The Facts: On Friday, June 13, 1980, at 10:00 am in the town of Wylie, Texas, Candy Montgomery, a 30-year-old homemaker who attends daily Mass and is very involved in church activities She went to her home Neighbor and friend Betty Gore to theoretically ask her if it was okay for her daughter to go to the movies with her family that afternoon and stay the night. From the time the visitor closed the door to when she opened it to leave, only Montgomery knows for sure what happened. The neighbor can’t tell. Betty Gore’s body was left on the ground with marks from a total of 41 ax blows and was discovered hours later by some neighbors, who also found the deceased’s one-year-old baby crying inconsolably in the cradle. Meanwhile, Candy Montgomery, her family and Gore’s other daughter continued with the evening watching Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
The verdict: not guilty. The inquest found that Candy Montgomery, who admitted killing her neighbor and showering her at the scene to remove the blood, had previously had an affair of almost a year with the victim’s widower, Allan Gore, who was not at the scene that day City was work trip. According to both versions, the meetings ended months ago. However, according to Montgomery, Betty Gore knew about the affair and still had the thorn in her side, which is why she suddenly brought an ax into the room during the meeting to give the guest a deadly argument of authority to stay away from her husband. The defendant alleged that the act of taking Gore’s tool and using it against her was in self-defense. That statement passed the polygraph test with flying colors and the jury gave it credibility, much to the public’s furore: 41 slashes with an ax struck many as excessive self-defense. Montgomery soon divorced her husband (who discovered the affair in the process), reclaimed her maiden name, and started a new life out of town as a psychotherapist.
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This is one of the most popular crime stories for fans of the subgenre in the United States. After sparking controversy in the Texas community, the case attracted national interest thanks to the book Evidence of love: A true story of passion and death in the suburbs (1984. , but previously unpublished in Spain), an investigation by journalist John Bloom and Jim Atkinson, which became an instant bestseller. In addition to the countless documentaries and special episodes that followed about serial murders, the book was adapted into the television film Criminal Implication (1990); in the Hulu series Candy: Murder in Texas (2022) – which is available in Spain via Disney+ and which stars a very characteristic Jessica Biel – and less than a year after the previous one premiered, she will do to get a new incarnation: HBO Max has announced the launch of the series Love and Death for April 27, starring Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery and Jesse Plemons as the victim’s husband.
Despite the fact that the event took place more than 40 years ago, the appeal of the story is obvious. It contains an unsolved mystery, a forbidden love story, an excitingly boring setting (the typical town and neighborhood where nothing happens until it happens), and conservative and religious breeding ground in a pressure cooker. “I’ve been doing everything a woman should be doing: housekeeping, cooking, cooking… Where’s my reward?” Montgomery asks Elizabeth Olsen in the Love and Death trailer as we watch her character do it she picks up the laundry, serve the dishes, or recite the prayers at the Methodist Church where she is a regular. With Nicole Kidman serving as executive producer, the motion does not indicate any material differences in the approach to Candy that also favored Defendants’ position. However, the signature of screenwriter David E. Kelley, creator of hits like Ally McBeal (1997-2002), The Lawyer (1996-2004), Big Little Lies (2017-2019) or The Undoing (2020), invites you to expect one Emphasizing the legal and social dimensions of the argument.
“Candy didn’t mind taking care of the kids and housework, but she was mad with boredom. So it was a ray of hope for her on her 29th birthday to receive a totally unexpected phone call,” Bloom and Atkinson told Evidence of Love. In the text, they underscored the state of deep and oppressive boredom in which both she and her lover were living when they decided to meet after Montgomery approached him with the proposal, he turned it down, and weeks later backtracked over the phone. The authors also devoted a few lines to the hypnosis session the defendant was subjected to, so that the attorney could find a way to justify those 41 ax blows: Childhood trauma surfaced during the session related to Candy Montgomery’s mother silencing her . Fighting the ax with Betty Gore to complete the reconstruction of the events the hypnotized woman offers a “Ssssh!” snapped by the neighbor would have triggered the cruelty.
dark reflection
“I keep saying it was a crime of passion. Wouldn’t you like to love someone on this level? And that that person loved you too?” one trial viewer asks the other at the climax of Candy: Texas Murder. The fictional conversation is an explicit and almost metareferential irony about the role of viewers of the true crime subgenre (True Crimes) and their addiction to gruesome stories: there is a certain level of morbidity, but also another level of identification with certain edges of certain stories, no matter how pathetic they may be. Incidentally, according to Justwatch measurements, Candy was the most-watched streaming series in the week of its premiere in the United States, although Hulu is estimated to have nearly 30 million fewer subscribers in the territory than Netflix.
Image from “Candy” starring actresses Melanie Lynskey (left) and Jessica Biel (right) playing Betty Gore and Candy Montgomery.©Hulu/courtesy Everett Collection/Cordon Press
“I think it’s a bit Jungian in concept of the shadow [el arquetipo con el que el psiquiatra suizo Carl Gustav Jung definió el lado oscuro de la personalidad]. The world we have now denies shadow, evil, anger and all darkness. But the fact that we deny it and pretend to be super happy on Instagram does not mean that this page does not exist “, reflects Mona León Siminiani, consulted by ICON, the quintessence of true crime in Spain with the Audible- Podcast Do You Speak Fear? and before that with the criminal program Cadena Ser Negra y, both devoted to both the fictional adaptation of psychological intrigue and the exhaustive chronicle of historical crimes at home and abroad.
Siminiani believes that True Crime has entered a new golden age thanks to the rise and consolidation of the podcast, not just because of the modern structure that has been put in place to “follow people through the process who start investigating with their little notebook and tape recorder “. but because “everything that is heard is a billion times more impressive and frightening”. But he also believes that “looking good and not being thought crazy” has something to do with today’s image mania. “Football sometimes conveys anger like bullfighting used to, which literally kills. Those impulses have to come from somewhere, and the gory and sadistic true crime stories are a break from all the positive face, ie Yankee and “everything is fine” stuff that we’ve immersed ourselves in and are more slaves to than we think.” he thinks.
This does not mean frivolity: “One is the event itself and the other is the story. What we consume is the story, what does the crime involve, what is the main subject, where does it leave us, who are we in relation to it. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups, with the same warnings not to talk to strangers, to beware of the bogeyman or the wolves in sheep’s clothing, those friendly neighbors who always say hello and who randomly have people slashed open and buried in the backyard.” “It’s another thing to be killed,” he recalls, “from subjecting you to that brutality or from subjecting you to that brutality or someone you love or know. There’s nothing romantic or pretty about a killer.”
Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) sings in her Methodist congregational choir in a still from “Love and Death,” HBO Max
The actual parties testify. The person formerly known as Candy Montgomery, who is not a legal criminal or involved in a similar episode, is now 73 years old. Her private Facebook account, with her current name, has been inactive since 2021, and it’s easy to see why: the posts she has related to her professional activity are littered with comments that insult her and commemorate the event. The rating she receives as a therapist in internet aggregators isn’t good either, but it’s doubtful whether the votes came from clients or from cyberbullyers who tracked her down. Montgomery left the town of Wylie after the 1980 trial because her neighbors shouted “Killer!” at her, but also because her personal life was under scrutiny. For most of Texas society at the time, adultery was an equally appalling crime, and indeed it was deemed appropriate in court to bring up another of the housewife’s previous infidelities.
The family of the deceased doesn’t want to know either, since part of the oddity of the different stagings lies in Candy Montgomery’s motivations and justifications, as if she had simply become a victim of the environment to which she and Betty belonged Gore, a mentally ill woman, embittered, oppressed, and obsessed with making her husband like her; For the time being, in the absence of knowledge of the perspective of love and death, it seemed as reflected in Candy. In an article, Buzzfeed journalist Stephanie McNeal quoted an anonymous Gore source as regretting the renewed interest in the case and “unable to comment” on the portrait of her family in the two series because she had not been contacted, she claimed. by no responsible person. “It’s extremely frustrating and definitely stressful,” he said. “I hate when I just want to sit back and scroll through the Hulu menu, I have to have a huge picture of Candy.”
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