The tragic murder of Janet Leigh’s stand-in by a ‘Psycho’ fan
There are few movies to have made an impact on cinema quite like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which found the ‘Master of Suspense’ at his mischievous best.
Thanks to his staunch insistence that nobody wander into the cinema once the film had already started, the seminal 1960 slasher simply refused to let anyone either buy a ticket or take their seats unless they were on time. People wondered why, but it soon became clear that he had a shocking ace up his sleeve.
As the biggest star in the cast and the focal point of the marketing, everyone assumed that Janet Leigh was going to be the focal point of the story, with her Marion Crane acting as both audience surrogate and protagonist. Of course, that wasn’t the case, and rarely have expectations been so jaw-droppingly subverted.
One of the most iconic scenes ever captured on film, the stab-happy shower sequence pulled the rug right from under the viewer, creating a sense of unease and dread from that moment forward. The main draw was unceremoniously murdered, all bets were off, and countless thinly-veiled imitators and homages would permeate the medium for decades.
That sleight-of-hand would continue to inform Psycho for decades, with one notable example of the movie’s signature misdirection coming under the most tragic of circumstances. In 1988, Marli Renfro – who was Leigh’s body double on-screen – was sexually assaulted and murdered by Kenneth Dean Hunt, a crazed fan of the film emulating the slasher scene, or so everyone thought for a long time. While somebody who’d worked on Psycho had been killed, it wasn’t Renfro.
The victim’s name was Myra Davis, who’d also gone by Myra Jones. Somewhere along the lines the wires became crossed, and news rapidly spread across the world that they were the same person. However, not only were they two very different people, but Renfro was alive and well.
Davis’ granddaughter said she would have never done any nude work during her time spent working as a studio stand-in, before author Robert Graysmith put the pieces together. Renfro was the double and Davis was the stand-in used during setups to check the lighting and camera were going to be the way Hitchcock wanted them in the frame, with the sensational nature of the crime getting them conflated.
The writer even suggested that Hunt was obsessed with Psycho to the point he actively sought out Leigh’s double, only to murder the stand-in instead. Not only that, but Renfro had no idea her former colleague had even been killed until Graysmith told her, with the former actor having “no interest in her past career.”
“Janet Leigh went around telling everyone how embarrassed she was filming the shower scene, and Hitchcock backed up the story,” he said per The Guardian. “They concocted a lie.” Regardless of whether or not is was Leigh or Renfro in the shower and how long the star or director dined out on it, the tragedy is that it wasn’t Davis, and she may well have been killed because of it.
