Alone, finally. Now a shower and then sleep! The young woman turns on the water, holding her face in the beam. A pleasant smile plays around the corners of her mouth. Suddenly a shadow appears in the back behind the curtain. The shadowy figure comes closer. Pull the shower curtain aside. A knife flashes. And the young woman gives a panicked cry.

The shower scene from the movie "Psycho" from 1960 is one of the most famous cinema scenes of all - and particularly elaborately staged.

Throughout the United States in 1960 horrified glances were directed at the flashing kitchen knife of the killer, which actually touched the body of the victim recognizable only in one shot. But the hectic cuts of Alfred Hitchcock and shrill string music - Iiieek, iiieek, iiieek, iiieek! - mistreated masterfully over it.

In 78 shots and 52 cuts star director Hitchcock had his female lead slaughtered by one of the most famous film psychopaths of all time. For the audience then a shock. Perhaps the most monstrous thing was: in the shadow of horror, Hitchcock smuggled a bare navel onto the canvas - and a naked breast close up! Censors meant to make out even a nipple. In the prudish USA 1960 actually a no-go.

It was Marli Renfro who wrote film history with this belly button. Because in the shower scene her breasts, hands, legs are visible, always, if one does not recognize the face of actress Janet Leigh clearly. But hardly anyone knew the name Marli Renfro. Only decades later he was to make headlines - in a very real murder case.

From pin-up to "mystery girl"

Renfros acting career was short: In 1960, she appeared in two nude movies - a Western with the telling title "Wide Open Spaces" and in "The Peeper" in which a voyeur sneaked pin-up girls secretly at the photo shoot. The Spanner Strip was staged by a young film student named Francis Ford Coppola.

He was also commissioned to pimp the two short films into a feature film. The result was the trashy erotic comedy "Naked in the Wild West", his feature film debut. A slippery, silly revue busty beauties in all hair colors. Renfro gave the fiery redhead in it. It was her only appearance as an actress.

A year earlier, Renfro heard from a "Playboy" photographer at a photo shoot that Universal International was looking for a model for a movie. The 21-year-old, who had already worked successfully as a revue and pin-up girl and should appear on the cover of "Playboy" in September 1960, applied. One after the other she had to undress in front of the director and the main actress. Since her measurements resembled those of Janet Leigh, she got the job as Bodydouble.

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Bodydouble Marli Renfro: The woman from the shower

Originally, Renfro was only booked for two or three days. In the end it was a week and a half. Seven days of shooting, almost a third of the time Leigh spent on the set of Psycho. For a single, three-minute scene.

Few knew who the red-haired young woman with the turquoise eyes was, walking day and night across the studio grounds, stark naked. The confident nudist caught her eye as she talked to Hitchcock, who was always wearing a dark suit, completely unclothed. Or if she performed stretching exercises in front of the assembled press, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Hitchcock, who understood the PR game with the media like no one else, had specifically invited journalists and channeled them into areas that would normally be closed to visitors. Should the assembled reporters calmly wonder what the mysterious naked man was doing there. But because hardly anyone knew her name on the set, she was soon called the "Mystery Girl".

The third woman in the shower

Little by little, in the 1960s, following the release of "Psycho", her secret was revealed: that not only Janet Leigh had been filmed in that groundbreaking murder scene, but also Marli Renfro. There had even been a third woman in the shower.

Myra Davis worked as a so-called stand-in for Janet Leigh while filming "Psycho". Art Director Saul Bass had made test shots for the shower scene with Davis. Unlike a double, a stand-in does not appear in the finished movie, but is only used in camera or light tests. Outside the film industry, the two terms are often used interchangeably.

This was also the case in the spring of 2001, when Kenneth Dean Hunt, then 34, was on trial for two murders in Los Angeles. In 1998, he had raped and murdered a 60-year-old woman, occasionally helping out in the home. Only in the course of this investigation it turned out that Hunt, called "Sonny", was responsible for another hitherto unresolved murder: In 1988, he raped his 71-year-old neighbor and strangled - it was Myra Davis.

The lady, it was said, has gained some celebrity by once working on the set of "Psycho" as a stand-in for Janet Leigh. Others referred to them as Bodydouble. Knowing by now that Leigh had been doubly showered in the shower by Marli Renfro, it was obvious that it was the same person. Marli Renfro was apparently Myra Davis's stage name. "Marli / Myra," it was reported, the girl from Hitchcock's shower, was dead.

Confusion about confusion

Robert Graysmith clarified the error when his book "The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower" appeared in 2010. That Marli Renfro was called Stand-in, had him startled. That he was 43 at the time of shooting, he could hardly believe - on the "Playboy" coat she looked much younger. Also, Myra Davis' granddaughter Sherry insisted that her grandma had never shown herself naked in front of the camera did not fit into the picture.

Graysmith tracked down Renfro. She lived secluded in an oasis in the Mojave Desert, but was alive and kicking.

Her supposed murderer was described as an obsessed "psycho" fan. So, was Myra Davis a victim of confusion in 1988, and Kenneth Dean Hunt really wanted Marli Renfro? At least that's what newspaper reports suggested. "Everyone mistook the two," cited Guardian author Graysmith in 2010, "even a murderer." A macabre punch line. However, not very credible.

It seems more likely that the facts once again flowed wildly here. In the early 1960s, there was actually a serial killer named Sonny, who claimed that Hitchcock's movie had driven him to his actions. The "psycho-killer," as the media called him, strangled three women. All significantly older than him. With his second victim, he had watched in 1960 together "psycho" in the cinema, before he struck.

However, Henry Adolph "Sonny" Busch, as the psycho-killer was actually called, had been executed in the gas chamber of the San Quentin Prison in early summer 1962, four years before Kenneth Dean Hunt, the murderer of Myra Davis, in May 1966 was born.