Memoirist Jillian Lauren tells the stories of women victimized by a man considered to be the most prolific serial killer in United States history in the new series Confronting a Serial Killer. The series focuses on the miscarriages of justice and bias against the victims due to their race, lifestyles, and gender. This is the concept of what we call “the less dead” concept, where some victims are considered less worthy of attention than others.
In 2017, Jillian Lauren was working on a novel and was able to interview Detective Mitzi Roberts in Los Angeles’ Robbery and Homicide division. Roberts is the detective who brought down serial killer Samuel Little. Little denied having committed the over 90 murders that he is convicted having completed in his 80 years on earth. Lauren was able to get access to Samuel Little, and what followed were frequent conversations that not only unraveled the story of a killer, but those of his victims and survivors.
The five-episode series comes to Starz on April 18, 2021, but it premiered tonight at the SXSW film festival. This one is hard to watch, especially as we hear so many stories of women so close to each other murdered and discarded with trash. The documentary is stressful because I could see Jillian Lauren pulling a Clarice Starling with prid pro quo discussions and I kept wanting to scream “nooooo. Don’t do that! Don’t!” I hope this documentary pisses you off the way it pissed me off. There were so many examples of sexual assault. There were so many indicators of dangerous and brutal behavior. The way Samuel Little spoke about women was such a clear indicator. We also get a pretty big discussion of the mind job we do on women from the earliest of ages and how we put violence against women and protective measures onto the shoulders of women rather than hold men accountable for their actions.
