MOVIES ABOUT MURDER AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PART 1

 From early on, storytellers fascinated audiences with tales of the awful things that people do to one another, like stealing, lying, cheating, and especially killing. For example, Shakespeare penned a variety of plays about those whose lives ended tragically because of ambition (Macbeth), revenge (Hamlet), or hatred (Romeo and Juliette). The murder mystery, on the other hand, appeared much later. Generally, people consider Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the first modern detective story. In it, C. Auguste Dupin used ratiocination, or analytical reasoning, to solve the senseless murders of a woman and her daughter. Fifty years after that, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introduced audiences to a more fleshed-out character named Sherlock Holmes. The story was so well received that the author went on to write a collection of novels featuring the detective and his ever-skeptical sidekick, Dr. Watson. Doyle’s style soon influenced other writers, and they began to create similar heroes, like Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie), Sam Spade (Dashiell Hammett), and Phillip Marlow (Raymond Chandler). And, just as happened with science fiction, when they realized how many people loved the genre, screenwriters started writing scripts and producers started making movies.

In 1903, the silent short Sherlock Holmes Baffled came out and twenty years later the first full-length silent movie about the wily detective entitled The Man From Beyond hit the big screen. Soon after, the industry began producing a plethora of mysteries, starting with The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and followed by other great films including The Maltese Falcon, Murder On the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, and Rear Window. These types of plots have proven to be so popular, in fact, that movie companies are still making them, including the Glass Onion and The Pale Blue Eye, which recently aired on Netflix.  

Other than stories about the wild west (The James Gang), mobsters (The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre), genocide (the cavalry slaughtering Native Americans), or war (soldiers killing civilians), most films about homicide contained one or two victims, one or two perpetrators, and a brilliant detective who solved the crime. That changed in 1965, however, when Truman Capote published the biographical novel In Cold Blood, which described the real mass murder of the Clutter family and the capture and execution of their killers, Dick Hickok, and Perry Smith. Two years later (1967) Pax Enterprises turned the book into a movie that was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Cinematography.

That film introduced a new type of entertainment, and its influence can be seen in numerous projects from that era. For example, the movie Badlands (1973) based on the 1957 true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate, whose parents and baby sister along with eight other people were murdered, starred Martin Sheen as Kit (Starkweather) and Sissy Spacek as Holly (Fugate). In the film, the couple is caught, put on trial, and found guilty. Like Starkweather, Kit is executed in the electric chair eighteen months after his conviction, but unlike Fugate, who served eighteen years of a life sentence (which still causes controversy), Holly ends up getting probation and marrying her attorney’s son because in the movies pretty young girls get sent to prison.

That film was followed three years later by the made-for-television miniseries Helter Skelter (1976), taken from the book by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. It recounted the Manson Family’s Tate-LaBianca spree killings, and the perpetrators’ subsequent arrests, convictions, and sentences. Then in the 1980s, two true-crime stories entitled Fatal Vision (1984) and Echoes in the Darkness (1987) were televised. The former recalled the grueling nine years it took prosecutors to convict Jeffry McDonald for the murder of his pregnant wife and two young daughters, while the latter recounted the case of  murdered schoolteacher Susan Reinert and her missing children, Michael and Karen. It took seven years for prosecutors to put William Bradfield, Susan’s fellow teacher and secret lover, and Principal Jay Smith behind bars. Even in these bizarre cases, though, the format was pretty traditional, the killers and victims were known to one another, and the motives (McDonald-discontent; Bradfield and Smith-greed) were pretty clear.

Then in 1986, the biopic The Deliberate Stranger aired. Unlike the other docudramas, this one detailed the story of a man named Ted Bundy who spent years murdering multiple female strangers for no discernible reasons. Although they didn’t know it, the viewers had just been introduced to a serial killer, a term coined by FBI Agent Robert Ressler in 1974. Although journalist Richard W. Larson’s book was published in 1980, most Americans were unaware that there are monstrous people who kill simply because they want to. Even more shocking, shortly thereafter stories about similar perpetrators like John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Bruno, Jr, (the Hillside Stranglers), Gary Ridgeway (the Green River Killer), and the still unidentified Zodiac killer, appeared on store shelves.

Noting how many people were fascinated by these gory tales, the movie industry cashed in by putting them on celluloid. At first, they primarily made horror films like the Scream, Friday the 13^th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Then, to terrify readers (and viewers) even more, plots began portraying serial killers as average-looking men with genius IQs that could outsmart the cops at every turn. The most striking example is Hannibal Lecter from Thomas Harris’ novel The Silence of the Lambs. More recently, some serial killers are even being depicted as basically good guy heroes, like Dexter, whose prey deserves what they get.

Characters who were seldom the subject of these types of movies, however, were children. It’s not that the young were never victims. Of the twenty-nine people killed in the 1979-1981 Atlanta Child Murders case, eleven ranged in ages from seven to twelve and another twelve were under the age of eighteen. Two of Jeffrey Dahmer’s and the majority of John Wayne Gacy’s victims were adolescents, and two of Bundy’s victims were only twelve. It also would be inaccurate to say that children were never murdered in movies. Several films based on Stephen King’s books showed children meeting horrific demises, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand included, but the perpetrators were supernatural beings, not real people. In fact, aside from the 1959 made-for-television movie Compulsion about the trial of Leopold and Loeb, two teenagers that murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, and the 1976 docudrama The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case which recounted the 1932 kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son (An almost unrecognizably young Anthony Hopkins played kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann.), children were seldom victims of violent crime. In fact, during the Twentieth Century, the film industry seldom put murder and children under the same umbrella, and when it did, for instance in The Bad Seed (1956), Lord of the Flies (1963) Children of the Corn (1984), or The Good Son (1993) the kids were the killers. 

It is interesting, then, that in 1994 two movies with plots that eerily tied childhood and murder together were released, Silent Fall and When the Bough Breaks. Admittedly, neither shows the victims, and there is a supernatural kind of vibe in both, but these stories were much different than other films of the day, which is probably why I remembered them.

 

Silent Fall – 1994

In 1994, Richard Dreyfus had been a professional actor for thirty years. He portrayed his first character in 1964, at the age of sixteen, and, as of today, has completed 124 projects, including the well-known movies Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Goodbye Girl, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, and Mr. Holland’s Opus, for which he was again nominated. His appearances have included Shakespearean dramas (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), light-hearted comedies (Moon Over Parador), voice-overs (Family Guy), TV series (Weeds), and documentaries (The Great Battles of the Civil War-Narrator). He even played a psychiatrist in What About Bob?, three years before Bruce Beresford cast him as psychotherapist Dr. Jake Rainer in Silent Fall. 

When the movie opens, it is Halloween evening and Jake (Richard Dreyfus) is working in his study. Excited trick-or-treaters fill the neighborhood, knocking on doors and demanding candy, but when they get to his house, Jake ignores them hoping they will move on. When the bell continues to ring, however, he pulls himself away from his work and trudges to the door only to find not children, but Deputy Sheriff Bear (Zahn Tokiya-ku McClarnon), standing on his porch. The police officer says that Sheriff Mitch Rivers (J. T. Walsh) needs his help with a case. Disgruntled, Jake tries to beg off, but when he realizes the Deputy isn’t taking no for an answer, he reluctantly agrees. As the two men drive from Jake’s middle-class home into an upscale neighborhood, they discuss the unseasonably warm weather. Bear comments that his Apache grandmother used to call the phenomenon Indian Summer, a time “when a man’s shadow would come alive and wrestle with his soul.” However, it isn’t the weather that seems to bother the doctor.

Bear pulls up to an opulent two-story house and leads Jake inside, where the sheriff greets him. Both men appear tense as Mitch explains that someone has hacked the homeowner and his wife to death, their eighteen-year-old daughter Sylvie (Liv Tyler) is missing, and the couple’s nine-year-old son, Tim (Ben Faulkner), is present but won’t tell anyone what happened. Grudgingly, Jake accompanies him upstairs to the parent’s bedroom where EMTs are zipping up body bags, blood saturates the carpet and bed, and Tim, also smeared with blood, is holding a large butcher knife. Jake immediately deduces that the child is autistic, but although he appears to be nonverbal, the boy does an excellent job of conveying that he wants to be left alone by threatening to stab anyone who comes near him. Jake hasn’t worked with children since one of his patients committed suicide a year earlier. However, it’s clear that he is probably the only person who can handle the situation without using drugs, a practice he finds loathsome, so he steps up. Talking in a cartoonish voice while studying the scene, he notices that there are playing cards scattered at Tim’s feet. Jake knows that people with autism love anything to do with numbers, so he sends the police officers to locate another deck. When Deputy Bear brings one back, Jake gives it to Tim in exchange for the knife.  

Meanwhile, another officer finds Sylvie bloody and unconscious in her bedroom closet. She immediately comes to and rushes to her parent’s bedroom, where she sets about comforting her brother and cleaning him up. While doing so, Sylvie explains she didn’t witness the attack because she was out shopping. In fact, the only people who were home when the intruder broke in were her brother, her mother, and her father because the maid was off, and the gardener was out buying plants. When she returned from the mall, Sylvie states, Tim was standing at the door of the bedroom, and a man was inside stabbing her parents. Sensing her presence, he turned and ran, slamming her against the wall on the way out. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the closet. Although Tim is the only witness, the police conclude he couldn’t have committed the crime because he isn’t tall or strong enough.

While the adults are talking, Tim becomes unresponsive, and Mitch pressures Jake to make the boy communicate. Fearing that someone will medicate the child, he is considering taking the case when Dr. Rene Harlinger (John Lithgow), who advocates using drugs, arrives. Harlinger instantly diagnoses Tim as catatonic and prepares a shot to elicit the boy’s cooperation. Unwilling to argue about it, Jake decides to leave, but on his way out the door, he throws a deck of cards at Tim and the boy catches it. Back at home, he discusses the case with his wife Karen (Linda Hamilton) who knows him better than anyone. She encourages him to work with the boy, but Jake is hesitant because he doesn’t want what happened before to happen again.

In the meantime, Sylvie and Tim are searching for a place to stay. They don’t have many relatives and those they do have are afraid of Tim, who can be difficult to control. Finally, running out of options, they go back to their house and curl up on the blood-stained carpet in their parent’s bedroom. Later, Sylvie goes to the library to research Jake and decides that despite losing a patient to suicide, the doctor is the best person to work with her brother. At first, he refuses, but after he gets an emergency call from the hospital where Rene is on staff, he agrees to take the case. He fixes up the room where he used to work with children, has Sylvie bring Tim over, and sets about trying to build a one-on-one relationship with the boy. 

The first sign that Jake’s made a breakthrough is when Tim voluntarily closes drawers and cabinet doors that Jake leaves open. The second occurs when the boy takes the jacks and queens out of a deck of cards and begins to cut them.  However, when Jake excitedly shares this information with Sylvie, she says he’s wrong; it’s not about the people, it’s about their voices. To show what she means, she grabs Tim, and they take Jake to a restaurant where her brother mimics the hostess perfectly. Sylvie treats her brother’s ability as if it’s a cool parlor trick, but Jake believes it means Tim doesn’t feel safe. His goal is to help the boy comfortable speaking up for himself. The problem is, every time Jake seems to make progress, he encounters the same two roadblocks: Tim runs from any mention of his parents, and something always happens to Sylvie that interferes. Finally, frustrated, Jake sputters “Goddamn,” which causes Tim to repeat a dialog in different voices. As Jake contemplates who is saying what, though, Sylvie steps in and explains that the conversation has nothing to do with the murder but occurred when her father and mother were having sex.

Meanwhile, Mitch has been searching Sylvie and Tim’s house and has found negatives that suggest that Tim’s father was molesting him. The Sheriff concludes that this could be a motive for Tim to have killed his parents and needs to know if the boy was capable of doing it after all. He calls Jake and orders him to bring Tim to the hospital where Rene is waiting to hypnotize the boy. Unable to prevent what he knows is a mistake, Jake complies and watches as Rene puts the boy under, then convinces him that he’s locked in a dark room. Terrified, Tim rushes to the door and rips off the knob. Over Jake's strong objections, Rene declares that Tim definitely had the strength to commit the murders, and Mitch starts to arrest him. Unconvinced, Jake asks for one more day to find out what really happened, and the sheriff hesitantly complies.

Jake takes Tim back to his house. Sylvie is there and changes her story by admitting that Tim did kill her parents because their father was molesting him, and their mother didn’t stop it. While they are talking, Tim cuts more cards and positions them, laying down three and placing the queen standing over them. While Jake is puzzling over what the boy is trying to tell him, Sylvie brings in a bottle of wine and pours it into two glasses. After making sure Jake is drinking his, she admits she chose him to work with her brother because he is a quitter, and she thought he would give up so Tim would never have to tell his side of the story. As she’s talking, Tim wanders away and Jake begins to feel woozy. He realizes she spiked his drink and collapses to the floor. Sylvie drags him out onto the frozen lake, breaks the ice surrounding him, and reveals that she plans to tell the Sheriff that Jake chased her onto the pond to seduce her. Luckily for her, the ice broke beneath him, and he fell in. Jake’s body starts to sink, and she walks back to the house, stepping inside just in time to answer a call. The caller is Mitch, and he says he needs to see her at the police station, but in reality, it’s Tim imitating the sheriff’s voice. He hides until his sister is gone, then pulls Jake out of the lake and brings him inside to warm up. Of course, when Sylvie gets to the police station and Mitch tells her he didn’t call, she realizes her brother has tricked her. She watches the sheriff put a gun in his briefcase and when he turns his back, she steals it.

Back at the house, Jake is on the line with 911 when he looks at the cards and finally understands what Tim has been telling him all along. I’m stopping there. If you want to know what the cards mean, and why Sylvie is so determined to get rid of Jake, you’ll have to watch the movie. In fact, go over it twice. The first just to understand the plot, then the second to look for the clues that have been there all along. To get you started, I’ll give you two hints. The first is Jake’s statement to Mitch that every family has secrets. The second is Jake’s speech to Sylvie about Tim’s reluctance to use his voice.

https://americanwritersmuseum.org/many-writers-many-forms-mystery/#:~:text=The%20mystery%20genre%20as%20we,committed%20the%20crime%20and%20why

 

When the Bough Breaks-1994

There are countless award-winning actors, but few have appeared in more projects than Richard Dreyfuss. Martin Sheen, who has worked in over 250 productions, however, is one of them. That said, the men’s careers have numerous things in common. Like Dreyfuss, Sheen started out on TV while in his mid-teens. Like Dreyfuss, he appeared in numerous television shows, perform voice-overs, and narrate documentaries. Like Dreyfuss, he starred in popular movies like The Departed, Apocalypse Now, and the aforementioned Badlands.  And although he’s never won an Academy Award, the industry has recognized the actor for his work many times, and won three Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a SAG (Screen Actors Guild). And, during his stellar career, like Dreyfuss, in the 1990s the actor accepted a role in a movie involving murder and children, Michael Cohn’s thriller When the Bough Breaks.

There have been three movies with this title, so be certain to watch the one made in 1994. In this film, it’s nighttime on a rainy Fourth of July in Houston, and children are carrying sparklers and dancing in the flooded streets. As a teenage girl and her boyfriend run through the gushing water, a severed hand spurts out of a storm drain. Nearby, a road crew repairing the overwhelmed sewer system finds more of them. They call the police, and soon the area is awash with cops and news crews. To check out the situation, Captain Swaggert (Martin Sheen) arrives and an officer shows him a plastic bag filled with different sizes of hands. Since his department is ill-equipped to investigate this odd type of event, he turns to the state crime division for help. Rather than sending a regular police officer, however, the state sends a systems analyst who was trained at Quantico, dresses business professional, talks about statistics and data collection, prefers Earl Grey tea to coffee, smokes non-stop, and is named Audrey Macleah (Ally Walker).  

Uncomfortable working with a woman, the captain sends Audrey to the morgue, which houses the evidence. The coroner Vince Hess (Dick Welsbacher) explains that although many hands are missing, someone numbered the ones he has which vary in size, showing that they are halves of pairs that came from children ranging in ages from five to twelve. One notable thing about them is that, except for suture scars around the wrists where the perpetrator sewed them onto something, none have any blemishes. Audrey’s first thought is for the department to contact families who have reported their children missing and find out about the locations and circumstances of the disappearances. Not wanting to upset the families needlessly, however, Swaggert resists the idea.

Thinking that someone with a history of mental illness might be involved, the Captain sends Audrey to the local psychiatric hospital to speak with Dr. Singer (Ron Recasner). The doctor states that he has seen no patients likely to be the perpetrator of these crimes, but has a fifteen-year-old patient named Jordan (Tara Subkoff) who sometimes displays behaviors that could be tied to the case. The boy has been at the facility since he was five years old and every year on July 16^th, which is his birthday, red welts appear on his wrists, and he draws numbered hands on the walls. Describing the patient as an elective mute, meaning that he can talk but won’t, the doctor takes Audrey to the boy’s room in the basement, where he has always lived. When they walk in, Jordan is sitting on the bed, humming to a doll with the name Jenny written across its forehead.

Audrey wants to examine the doll, but Dr. Singer tells her that Jordan, who has been there ten years and never had a visitor, is antisocial. Rather than being dissuaded, Audrey, who is also aloof and has a back mysteriously covered in scars, seems drawn to the boy. Thus, when the doctor makes her leave, it is a pretty good bet that she’ll be back. Noting Jordan’s penchant for expressing his thoughts through art, the next time Audrey visits, she brings a sketch pad with crayons and encourages him to answer her questions by drawing. He remains rebellious, however, and instead mimics her. When she reaches toward Jordan to break through to him, he bites her. Because she feels an odd connection to the boy, however, Audrey knows better than to let him win and warns that the next time he does that, she’ll bite him back.

When she isn’t with Jordan, Audrey is collaborating with the police, looking into reports of missing or murdered children in the Houston area. She quickly discovers that every year since the early 1980s, one child has gone missing around the sixteenth of July. Details of the disappearances differ with one exception: they all occurred in public parks, suggesting that a serial offender uses them as hunting grounds. Unfortunately, it’s already the fourteenth of July, and they only have two days to find the culprit. The police split up into two groups, one patrols the city’s parks, and the other contacts the victims’ families. The police also have a video that a child recorded at his birthday party when an abduction took place. Even though the officer who worked that case insists there’s nothing to see, Audrey wants to check for herself. Admittedly, the film is grainy, and the focus is bad, but after repeatedly playing and rewinding, she notices two things that the policeman missed: one is the presence of an ice cream truck that doesn’t have a logo, and the other is that it plays the same song which Jordan hums, Rock-A-Bye-Baby.

Leaving the police surveilling the parks, Audrey goes back to see Jordan. He is staring up out of the window, and when she asks what he’s doing, he explains his name is Jenny, he’s underground, and his Daddy sometimes brings him hands. Meanwhile, back in one park, a teenage girl is jogging. Wanting something cold, she approaches an ice cream truck that’s parked beside a trail. When the driver doesn’t come to the window, she climbs inside, opens the freezer, and just as she reaches for a treat, a man grabs her from behind. At the hospital, after struggling with her difficult patient, an exhausted Audrey falls asleep in his room. When she wakes up, she sees the walls covered in drawings and the words two rivers written in her lipstick. Excited, she goes back to the department and asks if anyone knows what the words mean. The officers tell her that the name of a town and there once was a hospital there, but it closed ten years earlier. Suspecting that the hospital could be the link they’re looking for, they check a list of death certificates and find an entry for a newborn girl named Jennifer Lynn that died at the Two Rivers Hospital on July sixteenth fifteen years earlier.

Audrey goes to the abandoned facility and comes across a maintenance man who directs her to the basement where the old records are kept. There is water standing on the floor and boxes stacked haphazardly, so it takes a while for her to find Jennifer’s file. The report lists the baby’s mother as Mrs. Eben, and her father as the attending physician Dr. Eben (Ron Perlman). It states that Jennifer had serious birth defects, and an attached death certificate verifies the baby’s date of death as July 16^th. It also lists the parent’s home address. Running out of time, Audrey drives to the doctor’s house without waiting for backup and rings the doorbell. The housekeeper answers, introduces herself as Mrs. Voss (Julianna McCarthy), and after explaining that the doctor is away on vacation, invites Audrey inside. Mrs. Voss goes into the kitchen to make tea, and while she’s gone, Audrey spies a photo on the mantle of a pretty girl. When the housekeeper comes back, Audrey asks who it is. The woman replies that it is Mrs. Eben at her childhood home in Two Rivers. She explains that the doctor’s wife was a great pianist but tragically died a few years earlier. Mrs. Voss says she has never seen their daughter Jenny, who is in a private school in Europe, but according to the doctor, the girl looks just like her mother. Audrey notes that Jordan strongly resembles her, too.

When Audrey leaves the doctor’s home, she feels certain that Jennifer didn’t die at birth, and that she is Jordan’s twin. She further believes that the girl is at the house in Two Rivers and that her father is there for her birthday. Determined to prove it, Audrey drives back to the town, finds Mrs. Eben’s girlhood home, and knocks on the door. No one answers, so she looks around, and notes that although someone boarded up the windows, he parked a late-model truck in the garage. This convinces her further that she’s right, so she breaks in. Immediately noting that even though the place appears vacant, the utilities are on. She continues to investigate and finds a closet with a trapdoor on the floor. The latch is hard to manipulate, but once she figures out how it operates, the hatch opens and reveals a set of stairs that lead down.

They take her into a dusty basement that is crowded with old furniture, except for a back corner where a child-size bed covered with stuffed animals sits close to a locked door. Audrey forces it open, creeps inside, and sees x-rays of misshapen hands hanging on a light board and a fully equipped operating room. In the eerie quiet, she can hear someone crying softly and, upon searching further, finds the missing girl from the park chained to a pipe. Just as she frees the girl, the ring of heavy footsteps echoes from above, then descends the steps. Once again, I’m not spoiling the ending because that’s no way to treat a thriller. All I’m going to say is that you already have the information you need to solve the mystery.

 

Summary

In the Twenty-First Century, it’s not unusual to see tragic stories, both real and fictional, about child abduction or murder, and today there are many professional actors who perform despite having a variety of challenges. However, this was a rarity in the 1990s. In fact, the primary commonality between these movies is that they presented audiences with situations about children that needed to be considered. In one, a boy with autism not only witnesses his parents’ murders but faces being charged with the crime, despite only being ten years old and unable to understand what’s happening. In the other, children have been disappearing for ten years, and no one realizes it because the police do not share information from one precinct to another, and the officers whose job it is to solve the cases don’t know how to go about it. Then there is the whole “females are not to be taken seriously” theme, which is starkly apparent in both movies. Jake’s wife has to reassure him repeatedly that he is the best person to work with Tim because he doubts her ability to judge. Likewise, the Captain and police officers repeatedly rebuff Audrey’s suggestions despite her education and training because, in their estimation, her sex supersedes her qualifications. However, the most important aspect of these films is that they were at the forefront of a new type of genre, one meant to start the American public viewing young victims in a new light. When the Bough Breaks asserts that terrible things don’t only happen to adults; and that although people like Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer are exceedingly rare, they exist, sometimes in our own homes. Meanwhile, the motive of Silent Fall seems to be a reminder that monsters don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. For them, it is acceptable to pursue even the most vulnerable members of our society.

I think one catalyst that drove writers to pen these scripts was the kidnapping of Adam Walsh, a case that began with the disappearance of a seven-year-old boy from a Sears store in July 1981. He was not the first child to disappear, but his case became well known because his father, John, a successful developer of luxury hotels, was a savvy promoter and his mother, Reve, a sophisticated and intelligent woman, was an impassioned parent. Perhaps a more significant factor was that the attractive couple photographed well on television shows like Good Morning America, where they went to plead for help in finding their son. It is important to note that some critics believe their campaign has caused an exaggerated fear of stranger abductions when most missing children either run away or absentee parents take them. However, when the police found Adam’s remains miles away, it was clear a stranger killed him. After their son’s death, the Walshes began to advocate for all missing children. Their tireless campaign convinced Congress to pass the Missing Children Act of 1982 and the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984. Their work culminated in the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which established a nationwide registry for sex offenders that the public can access. 

https://time.com/4437205/adam-walsh-murder/

 

Conclusion    

Currently, Silent Fall is streaming on Freevee, Roku, and Tubi. When the Bough Breaks is also on Tubi, so you can watch either movie as many times as you want. In a couple of months, I will continue with this series by discussing films with adult victims. In the meantime, you can watch other movies from that era that also reflected the changes that occurred in the criminal landscape during the 1980s. Some good examples are Dressed to Kill (1980), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Seven (1995), and Copycat (1995). Movieland TV, another free station, is currently streaming Badlands, and if you have access to Showtime (which has a 30-day free trial going on) you can view a four-part series about the Nebraska murders that were fictionalized in Badlands, along with updates on Caril Ann Fugate.

That's it. I'm gone. Catch you later this spring.