Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pillowcase Murders’ On Paramount+, A Docuseries About The Serial Murders Of Women In Texas Retirement Communities

Pillowcase Murders, a three-part docuseries directed by Randy Ferrell, explores the murders of elderly women in a number of different retirement communities in the Dallas area. The murders, which occurred between 2016 and 2018, were accompanied by robberies, mostly of jewelry the women were wearing or had nearby. As police, medical examiners and the administrators of the communities chalked these deaths up to natural causes, the children and grandchildren were calling for further investigation.

PILLOWCASE MURDERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man sitting on a swinging bench near a pond. “It only takes two to three minutes,” he says. “Two to three minutes of sheer horror.”

The Gist: Just about all of the murders examined in Pillowcase Murders took place at high-end retirement communities like The Tradition-Prestonwood near Dallas. Through interviews with the children and grandchildren of the victims, when they were called to the apartments of the victims and/or found them lifeless on the floor or bed, things didn’t add up for them. Not only did it seem that all of these elderly women, many of whom lived near each other, were passing away in quick succession, but the way they were found didn’t make sense to their families, given either the position they were in, their routines, and other factors. Plus, they all found jewelry missing, often taken right off the victims’ bodies

However, the administrators thought the deaths were natural causes and the robberies were perpetrated by the first responders on the scene. Law enforcement and the medical examiner’s office agreed about the causes of death for these victims, even as the deaths kept happening with the same suspicious pattern.

Then, after a pause, the suspicious deaths started happening in a community in Frisco, then at a community in Plano. Like the community in Dallas, there was a decided lack of security, including no CCTV cameras in the hallways of the apartments. But unlike in Dallas, administration and law enforcement was getting reports of an intruder in the hallways of the apartments, claiming to either be an aide to one of the residents or a worker looking for a leak. The description of the intruder was almost universally the same.

After one of the killer’s victims survived their attack, police were able to track down Billy Chemirmir, who was arrested for the murders in Plano. However, some of the jewelry and other things found in his possession indicated that there were more victims yet to be found.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Pillowcase Murders is pretty much the same style as a number of serial-killer docuseries, like The Ripper.

Our Take: Pillowcase Murders hits on the same theme that many true crime docuseries, especially ones having to do with serial killers, hit on: The fact that law enforcement never thought out of the box long enough to notice that the deaths of these seniors might not have been from natural causes, especially given the observations from the victims’ children and grandchildren. It seems to be endemic in this country, at least from the perspective of the filmmakers of these series. But it’s especially tragic here, as it seemed that Chemirmir used their age to his advantage, smothering them and making it look like these women just dropped dead from old age.

One thing we might have wanted to see was some interviews with the law enforcement officials from Dallas who were so dismissive of the questions asked by the families of the victims, and the coroners who seemed to just list natural causes as the deaths without searching for more evidence. Of course, they may not have wanted to talk to the filmmakers, but just an idea of what was going through their minds that made them not take the families’ observations seriously would have been good to hear.

The second episode is going to delve into just how many unattended deaths of seniors Chemirmir was involved in, and both of the remaining episodes are going to examine just how these families were failed by both law enforcement and the owners and administrators of these communities, who didn’t provide the security that was part of their sales pitch to the seniors and their families to begin with. It’s also going to talk about the fate of Chemirmir, which may or may not have been satisfying to the families of his victims.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The Plano cops that were interviewed recall telling the metro Dallas police to look at the pillows in the bedroom of Lu Thi Harris, Chemirmir’s final victim. Indeed, they found lipstick on the underside of the pillow.

Sleeper Star: MJ Jennings, daughter of Leah Corken, one of the victims at Tradition-Prestonwood, was fascinating to listen to, because she was suspicious from the minute she saw her mother’s body lined up in such an unusual way on the floor. She put her grief aside in order to advocate for her mother in order to get someone to acknowledge that her death wasn’t from natural causes.

Most Pilot-y Line: None.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Pillowcase Murders is a painful reminder of how victims’ families need to advocate for their loved ones if they suspect foul play, because of the institutional biases law enforcement seems to have.

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.