Womb Ripper

**“***Rock-a-bye baby... on the tree top... When the wind blows... the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks... the cradle will fall... and down will come baby... cradle and all. Rock-a-bye baby... gently you swing. Over the cradle... mother will sing. Sweet is the lullaby... over your nest... that tenderly sings... my baby to rest. From the high rooftops... down to the sea... No one's as dear... as baby to me. Wee little hands... eyes shiny and bright. Now sound asleep... until morning light.***”**
— **The Womb Ripper singing "Rock-a-bye Baby" over the radio**

**Samantha Rhodes**, a.k.a. the **Womb Ripper**, is the main antagonist in *Bloodwash*.

## Biographical Overview

### Career

Student (formerly)
Laundry worker (formerly)

## Description

### Appearance

Samantha is a tall, slender adult Caucasian woman. Before her disfigurement, she had mid-length dark brown or black hair.

During her murderous rampage as the Womb Ripper, she was entirely naked, showing her androgynous, scarred body, and wore what appears to be a grey-colored baby mask, later revealed to be made from the skin of the fetuses she took from her victims. In her right hand, she holds a heavily degraded kitchen knife, which she uses to slash and eviscerate her victims.

She displayed superhuman strength and durability, as she was able to lift an adult man with one arm and withstand multiple gunshots.

### Personality

Prior to her descent into insanity, Samantha was described as being a nice person, but any trace of her old personality has since disappeared and been replaced by a demented and rage-stricken shadow of her former self.

As the Womb Ripper, she had become devoid of any shred of humanity and was reduced to an animalistic state, vocalizing almost exclusively through wails and screams. Despite being obviously deranged, she is not mindless and still seems to be possess most of her cognitive abilities, allowing her to operate in an organized, downright devious manner, tracking down suitable victims and purposely disposing of bodies for authorities to find, all the while remaining elusive and keeping her own existence hidden from the city.

Samantha is highly sadistic, not only physically torturing victims before their deaths, but toying with and terrifying them via means of psychological warfare, usually thematically referencing their pregnancy in some twisted way. Once fully committed to murdering her target, however, she foregoes all stealth and caution, hunting them like a frenzied predator, with any bystanders crossing her path becoming collateral damage.

### History

Little is known about her besides that she lived in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio and used to attend classes with the Pizza Dude. She was employed at West End Laundry and was frequently subjected to abuse by her boss, Louis Kennedy, who had a reputation as a philandering sleazebag. At some point, Samantha became pregnant and though it's never specified who the father was, it's heavily implied to have been Louis, as he had a well-known proclivity for younger women.

One fateful night, Louis locked her in the office and set the whole place on fire, apparently hoping to kill her to hide the pregnancy and make it look like a random act of arson. Despite rescue services not finding her remains, Samantha was officially declared dead. In actuality, she had survived, at the cost of her baby and suffering disfiguring burns all over.

The whole ordeal caused her to snap, tracking down and killing Louis in the following weeks, before going into hiding in the abandoned ruins of her former workplace, even after another one, Spin Cycle Laundromat, opened up right next to it. Seemingly out of a mixture of resentment, jealousy and genuine insanity, she began targeting pregnant women in a killing spree, brutally slicing open their stomachs and ripping the fetuses out of their wombs. She then further mutilated the bodies in satanic rituals, going as far as to hang and sprawl at least three of them around her hideout, which was decorated with mock-up toddler items and mannequins. She kept at least four of her victims imprisoned at the laundromat, where she tortured them through various means. Once the mothers were killed, the fetuses were skinned and used as sewing material, with their flayed remains being kept inside washing machines. To further haunt and disturb visitors of the plaza, she would sometimes make ghastly howls in the middle of the night, in a poor imitation of a child's crying. The prolific serial killings lasted years, but remained undetected, as it was assumed that many of the missing women simply skipped town for greener pastures.

In the summer of 1986, some weeks before the events of *Bloodwash*, she started dumping some of the bodies in the open, thus alerting the public to the presence of a serial killer, dubbed "Womb Ripper" by the press.

## *Bloodwash*

As Sara goes to wait by the bus station, a suspicious blue car stops dead in its tracks across the road, remaining unmoving until the bus arrives. The same car later appeared at the plaza, parked in front of the old laundromat.

While Sara was waiting for her clothes to get dry and browsing the plaza, Samantha snuck into the employee's section of the new laundromat and murdered the attending clerk, planting his body on the office ceiling. She then hides in a stall in the men's room, sometimes placing items around the laundromat (a doll head, a pregnant mannequin) and calling a nearby phone to frighten Sara, who discovers the corpse several minutes after her arrival. She calls 911 and while the signal breaks off, the dispatcher sends a patrol car to her location.

To get rid of the potential threat, Samantha padlocks the laundromat entrance and with her victim trapped, she breaks into a neighboring income tax office, slaughtering the night-shift staff. The commotion is overheard by the arriving policeman, Officer Burton, who checks out the building and finds her joyfully holding a bloody fetus, presumably freshly taken from a pregnant staff member. She briefly makes eye contact with the stunned officer, before the power is cut, with her disappearing in a flash. She eventually finds a surviving worker begging Burton for help, killing the former, then locks the officer in a room. Burton attempts to escape through the vents, but she continues to stalk his movements below and tries to stab him with a spear, screeching incoherently while doing so. When Burton finally reaches an exit shaft, Samantha pops out through it and murders him.

Samantha returns to the laundromat where she murders a patron and displays his gore on the washing machine aisle, along with a recording of her crooning a lullaby in a unhinged pitch, before setting her sights on Sara, who flees into the old laundromat. There, she stalks her victim, once locking her in a room and stabbing at the exit door and another time silently watching her as she advances deeper into her hideout. For unknown reasons, Samantha leaves clues for Sara directing her to Burton's gun and a box of ammo, and after a game of cat and mouse, Sara manages to lure Samantha into a final showdown in her own lair. Parrying her attacks in the pitch dark basement, it takes four direct shots into her torso to take her down. From the clues she's gathered, Sara finally identifies the Womb Ripper as Samantha Rhodes, with the shocking revelation making the news within hours.

The same night, her lifeless body is transported to a morgue, where she is examined by a coroner named Doug, who notes that the first shot alone should have killed her immediately. During the following autopsy, at approximately 3:30 A.M., the lights go out, forcing Doug to leave momentarily and fix the power. A hideous scream echoes through the halls shortly after and upon returning, to his shock, Samantha's corpse was gone. Before he could leave, Samantha appeared from a morgue cooler and killed him.

Authorities concluded that Samantha's corpse was stolen by hooligans. The infantile cries of the Womb Ripper resumed in the outskirts of town.

## Sniper Killer

**“***You can't just go around saying that! I mean Hell, we just wrapped up the Womb Ripper killings and now you're saying some maniac is running around the city with a rifle shooting random people.***”**
— **Detective Dutch**

Samantha does not appear, but she is mentioned by Detective Dutch who tells Gail that they just wrapped up the Womb Ripper killings and doesn't believe that there's another killer on the loose.

## Powers and Abilities

* **Superhuman strength:** Samantha posseses superhuman strength. She was able to hold and lift an adult man effortlesly with one arm before murdering him and dragging his corpse away.
* **Superhuman durability:** Despite being naked, Samantha seems to posess superhuman durability as witnessed in her fight with Sara. Samantha was able to withstand mutiple gunshots as written in her autopsy report that should have instantly killed her, but she kept on fighting.
* **Ressurection:** After being killed by Sara, the same night in the morgue Samantha came back to life.

## Victims

* Louis Kennedy
* At least 72 pregnant women and their unborn children (7 referenced in-game, while 65 fetuses are found in the Womb Ripper's hideout)
* Laundromat Employee
* At least one office worker
* Officer Burton
* Patron
* Doug

## Trivia

* In the early versions of the game, Womb Ripper was originally called "The Eviscerator".
* When exiting the pizza place after picking up the washed laundry, an old woman will appear and if prompted, ramble about losing a girl who looked similar to Sara. This woman may either be the mother of one of Samantha's victims, or possibly even Samantha's own mother, as she abruptly stops talking when Sara mentions the disappearances. It should be noted that she and Samantha share an unusually tall height.
* Samantha's age is unclear as no dates are given for the events in-game or timespans between them. What is known is that Samantha was still in education at the time of her initial disappearance according to Pizza Dude, though what level (high school or college) is never specified, and that the Womb Ripper has been killing for several years, as said by Peepaw. Assuming she is around the same age as Pizza Dude (a cameo role for YouTuber YuB, who was 33 at the time), she is probably in her late 20's to mid 30's.
* It is unknown whether there is any connection between her and the Creepy Guy, who implied familarity to the Womb Ripper.
* The lullaby heard sang by her through the baby monitor is *Rock-a-bye Baby*.
	+ Her singing voice is provided by Rebecca Chiara Marano.
* The laundromat patron gives a conflicting account on the aftermath of the laundry fire, mentioning that Samantha's remains were found in the office, contradicting the given timeline of the fire, which initially alerted police and lead to a search for Louis Kennedy, who would then be discovered to be missing. Several other characters, however, outright state that she had only been presumed dead *because* no remains were ever recovered.
* Despite the Womb Ripper having the tallest model in *Bloodwash*, the polaroid of her and Louis show her to be slightly shorter than him, even though his in-game model is regular sized.
* Samantha's pathology is an extreme and unique variation of fetal abduction, one that is unseen in the real world. In her case, it is not directly motivated by the wish to have a baby while unable to bear her own, on account of impotence, lack of a partner or barring from adoption or surrogacy services, but rather out of envy following the loss of her own unborn child, which drives her to take out her anger and frustration on pregnant women, who represent the motherhood she desires, but can no longer attain. As such, she does not wish to nurture and treat the snatched fetuses as her own, but instead murders them out of spite, so that their already dead mothers are robbed of their maternity like she had been.
* It's highly possible that the rituals she performed granted her supernatural powers, as it's acknowledged that Samantha‘s durability is abnormal, as numerous fatal shots failed to outright kill her and, as later shown, was able to survive both these wounds and even her own autopsy. This could also explain her immense strength despite the lack of visible muscle mass and her untraceable moving pattern in the office and the laundromat.
* Samantha Rhodes seems to be loosely inspired by Margaret White from the horror novel *Carrie*. Both are deranged laundromat workers with a violent obssession with motherhood (having a child with Samantha and "morally" raising her daughter with Margaret) and dealing punishment in the name of a religious entity (A satanic deity for Samantha and God for Margaret).
* In an April Fool's Twitter post, Jordan King stated that the Womb Ripper would return in her villain role in *Bloodwash 2*, in which she stalks after Peepaw, who was impregnated by a demon during an ouija board summoning.

## Gallery

Samantha in the income tax office, holding a fetus.Samantha killing the office workerSamantha appearing before and killing Officer BurtonSamantha battles SaraSamantha defeatedSamantha's body in the morgue

## References

1. ↑ https://twitter.com/LeggoMyGiallo/status/1443209941876191234
2. ↑ https://twitter.com/LeggoMyGiallo/status/1437556863449636866
3. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15445556/fullcredits
4. ↑ https://twitter.com/leggomygiallo/status/1509956843505954822