Black Fly (2014): The Shock of Serial Murder in a Small Town

In the city, people are often scared by serial and spree killers because of the anonymity involved— amongst a large population, a multiple murderer could be anybody, anywhere. In rural areas the fear strikes people differently. Small towns become gripped with fear in the face of a killer not due to anonymity but rather it’s usually due to the fact that the killer’s known to people there. He could be a neighbour, a mechanic, a new teacher at the local school, or maybe he’s just a loner living down the road. Director-writer Jason Bourque grew up in rural New Brunswick after moving from Saint John to the Kingston Peninsula. There, he remembers a different, sometimes brutal, way of life than the one most people are used to in the city. He also remembers growing up down the road from a charismatic if not isolated young man named Noel Winters. It wasn’t until years later Bourque realized Winters was the same killer responsible for the deaths of four people from the fall of 1983 to the winter of 1984, including a well known killer-for-hire named Jack McLaughlin and his girlfriend Maria Hillebrand, then later a father and son, James Keenan Sr. and James Keenan Jr, whom he dismembered with the help of his friend Paul Hines before tossing their remains at a nearby dump.

Black Fly (2014) is Bourque’s way of channelling his macabre memories of home to the screen, from Noel himself to the general atmosphere of growing up in a rural space scarred by alcoholism, socioeconomic hardship, and violence. The screenplay tells a story of two brothers— Noel (Matthew MacCaull) and Jake Henson (Dakota Daulby)— who are reunited when Jake runs away from home to stay with his big brother. What begins as a nice, albeit awkward, reunion devolves into a nightmare of betrayal and alcoholic rage. Noel eventually kills two men when an argument escalates into violence, forcing both his girlfriend Paula (Christie Burke) and Jake to choose loyalty to him or potentially grisly death like his victims. Although the screenplay strays from the events of Winters’s actual case, the core themes remain the same, and the story explores how terrifying horror can lurk right below the surface of a quiet town, waiting for the time when it will finally strike.

Something Bourque does in the screenplay is separate the city from the rural. In Noel’s small town world there’s a decidedly different sense of violence, as if it’s second nature to those who live there. At one point, Noel tells a story— one that’s actually based on a real experience of the director— about how he once witnessed his mother attach a bag of dying chickens to a muffler to put them to death by carbon monoxide. He calls it “another fond memory of country living.” The tale feels like a nasty anecdote about the difference between living in a city versus living in a rural place. Many who live in smaller places are always so quick to believe that violence comes from the city and our society’s obsession with urbanism. Yet Noel’s kitten anecdote allows the viewer to understand life outside the city can affect a person in violent ways just as much as the cities themselves, only in different ways. His relationship with a local police officer also speaks to the way small towns operate. Cops in rural areas often have a closer relationship with the people they police. There’s no record of the real Noel ever having this type of connection to an officer of the law. The film’s depiction of Noel and the cop is likely another part of Bourque’s memories of living in rural New Brunswick, where not only neighbours but also the local authorities were unaware of exactly how violent Winters would become and none of them could have suspected there were corpses already buried in his yard.

One large difference between Noel’s real life and Black Fly is his accomplice, Paul Hines, who doesn’t turn up in the film. Instead, he’s replaced by a fictional brother, Jake. Hines willingly helped his killer friend chop up and dispose of the father-son duo’s bodies, dropping their remains off at a dump in regular green garbage bags. This actual event is subverted cleverly in Bourque’s screenplay. Rather than a willing Hines giving Noel a hand with the bodies of two dead men, Jake unknowingly helps his older brother take those green garbage bags out to the dump, made accomplice to Noel’s horrific crimes without knowing what’s actually happening. This fictionalized scene involving Jake does also mirror the real Noel involving his actual girlfriend as a reluctant accomplice to his killing. During the scene depicting the father-son murders, Noel’s girlfriend, Paula (played by Christie Burke), helps him clean up the scene of a double murder. The real girlfriend— twenty-three-year-old Mary Elizabeth Clark— testified in court she was forced to fetch him a 9mm pistol so he could shoot one of his victims. So, while Bourque’s screenplay turns certain aspects of historical fact into fictional moments to help bolster the story, these scenes remain true to Noel’s chilling personality.

Another significant change to the real story is Noel’s ultimate death. In the film, he’s killed by Paula after involving her in his crimes and becoming steadily more abusive towards her. Because Black Fly is loosely based on real events, its end for Noel is obviously an attempt at forging a new story. At the same time, it feels similar to the way the excellent recent film The Clovehitch Killer also adapted a real serial killer’s life to the screen, by figuratively rewriting history and allowing for a more triumphant climax. In reality, Noel was not killed by his girlfriend, though she did go to the police to turn him in for killing the Keenans. On the 24th of April, 1984, he hung himself with a bedsheet at Dorchester Penitentiary. Noel was a coward who couldn’t bear to face the punishment of rotting away in prison for the remainder of his life. The film doesn’t make him out to be heroic or larger than life in any way, but having him be killed by someone else’s hand is wishful in that it gives the fictional adaptation of Noel’s story a better sense of control. We’re disturbed by serial killers, as a society, because they signify chaos, and society lacks control over what’s chaotic. The real Noel, like many other killers throughout history, committed one final act of masterful control by ending his own life and, in a sense, robs society, as well as those who were close to his victims, of a modicum of closure that knowing he was in jail could have offered.

Although the fictional story of Black Fly differs in certain moments from the true crime source, the screenplay’s perspective on Noel is a character study of the real man himself, also providing a contrast between those we consider serial killers and those we consider spree killers. The FBI originally defined serial murder as involving at least four kills in different locations separated by what’s called a cooling-off period. They eventually lowered the number of kills to three in the 1990s. The U.S. Bureau of Justice defines a spree killing as killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders. Noel Winters nearly fits the definition of a spree killer perfectly, having killed two sets of two people at separate times, and, though they were separated by a season, the murders occurred in a fairly short period of time. It’s more than that which designates Noel as more of a spree killer. Even though most of us without murderous intent see the violence killers do their victims as irrational and uncontrolled, the truth is most serial killers are, in fact, quite in control of their actions. Spree killers are not generally so collected and in control. They’re defined by their outbursts of emotion and violence. Noel was not only erratic, he was also known for drinking, and while drunk he would become worse, prone to angry rants and violent acts. Winters had an 18-year record of convictions for burglary, robbery and drug possession. He’s a microcosm of small town violence, lying in wait just below the surface until it randomly explodes. People near him had no idea that the violent drunk living down the road from them was actually a cold blooded murderer until his arrest.

Part of Bourque’s film rests on this idea of Noel’s unexpected nature. Despite his getting violent while drinking and the potential mental health issues from which he suffered, he was never suspected by those living in the same town to be someone capable of full-fledged murder. During a Q&A session after one of the original screenings for Black Fly, Bourque told the audience: “Noel was very liked in the community, very charismatic type of guy, who you’d want watching your back. At the same time he had this temper. And when he was drinking, he was prone to these acts of violence, but when the double murder happened, we had no idea that he was capable of that.” The film takes many creative liberties to turn this real life tale into a fictional work. This doesn’t change the core of the story. In the aftermath of the fictional Noel’s crimes we see Jake and Paula grapple with the same issues the real people who lived around the real Noel dealt with, albeit slightly more life threatening. The fictional Noel dies and the story is finished. But in New Brunswick, the real Noel’s legacy continues to live on. Bourque, and others from the area, still remember Winters as a sort of rural boogeyman, and it’s because nobody anticipated the horror he would go on to commit. Unlike characters in a film, the stain of an actual killer doesn’t go away once the story comes to a close. More than that, the people of small town New Brunswick where Winters lived had to continue on with their lives knowing they were incapable of spotting a ruthless killer living in their midst— a devastating psychological and social space in which to exist.