‘Under the Bridge’: How did Rebecca Godfrey die?

Novelist and non-fiction writer Rebecca Godfrey plays a huge part in Hulu’s 2024 crime drama Under The Bridge.

Godfrey is played by Daisy Jones & The Six‘s Riley Keough but her real-life counterpart not only helped develop the show but also wrote one of the seminal books about the case that it explores. Godfrey grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, around the same area as Reena Virk, the 14-year-old Canadian girl whose shocking murder at the hands of other teenagers is at the center of the Hulu drama.

Eerily, the author’s brother, Jonathan, also died by drowning after falling from a cliff when he was 16 and Godfrey was 13. She told The Paris Review in 2019 that the aggressiveness with which journalists handled the tragedy then informed the way she chose to approach Virk’s death in her writing.

I didn’t want to be that intrusive or voyeuristic, so I was quite tentative by journalistic standards. I took a long time. I remember being in my car, pulling over to the side of the road, with panic attacks while I was on my way to interview people.”

Despite moving to New York to develop a career in journalism, the case felt close to home for the author, who moved back to Canada to investigate and write a book about it. Under the Bridge was published in 2005 and won the second annual British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction the following year. The judges for the competition summarized what it was that largely defined not just the book’s success but Godfrey’s career as a writer in general.

Godfrey’s depiction of teenage sentiment, as disturbing as it is compassionate, lingers long in the mind and the heart.”

Although Under The Bridge made Godfrey a household name, before it she had already published the critically acclaimed The Torn Skirt in 2001, which explores a lot of the same themes of female juvenile delinquency.

What happened to Under The Bridge author Rebecca Godfrey?

Rebecca Godfrey sadly passed away from lung cancer complications in a New York City Hospital on Oct. 3, 2022, at age 54. The news was only announced a month later in November, but around the time of Godfrey’s passing her name was in headlines for a different reason: Hulu had ordered a series based on her best-selling true-crime book, Under the Bridge.

“Rebecca passed away a few weeks before we started shooting the pilot, but she was super creatively involved in the years before,” Under The Bridge showrunner Quinn Shephard told The Wrap at the time of the show’s release in April 2024. According to The New York Times, the two collaborated for two and a half years to adapt the book to the television format, with Godfrey being credited as an executive producer.

Although the Hulu miniseries and Godfrey’s book share a title, Shephard was adamant it should adopt a “bird’s eye” perspective over the events, which included consulting Virk’s father and making Godfrey one more character in the show (Keogh shares the spotlight with Vritika Gupta’s Reena Virk and Lily Gladstone’s police detective Cam Bentland). The author’s ability to connect with the teens who were involved in the murder and get them to open up was a big part of Under The Bridge‘s success (show and book alike).

Rebecca allowed me to embrace the rebellious, sensitive, and mischievous spirit she had at the age when she wrote this. I wonder if at the time, when she was in it, it was hard to see how special the story of her writing this truly was. She would often say that looking back, she wondered how she was able to do it, withstand all of that darkness for so many years.”

Godfrey was excited to create her fictional counterpart, Shephard says, and was even behind the casting of now-Oscar-nominee Gladstone as the completely fictional police officer, with whom Keough’s character has a romantic history.

Her friend had worked on Killers of the Flower Moon and was like, ‘There’s this actress you have to see.”

Rebecca Godfrey is survived by her husband, Herbert Wilson; their daughter, Ada; her mother; and her brother Samuel.