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Vance Kingsley is the main antagonist of the 1978 slasher film The Toolbox Murders. Vance is a homicidal maniac driven to killing women out of trauma, putting the city of Los Angeles on edge.
He is portrayed by Cameron Mitchell (who also portrayed Massimo Morlacchi in Blood and Black Lace and Benedict in The Stranger) and possibly an uncredited stunt double.
Biography[]
Vance is an apartment building super who lost his daughter Kathy in a car crash. The trauma he suffered drove him toward a violent pioty against women he frowned upon, which escalated to him murdering them all in 1967. Dressing in black and a ski mask while carrying a toolbox filled with murder weapons, he sets out in his building to kill Mrs. Andrews with an electric drill, two other women with a hammer and screwdriver, and yet another woman with a nail gun the next night. Shortly before the last woman's murder, the police question everyone in the building, including Vance and his nephew Kent. Laurie Ballard is kidnapped and tied up in Kathy's bathroom, Vance wanting her to act as his daughter and seeing her as much more innocent than the women he killed.
Joey, furious the police won't look into Laurie's disappearance, goes into the women's apartments, where Kent is cleaning them. Kent reveals Kathy's deadly car crash, which was seen in flashbacks since the beginning of the film, revealing Vance as the killer. Joey speaks again with Lieutenant Mark Jamison, realizing Vance is responsible and rushing back to Kingsley residence. Finding the bloody murder weapons in the garage, Joey is then confronted by Kent, who burns Joey alive to eliminate him as a witness. Kent then meets with Vance while he speaks to Laurie, alleging Vance and Kathy were having incest. Enraged, Vance fights Kent, who stabs him to death with a kitchen knife. Laurie thinks she's free when Kent cuts the ties with scissors, but he then kisses and rapes Laurie, wanting her to be his "wife". In her shock, she sees the scissors and stabs Kent to death off-screen. After Laurie stumbles outside covered in blood, an intertitle says she was psychiatrically hospitalized for three years, then moved to San Fernando Valley with a husband and child.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The movie is reportedly inspired by a killing spree in Minnesota that occurred before the movie was made, which reported Linda Gross covered in her research of the film in a Los Angeles Times report.