Cover of "What Holly Heard"
Ruth Carver is the main villainess of "What Holly Heard", book #34 of R.L. Stine's original Fear Street series (published on January 1, 1996). She was the friend of two of her classmates Miriam Maryles and Holly Silva. Little is revealed about Ruth's past outside of the fact that her father died when she was young. Secretly, Ruth came to resent Holly for her self-centered attitude and gossipy ways. One night, while Holly was at school late after helping decorate for a pep rally and was waiting for Miriam to pick her up, Ruth came in and killed Holly by strangling her with her own scarf, leaving her body to be found by Miriam.
To cover up her evil deed, Ruth went along with Miriam's belief that classmate Mei Kamata and her boyfriend Noah Brennan had killed Holly to cover up the fact that Mei and Noah had killed Mei's mother for disapproving of Noah (when she had really accidentally fallen down the stairs to her death soon after Holly heard them talking about how Mei was mad enough to kill her for their fight). She furthers Miriam's assumption by planting a message on her notebook to make it appear that Mei and Noah were threatening her. Much later in the book, when Miriam ran to Ruth's house after having a fight with her boyfriend Jed, Ruth claimed that Mei and Noah had broken into her house and killed her pet hamsters to leave another threat. But in actuality, the evil Ruth had killed her own pets with a claw hammer left to her by her father.
Miriam discovered Ruth's secret when she discovered the bloodied hammer while searching in her closet for something to cover up the mutilated hamsters. Suddenly, Ruth burst into the room and tried to attack Miriam with the hammer, eventually hitting her in the knee. She then went on to reveal her hidden hatred for Holly, as well as revealing how she was in love with Holly's boyfriend Gary Foster, who Holly had treated poorly. Just as Ruth was about to kill Miriam, though, Jed burst into the room to save his girlfriend. Ruth was able to easily stop Jed by throwing her hammer at him, hitting him in the head and disorienting him. But the distraction gave Miriam the chance to knock her psychotic friend unconscious with her hamster cage. Ruth was presumably arrested for murdering Holly and attacking Miriam and Jed.
Quotes[]
- "There is no hope. All of us were put on this earth to suffer and Holly never suffered." (Ruth as she confessed to her hatred of Holly and of murdering her).