On March 10, 1928, a nine-year-old boy named Walter Collins was kidnapped from his suburban Los Angeles home. Within a year the kidnapping would lead to the wrongful imprisonment of Walter’s mother Christine, to a corruption scandal that would permeate the highest levels of the LAPD, and to a child-abuse horror that would shake the city to its core.

This was the basis for Changeling. “There are some true stories that grab you by the lapels and don’t let go,” says the film’s writer, J. Michael Straczynski, a former LA Times journalist. “Once I started digging here, I couldn’t stop.”

Trawling through LA’s City Hall archives, Straczynski discovered an increasingly bizarre tale that revolved around the institutionalised victimisation of Christine Collins. Here, the single mother, after months of police inaction, was presented with a young boy, Arthur Hutchins, posing as Walter, by the LAPD police Captain J. J. Jones. When she refused to acknowledge the boy as her son she was first rebuffed by the police, who ordered her to try the new Walter out “on a trial basis”, and then eventually incarcerated in the psychiatric wing of LA County Hospital.

“Every time you think it can’t possibly get worse for her, it does,” says Straczynski, who adds that 90 per cent of the movie’s dialogue comes from written testimony. “When Captain Jones says: ‘Take the kid home on a trial basis,’ that’s verbatim from court records,” he says.

The tale takes a darker turn into the killings of children by Gordon Northcott (known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders), but at every step Collins is struggling for justice, and for Walter. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for her to take on the LA establishment,” Straczynski says. “So I thought I need to tell this exactly the way it happened, if only to honour her courage.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010