Every film about a real murder case is made twice: once by the people behind the camera, and once by the court record it is measured against. Some of these films were shot while the investigations were still open. Some arrived decades later, with the convictions settled and the appeals exhausted. A few changed the names of the guilty, and some changed the names of the dead. Set side by side, they show how quickly a case becomes a story, and how far the story can drift from what a jury, a judge or a plea agreement established.
John McNaughton made the film for about $100,000, the money put up by the producer Waleed Ali, and shot it on 16mm. He told the critic Peter Sobczynski that he first heard the term "serial killer" in a twenty-minute 20/20 segment about Henry Lee Lucas that a friend played for him on cassette. Michael Rooker played Henry, in his first theatrical film, with Tom Towles as Otis and Tracy Arnold as Becky; the script was by Richard Fire and McNaughton.
The film premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1986 and then went nowhere for years. According to the American Film Institute’s catalog, the home-video company that was to release it found it too artistic and not bloody enough, and the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an X rating, telling the producers that editing could not fix its overall tone. Maljack Productions sued the MPAA in 1990, calling the rating discriminatory. By then the film had reached the Telluride Film Festival in 35mm, in September 1989, and it went on to New York on March 23, 1990, and Los Angeles that April.
The man who inspired it was a very different figure from the calm drifter on screen. Lucas was convicted in Michigan in 1960 of the second-degree murder of his mother. In Texas in 1983 he was convicted of murdering Frieda "Becky" Powell, a fifteen-year-old who had traveled with him. After his arrest he confessed to some 600 killings across the country, and police closed cases on his word. Most of those confessions did not survive scrutiny. A report by the Texas attorney general’s office in 1986 found them largely false, and in 1990 an investigator told the Associated Press that police were "pretty sure" Lucas had killed three people. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman known for years only as "Orange Socks"; in June 1998 Governor George W. Bush commuted the sentence to life. Lucas died in prison in March 2001, aged sixty-four. In 2019 the woman in the case was identified as Debra Jackson, and the Netflix series The Confession Killer revisited the confessions that same year.
The Deliberate Stranger aired on NBC on May 4, 1986, during the May ratings sweeps, while Bundy sat on Florida’s death row. Marvin J. Chomsky directed the three-hour miniseries from Hesper Anderson’s adaptation of Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger, a book by the Seattle journalist Richard W. Larsen. Mark Harmon played Bundy, with Frederic Forrest as the King County detective Bob Keppel and George Grizzard as Larsen. The story runs from the disappearances in Seattle in 1974 through Utah and Colorado, the two escapes, and Florida. The historian Paul Mavis, writing for DVD Talk, judged it "necessarily sanitized" by network standards of the day but faithful to the case apart from changed names.
Matthew Bright’s Ted Bundy, released in 2002, went the other way. Michael Reilly Burke played Bundy in a film that ran from 1974 to the execution and mixed explicit violence with black comedy. Marrit Ingman of The Austin Chronicle found it unsure what it wanted to say about its subject, and she faulted it for treating the women as anonymous bodies. "These women have names and survivors," she wrote.
The record behind both films is narrower than Bundy’s reputation. He was convicted of three murders, all in Florida: of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, killed at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee in January 1978, and of Kimberly Leach, twelve, of Lake City, in February 1978. The Supreme Court of Florida upheld both judgments. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. In his last days he confessed to many more killings in other states; United Press International reported a count of twenty-eight. None of those confessed killings was ever tried.
CBS broadcast Helter Skelter in two parts in 1976. Tom Gries directed, adapting the best-seller by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, and about 55 million people watched, according to Rolling Stone, making it the most-watched television film of its time. George DiCenzo played Bugliosi. Steve Railsback, the first actor to play Charles Manson, refused to meet him. "I didn’t want him to manipulate me into thinking he was something he wasn’t," he told Rolling Stone. The broadcast still lost money: too few sponsors would attach their names to it, and some stations scheduled it late at night or not at all.
The source matters. Bugliosi led the prosecution, and his book is the prosecution’s account. Manson was convicted in January 1971 of seven first-degree murders in the Tate and LaBianca killings, and later that year of two more, of Gary Hinman and Donald "Shorty" Shea; the California Court of Appeal affirmed both sets of convictions. Others in his commune struck the fatal blows. His death sentence did not survive the California Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling against the death penalty, and he died in custody in November 2017.
Brian Dennehy played John Wayne Gacy in To Catch a Killer, a 1992 television film that brought him one of his six Emmy nominations, as TVLine recalled when he died in April 2020 at eighty-one. The facts against which any Gacy film is measured come from the Illinois courts. In March 1980 a Cook County jury convicted him of thirty-three murders committed between 1972 and 1978, nearly all of them of teenage boys and young men, and he was sentenced to death on twelve of the counts. The Supreme Court of Illinois affirmed. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein (2000) cast Steve Railsback, Manson in Helter Skelter a quarter century earlier, as the Plainfield farmer, with Carrie Snodgress as his mother, Augusta. Michael Gingold, reviewing it for Fangoria, called it a "methodical case history" of Gein’s two killings and credited its restraint. Michael Feifer’s Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), with Kane Hodder in the lead, took the opposite course. Feifer used suspected killings beyond the record to give Gein what Gingold called a "Jason-sized body count," built the story around a deputy whose mother is among the victims, and let a character call 911, a system that, as Gingold pointed out, arrived more than a decade after the events.
The record holds two women. Gein told authorities he had killed Mary Hogan, a tavern keeper, in 1954, and he admitted killing Bernice Worden, who ran a hardware store in Plainfield, in November 1957. He was initially declared insane and committed to the state’s hospital for the criminally insane. In 1968 he was found fit to stand trial for Bernice Worden’s death, the only killing for which he was tried. He was never sent to prison. He spent the rest of his life in state mental institutions and died in 1984, aged seventy-seven. His case had already passed into fiction: the Wisconsin Historical Society counts him among the inspirations for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
John Borowski’s documentary Albert Fish, released by Facets Video in 2007, runs eighty-six minutes and is built from archival photographs, staged reenactments and narration drawn partly from Fish’s own words. Its subject was tried in 1935 for the murder of a ten-year-old girl, Grace Budd, in New York, convicted, and executed the following year. Video Librarian, the review journal for libraries, described it as a portrait of a man who preyed on children in New York during the Depression.
David Jacobson wrote and directed Dahmer, released in 2002, with Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer and Bruce Davison as his father. The film is not told in order. It centers on one night with a young man the film calls Rodney, cuts between that night and Dahmer’s first killing years earlier, and leaves out the arrest and the trial. Dan Lybarger of Nitrate Online called the approach "oddly refreshing."
The facts the film leaves out were fixed in a Milwaukee courtroom. Dahmer admitted seventeen killings of men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He pleaded guilty but insane to fifteen counts in Wisconsin, and on February 15, 1992, a jury found him sane; he was given fifteen consecutive life terms, and a sixteenth life term followed in Ohio. A fellow inmate killed him at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage on November 28, 1994. In 2022 a Netflix drama series about the case drew public objections from relatives of his victims, among them the mother of Tony Hughes, who spoke out against it to ET Online.
Ulli Lommel, the director of The Boogey Man, turned in his later career to what Rue Morgue called "low-budget scare features based on actual murderers." The magazine’s obituary, published after his death on December 2, 2017, at seventy-two, lists Zodiac Killer, B.T.K. Killer and Green River Killer, all from 2005, Black Dahlia (2006), and later films on the Son of Sam, the Night Stalker and the D.C. snipers.
The cases behind the titles were settled in court, at length. Gary Ridgway, a truck painter from the Seattle suburbs, was arrested in November 2001 after DNA from a saliva sample taken in 1987 matched evidence from three victims of 1982. On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder, under an agreement that spared him the death penalty in return for leading detectives to remains, and on December 18 of that year he was sentenced to forty-eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of release. A forty-ninth count, for Rebecca Marrero, followed in 2011.
Dennis Rader, a code enforcement officer in Park City, Kansas, was arrested on February 25, 2005, ending a case that began with killings in 1974 and letters to police and the press signed BTK. On June 27, 2005, he pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder, and on August 18 he was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms. Among his victims were two children of the Otero family, killed with their parents in January 1974.
Black Dahlia rests on a case with no verdict at all. Elizabeth Short, twenty-two, was found dead in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. The FBI identified her from fingerprints sent from Los Angeles in fifty-six minutes. Her killer has never been identified, and no one has been charged.
The first Zodiac film was made while the man who called himself by that name was still writing to newspapers. Tom Hanson, an actor turned director, produced The Zodiac Killer, written by Ray Cantrell and Manny Cardoza, with Hal Reed as the killer and the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery as a consultant. Hanson said it was shot for $13,000. When it played the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, the theater invited patrons to enter a motorcycle giveaway with a handwritten card about the Zodiac’s motives, so that the handwriting could be compared with the letters; Nathaniel Thompson of Turner Classic Movies recounted that watchmen were posted to look for suspicious entries, one of them hidden inside an ice cream freezer. No arrest came of it. The film’s prologue says it was conceived in June 1970 to create "awareness of a present danger."
Alexander Bulkley’s The Zodiac, released on DVD by ThinkFilm in August 2006, opens in Vallejo in December 1968 and follows a fictional detective, Sergeant Matt Parish, played by Justin Chambers. A title card announces that names have been changed. The attacks are real; the investigation on screen is invented.
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), written by James Vanderbilt from Robert Graysmith’s books, is the version most viewers know. Jake Gyllenhaal played Graysmith, a Chronicle editorial cartoonist; Robert Downey Jr. played Avery; and Mark Ruffalo played the San Francisco inspector David Toschi. Roger Ebert observed that the film builds a persuasive case against a man who was "perhaps guilty." The record allows no more than that. Police attribute five killings and two further attacks in 1968 and 1969 to the Zodiac. The leading suspect for decades, a Vallejo man, was served with a search warrant, was never charged, and died in 1992. The FBI’s files remain open. No one has been charged in any of the attacks.
David Grieco’s Evilenko (2004) gave Malcolm McDowell the role of a killer named Andrei Romanovich Evilenko; only the surname differs from Chikatilo’s. Scott Weinberg of DVD Talk called the renaming "a frankly unnecessary jolt of 'fictionalization'" and recommended the film chiefly for McDowell.
There was nothing fictional about the verdict. On October 15, 1992, the Rostov Regional Court convicted Andrei Chikatilo of fifty-two murders and sentenced him to death. Many of his victims were children. He was shot at Novocherkassk prison on February 14, 1994.
Karla, produced by Michael Sellers of True Crime Productions for about $5 million (US), cast Laura Prepon as Karla Homolka and Misha Collins as Paul Bernardo. It was to premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival in August 2005, but organizers pulled it after pressure from sponsors and advertisers. Ontario’s premier, Dalton McGuinty, urged a boycott. Tim Danson, the lawyer for the families of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, saw the film privately and announced that the families would not oppose its release. It reached about 100 Canadian theaters on January 20, 2006, with a restrictive 18A rating in Ontario, and two broadcasters pulled its advertising from their stations. The film is told from Homolka’s point of view, and the names and appearances of the victims were changed.
Behind the film lies the plea agreement. Under an agreement finalized in May 1993, Homolka pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy, fourteen, and Kristen French, fifteen, and received twelve years. Her agreement also covered her part in the death of her younger sister, Tammy, fifteen, in December 1990, for which she was never charged. Videotapes found in 1994 showed her as a participant, but a 1996 review found that the agreement had to stand. Bernardo was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of both schoolgirls in 1995. Homolka testified against him and was released on July 4, 2005, at the end of her sentence.
For years Mexico City police searched for the killer of elderly women in their homes, and the press spoke of the killer as a man. The person arrested on January 25, 2006, minutes after the death of an elderly widow, was Juana Barraza Samperio, a former professional wrestler known in the ring as the Lady of Silence. On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City court convicted her of sixteen homicides and twelve aggravated robberies and sentenced her to 759 years. She called the sentence unjust. She remained in custody, in a wheelchair, in September 2026.
The case reached the screen several times. The Mexican series Mujeres asesinas dramatized it in 2010. Netflix’s documentary Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders, directed by María José Cuevas, was streaming by August 2023.
Michael Feifer followed his Gein film, in the same year, with Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck (2007), a ninety-two-minute feature released on DVD by Lionsgate, with Corin Nemec as Speck and Andrew Divoff, Tony Todd and Debbie Rochon in support. Steve Barton of Dread Central praised Nemec’s "powerhouse performance" and little else.
Speck’s case was not a serial one. On the night of July 13, 1966, he killed eight student nurses in Chicago. It was one event. He was caught two days later, after a doctor at Cook County Hospital, treating a man who had tried to take his own life, recognized a tattoo that read "born to raise hell." A jury in Peoria convicted him on April 15, 1967, and he was sentenced to death. After the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the death penalty as then applied, he was resentenced to 400 to 1,200 years. He was denied parole seven times and died of an apparent heart attack in a Joliet hospital on December 5, 1991, at forty-nine.
Ford Austin’s The Curse of Lizzie Borden (2006) is a ghost story. A college class visits a Lizzie Borden museum, a student is given a brooch possessed by Lizzie’s spirit, and the spirit announces that she sold her soul to take revenge on the townspeople who "wrongfully accused her." Dread Central gave it one star out of five.
The film’s premise at least respects the verdict. Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother, were killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 4, 1892. Lizzie Borden was arrested on August 11 and tried in New Bedford beginning June 5, 1893. On June 20 the jury found her not guilty, and in law she bears no guilt for either death. She died in 1927 at sixty-seven.
Martin Weisz’s Rohtenburg was due in German theaters on March 9, 2006. Armin Meiwes sued, arguing that the film violated his personality rights, and the courts in Kassel and Frankfurt agreed and barred its release. On May 26, 2009, the Federal Court of Justice reversed them (case VI ZR 191/08). The court accepted that the film could cause Meiwes considerable psychological strain, but it held that the filmmakers' artistic freedom and the public’s right to information outweighed his claim, noting that the events on screen were virtually identical to his own.
Meiwes’s crime was a single killing, of a forty-three-year-old man he had met over the internet, in March 2001. He was arrested in December 2002. In 2004 the regional court in Kassel convicted him of manslaughter. The Federal Court of Justice set that judgment aside, and in 2006 the regional court in Frankfurt convicted him of murder and of violating the peace of the dead and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He is not a serial offender. In August 2025 he was serving his sentence in Kassel and had applied again for early release, after refusals in 2017 and 2020.
The films that last are rarely the ones that stay closest to the record. Henry, loosely based on a man whose confessions mostly collapsed, was screened again for its thirtieth anniversary. Zodiac stays close to Graysmith’s books and still cannot name anyone, because no court ever has. Others, made fast and sold on a real name, are remembered mainly for what they changed. What remains fixed is the paperwork: three convictions for Bundy, thirty-three for Gacy, forty-nine for Ridgway, an acquittal for Lizzie Borden, and two unsolved files, in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco Bay Area, that no film has closed.
• June 1970: The Zodiac Killer conceived, according to its prologue; it plays in San Francisco while the letter writer is still active.
• 1976: CBS broadcasts Helter Skelter in two parts, with Steve Railsback as Charles Manson.
• 1986: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer premieres at the Chicago International Film Festival.
• May 4, 1986: NBC airs The Deliberate Stranger, with Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed in Florida.
• March 23, 1990: Henry reaches New York theaters.
• 1992: Brian Dennehy plays John Wayne Gacy in To Catch a Killer.
• October 15, 1992: Andrei Chikatilo is convicted of 52 murders in Rostov-on-Don.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed in Illinois.
• 2000: Ed Gein, with Steve Railsback.
• 2002: Dahmer, with Jeremy Renner, and Ted Bundy, directed by Matthew Bright.
• November 5, 2003: Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
• 2004: Evilenko, with Malcolm McDowell.
• 2005: Ulli Lommel releases Zodiac Killer, B.T.K. Killer and Green River Killer.
• August 18, 2005: Dennis Rader is sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
• January 20, 2006: Karla reaches about 100 Canadian theaters.
• 2006: Rohtenburg is barred from German release; Black Dahlia and The Curse of Lizzie Borden are released; The Zodiac reaches DVD in August.
• 2007: Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield, Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck, Albert Fish and David Fincher’s Zodiac.
• May 26, 2009: Germany’s Federal Court of Justice lifts the ban on Rohtenburg.
• 2019: Netflix’s The Confession Killer revisits the Lucas confessions; the "Orange Socks" victim is identified as Debra Jackson.
• 2022: Netflix’s Dahmer series draws objections from victims' relatives.
• August 2023: Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders is streaming on Netflix.