'Changeling': Fact behind the Fiction

The Facts and Events

While Straczynski sticks true to the story, around 90% of it at least, there are some important occasions where he departs from the actual events, the major one being the omission of the character of Sarah Louise Northcott. Also, in the film it is implied that Northcott murdered up to 20 boys before being apprehended. This was based on the unsound testimony of Sanford Clark, and no hard evidence was ever adduced to support this claim. Northcott was convicted for the murders of three people: the Winslow boys, Lewis and Nelson, and an unidentified Mexican ranch hand, possibly a Jose Gonzales who was 15. His mother, Sarah Louise, was convicted for the murder of Walter Collins.

The supposed bodies at the ranch never amounted to more than a finger, scraps of hair, a piece of scalp and a piece of skull. There were three empty open graves, and it is a likely assumption that Northcott, having taken fright at Clark’s disappearance, moved the bodies out into the Mojave desert. The number of 20 was also more likely to have been the number of missing children at that time: it would have been a reasonable, though unfounded, speculation that Northcott was responsible, but certainly he did not hang for the murder of 20.

There is nothing to support the ending of the film either where, five years after the trials and execution, David Clay, a boy thought to have been murdered by Northcott, turned up alive and well. In the film, this supposedly gave encouragement to Christine to go on searching for Walter in the hope of finding him, but in reality she needed no motivation. She spent the last documented years of her life pursuing the civil suit against Captain Jones and the city in hopes of using the damages to keep the search going. In any case, the sordid story of Northcott died with him on the scaffold – only he truly knows how many and who he killed.

A throwaway line uttered by the impostor Arthur Hutchins, the true changeling of the film, could have benefited from either more elaboration or its exclusion. As Hutchins was being bundled on to the train with his real mother, amidst the flashing bulbs and yelling reporters, he cries “it was the police who made me do it!” This raises interesting questions of whether the police were complicit in the deception, or whether it was the precocious young scamp who cooked up the whole story and maintained the subterfuge till the very end.

If Eastwood/Straczynski had intended the issue to be raised, they should have elaborated a little, otherwise they risk muddying the facts of the case. Either way, there is nothing more to suggest that the police were anything other than incompetent, although from what we now know, malicious deception would not have been beyond them.

Juan Hann Ng

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