Last night’s movie was called A Murder to Remember and it was based on a real crime that took place in Oregon in 1976, when a young couple, 21-year-old Juan “Julio” Torres and his 17-year-old bride Candra drove into the Mount Hood national monument for a camping trip to celebrate their first anniversary. Only along the way they ran into a criminal drifter, Thomas Brown, who killed Juan and kidnapped Candra, holding her hostage for four days and using classic brainwashing techniques to convince her that her husband’s death had been a hunting accident. He routinely raped her — apparently his motive was lust at first sight for Candra and a determination to eliminate her inconvenient husband so he could have her — and she stayed in the woods with him for four days, going along with whatever he wanted until he decided that she’d been sufficiently “programmed” that when they returned to civilization she would tell the “accident” story he wanted told. Rule first wrote about this case in 2001 as one of the short stories in her book Empty Promises, and she called the chapter about the Torres murder “The Stockholm Syndrome.”
The “Stockholm Syndrome” was a highly controversial
mental diagnosis from the 1970’s based on BBC news reports of a hostage
situation created by a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973 in which the
hostages allegedly began identifying with their captors and actively protecting
them against the police in ways psychologists studying the incident went beyond
the requirements sheer survival necessitated from them. The “Stockholm
Syndrome” first got mentioned in a U.S. courtroom when Patricia Hearst,
kidnapped newspaper heiress who became a part of her captors’ organization, the
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and joined them in a bank robbery, was tried
for that crime. Veteran defense attorney F. Lee Bailey tried to argue that
Hearst had been brainwashed by the group, including being held inside a closet
for weeks to break down her will, and Garry Trudeau did a Doonesbury strip lampooning the defense by suggesting Bailey
would ask the court for permission to give his closing argument to the jury
inside the closet where his client had been held. It didn’t work; Patty Hearst
was convicted and sent to prison — where she fell in love with, and ultimately
married, one of her guards (a development that fascinated Alfred Hitchcock, who
followed the case and wanted to make a movie about it — alas, he was too old
and his health too poor for him to do so). Candra Torres became the first
person in American jurisprudence successfully to argue the “Stockholm Syndrome” defense — though
she was never actually charged with a crime, her testimony against Brown,
bolstered by a jailhouse informant who disclosed (among other things) that
Brown had actually read a book about brainwashing before he committed his
crime, was instrumental in getting him convicted and sentenced to life in
prison.
Ann Rule had already fictionalized the story quite a bit, giving the
victim couple the Anglo names of “Hank and Robin Marcus,” and the makers of A
Murder to Remember, writer Amber Benson and
director Robin Givens, fictionalized it further, though at least they re-made
the slain husband a Latino (“Javier Rivera,” played by Kevin Rodriguez). They
also made the Riveras, Javier and his wife Robin (Maddie Nichols, top-billed),
behave with a shocking level of immaturity on their way to the mountain
catastrophe, and they made the bad guy, “Sam Turner” (T. C. Maherne), a
genuinely charming fellow with his own boyish manner concealing his true evil
and calculating nature. (They also pulled the interesting touch of having him
get sick in the mountains, doing so much coughing and wheezing when he’s taken
into custody that the woman sheriff in charge of the investigation — more on her later — orders a deputy to give him cough medicine.)
My background in the facts of the real case came from a post on Oprah Winfrey’s
Oxygen site, https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/a-murder-to-remember-julio-torres-and-candra-torres-case,
and a documentary Lifetime showed after the movie hosted by Elizabeth Smart,
who was kidnapped and held hostage for far longer than Candra was and by
someone with quite different motives, and whose own case has been the subject
of two TV-movies already. Elizabeth Smart hotly disputes the whole idea of
“Stockholm Syndrome” and insists that she never felt anything towards her
captors other than fear, loathing and hatred — and she comes off as way too sweet, as if the year-long ordeal she went
through was just a blip in her otherwise nice white-bread Mormon life. (Her
captors were also Mormons, a man who had picked Smart to be his wife number two
and his wife number one, who’s really the most complicated character in the
tale.)
The most interesting character in A Murder to Remember is the hard-ass butch woman sheriff who runs law
enforcement in Oregon City, Oregon, where Robin is held and given a polygraph
examination — as is her captor Sam, who passes his test while Robin fails hers.
(In real life Candra took two
polygraph tests, passing the first — in which Brown was also present and she
went along with his story that her husband’s death had been an accident — and
failing the second, in which she told what turned out to be the real story.
There’s a reason why polygraph
tests are not admissible as evidence in U.S. courts.) Though she represents yet
another change from the true story — in which the lead investigator was a man —
Sheriff Watkins (played by Law and Order veteran Leslie Hendrix — another Law and Order alumna, Carolyn McCormick, played Robin’s mother
Celeste) is by far the movie’s most compelling character. Tall, with her hair
pulled back, her face heavily wrinkled and a tie around her neck, Watkins
becomes a sort of cross between the Wise Old Crone and the Avenging Angel,
originally uncertain of who or what to believe but ultimately becoming
convinced of Sam Turner’s guilt and determined to nail him despite the lack of
much in the way of forensics or other actual evidence. (The cops who first
investigated the crime scene had bought into the “accident” theory and much of
the evidence that could have proved otherwise was destroyed; as the documentary
points out, it was only through sheer accident that a piece of the husband’s
flesh at the entry wound survived, and its lack of powder burns proved that the
gun which killed him was at least three feet away, precluding the sort of
accidental shooting the killer had claimed.)
Though it’s somewhat disappointing
that the film shows none of Turner’s actual trial — especially since one of the
big issues in the film’s latter half is whether Robin will be strong enough to
testify with Turner there in the courtroom — A Murder to Remember is actually a quite well-done film. Director Givens
(her first film in that capacity) turns in an excellent job, bringing a strong
visual sense to the narrative and effectively playing up the contrast between
the dire things that are happening to the people and the awesome beauty of the
natural settings in which they’re happening. She also has the usual knack of
actor-directors of getting effectively understated performances from her actors
(as I’ve noted in these pages before, even actor-directors who as actors were
heavy-duty hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, got their actors to
underplay) — though I thought Kevin Rodriguez really overdid his character’s immaturity on the way to the
mountain and it’s hard to take seriously a tragic drama about a character
murdered way too young when he’s made himself as insufferable as Rodriguez made
Javier. Still, that’s a minor blemish on an otherwise quite well acted and
directed film. Writer Benson missed a few opportunities — I would have hoped
for a soft-core porn scene between the Riveras on the way up the mountain and a
scene of Robin being sexually assaulted by Sam after he killed Javier, if only
to depict the contrast between the two the way the makers of Sleeping
with Danger did in the contrasting sex
scenes between the leads, the fully consensual and obviously enjoyable sex the
woman was having with her future abuser at the start of their relationship and
the brutal rape he commits on her after he’s bound her and before he tries to
kill her.
But Benson also depicted the action effectively even though some of
her departures from real life are annoying (in the film Robin takes only one polygraph test, goes along with the “accident”
story, and fails it), and though making the sheriff a woman was counter-factual
it not only fit in with Lifetime’s boast that they were empowering women by
using them for all the major behind-the-camera tasks, it also created the
strongest and most indelible character in the movie. Leslie Hendrix’s
performance reminded me much more of Frances McDormand’s work — particularly as
a rural sheriff herself in Fargo
and a private law enforcer, determined to get justice for her raped and
murdered daughter, in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — than her own previous acting as the medical
examiner on Law and Order, and
she becomes a chilling character. You wouldn’t want to be facing her in a
police station whether you had done anything illegal or not, but you’d also
have the sense that she has a strong enough commitment to justice she wouldn’t
railroad an innocent defendant just to keep up her solve rate. Sheriff Watkins
is the sort of law enforcer who doesn’t give a damn about any individual person
but does care deeply about
justice and truth, and her exultation when she receives the report from the
state crime lab about the absence of powder burns on Javier’s entrance wound —
and realizes that, whether it’s sufficient evidence to win a conviction against
him, it convinces her that the
killing wasn’t an “accident” and Sam Turner is guilty, is a quite effective
depiction of visible emotion from a character who, like her real-world
prototypes, rarely allows herself to get emotional about anything related to her work.
