| “ | I want to bring you up to date, Miss Foley, you've been living with ignorance too long. I want to impart some information to you, because it's clearly coming back to you anyway, and I want to be the first, I want to be the VERY first… that night it was me in your bedroom. I killed your mother. There was some trouble with the books and I was pleading with her to cover for me. But your mother, rest her soul… was a particularly rigid, straight-laced woman who was going to inform on me. When she ran into your bedroom I had to follow her. Hardly enough Helen, I'd have had to come after you next… | „ |
| ~ Peter Selden revealing his true nature. |
Peter Selden is the main antagonist of The Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare as a Child". He is an old friend of the protagonist's mother, but is later revealed to have been the man who murdered her.
He was portrayed by the late Shepperd Strudwick.
History[]
Peter Selden is first introduced as a polite and considerate man who the protagonist Helen Foley bumped into on her way home from work one day. He introduces himself to her, and she initially does not remember him, as she has only a few, vague memories of her childhood, apparently having become semi-amnesiac due to the violent death of her mother when she was young. He asks her if she remembers anything from that night, but she answers in the negative.
However, as Helen Foley starts to remember more and more, Peter Selden returns, and reveals to Helen (who has by now remembered some of the details of her childhood and her mother's violent death), that he was the one who murdered her mother, having done it to keep her from informing on him due to "trouble with the books". He had intended to kill Helen as well, but her screams had alerted people, and he needed to flee. But ever since then, he's been discreetly keeping tabs on Helen, as he knew it was only a matter of time before she remembered exactly how her mother died. With her now remembering all of it, Peter tries to kill her, but she fights him off, and he ends up dying when he falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck.
