Buster kills Myrtle Keeton

Buster Keeton’s murder of Myrtle Keeton turns a private financial and marital crisis into an irreversible crime. After killing her with a hammer, he passes from a fugue state into exhausted recognition of what he has done; even the Winning Ticket, once a promise that he could recover his losses, now seems useless and damaged. The murder follows a widening collapse shaped by gambling, embezzlement, an impending audit, and his conviction that the town is persecuting him.

Causes and Background

Buster’s gambling began with wins at Lewiston Raceway, but early losses drew him back to the track to recover his money. When another visit left him further behind, he took one hundred dollars from the town’s petty-cash fund to cover the gap in the household account before Myrtle noticed. The small diversion became the first step into a larger financial crisis: he kept betting, later found a bookie who would accept larger wagers, and failed to improve his luck.

The concealment was especially consequential because Buster was a certified public accountant with access to the town’s financial records. By autumn 1990, the arrangements he had used to keep his losses and misuse of public money out of sight were beginning to unravel. He privately kept correspondence with the Bureau of Taxation in a locked filing-cabinet drawer and sorted its letters apart from his own replies, although his secretary, Shirley Laurence, had typed none of those responses. The state’s demand to audit all town books—including tax, revenue-sharing, expenses, road maintenance, law enforcement, parks, and the experimental tree farm—made the threat concrete. One of the threatening slips later displayed the accusation of embezzlement in plain terms.

The Murder and Immediate Aftermath

After Myrtle’s murder, Buster falls into a deep fugue state. The idea that the town is crawling with persecutors, which had shortly before given him a sense of righteous purpose, no longer sustains him. In its place are weariness, depression, and the pain of his exertion. He looks at the hammer in his hand, lets it fall, and becomes absorbed in the mark it leaves on the kitchen floor, which he imagines resembles his father’s face.

He then goes to his study and retrieves Winning Ticket, the wind-up horse-racing game he had hidden in a closet beneath hanging clothes. The handcuff chain still attached to him catches on one of Myrtle’s shoes as he crawls out. Rather than feeling the excitement the game once gave him, he sees no way it can help: replacing the money would not undo the murder. He insists to himself that Myrtle deserved what happened, but immediately recognizes that the authorities will not accept that justification and imagines himself imprisoned in Shawshank Penitentiary.

Delay and the Failed Promise of Winning Ticket

Nearly twenty minutes pass between the murder and Buster’s trip through the shower. He is not taken into custody during that interval because the sheriff’s office is in near-total disarray amid a change in authority, and his whereabouts do not seem important to those managing the transition. The delay gives him time to wash, change into clean clothes, and return to the study, but does not restore his composure or his earlier confidence.

Buster examines Winning Ticket again, hoping his depression will pass and the old sense of possibility will return. Instead, Myrtle’s blood marks the picture on the box, and the toy horses appear faded and disordered. Inside, their colors have dulled, and a broken spring protrudes from the winding hole. He reads this damage as evidence that someone has tampered with the game. The contrast is decisive: the object once represented a way to win back money and escape the consequences of gambling, but after the murder it can offer neither financial repair nor relief from responsibility.

Consequences and Significance

The murder is the point at which Buster’s self-justifying story loses its power even for him. He continues to blame Myrtle and to imagine the town as an enemy, yet he understands that the killing has created a consequence that cannot be settled by repaying the stolen funds or winning at the races. His attention shifts from the imagined persecutors to the fact of his own act, then back to suspicion when the damaged game seems to confirm that someone has interfered with it.

The episode joins Buster’s financial misconduct to his unraveling sense of persecution without making one erase the other. The audit threat is real, his use of town money is real, and his fear that the town will punish him becomes entangled with his belief that unseen forces are closing in. In the aftermath, the blood-marked game condenses that collapse: an instrument of gambling, a symbol of hoped-for recovery, and an object he now interprets through suspicion. The murder of Myrtle is therefore not a solution to Buster’s crisis but its irreversible human cost.