The Devil's Audition - Part One

THE DEVIL’S AUDITION

Episode One: Temptation

On November 9, 1980, twenty-six-year-old Valerie McDonald was doing something remarkably sensible: she was getting out.

The aspiring filmmaker, actress, model and cocktail waitress had become frightened by the men managing her apartment building in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. She reportedly told friends and family about drugs, threatening behavior and activity she considered Satanic. With friends helping her move, Valerie appeared ready to put the Tower Apartments—and the people surrounding it—behind her. TDW_Devil Audition_1

Then Michael Hennessey arrived with an offer almost perfectly designed for an ambitious young actress.

There was a movie shooting in town, he said, starring Dustin Hoffman, who was then at the absolute height of his career after winning the Academy Award for Kramer vs. Kramer. The production supposedly needed an attractive blonde woman for a small role playing the victim of a serial killer. The job paid $200 and, more importantly, offered Valerie the possibility of appearing opposite one of the biggest movie stars in America. TDW_Devil Audition_1

Valerie agreed to go.

Her family would never see her alive again.

The movie did not exist. A private investigator hired by Valerie’s parents later contacted the production company and Hoffman’s representatives and found no evidence of the film or the role Valerie had been promised. Someone appears to have constructed an elaborate fiction around Valerie’s ambitions and used it to lure her away. TDW_Devil Audition_1

Then the story became considerably stranger.

Within days, Hennessey and convicted criminal John Gordon Abbott were fleeing north. On November 26, Canadian authorities caught up with them in British Columbia. A confrontation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police erupted into gunfire. Abbott was captured. Hennessey was killed. TDW_Devil Audition_1

Among the fugitives’ belongings, authorities reportedly discovered Valerie’s voter-registration and unemployment-benefit cards. The missing woman in San Francisco was now physically connected to the men who had fled hundreds of miles toward Canada. TDW_Devil Audition_1