Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Confronting A Serial Killer’ On Starz, A Docuseries About Author Jillian Lauren’s Conversations With Serial Killer Sam Little

Serial killer docuseries generally center their perspective on the killer, his life and his motivations for killing over and over again. But Confronting A Serial Killer takes a different tack, centering the series not on serial killer Sam Little, who admitted to killing 93 women from 1970-2005, but on his victims’ families and on Jillian Lauren, the author who managed to get him to admit to those murders via a string of interviews in 2018.

CONFRONTING A SERIAL KILLER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a garbage-strewn alley in Los Angeles, author Jillian Lauren gets out of the car and walks through the scene where one of Sam Little’s victims, Carol Alford, was found.

The Gist: Confronting A Serial Killer is a 5-part docuseries directed by Joe Berlinger that focuses on the conversations that notorious serial killer Sam Little had with author Jillian Lauren in 2018.

The first episode walks the audience through how Lauren, a novelist who had a strong interest in true crime, came to meet Little and how, after denying he killed anyone, admitted to 93 different murders across the country, committed from 1970 to 2005. When she was researching a book, she asked Mitzi Roberts, an LAPD homicide detective, about the case she’s most proud of. And the one she cited was catching Sam Little, nailing him for Alford’s murder and the murder of 2 other women.

As Lauren went down the path of investigating Little, she was shocked to find that he had a rap sheet 100 pages long, dating back to his days in Mississippi in the 1970s. He continued to get arrested, even indicted of crimes like robbery, sexual assault and even murder, but never got convicted. What Lauren learned is that most of his victims were women in marginalized categories, like prostitutes and drug addicts, and many of them were Black.

She had a personal connection to these victims because when she was 20, she had almost been strangled by a boyfriend, during a period where she was addicted to heroin. So she travels to Pascagoula, Mississippi to talk to Hilda Nelson, someone who survived an attack from Little, back in 1980. The case and one other survivor, both Black, were ignored until a white woman named Melinda LePree disappeared two years later, her body eventually found badly decomposed. Law enforcement in Pascagoula needed the testimony from Nelson and the other survivor in order to nail Little on LePree’s murder, but a grand jury wouldn’t indict Little, mainly because the survivors, both prostitutes, weren’t considered to be credible witnesses.

When Lauren finally got a chance to talk to Little in prison, he at first denied everything. But when she showed him she can hang in with him and make deals with him for information, he started to open up.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Confronting A Serial Killer is so similar to I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, it’s eerie. A dogged true crime author chasing down a notorious serial killer case. A celebrity husband (Lauren is married to Weezer bassist Scott Shriner). The only difference is that Lauren is still alive and she talked to Little while he was already in prison.

Our Take: While watching the first episode of Confronting A Serial Killer, we were wondering why we didn’t hear a whole lot about said serial killer, Sam Little. What the episode turned out to be was more of a character sketch of Jillian Lauren than it was of Little.

Now, given the title of the series, maybe that was the intention, to set up Lauren’s commonalities with Little’s victims and her desire to get their stories out in the open via the extensive interviews she’s had with him. But we were left frustrated that Little became more like a character in Lauren’s story, not knowing much more about the killer at the end of the hour than we knew in the beginning.

For instance, the time it took for Lauren to show us the recorder she used to talk to Hilda Nelson could have been used to talk to more of his victim’s families, or at the very least dive more into his motivations for killing these women. We hear some of it in interview snippets, but nothing that speaks to his history or upbringing.

What we were more interested in hearing about why Little managed to evade conviction for so long, even though he was arrested hundreds of times. Because his victims were prostitutes or drug addicts, law enforcement didn’t make as much effort to investigate — according to Lauren, they were considered “less dead” than white women from families with money — and even if they managed to arrest Little, the charges wouldn’t stick because his victims were in marginalized groups.

We hope that Berlinger and Lauren will explore that aspect of the case more, and interview more families, whether they’re white or people of color. Lauren has had an interesting life — she was once part of the Prince of Brunei’s harem, the topic of one of her earlier books — but the person we want to find more about in this series is Little.

Parting Shot: As we see video of Lauren staring at cards on a bulletin board, we hear her ask Little how many women he’s murdered. “You’re a smart cookie,” he says, “Why don’t you find out for yourself? The ball is in your field.”

Sleeper Star: We’d like to hear from Scott Shriner a little bit more, to hear how these interviews with Little affected Lauren and her relationship with him and their two kids. There seems to be hints that there were issues as she got more involved, but we don’t hear from him that much in the first episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not sure why we needed an introduction to Lauren’s recorder and why she records people she interviews for research. All good journalists do that by default.

Our Call: STREAM IT, with the caveat that we’re hoping that Confronting A Serial Killer delves more into Little’s life and motivations and the fact that murders of women in marginalized groups are so readily dismissed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Confronting A Serial Killer On Starz