Joe : Real life events that inspired this movie?

I don't recall reading anything at the time that Joe was in the movie theaters, but several years later, while working as a proof reader for a legal publishing firm, I ran across a case involving a father who had tracked his daughter to a hippie commune in Greenwich Village, I believe, and killed her and everyone else there. This had apparently happened in 1969, a year before the movie was released, and I felt it had to have been the inspiration for this film, but no one seems to know anything about the case.

Does this real life crime sound at all familiar to anyone, or has anyone ever read anything about possible origins of the screenplay?


And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_(film)

That mans name was Arville Douglas Garland. There is more info on him on the Wiki entry for this film.

"I would give my life to be dead" Francesco Dellamorte

The Arville Garland incident did bear a strong resemblance to the final scenes of "Joe," but it happened a mere ten weeks before this film was released. By that time, the movie was already in the can, so Garland's murders did not and could not have "inspired" the film. The coincidence did provide some helpful publicity for the film, however, as the Wikipedia entry states. The film's publicists were able to make the case that the screenplay was, in a certain sense, almost prophetic.

Oddly, when my brother and I saw "Joe" in the theater, my brother thought the ending was ridiculous, that nothing like that could happen in real life. I protested that I thought it could. Little did either of us know, it already had happened.

"I don't deduce, I observe."

Hell, i've had to explain how Bond was mostly based off the life of it's author Ian Fleming.

Reality is truly stranger than fiction.

"I would give my life to be dead" Francesco Dellamorte

I think that girls running away to get caught up in drugs, sex, crime and so on was a common theme in the early 1970s.

"Go Ask Alice" popularized it in print. I think "The Panic In Needle Park" was the best of them on film.