The woman who inspired the novel and the film "The Natural" after her obsession with a baseball player, whom she shot and nearly killed, died three months ago of natural causes, with the news finally trickling out in March.
According to the Associated Press, Ruth Ann Steinhagen died three months ago on Dec. 29 at age 83, which was reported by the Chicago Tribune last week. Many did not realize who she was at first, but she was in fact a woman who once lured Cubs first baseman Eddie Waittkus to her hotel room with a cryptic note, the shot him, which nearly killed him.
"She chose to live in the shadows and she did a good job of it," John Theodore, an author who wrote a 2002 nonfiction book about the crime, wrote in an email Sunday.
Her story inspired the 1984 film starring Robert Redford, which was based on a novel by Bernard Malamud that saw Redford's character lured to a room and then shot, derailing his baseball career until a comeback. The woman was obsessed with Waittkus and even left him a place setting at the dinner table. After he was traded to the Phillies, when they came to Chicago, she checked into the same hotel.
She left him a note. "We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about," she wrote in a note to him after a game at Wrigley on June 14, 1949.
He came to her room, where Waittkus was then shot. According to the AP: She said: "I have a surprise for you," then turned with the rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest. Theodore wrote that she then knelt by his side and held his hand on her lap. She told a psychiatrist afterward about how she had dreamed of killing him and found it strange that she was now "holding him in my arms."
She was determined insane and served time in a mental hospital before regaining her sanity.
"I found out through my ex-wife -- I'm not sure how she found out -- and I looked [Steinhagen] up online. And as soon as I saw [her photograph] online I said, 'That's her," neighbor Chris Gentner said.
Waitkus died in 1972 before the move came out.
