The cliché goes that fact is stranger than fiction, but over and over again, Russell leans into some mighty familiar genre tropes. They’re like an odd couple partnership from a TV show or a movie, and that’s definitely how Russell treats them, right down to Carrillo’s domestic subplot with a loving wife who worries about his increased drinking and has to take the children to a secluded location to protect them when the heat rises. kid, a young punk detective with ambitious ideas, while Salerno was already a local investigative legend, the man credited with making the key connections in the Hillside Stranger case. The twin interviews that anchor the series are with Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, legendary homicide detectives with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and two of the key figures responsible for bringing the Night Stalker to justice.Ĭarrillo was an East L.A. Russell’s most recent background has been as writer and producer on several of Dick Wolf’s Chicago-set dramas, and thus it follows that Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer plays more as a police procedural than anything more tawdry. It has some annoying and inadvertently hilarious aesthetic choices, but in the balance, I admired its storytelling approach. The grip that the Night Stalker still has on the collective consciousness of Los Angeles can be seen in how Richard Ramirez has snuck into multiple seasons of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, and it’s a relief to be able to quickly dispatch with what I assume will be the first two questions asked by potential viewers: Tiller Russell’s series does not particularly sensationalize Ramirez or his horrifying crimes, and with episodes each running less than 50 minutes, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is much less padded than many of the recent prestige true crime docs.
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