May 2025 Bonus Review: Unknown Serial Killers Of America
the true crime that's worth your time
Oxygen is onto something, subject-wise. Is the finished product anything?
The crime
"Lesser-known" than the over-covered likes of Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper, "but equally lethal killers are revealed through interviews with police and victims' contacts, showing how these murderers stayed undetected while continuing their deadly sprees."
Oxygen's Unknown Serial Killers of America has aired two episodes as of this writing, on Carl Watts and William "Bill" Suff; upcoming episodes will cover Daniel Conahan, Terry Rasmussen, and Maury Travis.
The story
I didn't have super-high hopes for Unknown Serial Killers of America; nor did it surprise me, especially, although I do remember adding it to our list of prospective topics and thinking, "Smart play."
And it is…and it isn't. It is refreshing, if you can use that word about content in this grisly subgenre, for a viewer to look at an episode list for an Oxygen series and not be able to predict every single subject based on the show's title (I had heard of only one, Suff, for certain; a couple others sounded familiar).
And it's probably a needed break for the network's programming and marketing execs, too. Oxygen's core demographic can recite the crimes of Aileen Wuornos or Henry Lee Lucas like catechism by this point; you need to offer them something else sometimes.
It's still an Oxygen joint, though, so there's only so much "else" it's going to be. Unknown does a couple of things quite well, like understanding that sex work is work and that addiction is value-neutral. The show also has a better "actual crime scene photo"-to-reenactment ratio than some, at least in the episode I screened (Episode 2 on William Suff), and said photos are truly chilling, the more so because of the blurred-out sections; it put me in mind of the photo pack in Helter Skelter, the way those white shapes let the imagination run wild as to what really befell Sharon Tate and her friends.
But it's still retailing the usual drone shots of Suff's Riverside, CA hunting ground and the usual muzzy-focus re-enactments – and it's still hanging the narrative on the ol' "law enforcement, brave and true" framework, relying heavily on the case's investigators to drive the story. Generally speaking, I don't really have an issue with that in no-brow genre-network programming – it's not interesting, and the audience should understand how the police perspective is privileged (and/or exchanged for access to case files), but it is what it is – but I chose this specific episode because I remembered Bill James talking about it in Popular Crime, calling Suff a pasty blowhard or something to that effect, so I leafed through my office copy…
…to find James 1) noting that the local constabulary oversubscribed the idea of the killer, prior to his capture, as an evil mastermind they had no hope of outwitting, when in fact Suff got grabbed up the minute Detective Christine Keers put out a BOLO for a guy in a grey minivan and cheap kicks – but they could, and probably should, have caught him four victims prior to that; and 2) saying he thought he'd have to quit the best-known book on the case, Keers and Dennis St. Pierre's The Riverside Killer, because the first third is "so bad."
James does go on to say that the book – a genre rarity that I regret letting go for six bucks a couple years ago – improves, and is worthwhile as a thought-out overview of the case. Keers and St. Pierre both appear in Unknown Killers (the former periodically frowning in slo-mo at case notes, natch), and I do stan the "only lady homicide dick on the squad"s of yesteryear, so I don't mean that Unknown Killers shouldn't have used them as talking-heads or whatever.
I just found it striking that the one episode subject I did remember is a guy with, per James, "no particular talent at anything, including murder. He made every mistake a serial murderer can make, and frequently" (369) and that James calls out the investigators for having "no confidence in their ability to catch him – and, having no confidence that they could catch him, failed to take obvious steps to bring about his arrest" (370).
Unknown Killers isn't worth your time, except in that it might inspire you to look at other pertinent properties (James; Peter Vronsky). It's slightly better than you might anticipate, but still kind of baggy, and Oxygen has a nearly transcribed "article" on the case on their website that will get the same info across in a fraction of the time. (Should you choose to proceed, new episodes air Sunday nights on Oxygen, and you'll likely find them on demand as well if you still have cable.)
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