According to Paul Downey and David Hastings’ “It’s me, Billy — Black Christmas Revisited,” a 14-year-old teen named George Wester bludgeoned his mother to death with a baseball bat, which he also used to injure other family members. His siblings, Mina and Andrew, aged 8 and 12 respectively, were taken to the hospital because of their serious injuries (which they thankfully recovered from). The ferocity of this grisly incident shocked the town’s residents, as a murder of this nature was unheard of in Westmount (a neighborhood that was associated with being quiet and crime-free up until this point). The murder took place on November 17, 1943.
Around the same time, the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs spread rapidly and caused a citywide panic, especially due to a still-unsolved murder case of a babysitter named Janett Christman a few years later in March 1950. The details of this horrific murder are rather sparse; according to reports of the crime, the police received a distressed call from Janett but were unable to track her location due to the brief nature of the call. Once the owners of the house she was babysitting for returned, they found her body, which was grievously assaulted and rife with defensive wounds from an intense struggle. Janett was only 13 years old at the time of her tragic death, and the three-year-old baby she was looking after was unharmed.
Screenwriters Roy Moore and Timothy Bond used aspects of these murders to write the script for “Black Christmas,” which was tentatively titled “Stop Me!” at the time. The Lipstick Killer was also apprehended in 1946, and Moore/Bond took inspiration from the killer’s modus operandi of leaving chilling messages with lipstick on mirrors to frame some scenes in their evolving script.