The Bizarre Story of a Murderer Who May Have Killed the Wrong ‘Psycho’ Actress
· Vice
The shower scene from Psycho is easily one of the most iconic sequences in film history. Spoiler alert for a 66-year-old movie you really should’ve gotten around to watching by now: Roughly midway through the story, Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, decides to take a shower in her room at the Bates Motel, just outside Fairvale, California. In the process, a shadowy figure sneaks up on Marion and brutally stabs her to death.
You can check out the scene—without us ruining anything else for you—right here:
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During production, Leigh used both a body double and a stand-in, the latter of whom was used to check lighting set-ups. The body double was a former showgirl and Playboy cover model named Marli Renfro, who stepped away from the spotlight in the early 1960s. Fast forward to 2001, when a handyman from Los Angeles was convicted of raping and murdering a woman whom the press kept saying was Renfro. This caught the attention of true crime author Robert Graysmith, and he dug a little deeper into the claims.
What Graysmith discovered was that it wasn’t Renfro, but rather Leigh’s stand-in, Myra Davis (a.k.a. Myra Jones), who’d been killed by her neighbor, Kenneth Dean Hunt, back in 1988—he’d reportedly strangled Davis with her own underwear. The case went unsolved for a decade until authorities linked Davis’s death to another murder Hunt committed. In his 2010 book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower, Graysmith suggests that Hunt became obsessed with killing Leigh’s body double, but mistakenly got her stand-in instead.
“Everyone confused them,” Graysmith said of Davis and Renfro, “even a murderer.” Graysmith went on to say that he eventually found out that Renfro was still alive and well. “It turns out she’s been so busy fishing in Utah, hiking in Alaska, swimming with dolphins in Florida and generally living life to the fullest that she had no idea she was meant to be dead,” he explained.
As for Hunt, the former handyman was convicted of strangling Davis and a woman named Jean Orloff in 2001. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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