Subject: Re: Comments ...
From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack)
Date: 1990-05-19, 18:49
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <0aJIaA_00VsnABKlQt@andrew.cmu.edu> bobg+@andrew.cmu.edu (Robert Steven Glickstein) writes:
> >OK, modified theory (on behalf of Paul Raveling):  Leland enters the
> >red-curtain cabin at some point when Laura is there but Leo, Jacques
> >and Ronette have gone.  He has seen their sexual cavortings, and
> >somehow kills Laura (probably inadvertently).  He runs away and Leo
> >and Jacques return.  With their reputations, they're sure that the
> >murder will be blamed on them.  So they wrap up the body, stick an "R"
> >under a fingernail to make it look like another murder the year
> >before, then dump Laura's body far away.

Sorry, but this doesn't quite work either. Remember in the pilot,
when Cooper and Truman are in the morgue, examining Laura's body?
Cooper examines her ring finger with his magnifying glass and says
"There it is, there it is, oh my God, there it is!" Then:

COOPER (to morgue technician): Would you leave please?
MT: Jim.
COOPER: (pause) Would you leave us alone please?
MT: Oh, sure.
(MT leaves.)

Cooper asks the morgue tech to leave because the business of the
letter under the fingernail is one of the crime signatures that
hasn't been made public, so the police can separate the copycats
and the compulsive confessors from the real killer. 

That's how we know that the same person killed Laura Palmer and
Theresa Banks. 

Also, in considering who the killer might be, remember this: Laura
died of loss of blood from many small wounds, no one of them
sufficient to have caused her death. This was not a crime of
passion or rage. It was calculated torture and it took some time.
People don't bleed to death all that quickly. I can imagine a
father who is nuts killing his daughter, but I can't imagine him
slowly torturing her to death. This theory also fails to explain
Ronette Pulaski who, according to Dr. Hayward, was attacked by the
same person who killed Laura, based on the type of wounds she suffered.

Leo Johnson is the most obvious fit for the killer. He's mobile, and
could easily have been in the south-west corner of the state when
Theresa Banks was killed. He's a violent sociopath who enjoys
inflicting pain. Also, now that we know Leo and Jacques were with
Laura and Ronette in the cabin, it makes a certain amount of sense:
Leo tortures Laura to death while Jacques works on Ronette, but Jacques
doesn't finish the job and lets Ronette escape. After Ronette wanders
down off the mountain, Leo finds out about it and, realizing that
Jacques' soft-heartedness threatens to put him in the electric chair
(assuming they have the death penalty there), beats the snot out of
Jacques on Friday night but doesn't kill him because he still needs
him for his drug connections. This is why Leo's shirt has a large
amount of Jacques' blood on it, and why Jacques disappears for a
few days.

The problem with Leo is that it's not clear to me that he is a
sexual sadist of the type who usually commits serial murders. Nor is
he the type to engage in the ritualistic aspects of the murder: the
letter under the fingernail, the mound of dirt and the necklace, FIRE
Walk with Me, etc. Leo is very pragmatic. Instead of hanging around to
cap Bobby and Shelley after he hears the police traffic about
Waldo, he immediately drives off to pop the stool mynah because it
can connect him to the cabin and Laura.

Also, he's just plain too obvious.

My nominee for the killer is still Dr. Jacoby. Maybe he was sacrificing
Laura to Pele, but Mount St. Helens was too far to drive, so he dumped
her in the river after killing her. Then, since she wasn't a virgin, he
decided to offer up Ronette as well, but was interrupted and Ronette
got away. Or, to be slightly more serious, if Laura is as corrupt as
we've been told, maybe she tried to blackmail Jacoby for patient-porking
and he decided to "cure" her overnight. The operation was a success
but the patient died?

My second choice after Jacoby would be Major Briggs. He's about the
right age to have been in Viet Nam, and could easily have heard about
a particularly ugly form of execution in Asia known as The Death of
One Thousand Cuts, which sounds remarkably like what was done to Laura.
I can easily imagine him giving one of his boring didactic lectures
while cutting up Laura for corrupting Bobby.

-- Dave Mack