Entertainment
The X-Files Episode Secretly Inspired By A Real-Life Serial Killer
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While The X-Files is famous for stories about aliens, monsters, and far-reaching government conspiracies, it sometimes focused on more down-to-Earth threats. This includes serial killers like Luther Lee Boggs, Gerry Schnauz, John Lee Roche, and more. Sometimes, the show had it both ways by featuring characters like Eugene Tooms and Robert Patrick Modell, who used their fantastic powers to take killing people to a whole new level.
Obviously, The X-Files is a show filled with fictional serial killers guaranteed to make your skin crawl. But one forgotten episode from early in the show’s history crafted a fictional story that took great inspiration from one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. That episode is “Aubrey,” which featured some powerful allusions to the Hillside Strangler!
A Cut Above The Other Killers
“Aubrey” is a Season 2 episode where Mulder and Scully investigate the unusual case of a woman who may have genetically inherited violent tendencies from her serial killer grandfather. At first, this manifests as a psychic vision where she is able to inexplicably discover the hidden body of an FBI agent who was murdered in 1942; later, it is revealed that she is killing people in the same way that her grandfather did, including carving words (such as “Sister” or “Brother”) into victims’ chests. Eventually, she is busted for her copycat crimes, and after killing her grandfather (the former serial killer), she is committed to a psychiatric ward.
What does this weird X-Files story have to do with a real-life serial killer? The female character in “Aubrey,” B.J., bears some surface-level similarities to Veronica Compton. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, she is someone who tried to kill a woman in 1979 in a copycat murder intended to prove the innocence of one of America’s most infamous serial killers: the Hillside Strangler!
The Ghost Of Killing Sprees Yet To Come
The original Hillside Strangler (later, his cousin was convicted of the same crimes) was Kenneth Bianchi, a man who tortured his victims before strangling them to death using a ligature. He then dumped the bodies on the wooded hillsides of Los Angeles, creating a grim tableau for the police to find. In 1979, police arrested Bianchi as well as his murderous cousin, Angelo Buono Jr. After the arrest, he began a relationship with Veronica Compton, a woman who ended up testifying for the defense at his trial. Eventually, she tried to strangle another woman to death in an attempt to make the authorities think the Strangler was still at large.
Many X-Files fans have noted that in “Aubrey,” there are several parallels to Compton and the Strangler: for example, there’s a woman committing crimes that copy the M.O. of someone who can’t have committed them (Bianchi was in prison, and B.J.’s real grandfather was extremely elderly). Also, while B.J. wasn’t consciously trying to clear Cokely’s name, her copycat methods brought more attention to his crimes, just as Compton’s copycat attempted murder revived the real killer’s legacy. Finally, both women end up in confinement: B.J. is placed in a psychiatric facility, and Compton was imprisoned for her crimes before being released in 2003.
At the end of the day, “Aubrey” is a pretty forgettable X-Files episode, and the plot’s reliance on inherited memory seems weirder and more gimmicky now than ever before. However, knowing the episode was a fictional homage to the Hillside Strangler and the woman who loved him does make it that much more interesting. Unlike the strangler himself, though, this strange episode never quite manages to take our breath away.