The buildings were designed with the pipe chases behind the medicine cabinets to provide easy access to the plumbing if something's leaking, janitors simply have to remove the medicine cabinet to check the pipes. Two more boys had been behind him in the wall, but had retreated.' 'Noises in the bathroom alerted her to a second intruder, a 13-year-old boy whose girth slowed him as he attempted to squirm out of the opening where Johnson's medicine cabinet had been until the first intruder removed it. The cabinets themselves, secured by only six nails, are no obstacle.Ī fifth floor resident named Alice Johnson, told Borgia that she was watching a television one night when she saw a figure dart out of her bathroom and race out the front door. 'Even the dullest youth here knows you can slither from one apartment to the adjacent one through the pipe chase, about two-and-a-half feet across, between the cabinets,' wrote investigative journalist Steve Borgia in the Chicago Reader. Ruthie McCoy's shocking murder inspired the 1992 horror film, Candyman, which is about a Chicago cop that investigates a spate of mysterious bathroom-based killings By that time of McCoy's murder, intruders had been sneaking into apartments through medicine cabinets for at least a year. They wondered: was this the possible mode of entry?Ĭops were stunned by the brazen bathroom break-in but residents of the Grace Abbot project were not. Through the opening, detectives could see the pipes that her killers wriggled past, and beyond that, the bathroom of 1108. Leaving behind, instead, a gaping foot-and-a-half wide hole that opened up into a short corridor.
Investigators were confounded when they discovered that the medicine cabinet was missing entirely. She had been shot four times and crime-scene but there was no indication of forced entry. McCoy lived in the Grace Abbott Homes - 15-story Y-shaped tower where murder, poverty, drug addiction, rape and burglary was part of daily life.Ĭops didn't discover McCoy's lifeless body until two days later, after multiple trips and phone calls from worried neighbors summoned the police to break down her front door. Ruthie failed to answer the door or respond to multiple phone calls and the police left after 30 minutes of repeated attempts.Īt the time, violence in the south side Chicago projects was rampant. Other 911 calls from neighbors reported shouting and gunshots from apartment 1109 but by the time cops arrived on the scene, there was total silence. 'They throwed the cabinet down,' she told the dispatcher. This time, she wasn't just imagining things. But McCoy wasn't hallucinating when - later that night - she made a frantic 911 phone call to report that someone was breaking into her apartment through her medicine cabinet. Terrifying fantasies and bizarre outbursts were par for the course in her life. The chilling crime was later turned into the 1992 slasher flick, Candyman. The videos immediately prompted users to draw comparisons the terrifying 1987 murder of Ruthie May McCoy, a 52-year-old Chicago resident who was attacked by intruders that broke into her apartment through her bathroom medicine cabinet. 'It doesn't matter how high the heat goes, I'm cold.'įollowing the frigid draft to her bathroom mirror led to the disturbing discovery of a concealed portal into a dilapidated, unoccupied apartment next door. 'I'm in my New York City apartment and it's cold,' she says in the first clip. Hartsoe was investigating why her apartment was so cold and gamely documenting her sleuthing for TikTok. When New York City resident Samantha Hartsoe made the shocking discovery that there was an abandoned apartment hidden behind her bathroom mirror, little did she know it would draw chilling comparisons to the 1992 slasher film Candyman when she posted it to Tik Tok - and a reminder of the forgotten real-life murder that inspired it.
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