The Night of the Hunter

We'd had some minor discussion about this film a while back. I love it, it's not one you'd watch all the time but it's a good one...and it was recently brought to my attention that it was based on a true story. I had never heard this, I knew it was based on a novel, but a real case? I found this out in an article of the local newspaper because the college is showing it next week.

So I did some checking, and in 1932 a man who used the name Harry Powers (Harry Powell in the movie) who was a vacuum cleaner salesman, was arrested for the murders of 2 women and 3 children found buried by his garage. He was also fingered for the deaths of 50 other women but the authorities were never able to make the cases, all the same, he hanged for the five murders that they did. This man whatever he was, took out lonely hearts ads in magazines to meet women (just goes to show that there's nothing new when we talk about the Craigslist killer and such, you'd think by now people would learn to stop taking out these ads), and used the same aliases he had years before when he was arrested for defrauding widows and other women.

It seems that this Harry Powers or whatever his real name was, hated women, not necessarily in the sense that Mitchum's character Harry Powell does I don't think; and in fact I'd go so far to say this guy was a complete psycho because through his trial he cracked jokes and was very nonchalant about everything up to his hanging.


Now, what I'd like to know most of all is this was the biggest scandal ever to hit the state of West Virginia in the 1930s, scandals never seem to die down so why is this one so well forgotten by time and seldom heard of at all? Had anyone else heard about this before?

And likewise, I'm also curious as to why this great movie, and the book it came from, are also so little known despite their greatness.