‘Lady of the Dunes’: The murder mystery during the filming of ‘Jaws’
A number of strange incidents have happened on movie sets throughout the years, with some thought to be plagued by supernatural curses whilst others endured the maniacal control of an auteur. Even still, few movies can say they feature a murder victim as an extra, with one theory regarding the case of the ‘Lady of the Dunes’ being linked to the filming of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws.
Back in the summer of 1974, Ruth Marie Terry was found dead in the Race Point Dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts, by a teenage girl walking her dog. Badly decomposed, the body was found lying face down on a towel, having suffered a severe head injury that left her dead weeks before her remains were found. The victim’s name was not known, and only had a pair of jeans, and a distinctive blue bandana was found near her at the scene.
Speaking to Inside Edition, Joe Hill, the son of horror writer Stephen King, who has long been interested in the mystery: “Someone had gone through a great effort to make it nearly impossible to identify her”. In November 2022, the woman’s name was confirmed to be Ruth Marie Terry, though, despite this discovery, the killer has never been found.
A theory of what might have happened to Terry came from a background extra in Steven Spielberg’s seminal shark flick Jaws from 1975. One scene in the movie, which tells the story of a killer shark which causes chaos in a tight-knit beach community, sees a group of travellers getting off a ferry, with a woman wearing a blue bandana and jeans sticking out of the crowd.
The body of Ruth Marie Terry was discovered in Provincetown, about 100 miles from where Jaws was shot on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts in 1974. “The woman, in that moment, bore a striking resemblance to the facial reconstruction of … the Lady of the Dunes,” Hill told the publication, adding: “I’m sort of fascinated by the idea that for decades afterwards, every time Jaws came on TV, he saw his dead wife turning her head to stare out of the screen at him…There’s something sort of chilling in that notion”.
A cinematic game-changer, Spielberg’s Jaws was responsible for coining the phrase ‘blockbuster’, with the film being so popular that audience members were queueing around the block to secure a ticket. Starring the likes of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, the film is a masterpiece of tension, with Spielberg creating a film that innovated special effects and modern cinema as we know it today.
Only recently, the cinematographer behind the 1975 classic, Bill Butler, passed away, with the American creative being responsible for some iconic moments, including the dolly zoom shot when Roy Scheider’s Brody realises the gravity of the situation as a shark claims his prey in the shallow waters of the beach.
Take a look at the trailer for Jaws below.
