Yep.
It’s just like our favorite nineteen ninety whatever it was horror flick.
Minus the teenaged sex, trendy music, and hot overacting prom queens.
(#funfact: this is also the name of my favorite Gwen Stefani song)
In this particular tale, the killer was waiting for a conscience crisis, apparently.
Ya know, I legit don’t remember what happened at the end of “I Know What You Did” or its sequel “I Still Know”, but the main plot of this IRL tale about a less-seductive-than-J-Love-Hewitt dude, homie committed a murder 17 years ago, and dumped the body after a one night stand gone wrong. No one ever found out, but later on after he had a spiritual awakening – that awakening led to a crisis. And that crisis came to a head as his own conscience hijacked his sanity, leading him to ultimately turn himself into the authorities.
(Ooooh, I was so wrong. Tote’s a Philipe clone…)
What was the tipping point you might ask?
Drugs. But not in the way you’re thinking. You see, the pharmacy at Wally World kept mistakenly sending over messages to his phone with the name of a woman whose scripts were ready for pickup. Mind you, he didn’t know the name of the gal whose goose he cooked years ago, but the guilt had built to such a degree that his mind start suggesting, “Oh, yeah. That’s definitely her name. Someone knows and is fckking with you, man.”
Matthew Gibson took a woman back to his Arizona trailer in 1997 and, when she refused to leave, he beat her to death and threw her body in the Colorado River.
Gibson stayed silent for 17 years, but when he began receiving texts from Walmart that a prescription for a woman named Anita Townshed was ready, he became convinced that Townshed was the name of the woman he killed and that somebody was onto his deadly secret. He also received a mailer from Walmart with no address or name marked on it.
Ya know, actually this story’s starting to remind me a bit more of Bale’s role in “Machinist” – where he’s (spoiler alert) stuck in the psychosis of supercharged cognitive dissonance following a hit and run and spends the whole movie suffering anorexic insomnia and battling this dude he doesn’t realize is his own guilty alter-ego. It’s not until he remembers and turns himself in, that he settles into a nice slumber. Granted, it’s behind bars, but I bet it was the best he’d ever had. Unless he ever took opium before. That’d be tough to beat. Point is, the whole “truth will set you free” is crucial for some – even if they’re literally never going to be free again. And might get shanked in the shower tomorrow.
One more point on this fun story:
Maybe people like me who compare everything to movies and their “main characters” don’t help (life is not a movie, no one’s focusing a camera on you, the comparison’s are for a laugh), but isn’t this dude a little egocentric here? Bit of an inflated sense of self importance? It’s tragic that the woman in question was murdered – especially so brutally. And it’s great the police can now recover her remains. But, on a statistic level, people die every day – and this dude thought the NSA was after him? They’re not tied up with bigger security threats and tapping into people who do murders on a monthly basis – not just a one time shot like his? Like they have time to sit around and brain-screw Joe Dirt with prank texts?
From trailer murder, to Walmart, to four walls – this story’s about as white trash as it gets. I just hope that if the deceased has some family around, they can rest a little easier with closure, and knowing the dude who did it is safely locked away and paying penance. Even if it’s only for ten years.
But for all I know, maybe it’ll follow him forever like a masked killer. Or a bad sequel.
Right up till it finally finishes him off. (We can hope.)
After all, our internal ghostface hookhand is worse than anything Hollywood can concoct.
