How She Caught a Killer (Suspense Productions, Tiny Riot Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on two Lifetime movies in a row for myself and my husband Charles last night (Sunday, September 17). The first, How She Caught a Killer, was quite good: it took place in a small town called Good Falls, Minnesota in the late 1980’s and was about a serial killer who targeted sex workers alongside Highway 60, a favorite location for prostitutes and johns looking for quickies. Only it was really about Linda Murphy (Sarah Drew, who also co-produced), who took a job as secretary to police detective David Goodman (Eric Keenlyside) but really wanted to be a sworn police officer herself. It’s established that police work is literally in her blood: her late father was also a cop, and indeed was Goodman’s police partner until he got obsessed with a case in which a serial rapist was breaking into women’s homes, sexually assaulting them and then escaping. Murphy père met his end when he was chasing the prime suspect in the case when the suspect suddenly pulled his truck to a stop and blew his own brains out; one would think that would be a happy ending for the cop, especially since the assaults stopped once their suspect killed himself, but Murphy, Sr. never got over his inability to solve the case and arrest the culprit, and this led to his own death a few years later (though writers Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner never quite explain just how he died).

Now Murphy fille has just passed the police academy, shown by director Robin Hays (a woman, by the way, whose work I’d previously seen in another truth-based Lifetime movie called Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer, which impressed me far less than this one did) in some quietly effective scenes of her keeping up both physically and psychologically with her nine classmates, all men. She’s passed the Academy with flying colors, but much to her irritation Goodman, her immediate superior, relegates her to desk duty and refuses to allow her to do any actual investigations. She overhears a conversation between Goodman and a hunky Black FBI agent named Neil Carter (Jamail Johnson) in which Carter explains that he’s been sent from FBI headquarters to tell Goodman that the murders of prostitutes that are happening in Good Falls are just random crimes, not the work of a serial killer. Fortuitously, the killer strikes again just as Carter is in town, and he tells Goodman, “I guess I’ll be extending my stay here.” The new crime convinced both Goodman and Carter that they do indeed have a serial killer on their hands, and Linda Murphy overhears their conversation and offers to disguise herself as a sex worker and go undercover to attract the killer. Both Goodman and Carter make the predictable sexist objections to her plan even though they don’t have any better ideas for how to catch the man, and ultimately they agree to let Linda impersonate a prostitute on condition that she wear a wire throughout (which made me wonder if Baranovsky and Gulner were setting up a scene in which she’d be inadvertently “outed” by a john who saw the wire as she undressed). She’s also told never actually to get into a car with a potential john, and when she protests that she won’t have any credibility if she doesn’t, they agree to send her a cop in plain clothes to act as a decoy and pretend to pick her up for sex.

Linda shows up and befriends some of the actual hookers, who show her the ropes (reluctantly, in the case of a Black woman who resents the competition). The police ultimately narrow down the suspect pool and focus on Wilson (Bradley Stryker), though at one point Linda challenges a man who’s staking out Highway 60 on his own. He turns out to be, not the killer, but Stan Peterson (Donavon Stinson), whose daughter, Joyce Peterson, was the first victim, and whom Goodman informed of his loss in a prologue in a matter-of-fact monotone that, as I joked, marked Eric Keenlyside as an honors graduate of the Jack Webb School of How to Play a Cop. Wilson actually recognizes Linda in her various guises – first as a pretend hooker and then as a cop – though she gets close enough to feel the inside of his blue van and recover bits of fiber from the van’s carpet that turn out to match the fibers found on one of the victims. Eventually the cops collect enough fragmentary evidence to get a court order to allow them to bug Wilson’s van, though Wilson spots the bug and starts dictating taunting messages to the cops who are listening in on him. It also turns out that Wilson has a job as a clown entertaining children’s parties in a rabbit costume, and he has a wife and two daughters, none of whom have any idea about his hobby of kidnapping women, torturing them within an inch of their lives, and ultimately killing them but without raping them first.

How She Caught a Killer is pretty standard Lifetime fare, but it’s unusually well done for the network and is particularly strong in dramatizing Linda’s plight, caught as she is between her fellow cops and their limited ideas of just how much help a woman can be to them, and their prejudice against the victims because they were sex workers. In one scene Linda chews out both Goodman and Carter over the ways they’ve written off the victims, saying that they weren’t just sex workers; they were planning for the future and saving up to go to college or trade schools so they didn’t have to keep selling their bodies, and some of them had children and were raising them as single parents. Ultimately Wilson and Linda have their final confrontation and Wilson taunts her to shoot him, saying that if she lets him live he’ll just keep torturing and killing women, and as director Hays cuts away we hear five shots on the soundtrack. Then Goodman and Carter arrive on the scene, and it turns out Linda just fired her pistol into the air; she refused to take Wilson’s dare and instead left him alive so Goodman could arrest him. There’s a quirky finale in which both Goodman and Carter make offers to Linda – Goodman to take her on as his partner with the Good Falls police and Carter to get her a job with the FBI, albeit only doing desk work – and we’re not told which Linda chose (nor is the Internet much help: I tried Googling her and got quite a few “Linda Murphy”’s) – but for the most part How She Caught a Killer is a first-rate crime thriller, one of Lifetime’s rare diamonds in the rough, due largely to the precision of the writing in detailing the various conflicts ruling Linda’s life and Sarah Drew’s skill in bringing them all to life while playing her.