Candyman

Urban Legends ? 

I've touched on it numerous times, The Urban Legend and Campfire-style tales. We all have a favorite. The escaped convict with a hook for a hand stalking horny teens in the woods, The Spider bite from overseas, and of course the “Always check the back seat” style tales, warning people that an ax murderer could be hiding behind you as you blissfully drive down the road. Then movies were made like Candy Man, who comes through the mirror to murder people.

Like that could ever happen, I mean imagine a real life where there is such a thing. We could ask, but Ruthie Mae McCoy, of Chicago, is dead, and the dead speak no tales.

What followed was a bewildering display of multifaceted negligence.

Ruthie Mae McCoy was a living example of how our institutions fail the marginalized and underprivileged. A Black woman who grew up on Chicago's South Side, she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness in her twenties. Despite the consensus that McCoy was mentally ill, those close to her weren't able to identify her condition—only that she would talk to herself or curse at strangers on the street suddenly and unpredictably. She would later be diagnosed with residual-type schizophrenia—a diagnosis that arises when someone has experienced schizophrenic episodes in the past but is not currently exhibiting symptoms.

On the evening of April 22, 1987
The frantic call confused the dispatcher. Recordings showed that McCoy told them that people threw the cabinet down and were coming through the bathroom.

While today we know this meant that attackers were breaking in via the bathroom medicine cabinet, the dispatcher didn't immediately make the connection. Despite the confusion, a police car was sent in response to the call. but when they knocked on her door, no one answered.
A couple officers went to the management office to retrieve the key to her apartment but for unknown reasons, it didn't fit the door’s lock.

Given McCoy's frantic phone call and the follow-up reports from neighbors, you would think the officers on the scene would attempt to overcome these setbacks.

Instead, they left.

The calls to the Police happened 3 more times by neighbors concerned, family wanting welfare checks and lastly the management office.

When the police finally gained access to Ruthie Mae's apartment,it was a grisly scene

Ruthie Mae McCoy was found in her bedroom, shot multiple times, stabbed, and lying in a pool of dried thick blood. The room had been ransacked. And because it'd been a couple days since the break-in had happened, the smell of decomposition had begun to pervade the apartment.
The mode of entry may have shocked some people then, but residents of the complex told a different story. According to a 1987 article by Steve Bogira published in the Chicago Reader, people had been breaking into apartments via medicine cabinets for over a year prior to McCoy's murder.
Two men would later be arrested for the break-in, burglary, and murder (s) - They actually were connected to 3 others.... but they were found not guilty in court.

Perhaps the case of Ruthie Mae McCoy would have been forgotten, had Candyman not hit theaters a few years later.
Not only did the film feature similar details to her murder, but in eerie fashion if you listen to the names in the new Candyman (2021) Movie.
The last name used.
Is Mccoy.

True Story turned Urban legend…one way to find out

CandyMan….CandyMan….