Ryan Murphy’s latest Netflix series The Watcher takes as its inspiration a spellbinding article by Reeves Wiedeman that chronicles the haunting of a suburban family in Westfield, New Jersey. Believing they’d finally reached the pinnacle of their lives in peaceful suburbia, the Broaddus clan closed on their expensive new home at 657 Boulevard only to begin receiving creepy letters from a stalker known as The Watcher.
Murphy’s series takes an interesting approach to its source material. While the broad details of the story are generally true, many prominent supporting characters were either created out of thin air (such as Jennifer Coolidge’s character Karen) or very loosely based on real people mentioned in Wiedeman’s article (such as Richard Kind and Margo Martindale’s weirdo next door neighbor characters). Murphy and his creative team also exaggerated the relevance of an especially brutal crime to make it more essential to their plot.
The Letters Were Real
The Broaddus family, renamed the Brannocks in the show, really did receive creepy and threatening letters from an anonymous stalker called The Watcher after purchasing the house at 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey in 2014. Some of the real letters’ content is even used in the Netflix show. As detailed in Wiedeman’s article, this first letter set off a chain of events that led the increasingly paranoid Broadduses to become obsessed with uncovering The Watcher’s identity.
Unlike the show, the Broadduses never moved into their new home out of justified concern for their children’s safety. But they did become suspicious of some of their neighbors, tasking the police and their own hired private investigators with uncovering the truth.
Pearl and Jasper are Loosely Based on Real People
The real-life Langford family, who lived near the house at 657 Boulevard, were a bit odd. The matriarch Peggy was in her 90s and lived with several of her adult children, all in their 60s. Her son Michael was unemployed and described by neighbors as a kind of “Boo Radley character.” He was known to sometimes walk into his neighbors’ yards and peer inside their windows. But most who knew him claim he was harmless. One neighbor even said Michael would get his paper for him every morning.
The Langfords are the likely inspiration for the characters Pearl (Mia Farrow) and Jasper (Terry Kinney). These characters are far more intrusive and suspicious than the real-life Langfords, who seem to have done nothing more than being perceived as strange by their neighbors. In a desperate hunt for The Watcher, the Langfords became prime suspects, although police could never find any hard evidence linking the family to the letters.
The Murderer John Graff Is Based on a Real Person
John Emil List was a New Jersey accountant who murdered all five members of his family in 1971. List, like his fictional counterpart John Graff (Joe Mantello) in The Watcher, had been stealing money from his mother’s bank account after struggling to stay employed. The stress of supporting his family during this time of economic hardship apparently overwhelmed him, and he decided that killing his wife and children would not only alleviate his stress but also save his family’s souls.
After committing this brutal crime, List vanished without a trace for nearly 18 years. Then, in 1989, the Fox series America’s Most Wanted ran a segment about List and created a bust of what he might now look like. A woman in Virginia saw the segment and realized a churchgoing man she knew as Robert Clark looked a lot like List. It was him. List was caught, convicted of murder, and spent the rest of his life in prison.
List lived in Westfield, where the Broaddus family was terrorized by The Watcher, but neither he nor his crimes had anything to do with the letters sent to 657 Boulevard. Rather, his story was woven into the plot of the show to perhaps add a bit of creepiness and illustrate the hidden horrors of suburban life.
The Baby-Eating Blood Cult Isn’t Real
Unsurprisingly, the theory presented in the show that a baby-eating blood cult was responsible for The Watcher is not based on any real person, cult, or event. The introduction of such a cult to the show’s story may be inspired by the so-called Satanic Panic that gripped America in the 80s and 90s, or perhaps it’s just a bit of old-fashioned horror fun. In either case, there is no Satanic cult in Westfield suspected of writing The Watcher’s threatening letters.
The Watcher Was Never Caught, nor Heard From Again
As portrayed in the show, The Watcher’s identity remains unknown. The Union County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey has said the investigation is not active but also not closed. Based on the evidence, the suspect is likely an older woman who lives nearby in Westfield, but that’s about all we know. After living through their nightmare, it took the Broadduses five years to finally sell their home. The new homeowners claimed to have never received any letters from The Watcher.
The Watcher is currently available to stream on Netflix.