Ruth Cairns

Ruth Cairns was a writer for a magazine on Fleet Street. Her editor, Gwen Cox, wanted her to do a story about the "Think Thin" program taking place at the Chesterton Clinic. Ruth didn't want to do the story and longed to one day get out of the women's section of the magazine. Regardless, she agreed to the task. She attended one of the clinic's weight loss seminars under the guise of being a member. The seminar instructor, a P.E. coach named Willis, was a loud and cruel man, who triesd to get people to lose weight through public humiliation and negative reinforcement. At the seminar, Ruth met another member named Ben Farraday. The two hit it off and agreed to go to lunch.

As they ate, they discussed the program and Ben told Ruth how Willis had prescribed a special dietary pill for him. They concluded their meal and agrees to meet each other again. Ruth wrote her telephone number down on Ben's hand. Unfortunately, Ben was killed in a traffic accident later that evening.

Following the funeral, a young funeral home employee named Andrew approached Ruth. He told her about Ben and indicated that something felt wrong about the manner of his death. She asked him what made him feel this way and he indicated that the funeral directors, Basil and Cedric Ashford, would not allow him to inspect the body. He further noted that both men had been acting strangely of late and that he suspected they might be up to something underhanded. Despite her grief over Ben's demise, Ruth saw this intrigue as the sort of meaty substance required to make her a real journalist.

Late that evening, Ruth and Andrew broke into the Ashford Bros. Funeral Home and found the coffin containing Ben's body. They unsealed it and found a body wrapped in linen like a mummy. They cut through the linen, but instead of a human body inside, they found a metal frame. Ben's actual body was missing. They heard the Ashford brothers muttering about and learned that they were going to the Chesterton clinic. Ruth and Andrew decided to secretly follow them.

Knowing that something shady was taking place at the clinic, Ruth returned to the magazine and told Gwen what she had learned. She elected to go undercover to get the real story on Chesterton and had herself admitted as a patient. The manager of the clinic, Jack Rothwell, personally interviewed her and provided her with a private room at the clinic.

That evening, Ruth sneaked out of her room and began snooping about the clinic. She saw Rothwell take a bloody body bag from a room and load it into his car. Ruth followed him in her own vehicle to the estate of the clinic's founder, Humphrey Chesterton.

Her presence was soon discovered and she was invited inside. Humphrey Chesterton was very cordial to her and invited Ruth into the dining room. The room was filled with several other people and Ruth learned that they were all survivors of a plane that crashed en route from London to Marrakech. These survivors formed a bond with one another and they gave subtle allusions as to what they were forced to do in order to survive. Every year, they meet with one another to share their stories. This year represented their thirteenth reunion. As dinner plates were set around the table, Ruth began to realize the truth. The survivors of the plane crash were all cannibals. Terrified, Ruth ran away from the house and made her way back to the funeral home. When she arrived, she found Andrew lying on a medical table, dead. Willis, the training instructor from the clinic, stepped out with a meat cleaver and stated that he too was on board that ill-fated flight. With that, he brought the cleaver down upon her.