The Val Kilmer movie that accidentally hired a serial killer: “We had cast a mass murderer”
After falling out of mainstream favour, Val Kilmer became a prolific figure on the straight-to-video circuit. In a far cry from rubbing shoulders with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, he found himself sharing an ensemble with somebody who was sentenced to 195 years in prison for murdering five people.
In what was a galling oversight on the production company and casting agency’s part, the culprit had already killed two people before they’d set foot on the set. They’d go on to add another three names to that list, and nobody was any the wiser that there was a genuine mass murderer in their midst the entire time.
Rick Roman Waugh’s self-explanatory 2008 prison flick, Felon, was inspired by true events and told the story of Stephen Dorff’s Wade Porter, a man sentenced to a three-year stretch for accidentally killing an intruder in his home. Kilmer plays a veteran inmate who effectively serves as the Red to Dorff’s Andy Dufresnse, with Harold Perrineau’s brutal officer the Hadley of the piece.
It was a solid-if-unspectacular addition to the subgenre, even if Clifton Bloomfield’s appearance gave it some unwanted notoriety. On October 24th, 2005, he strangled Carlos Esquibel in his own home, and three days later, he broke into the home of a retired teacher, Josephine Selvage, and strangled her, too.
Two months later, he held an elderly couple hostage in their garage while he ransacked their home, which led to him serving 18 months in jail. When he applied for the gig in Felon, Broomfield lied about his previous experience, falsely claiming that he’d previously been an extra in Breaking Bad.
“We’re expecting actors to come to our casting calls,” casting director David Cordova said, per UPI. “I’m not expecting the real thing to come through. I don’t think anybody else was actually aware that we had cast a mass murderer on the film. He actually was what he came in to be. I think about the moments he had the opportunity to be with somebody alone and us not knowing. It’s really scary.”
Clearly, there was a fairly huge flaw in the vetting system, with Cordova sharing that he simply couldn’t afford to run extensive background checks on the thousands of people who apply and are approved to be extras on his pictures. Broomfield made the cut, and after his short-lived brush with cinema, he resumed his murderous ways.
A month after Felon had wrapped shooting in November 2007, he broke into the home of Tak Yi and his wife, Pung, beating him to death and killing her. In June 2008, he and an accomplice thought they were unlawfully entering the house of a man called Manny, wearing ski masks and brandishing shotguns, only to shoot Scott Pierce dead in a case of mistaken identity instead.
The authorities arrested Broomfield and his cohort, Jason Skaggs, for the Pierce murder, and DNA evidence eventually tied him to the others. In court, he pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder, resulting in a sentence that spanned almost two centuries.
