Everyone knows the murderous bloke in the movie ‘Scream’ and his mask, but I just found out that the whole movie is based on a real killer and since I know, now you have to.
Kevin Williamson wrote the original ‘Scream’ film, and in the movie’s ‘making of’ documentary, he said he was inspired to write it when saw a news story about a serial killer.
He was staying at a mate’s house and noticed the window was open, which made him scared shitless because he thought a serial killer had just snuck in the house. Fair enough mate.
“I was house-sitting for a friend of mine and I walk into the family room and I see that the window’s open, and I’m freaked out,” he recalled.
“So I go and I get a butcher’s knife and I start walking around the house and call up my friend on the phone and [say] ‘I think someone’s in the house’.”
The serial killer that Williamson saw on the TV that night was Danny Rowling, AKA ‘The Gainesville Ripper’.
Rowling murdered five college students over three days and the sicko would decapitate his victims and pose their dead bodies before leaving the scene.
Yeah, I’d grab a knife and call a friend if that was going on in my neighbourhood.
He largely got caught because his former neighbour, Cindy Juracich, tipped the cops after she remembered some really crook stuff he had told her.
According to Juracich, one day Rowling came over and told her and her husband that “he likes to stick knives into people”. Yeah mate, that will get you caught.
When Cindy saw the news of the students being murdered she decided to call the cops and tell them to investigate Rowling.
Rowling pleaded guilty after the cops caught him and was then executed in 2006.
