UPDATE
and now almost three decades later a call from a researcher working for writer and presenter Marcel Theroux who is developing a feature length doc for ITV.
Murderees Eve Stratford Von Bork, Lynne Wheedon and another unsolved case are linked and are believed to be committed by a serial killer.
And to quote Blue Velvet It’s a strange world as this reminded me of how I once stood in his father Paul Theroux’s kitchen (he had met my parents when he was living in dorset) discussing the casting for a movie about his friend Peter Bogdanovitch’s girlfriend playmate Dorothy Stratton who was brutally murdered in 1980. There went on to be two movies …seems like I kept bodyswerving the glamour industry.
THE HISTORY OF GLAMOUR THERESA DUNCAN 1999 (FROM GLAMOUR TO GRAMMAR) BLOGGER L’ESPRIT D’ESCALIER FILMMAKER AND VIDEO GAME DESIGNER
WHEN LOVE IS ECLIPSED BY POWER THE SOMBRE HUES OF SHAME DARKEN LIFE
The Unsolved Murder of Bunny Eve, Part 1: a re-visit, by Sarah Miles commissioned by Animate
In her 1998 film, A Bunny Girl’s Tale, Sarah Miles explored the story of the British Playboy Bunny and how the ‘Bunny Girl’ persisted in the collective imagination. The film included references to the 1975 murder of Eve Stratford. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Stratford
Ten years later, the cold case was reopened, and Sarah got a call from a detective…
Photo Credit Ed MIles A BUNNY GIRL’S TALE 1998
The film was originally inspired by Bunny Image Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S by Donald Barthelme the master of fragments, in which a woman is fired for loss of bunny image *1
It was to be a short narrative with a brief flashback to the Playboy Club and a scene in which the Bunny Mother asks a Bunny Girl for her tail. But Channel 4 wanted a drama documentary. As I gathered material, memories of my teenage years in the seventies of interrupted joy and feeling like a failed bunny (symbol of fertility and play) were buried as the investigation developed.2
Life and Death
Kathleen was one of the original six British Bunny Girls, called the Ambassadors to Britain in 1966.
A light in the film she invited us into her home sharing her memorabilia while her daughter watched and my son looked a bit bored. Poignant and funny, an independent mother with a glamorous past, fluffing her tail, she told me a lot of stuff off the record. When I returned with a crew Kathleen was more guarded she said you’ve swallowed the Bunny Manual.
The further into the burrow I went the colder it became, until I was with another ex bunny sharing the past experiences that haunted her, like waking up in hospital laughing with hysterical paralysis after the news of Bunny Eve’s murder. “She had long blonde hair” she said.
Was my identification with this a way of accessing buried parts of myself? I thought about how extreme acts of violence lead to terrifying blanks and about finding a way to express grief never expressed at the time.
70’s feminism was talking about being missing in the culture (invisible) because if you are a sister hood there is always going to be a sister missing dead left behind.
The lead detective on the now cold case agreed to an interview. He told me that since his retirement he had been haunted by this unsolved murder*.
And then one day I received a hand delivered copy of the closing case report.
Bunny Eve was no longer an allegorical figure. She was born Eve Elizabeth Stratford on the 28 December 1953. In March 18 1975 she was murdered in a sexually motivated attack.
Six months later the jury at the inquest gave the verdict: murder by person (persons) unknown.
It seemed that my investigation had led to an unsolved dark sadistic murder
When what pursues you is internal there is no escape.
Ten years later, I’m getting ready for the crime season, on the couch, remote in hand, when I’m contacted by a journalist who has seen A Bunny Girl’s Tale on the net: a degraded copy, wrong temperature, all content and no beauty, no truth, but enough to make me of interest. He tells me there has been a major breakthrough in the case. A DNA match with anotehr unsolved murder.
“Someone out there has kept a dark secret for thirty years”
“You think the memories are buried.”
We meet, and against my instincts, I let him make a copy of the closing case report in the strictest confidence.
Mens Rea
And the next thing, I get a call from the new lead detective Colin Weatherall on the reopened case.
As we sat in my kitchen, I had to resist confessing to all my ‘crimes’. He wanted to know why Detective J. McFadzean had given me this report as it went against all protocol. He thought it might have been self-aggrandisement, as he had also sent me his unpublished autobiography, Life of a Policeman.
Maybe. He has since died so we cannot ask him. But I recognised that it was his gift to me as a woman and a filmmaker – he wanted me to look, to do justice to this girl, to these girls, and in the process, to myself. But to tell stories that examine patriarchy requires agency and cultural power.
Or, in the words of James Ellroy, writer of My Dark Places, “after a while it just has to be about consciousness.”
Retired LA detective Stoner knew from experience that on rare occasions the passing of years can unlock secrets: previously reluctant witnesses want to unburden their consciences before they die.
After three fascinating hours with Detective Colin Weatherall we parted. I had to promise the report would remain in my possession.
The cold case is still under investigation.
My film treatments are cold ..longing….ghosty…One film executive said to me, “I’d give you the money for a script, but the sadist in me says ‘no.’” I left Channel 4, returned home, and watched Cold Case. 3
Footnotes
1 Loss of Bunny Image: the case of Bitsy S, Donald Barthelme, 1974 collected in Guilty Pleasures
‘She goes to pieces; she does not know to whom her hand belongs, or her shoulder; she has lost her ‘I’. Fragmentation has a way of suggesting the repressed. The voice of an unseen presence is trying to put the pieces together and fails, but the failure is the point. See what a world we have been given, the voice says: in pieces, some of them missing, others from the wrong set, and no instructions’.
Donald Barthelme’s last essay was called Unknowing and this is where I ended not knowing.
Untold tales
2 As a traumatised teenager, when filling out the form to become a bunny girl, I got stuck when it requested a medical history and the secret of my abortion left me feeling that my tail was soiled.
3 The ghost is the fiction in our relationship to death made concrete Helene Cixcous
Last but not least, the creative illusory space of pleasure and the feminine in the scene with P J Harvey singing.
The Unsolved Murder of Bunny Eve, Part 2
‘In the dark times will there also be singing
Yes in the dark times there will also be singing about
The dark times’ Bertolt Brecht
P J Harvey chose Nina In Ecstasy to perform in the Playboy Club choreographed by Gaby Agis
THE CHORUS is taken from Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep Mac & Katie Kissoon
Where’s your momma gone
(Where’s your momma gone)
Little baby bird
(Little baby bird)
Far far away far far awayayay…
REFRAIN
Last night I heard my momma singing this song
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Woke up this morning and my momma was gone
Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep
Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp
P J HARVEY did one take as Pocahontas bringer of peace
come run the hidden pine trails of the forest
photo credit Ed Miles
Original lyrics for A Bunny Girl’s Tale
I lay in wait for you sweetheart
To kill me
I watched the carpet grow between my toes
The net lift
I ran from you my ears flapping in the wind
Inside I can hide
Sex sex
Is it safe?
Hungry can’t find the right food
Love I can’t find the right love
Without a body I feel like a country I can’t return to
Lost in dreams dream me kill me love me
It’s a bunny girls tale (original lyrics for the film)
Copyright Sarah Miles
NOTES ON SERIAL KILLERS
‘Assume Nothing Believe Nobody and Check Everything’
Life of a Policeman John ‘Mac’ MacFadzean
Murderees Eve Stratford Von Bork Lynne Wheedon and another unsolved case are linked and are believed to be committed by a serial killer.
The escalated interest in crime has been described by David Schmid as lethal misogyny
leading to his books Murder Culture and From the Locked Room To the Globe: Space in Crime.
The serial killer is nowhere and finds the objective correlative of the nowhere land.
Violent intercessions of the unconscious in arresting the conscious self.
The dead will speak, the truth will out.
The serial killer needs to annihilate the other to give relief by projecting all the badness. The act of total destruction only occurs in extreme circumstances, as the need to project unwanted parts necessitates survival.
NIGEL DALI IN A BUNNY GIRL’S TALE 1998
It is this defence against the death instinct, which has primary envy at it’s source, that lies at the heart of all perverse activity. And primary envy is always to do with the creative potential of the other
Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in Cracking-Up-Work-Unconscious-Experience suggests such individuals seek to induce in others their own experience of an early total traumatic breakdown of trust in the adult world, enacting a revenge against the mother and a defence against the knowledge of the need for love from the other.Such a person goes on living by transforming others into killed ones
What cannot be thought about is acted out, which leads me to free association and how murder is incomprehensible and there is an inability to think about it.
The detective referred to this when he described unreliable witnesses and detective blindness.
What is endangered is that, knowing something about the world, the killer sets off a chain reaction and there is a fascination with these crimes because we have all experienced betrayal and trauma.
Perhaps the appropriate form of action against violence today is simply to contemplate to think…. Slavoj Zizek
March 25 2024 JOURNEY TO LEYTONSTONE AND THE HITCHCOCK CORRIDOR
CU PSYCHO HITCHCOCK GALLERY LEYTONSTONE UNDERGROUND
Sarah Miles Films 