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The Killing Season Interview

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‘KILLING’ DOC’S DUO PLUNGES INTO ABYSS SEEKING JUSTICE, HUMANITY

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Nietzsche warned that when fighting monsters, beware not to become one. Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills warn that when hunting killers, take care to not to forget their victims.

The New York-based producers undertake the daunting task of hunting serial killers and puzzling through the horrors and sorrows left in the aftermath in A&E network’s The Killing Season. The eight-part docu-series bows Nov. 12 and is as relentless in giving voice to forgotten victims and knitting together coalitions to study killers as it is in actually hunting for them.

READ MY REVIEW OF THE SERIES.

The Killing Season begins simply enough, though, as a look into the unsolved murders of four prostitutes on Long Island. Zeman and Mills throw themselves into this case in their back yard, detailing the crimes, interviewing law enforcement officials, dropping in on family and friends of the victims, and following leads.

The trail of clues to the initial crimes, which originated in 2010, has long since gone cold, complicated by law enforcement bureaucracy and a lack of cohesive shared evidence and information.

“We are drawn to the idea of helping when police get stuck,” Zeman says. He has experience with the subject matter, having produced and codirected another serial-killer-themed work, Cropsey, in 2009. He and Mills turn to cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to hashing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.

As we watch, the team’s scope steadily widens.

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A&E

“Alex Gibney (the documentary’s executive producer) encouraged us to look at bigger issues,” Zeman says. So Zeman and Mills began drilling down deeper into their investigation of victims—they are nearly all prostitutes and/or drug-addled low-income women on the fringes—as well as the fractured methods to share data among law enforcement and a disturbing patterns of long-haul truckers. In theory, some of these long-haulers target prostitutes while crisscrossing the nation. It’s a job, we are told, “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We also learn how the Internet becomes a deadly tool used by killers to target female escorts.

Zeman notes that in this era of social media, smart-device technology and web-savvy citizen across the nation, it was startling to learn that despite the wealth of information at our fingertips, there remains hurdles to unifying these resource into a comprehensive database that can be shared by law enforcement agencies.

“It’s called linkage blindness,” Zeman says. There’s the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) that makes data available to law enforcement agencies, but information is entered into ViCAP voluntarily, Zeman says. The input of data is not mandatory or consistent. While many law enforcement agencies collect data in their regions, the information is not typically connected with systems from other regions.

A powerful element of The Killing Season involves watching Zeman and Mills knit together information from this agency and that agency and match it with information gleaned from fastidious websleuths and geologists who can pinpoint possible burial sites and professors programing algorithms that deduce the hunting grounds of serial killer and amateur profilers who give their FBI counterparts a run for their money.

“Citizens have the most extensive databases we can access,” Zeman says.

Meeting with victims’ family and friends was about more than gleaning information about the cases, Mills says. It offered insight into the lives of often-invisible victims of these crimes. It was a difficult, but rewarding experience, she says. The love ones often emerged as keepers of the flame for the victims.

“Sisters in particular, they continue to tell these stories, keep the memories (of the victims) alive,” says Mills, executive producer at Jigsaw Productions, whose work includes the documentary Killer Legends (2014).

The duo often appears fearless in documentary, whether calling up possible serial killers, or confronting a suspect directly at his home, or taking rides with supposed informants, or meeting clandestinely with mysterious characters.

“Josh was gung-ho,” Mills says. “I had to work up bravery.” But there she is right beside Zeman, journeying into potential danger. At times, the two had to haul around bulletproof vests, Zeman says.

“Of course we got nervous,” Mills says, “but to make our point we had to be bold, to try to give these women justice.”

“These families were braver than us,” she adds.

All told, the duo spent 175 days on the road in an emotionally draining experience.

“We’ll see how people respond,” Zeman says. “Our goal is not to solve one crime, but to solve a whole lot of crimes.”

Take a look into the abyss on Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on A&E.

 

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Open Book

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The Man from Primrose Lane (2012)

By James Renner

365 pages

 

The Man from Primrose Lane is an effective crime thriller and character study that builds steadily for its first two-thirds, then zings us in its final third by charging full bore into the realm of science fiction. Whether you accept this final twist (although Renner points us toward it for much of the novel) will likely determine whether you like this book.

The Man from Primrose LaneStructured expertly by fellow Ohio author Renner, story proper involves a once-famous true-crime writer inching back from years of depression following a personal tragedy. David Neff found great and early success writing about serial killers. Now he lives comfortably off residuals, and finds solace (and insecurity) in his role as a father.

The death of a local oddball, the titular character also known as “the man with a thousand mittens,” plunges David back into the true-crime game. But first he has to strip himself of the antidepressant that stifles his writing and investigative instincts. Renner makes a point of writing realistically about the effects of antidepressant drugs and the dangers of divesting oneself from them, though this concern seems to drift away once the novel shifts into high gear.

There’s a lot here to digest: two love stories, interludes, a father-son tale, past crimes and the present-day crimes they intersect, serial killers, mobsters, hidden family secrets and of course sci-fi machinations.

I appreciate Renner’s careful prose, his deliberate writing. It brings weight to what might otherwise have been a routine police procedural; it keeps the novel from spinning off into absurdity once the sci-fi element reaches its fevered pitch. I like Renner’s insights into journalism—he knows his way around a newsroom, how editors and reporters talk. I like his presentation of crime details, his use of cop-speak, and especially the way his story pauses for bold strokes of characterization, including bittersweet time-spanning interludes involving a son trying to come to terms with and avenge his father’s untimely death.

David’s beloved wife, Elizabeth, is particularly well-realized. During a classroom meet cute she is quickly sketched as a quirky, damaged woman. But Renner deepens the character as the story unfolds; despite being presenting mostly in flashback and moments of reflective emotion, she really becomes one of the book’s most vivid characters.

As the book slides between past, present and the future—sometimes within the same scene—we get the sweep of David’s life: a brash, intelligent young man; an empowered, loving husband; a regretful son; a disillusioned, recovering author; a yearning middle-ager with reawakening sexual desires; a frightened, hopeful father.

Gradually we realize the novel’s major theme is obsession. What we first take as grief, then a dogged pursuit of answers, grows into something much darker. David is given disturbing means to follow his obsessions to harrowing depths.

The crime story aspect is the book’s engine, though. It keeps us turning pages. (Renner’s true-crime background pays off in spades.) Personally I would have been content without the genre-bending shakeup of the final third. The crime story, characters and well-written prose were enough carry me through the book. But, hey, I’m not going to fault the author for trying something different with a well-worn genre.

The book’s a treat for Akron, Ohio, residents like myself, with its spot-on detailing of local roads, communities, restaurants, public figures and landmarks. The cities of Mansfield and Cuyahoga Falls and the state of Pennsylvania also figure into the plot. Of course Cleveland—in current and future forms—looms large here.

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