The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story (Housewife Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 29) I watched two movies in quick succession: a Lifetime production called The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story and a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a 1951 film called No Questions Asked – though since the two showings overlapped I watched the latter on YouTube rather than switch from Lifetime to TCM in the middle of The Killer Inside. The Killer Inside was at least nominally based on a true story: Ruth Finley (Teri Hatcher) lives in Wichita, Kansas with her husband Ed (Tahmoh Penikett). The year is 1977, when the so-called “BTK” (the initials stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”) serial killer is terrorizing Wichita, and though the identity of BTK is kept ambiguous in this film, we at least see him as an on-screen character, played by James Ralph. We see him at work on several anonymous victims, and Ruth becomes obsessed with him, following his exploits on TV news while Ed and Ruth’s mother Fay (Candice Hunter) try to get her to change the channel. Ruth works in an office at the Southwestern Bell phone company, though we’re never told what (if anything) Ed does for a job, and the couple have no children. Just as Ed is talking about the two of them taking a vacation to Europe – he wants to go to London, Ruth would rather go to Paris – he suffers a heart attack and nearly dies. Ruth takes a leave of absence from her job to take care of him (as my husband Charles did when I had my heart crisis in December 2021), but she also reports that two men, one of whom was the BTK killer, abducted her and drove her to a deserted stretch of country, only she was able to get away by pepper-spraying them. (The pepper spray comes in a container with a very 1950’s-ish graphic of a woman who was presumably helpless without it.)

Later she reports that a man accosted her in a mall parking lot after she’d gone out to go shopping, very much against the advice of her husband, and stabbed her three times, fortunately missing any of her vital organs. Director Greg Beeman, working from a script by Katie Gruel, cuts from a scene of the attack on her to a shot of a surveillance camera, presumably recording the whole thing, and we think, “Ah, the police are going to look at the surveillance footage and see who did it.” Then, about two-thirds of the way through the film’s running time, we see [big-time spoiler alert!] Ruth Finley herself setting fire to the couple’s home, or at least to the shrubbery outside it, then getting back into bed until her husband Ed, thinking her mystery stalkers set the fire to kill her, rescues her. Throughout the movie Ruth has been narrating a story of how she was abducted and raped as a teenager, including being branded on both thighs with a clothes iron, and she’s been getting letters written in all caps, like the letters from the real BTK, issuing various threats, including that she pay him money or he’ll reveal the truth about her. We’re not sure after the big reveal whether this one really happened, but eventually Fay tells the police investigating the case that when Ruth was three years old and they were living in Kansas’s farm country, she was sexually molested and abused by a neighbor who’d take her out to his barn to have his wicked way with her.

Eventually, after Ruth is committed to a mental institution and the police are threatening to charge her with falsely reporting a “crime” that only took place in her mind, her therapist, here called “Dr. Kenneth Mitchell” (and played by an actor with a striking resemblance to Mad magazine’s iconic logo, Alfred E. Neuman) though his real name was Dr. Alfred Pickens, diagnoses her with multiple personality disorder and says another personality took over Ruth Finley’s consciousness, reported the false “attacks” and set fire to the Finleys’ home. (I had thought it would be Munchhausen’s, but this works about as well even though the fact that Ruth seemingly had only one other “alter” didn’t give Teri Hatcher the chance to give the sort of bravura performance Joanne Woodward and Sally Field did when they played multiple personalities in The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, respectively.) Ultimately the cops decide not to prosecute her and she and Ed are free to take that European trip, where a closing shot shows them at a street café in front of the Eiffel Tower and a few credits explain that Ed and Ruth stayed married until his death in 2011 and she survived and remained relatively healthy, both physically and mentally, until her own death in 2019.

The Killer Inside is well directed and decently scripted, though neither Teri Hatcher nor Tahmoh Penikett are that great as actors (Hatcher’s performance, especially in the early scenes, is so stiff and unemotional that after the big reveal I was wondering whether we were supposed to read her impassivity as a symptom of her mental illness instead of just bad acting). There’s also one anachronism: as Ruth is being ragged by Susan (Victoria Bidewell), her best friend at work, about how predictable her life is, Ruth tells Susan she’s picking a different brand of popcorn for the at-home “movie night” she’s going to have with her husband. At-home “movie nights” weren’t a “thing” until the videocassette recorder was marketed, which wasn’t until 1981 – four years after this film supposedly takes place. I was surprised that after the care the filmmakers took to make everything else look age-appropriate – including the big, clunky sedans the characters drive – they slipped up big-time on that one. I was also amused at the way in which so many of Ruth’s fantasies were presented as actual events on screen and depicted the way she narrated them; in his 1950 film Stage Fright Alfred Hitchcock had pioneered a flashback sequence on screen that turned out to be a character’s lie, but this film goes whole-hog with that gimmick. And when we see the actual surveillance footage from the parking lot where Ruth was supposedly near-fatally stabbed, she does so much writhing around while experiencing the mock “attack” I was surprised she didn’t go full-fledged psycho and tell the cops who showed her the footage, “Didn’t I tell you? My attacker was invisible!”