33 Years After Candyman First Terrified Audiences, Fans Are Only Now Learning the Truth: One of Its Most Haunting Scenes Wasn’t Fiction—It Was Ripped from a Real Chicago Murder

 It begins with a frantic whisper into a 911 line: “Someone is coming through the bathroom cabinet!” Ruthie Mae McCoy, a 52-year-old grandmother living in the shadows of Chicago’s Abbott Homes public housing project, made that desperate plea on April 22, 1987. Police dismissed it as paranoia from a woman battling schizophrenia. But when they arrived three days later, they found her body slumped in a bedroom, shot four times in the legs and chest, her apartment ransacked. The intruder hadn’t smashed a window or kicked in a door—he’d crawled through the thin plaster wall behind her bathroom medicine cabinet, exploiting a notorious design flaw in the crumbling high-rises that connected neighboring units like hidden tunnels. This wasn’t urban legend. It was real. And five years later, it clawed its way into Hollywood as the chilling inspiration for Candyman, the 1992 horror classic that turned mirrors into portals of terror.

Ruthie Mae McCoy’s story is a nightmare etched in neglect and tragedy. A resident of the ABLA Homes complex on Chicago’s Near West Side—home to 17,000 souls in decaying towers built in the 1960s—McCoy had endured a lifetime of hardship. Divorced with a daughter, Vernita, she scraped by on disability checks, her days blurred by mental illness and the constant threat of violence in a neighborhood plagued by gangs and break-ins. Reports from the Chicago Reader in 1987 reveal that for over a year, residents had whispered about “ghosts in the walls”—burglars prying loose medicine cabinets to slip between apartments, stealing what little they could without tripping alarms. McCoy wasn’t imagining it; she was living it.

That fateful evening, McCoy dialed 911 twice around 8:45 p.m., her voice rising in panic: “They’re coming through the bathroom!” Neighbors heard screams and bangs, calling police themselves, but no patrol arrived. By morning, silence. It wasn’t until April 25, when a foul odor seeped from her 11th-floor unit at 1440 W. 13th St., that officers forced entry. The scene was grotesque: McCoy dead on the floor, blood pooling from multiple gunshot wounds, drawers yanked open, jewelry gone. The medicine cabinet dangled by a hinge, revealing a jagged hole punched through to the adjacent apartment—apartment 1705, occupied by a young woman who claimed ignorance.

Investigators pieced together a grim puzzle. Two men, Jackie Robinson and Johnny Robinson (no relation), were arrested days later, linked to a string of similar break-ins. They confessed to the burglary but denied the murder, claiming McCoy was already dead when they entered. Evidence was scant: no fingerprints on the gun, no witnesses. After a two-year trial marred by witness intimidation and procedural errors, they walked free in 1989. The case remains officially unsolved, a cold file in the Chicago Police Department archives. McCoy’s daughter, Vernita, sued the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) for negligence, winning a settlement in 1988 that exposed the systemic rot: underfunded maintenance, ignored complaints, and a design flaw in the mirrored cabinets that turned homes into interconnected traps. “They knew the walls were paper-thin,” Vernita later said. “My mother begged for help, and they let her die.”

Enter Bernard Rose, the British director scouting Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects for his 1992 adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Forbidden. Local janitors, over coffee, recounted the McCoy murder as urban folklore: a woman killed by “something coming through the mirror.” Rose was hooked. In Candyman, the scene crystallizes: grad student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) crawls through a bathroom cabinet into a blood-soaked lair, confronting the hook-handed specter born from lynching horrors. The victim? Ruthie Jean, a fictional echo of McCoy, stabbed while pleading for aid. Rose wove in real Cabrini-Green lore—gang violence, poverty, racial tension—transforming McCoy’s tragedy into a metaphor for systemic abandonment. “It was too perfect, too horrific,” Rose told The Guardian in a 2021 retrospective. “Her story haunted me—the mirror as a portal to hell, right in your home.”

The 1992 film grossed $25 million on a $9 million budget, spawning three sequels and a 2021 Jordan Peele reboot that grossed $73 million amid pandemic restrictions. Tony Todd’s Candyman endures as a queer, Black icon of vengeance, but McCoy’s shadow lingers unspoken. Recent podcasts like Candyman: The True Story Behind the Bathroom Mirror Murder (2025, 48 Hours) and viral TikToks have revived her tale, drawing 10 million views with eerie parallels: the 911 tape, the cabinet crawl, the ignored cries. “Hollywood romanticized the monster,” says true-crime podcaster Dometi Pongo. “Ruthie was the real victim—forgotten because she was poor, Black, and ‘crazy.’”

Today, ABLA Homes are gone, demolished in 2007 as part of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation. But McCoy’s murder endures as a cautionary scar: a reminder of housing horrors that bred Candyman’s myth. Once you know the truth behind the hook, the mirror’s reflection feels forever tainted. Ruthie Mae McCoy didn’t summon a ghost—she lived one. And in the silence after her call, the real horror emerged: indifference, more deadly than any specter.