A Series On Serial Killers on TV, Part 1: What Homicide Got Right About Them And The lessons Its Creators Took To Their Next HBO Series

 

Actual serial killers are rare and the lion’s share of them not particularly interesting psychologically. But you’d never know that if you’ve been watching films and television for much of the past thirty years. Ever since The Silence of The Lambs introduced us to Hannibal Lecter, for the past thirty years the film and television industry have been obsessed with putting them everywhere: from David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac (and his connection with the Netflix series Manhunter) to the TV shows that have taken varying versions of the Hannibal Lecter story  (NBC’s Hannibal and CBS far less successful Clarice) to almost every police procedural in the twentieth first century, from every CSI to Criminal Minds to Prodigal Son. Recently Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer has become one of its most viewed shows in this quarter.

And almost every one of the films and television products have gone out of their way to glamorize some element of the killer – to make them clever or charismatic, almost charming despite the fact that they have no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. The other side of it has led, in a way, to a justification for much of often irredeemable behavior of law enforcement when it comes to approaching even suspects in these horrible crimes. The question begs to be asked: how did we get here? Beyond the fascination with the monsters – which started with Charles Manson and has been growing ever since – why does TV in particular decide to put so much of its time dealing with these horrible examples of humanity who most times, are not nearly as interesting as pop culture would have you believe?

In the next few articles, I will be analyzing TV’s fascination with the serial killer: how it began what series have taken the right approach and which have done it a disservice.

And I’d like to start with something that anyone of this millennium might find fascinating: there were multiple series in the 1990s that did in fact deal with serial killers, but the lion’s share of them considered them ordinary individuals, and in many cases not even the most interesting killers that they would end up tracking down.

I’ve have written a long series of articles in the past year dealing with Homicide, the 1990s Baltimore set procedural that was the rarely duplicated character driven cop show. In its entire seven season run, Homicide almost never actually dealt with the textbook definition of the serial killer: I recall just five major stories that dealt with it the entire way. And in all of them, they openly disregarded the idea that there was even remarkable about these killers except the body count.

In a three-episode arc that began the third season, the detective investigated a series of murders involving three Good Catholic women who were found in dumpsters, wearing only white cotton gloves. Frank Pembleton, a lapsed Catholic himself, was the lead investigator and realized this was crime of perversion (even though there was no sexual assault) and that the killer was Catholic. The killings were later linked to five more murders in Oregon.

The killer eventually showed up in the squad room: Annabella Wilgus. In one of the great interrogation scenes in the show’s history, Pembleton questioned her, only to have her ‘assume’ other personalities, including an elderly nun and a seven-year-old girl. Every detective believed she was faking it. The interrogation was interrupted when her attorney showed up and a few hours later, Wilgus confessed to the crimes to a local reporter, adding of course, that she had been the victim of sexual abuse herself. We never learn her eventual fate: there is a possibility she spent the rest of her life in an institution instead of going to prison. Pembleton’s reaction was pure cynicism, anticipating the book deals, news specials and movies of the week Wilgus would end up getting for her act. Given how the media has treating killers like Wilgus ever since, it’s hard to doubt his cynicism.

The next major case involving a serial killer was ‘Sniper’. (Full disclosure: this is the first episode of the show I ever watched when Homicide was on the air.) Over the space of twenty-four hours, nine men and women are killed from a rooftop shooting. At each shooting, a game of Hangman is found with each case a word written out and a partially drawn figure found. There is no connection between anything: the names of the victims and the letters chosen, the locations and the letters, the numbers of killings and the numbers of guesses. Eventually, all the detectives figure out the shootings are eight hours apart.

The victims eventually track down the shooter William Mariner.  Mariner has locked himself in his study with games of Hangman covering every surface in sight. He asks Bayliss (Kyle Secor) to choose a letter. Bayliss chooses B. Mariner says he’s finished the game, now he can stop, and kills himself.  The word he has written is ‘eromitlab’ (this is Baltimore backwards, none of the detectives pick this up.) Bayliss is left to think: “He finished the game, and I don’t even know what that means.”

Exactly eight hours after the third shooting, another one happens. The exhausted detectives go back to work. There are three more victims, but no game of hangman. The squad tries to use the FBI to try and figure out where the killer will attack next based on his previous crime scenes. They’re wrong and two more people die. This time, the killer literally walks over to them: his name is Alex Robey (David Eigenberg, three full years before he showed up on Sex and The City) and he was at both crime scenes. He has full knowledge of the media coverage of the killings, but no information to offer. It’s pretty clear he’s a copycat and wannabe. He is eventually manipulated by Pembleton and Bayliss into confession, when they discuss that while Mariner terrified the cities, this is just a pale imitation, a ‘nobody’. After confessing, Robey says before they write up: “You tell the press it was me that did it. I ain’t a nobody.”

While both of these episodes were considered conventional, even derivative compared to the brilliance of previous seasons, its worth noting what writers Tom Fontana and company did when they painted their serial killers. There’s nothing remarkable about Mariner’s murders or the patterns that catch him: he has simply gone insane and is following a pattern that makes no sense to anyone. The media obsession with him drives Robey to commit a similar string of murders, but there’s nothing particular remarkable about him. At one point Pembleton actually says: “You are maybe the biggest bore I’ve ever had in this room,” and I don’t think he’s saying just as a technique. The media may be obsessed with these killings (during the second episode, the brass has to deal with media coverage from every major newspaper and network) but that’s unworthy of the killers themselves.

This is true even of the closest thing we get to a genuine serial killer in the entire run in ‘Stakeout.” A man who is arrested on drug charges and possession of stolen goods confesses to his part in disposing the bodies of at least nine young men, who were strangled and mutilated. He even gives the name and address of the killer.  Almost the entire episode is set inside his next-door neighbors as the detectives begin shifts waiting for the killer to come home. The episode focuses on a clock every three hours, each time with one detective replacing another. The detectives spend the entire episode, watching, drinking coffee,  interacting with the married couple whose house they’re using, talking about their fears, their problems, even whether or not they should give up smoking.

This is one of the greatest episodes the series ever did and what is the most fascinating thing about it is that the killer himself and what he’s done, practically never come up. There is nothing different or special about this than any other killer.  When the killer eventually returns to his house in a taxicab, it’s an anticlimax – there’s not even a fight, he just drops to his knees and starts crying without even a line of dialogue. (I’m not even sure he got a screen credit.) A man who kills ten people may indeed by a monster, but for the homicide detectives of Baltimore, it’s no different than any other skell they pick up.

In a show that made it clear that every life had meaning, Homicide went out of its way to say that there’s nothing remarkable or special about someone who kills a dozen people over one. The victims of the families care, to be sure, but no more or even less than the families of other victims. It is only the media that seems to think this is remarkable.  Of all the astonishing thing Homicide did over the years, this may be one of their subtler but no less impressive messages.

And both the men responsible for creating this project  - Tom Fontana and David Simon – made that very clear in the first follow-up project they did with HBO.

As I’ve mentioned before, Fontana was the showrunner and author of every script of OZ set in a maximum-security prison. There were, as you’d expect, many serial killers on the show but almost none of them ended up in prison before that. Chris Keller (Christopher Meloni, who we will be getting back too) was the suspect in the killings of three teenage boys who he’d had sex with and murdered. An FBI agent spent the part of three years, trying to convict him of these murders, manipulating friends of Keller’s, manufacturing evidence and in the final episode trying to convince Beecher, Keller’s lover (Lee Tergesen) to give a false confession. Keller would briefly end up on death row for this but escape punishment.

We saw many people on the series commit multiple murders behind the walls of Oz – Vern Schillinger, Simon Adebisi, and in the most obvious case Jazz Hoyt, who eventually confessed to a series of murders and end up on death row himself. But in none of those cases were these killers shown to be any better or worse than the lion’s share of the other prisoners in OZ.  Indeed, during the entire seven seasons OZ aired, we only met one serial killer, played by Eric Roberts, and he only confessed to over thirty murders because his final appeal for clemency had failed.  Even then, Sister Pete who was adamantly opposed to the death penalty, refused to say he deserved it. Even Leo Glynn in a final discussion after Roberts was execution was actually willing to come up with a measure of sympathy for his fate: “

GLYNN: No one’s going to claim (his) body. So we’re going to put him in a box and ship him to Potter’s Field with no one to grieve over him.

SISTER PETE: I will.

GLYNN: I know you will. That’s why I love you.

Even for the worst of devils, the most cynical of wardens could muster sympathy for them.

As anyone who has watched The Wire’s final season knows, one of the biggest problems fans and critics alike have been McNulty’s scheme to get funding for his investigation (Baltimore has no money for overtime) is to desecrate the bodies of dead homeless men to make it look like the work of a serial killer. I don’t deny this storyline is deeply flawed, as well as the fact that Lester not only signs on to it, but openly abets it.

The thing is, McNulty has a point. Right before he begins his plan, the FBI and the city have equally refused to give time or resources to the real investigation, which includes the murders of at least twenty African-American men by a drug cartel. Drinking that night, Lester and Bunk admit that the problem is the race and gender. “If it was anyone else – white women, black women…” and its hard to argue the point.

There are also multiple flaws in the stories surrounding the Baltimore Sun, but it is worth noting that apparently the credo: “doing more with less” does not apply to a serial killer. Clark Johnson’s character, who has doubts about the reporter involved, is nevertheless gratified that they will be getting resources for this story.

It even becomes a political issue. Mayor Carcetti is trying to launch a run for the Governor’s chair and has no accomplishments to back it. When the homeless murders become a front-page story, he grants the funding the Baltimore PD has never been able to get for its drug cases or anything else. He starts campaigning in homeless shelters and taking funding away from the schools he’s spent the last year trying to prop up.

In the series finale when all of this comes out, everyone is furious – except one of his aides who is tickled by this. “They (the police) needed an issue to get paid. We needed an issue to get you elected.” (Personally I consider this one of the late Reg E. Cathey’s finest hours.) He actually wishes he was still with the Sun “so I could write about this,” not knowing (in typical fashion) the lies surrounding the paper’s involvement. Simon may have gotten a lot wrong about the final season, but in a sense, he clearly got the obsession that the media has with the serial killer. Even a fake one is more interesting than actual crime. If only the rest of the police procedurals that had followed had taken this to heart.

Tomorrow, I will be looking at the serial killer from the point of view of the supernatural and how shows in the 1990s made it just as clear as Homicide how ordinary these kinds of monsters really were.