Real Life "Purge": Killers Inspired by Horror Movies

Written By Kaelyn Moore

In 2016, Jonathan Cruz went on a four day killing spree inspired by the movie "The Purge". In 1985, Mark Branch wanted to live out his fantasy of being Jason from Friday the 13th. What causes some people to be inspired by horror movies to commit horrible acts of violence?

TW: Suicide

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SOURCES

BBC Joker crime https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-37564423

TRANSCRIPT

On June 2, 2016, 20-year-old Jonathan Cruz stood before a judge at the Marion Superior Court in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was being sworn in for the trial that would decide his fate. The prosecution planned to seek the death penalty.

Cruz was a thin guy with a curly-cropped haircut and a red star face tattoo next to his right eye. He didn’t look much older than a teenager, and yet, depending on what was decided today, his life could be over.

See, On May 12, 2016, the then-19-year-old took to the streets with a plan to kill as many people as he could get away with.

First, he Moved along the 3900 block of North College Avenue in the historic green neighborhood of Mapleton-Fall Creek, in the early morning hours. Cruz approached a 54-year-old man named  Billy Boyd. Boyd, who was about to become a grandfather, was walking home after caretaking for his own father, who was sick with prostate cancer. That morning Cruz approached the man, whom he did not know at all, and shot him twice in the head. 

Hours after leaving Boyd on the sidewalk, the boy took a fifteen-minute drive to the east side of the Hoosier City, where he encountered 40-year-old Jay Higginbotham, who he shot to death multiple times as Higginbotham tried to run away.

By the time the police arrived to the scenes of the two men who were murdered in broad daylight, Cruz was nowhere to be found. 

This horrible, senseless killing spree caught the attention of the news. Soon, his star tattooed face was plastered everywhere. But instead of lying low to avoid being caught, Cruz openly bragged to friends and family. And for as shocking as his crimes were, it was a text that he sent his girlfriend that would make headlines and would be used to explain Cruz’s motives.  

He texted his girlfriend, "I Purge every night now” “Purge” was a direct reference to the blockbuster horror franchise that hit theatres in 2013. 

If you’re not familiar, The premise of the Purge franchise, which has five movies and a short lived tv show, is that “One night a year, all crime is legal.” Including murder. The films take place after america faces a fictional financial collapse, and a new political party takes over. They believe that allowing Americans to Purge once a year will decrease crime rates overall. 

Jonathan Cruz saw those movies and felt inspired by them to enact his own personal Purge. 

And he didn’t stop at two victims. Police still didn’t know where he was after he committed the first two crimes, and a few days later, on  May 14, he enlisted a friend to rob and pistol-whip a stranger. 

Cruz then invited a female acquaintance to meet him at a Wendy’s, which led to a confrontation that seemed like a replication of an attempted assault in the second Purge movie. Cruz cornered the girl in a parking lot, telling her he’d kill her if she left. Thankfully, just like in the movie, whatever he had planned next was interrupted by a bystander who helped the young woman escape. But Cruz still hadn’t been caught, and the next day, he’d go one to shoot 44 year old Jose Ruiz in the driver's seat of his Pontiac. Jonathan Cruz was stopped the next day.

Cruz was ultimately sentenced to three life sentences in addition to sixteen years for the robbery. He took a plea agreement that removed the death penalty from the equation after the prosecution considered possible mental health factors that could have clouded his judgment. But many felt like something else had influenced Cruz’s mind. The Purge movie 

This is Heart Starts Pounding, I’m Kaelyn Moore, and today, I want to tell you some stories about people who felt inspired by movies, mostly horror movies, to go commit crimes. Now, as a lover of the horror genre, I know that these movies don’t inspire the every day average person to commit atrocities. No. What you’ll find in this episode is many of the people who feel compelled to reenact scenes from movies in real life, don’t do it with the same ethos or logic of the film. 


In The Purge, purging takes place over one night and there is a larger, ethical reason it happens in the film. In Cruz’s world, he was allowed to purge “every night” as he said in his text message. And it’s not really purging if youre the only one doing it and no one else knows it’s happening. It’s just murder and you deserve to go to jail for a very, very long time.


Ok, we’re going to get into it, and as always, listener discretion is advised. 

On October 24th, 1988, high school student Scott Landry woke from a nap to the sound of his land line ringing off the hook. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and got up to answer it. 

It was his mother, and she sounded frantic and upset. She told him that one of his classmates, Sharon Gregory, had just taken her life.

Sharon? Sharon Gregory. The news hit Scott like an atom bomb. He had just spoken to her on the phone, not more than what, a few hours ago?

At around 10am, Sharon, an 18 year old community college student called Scott in tears. She was upset, but that her car wouldn’t start and she wouldn’t be able to get to class on time. Where are you parents? He had asked. “Why can’t they bring you?” 

She told him they were at work and not home, and that her boyfriend couldn’t come get her because he was in class at the high school and they wouldn’t let him take her call. She’d figure something else out, she said, and they hung up.

The two lived in the small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, where everyone kind of knew everyone. It wasn’t uncommon to get a call from a neighbor or friend in the middle of the day asking for a favor. So Scott didn’t really think much of it

But he was shocked to hear that Sharon had taken her life just moments after that call. Was it a cry for help? Was something else going on? Scott was confused, and devastated. He felt like he was missing something, a key piece of information about what had happened

And he was not alone in that. Because over at Sharon’s home, a detective was arriving. Joseph LaChance. And LaChance also felt like he was missing something. 

LaChance arrived at the home of Sharon Gregory around 12:30pm, just after her sister found her body. He didn’t really know what to expect from the scene, other than a teen girl was found dead in her home, but what he found was much more intense than he could have imagined.

Susan had been stabbed multiple times, and her throat had been slashed. It’s unclear who first assumed that she had done this herself, but I would be shocked if a detective saw this and immediately ruled it self inflicted. And it seems like LaChance was weary of that cause of death, because he started asking around. 

He spoke with her neighbor, just to see if he had noticed anything strange that day, and he did. He said that at aroud XXX in the morning, he noticed a Chevrolet Chevette he didn’t recognize park in the driveway. A young man got out, around Sharon’s age with brown hair, about 6 feet tall. 

The boy walked inside, was in there for around 5 minutes, and then walked out, got back in his car and drove off. 

Not long after that, Sharon’s sister pulled into the driveway, and the neighbor said that around 10 minutes after that the police arrived. 

Luckily, one officer on the scene remembered an interaction he had with a boy in town from years ago. A boy that matched that description and had seemed a bit…troubled. A boy by the name of Mark Branch

LaChance was able to get the Branch’s address and his mother answered the door when the officer arrived. Do you know where you son is? The detective asked. The woman admitted that she didn’t. She actually hadn’t seen him since around 10:30 morning. He should be home by now, but wasn’t. 

He asked the woman what kind of car her son drove, and without hesitation she responded, a Chevrolet Chevette.

That was all LaChance needed to get a warrant to search the house for any information regarding the crime. He was pretty positive that Mark was responsible for Sharon’s death, he just needed to figure out why. And once he stepped foot into Mark’s room, he felt like he had a pretty good idea.

The boy’s bedroom was like a shrine to Jason, the slasher character in the Friday the 13th movies. Mark had multiple hockey mask replicas of the mask Jason wears in the movies. He had Jason dolls, Jason posters, multiples of each of the VHS’s from the franchise, even a Jason Greeting card. 

If you haven’t seen the Friday the 13th films, first of all, stop this podcast and go watch them. I know this story is not really a great sell for them, but I do enjoy the franchise.

Jason is a character who was thought to have drowned when two camp counselors weren’t paying attention. Turns out, he survived the near drowning and is now an unstoppable killing machine, violently hacking away at teenagers while wearing his signature hockey mask. 

Mark’s room was full of other horror collectables, as well as a plethora of adult films, and a clerk at a local video rental story confirmed that Mark only took out gory horror movies and adult films, the more violent the better, on both accounts. 

That’s when Scott Landry got another phone call, this time from Detective LaChance, who wanted to know if it was true that Scott had been with Mark the day the murder took place. He confirmed that he had, and then asked if it was because Mark had something to do with Sharon’s death. 

The detective asked Scott why he thought that, to which Scott replied. “Because he always talked about wanting to live out the fantasy of being Jason”

Scott and Mark would watch these horror movies together, but Scott always felt like Mark was overly obsessed with them. They weren’t just escapism, they were his fantasy. The day of the murder, Mark was actually in the car with Scott when he got the phone call from Sharon saying she was home alone with no access to a car. 

He must have seen that as an opportunity, because after that, he told Scott that he needed to be dropped off at home so that he could go pick up a check from the Stop and Shop grocery store where he worked. Scott had no idea that he wasn’t going to the store. 

Scarier still, no one had any idea where Mark was. Not his mother, not his friends, not the school. What followed was not only a manhunt, but a mass hysteria.

Locals started decrying Horror movies. They felt like Mark had been hypnotized by the Friday the 13th movies. A professor of the University of Massachusetts said in an article that “There is a strongly established linkage between children’s exposure to violence on tv and violent behavior”

Some locals even tried to blame it on the satanism they swore was sweeping through the nation. This happened in the late 80’s during the Satanic panic, though there was no evidence that Mark was at all connected to Satanism. 

But a little piece of this puzzle that was ignored by the media at the time, who wanted to frame this like Mark was a normal kid who fell under the influence of evil horror movies, is that Mark was most likely already suffering from some form of mental illness. 

Mark was attending a high school for troubled youth in the area, and his mother came forward and said that he had attempted to take his own life once before.

Scott told LaChance that Sharon and her twin sister had been known to make fun of Mark both to his face and behind his back, and that one day Sharon approached Mark and asked him what the papers he was holding were. He told her that they were the results of a psychological examination that he had done. She asked if she could see them, and he said she could, but only if she promised to not show anyone. 

Apparently, Sharon took them home and cut them into pieces, because two pictures of Mark from the exam were found in Sharon’s room, but the rest of the results were missing. Scott believed that Mark may have gone over to Sharon’s to get the results back. 

Eventually, Mark was found hanging from a tree in the nearby town of Buckland. Police ruled it a suicide, but some believed that someone may have gotten vigilante justice on behalf of Susan 

The crime left the whole town reeling, but the local teens who knew Sharon wouldn’t be given time to heal. Many of them were put on trial within the Greenfield court of public opinion for being satanists. Others had to explain their love of horror movies to their parents who were terrified that they would also go commit heinous murders. 

And while this feels like a thing of the past, like today we don’t vilify people for the media they consume, well that’s just not true. 


A more modern version of the mania people felt surrounding 80’s slasher movies, can be found within the more modern Dark Knight Trilogy. A set of movies that were deeply entangled in controversy. 


While not explicitly a horror movie, the villains in the movies are scary and visceral. And these movies get brought up a LOT when you’re looking at the history of movie copycat killers. 


The weekend the second movie in the Batman trilogy opened, The Dark Knight Rises, a gunman open fired on a theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and wounding 70. At the time, media outlets erupted in panic, claiming that the gunman had dyed his hair a wild shade of red which many thought was an ode to the films villain, the joker. Rumors spread immediately afterwards claiming that the shooter told an officer “I am the Joker.” all of those rumors were proven to be false. Contrary to popular belief The shooting was actually unrelated to the contents of the film, the gunman merely chose the theater because he knew it would be full. That didn’t stop the general public from wondering if the Joker had some sort of evil influence. 


Another tragedy related to the film also had to do with the Joker. The actor playing the role, and one of my personal favorite actors of all time, Heath Ledger, sadly passed away from an accidental overdose before the movies even came out.


Ledger was just 28 when he died. And when someone so young and so talented dies, people like to try to fill in the blanks. They try and guess what happened. Maybe it’s because we’re obsessed with celebrities, or maybe it’s because we’re scared the same thing might happen to us, either way, the leading theory as to why Ledger overdosed was that the role he was playing in the Dark Knight, the role of the Joker, was so psychologically hard to play that he relied on prescription drugs to manage insomnia and stress, and that reliance lead to an accidental overdose. Again, making people fear that this character was capable of poisoning peoples minds.


The Joker is as chaotic evil supervillain with a twisted red smile, the edges of which have been cut deep into his face. He blows up busses, and hospitals, he kills with no regard and lives on the fringes of society. His main goal seems to be to get the lawful batman to break his moral code.


And for some reason, the Joker has also been a character that people have clung to. I’ve seen lots of joker memes passed around the internet, usually in spaces where you find a lot of teen boys like reddit and 4 chan. he’s kind of become a hero to people who want to inflict chaos and pain onto the world. 


And unfortunately, the fear that he was encouraging people to commit acts of violence is not completely unfounded, there were multiple incidents that popped up around the world after the trilogy's release. 

So this story starts in January 2009 at South Vermillion High School in Bloomington Indiana. 6 months after the first movie in the trilogy premiered. It was the dead of winter in the midwest, so the kids were all bundled up inside. It was a totally normal day. 

When one girl, whos name hasn’t been released because she was a minor when this happened, but let’s call her Kate, raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. The teacher let her go and went back to teaching. But a few minutes we t by, and Kate didn’t come back. And then a few more minutes went by. Still, no Kate

No one really thought much of it, though it was strange Kate was gone for so long, but then, as the teacher was writing something at the board, she heard the students behind her gasp. 

There, in the doorway, was Kate, looking almost unrecognizable. Her face was caked in white paint and she had deep black circles drawn around her eyes. Blood dripped down the corners of her mouth onto her shirt. While in the bathroom, she had taken a razor to her face and carved her lips into a twisted smile, mimicking the jokers signature look. And there, in her hand, was a kitchen knife.

Kate lunged towards her teacher, who quickly grabbed a cart on wheels in front of her and pushed it against Kate. She screamed for her students to get out of the room, and most of them did, but a few boys stood back and were able to help get Kate off of their teacher. 

The 17 year old was eventually brought to a mental health facility for treatment, but the school never really understood why she did what she did. I don’t know how often highschools actually try to understand students behavior, rather than chalking it up to them being teenagers, but clearly there was something about the joker character that really stuck with Kate. Enough for her to mutilate herself during school hours and attack her teacher. 

And Kate wasn’t the only high schooler to do something like this. In 2016 a 15 year old girl in Hampshire, England, told one of her friends one day she planned on killing their other friend. She said in a message she did not care "if they blamed it on The Joker or Columbine, they didn't inspire me, they motivated me", 

Apparently, the friend she told didn’t believe her, and didn’t feel the need to alert anyone at their school. But that day, the 15 year old cut the corners of her mouth into a bloody, extended smile, put on a bandana, and lured her friend to a secluded part of their school, where she stabbed her in the chest. 

The victim survived. luckily, it was not a very deep wound but this was just another incident on a growing list so called “evidence” that the Joker was making people more violent. 

The debate over whether or not the violent media we consume influences us to become more violent ourselves is long, complicated, and ongoing. 

For the first 70 years of cinema history, the line of violence shown in movies  and violence in society is almost parallel. In the 1920’s homicide rates were increasing year over year, but then started decreasing around 1930, and basically stayed on the decline through the 1960’s,

1930 also marked the beginning of something called the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code. The Hays code was a list of censorship guidelines that movies had to adhere to, mostly regarding sexual content and violence. As a result, violence on screen plummeted, along with murder rates in the US

then, in 1968, the hays code was lifted, and movies were allowed to show more on screen than they could before. And you see this in the 70’s with movies like The Godfather, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a ton others. It was open season 

And it was around that time in the 1960’s that homicide rates in the US started climbing again. And a bunch of researchers looked at this chart and said CLEARLY violence on screen CAUSES violence in real life. And this went on throughout the 80’s, which is when our first story took place.

But then, something strange happened in the early 90’s. Homicides rates in the US started plummeting. And violence on screen started increasing. not only that, but the world was being introduced to violent video games, which also sparked cultural panic amongst parents of teenagers. Just ask anyone who bought Grand Theft Auto, I was told that game was going to be the downfall of civilized society. 

Despite that, homicide rates kept falling. movies and games got even more violent, and crime still went down. Cultural critics and researchers alike then had to rethink their analysis.

And what they found was much more nuanced, and it’s something that is still not really agreed upon today. A 2017 Oxford Research paper by Nicki Philips concluded after reading over 50 recent studies on the relationship media violence has on real world violence:

“While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.”

Basically, consuming violent media can impact someone's level of aggression, but it’s not really going impact whether or not they’re going to commit violence or other crimes. People who commit these copycat crimes are typically more likely to commit a violent crime anyways.

And What often gets left out of the story of the 15 year old girl in england who stabbed her friend, is how she also mentioned that the voices in her head told her do the attack. Clearly she was suffering from some sort of serious mental disturbance. It wasn’t just the film that inspired her. 

the same went for Mark. He had serious mental health issues, but, like Nicki Philips says in her paper, every time one of these tragedies happens, we have the same conversation. Society wonders if the film is having a bad influence, if normal, everyday people are becoming inspired to commit heinous acts of violence. Even though the research we have says otherwise

I bring all of this up because I want to do more episodes like this in the future, but I don’t want anyone to draw any conclusions that just don’t exist. And imagine a lot of us here in our little community love horror movies. I know you guys do, I see your little avatars on patreon and instagram and like 10% of them are characters from horror movies, and I think that’s awesome.

Kaelyn Moore
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