The Capwell boathouse Old beach road, Santa Barbara

Home   Cette page en Français

The boathouse of the Capwell family is located at the end of an old country road which leads to the ocean. Inside is a central pond filled with water communicating with the ocean, around which are installed different navigation equipments : rowing boats and reams, ropes, rubber rings, diving equipment... All this in a dark and disturbing atmosphere. Curiously, the size of the boathouse seems small with regard to what we could imagine of the places : only a small-sized boat can take place inside, and it is unthinkable to imagine that the boat can go out of the pond. The size on one hand and the dimensions on the other hand confirm the sinister aspect of the shed, as far as only a few light filters from the outside.

The place is used for the first time in 1986 when Kirk Cranston presses Gina Capwell so that she frees him of his wife, Eden. He indeed obliges her to shoot his wife after having given an appointment with her inside the shed. Kirk, hidden behind boxes, doubles then Gina by shooting in the direction of Eden, who succeeds in running away. Gina, as for her, dives into the pond and lets everyone believing she is dead during several weeks.

The boathouse returns on the front of the scene at the beginning of 1988, this time by being the place of a drama from the past : Hal Clark's murder by Pamela Conrad at the end of the 50s, when she was still married to C.C. Capwell. When C.C., by diving into the pond, finds some bones, he decides to destroy the shed by an explosion to be certain to leave no track of the proofs being able to accuse him of the murder (indeed he thinks he is the person responsible for Hal's death).

But even destroyed, the shed keeps another of its secrets : the bones come out of the water by C.C. then by Cruz Castillo are not in fact Hal Clark's, but Dr. Mark McCormick's, who had left Santa Barbara two years earlier, and who had been killed at Goletta convent. The investigation refocusing then around Mark's murderer rather than Hal's, Pamela and C.C. are cleared of any suspicions and the boathouse (at least what remains of it) will never reappear on the screens.