The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story (P. F. Birch Productions, Röhm Feifer Entertainment, Studio TF 1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 14) Lifetime showed a TV-movie that was, to say the least, an odd choice for Valentine’s Day: The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story. It was actually based, at least loosely, on a true story: Monica White (Lela Rochon), a divorcée whose 18-year-old son Isaiah (Trezzo Mahoro) has been her only companion since her divorce from her scapegrace husband Daniel (whom we never meet as an on-screen character, nor do we learn much about him or why they broke up), is encouraged by her best friend Layla to log onto a dating app called Connections. Monica lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where she teaches pre-school and has to deal with a particularly obnoxious boy named Rayleigh who keeps bullying a Black girl named Tracy. (The reason I’m not supplying more names for the actors involved is so far imdb.com’s credit list has only four names on it.) Meanwhile, Anthony Eugene “Tony” Robinson (the darkly handsome Jarod Joseph) is trolling Connections looking for women he can pick up, not for sex but to kill them. His modus operandi is to meet them in bars after having set up a date via Connections, take them to a nearby motel, kill them by strangling them in the middle of the sex act, then load their bodies into shopping carts and abandon them in the middle of parking lots. Tony lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a garbageman (which gives him a convenient way of disposing of his victims’ bodies) until he gets fired midway through the movie by a typically obnoxious boss for being chronically late to work. Writers Miriam Van Ernst and David Weaver don’t give us much of an explanation as to what Anthony’s motives are. Midway through the movie, when he and Monica finally meet face-to-face, he tells her that he had a girlfriend named Skye Allen who suddenly and without warning dropped dead of a heart attack, but we suspect that’s a B.S. story he just made up. (The reporting on the case in The Washington Post stated there was a real Skye Allen who died in a hospital, and her death was ruled accidental but there’s the possibility that Anthony killed her.)

The film was expertly directed by Elisabeth Röhm, who as an assistant district attorney on Law and Order for five years (2001 to 2005) certainly learned something from working in Dick Wolf’s atelier on how to do suspense. Also, since February is Black History Month, this is one of Lifetime’s “race movies” in which the central characters are Black; the only significant white role is that of the no-nonsense woman police chief in Fairfax County, Virginia who leads the investigation when the body of one of Anthony’s victims is found in her jurisdiction. I didn’t catch her name but I did the racially ambiguous male detective who’s working under her, Det. Lareto. The cops pull the case when a white store clerk working the parking lot picking up shopping carts discovers the body of Tonita Smith (Princess Davis) in one as he’s on duty. The local media immediately dub the unknown murderer “The Shopping Cart Killer” and writers Van Ernst and Weaver can’t resist planting a few clues. When Isaiah learns from his mom that she’s met a man online, he says, “He could be a serial killer,” having no idea that he’s right. Also cinematographer Tony Gorman carefully lights Anthony in shadow as he sits in a spartan room with a bank of computers, while Monica gets full light as she goes about her daily routine, hangs out with Layla and hears out her complaints about Layla’s boyfriend Jaden, and summons Rayleigh’s mother Beverly to school for a parent-teacher conference about Rayleigh’s behavior. Beverly is instantly hostile and pulls the how-dare-you-summon-me-when-I-need-to-be-at-work routine, but Monica and we both notice a bruise on her chest that signals that Beverly is being abused at home by Rayleigh’s dad and that’s the reason for Rayleigh’s bad behavior. There are a few close calls, including a woman in a red dress who meets Anthony at a bar but is so weirded out by his odd behavior she bails on him in mid-date and we’re of course thinking, “Lucky her.”

When Anthony and Monica finally meet in person he immediately wants to move in with her, and she’s appalled but allows him to sleep on her couch. When they finally do have sex together, for what’s her first time since her divorce, he literally can’t get it up and the implication is that only by killing his partner can he have a release. There’s an intriguing story on the real Anthony Robinson on the Arts & Entertainment Web site (https://www.aetv.com/articles/monica-white-shopping-cart-killer) which suggests that he was into S/M (the only hint of that we get in this movie is a scene towards the end in which Monica references his previously expressed desire to tie her up, surprises him and ties him up instead) and he was also Bisexual and once expressed his anger at Monica by literally peeing in her bed. In the movie there’s no hint of that, but Monica gets a complaint from her 19-year-old niece Jasmine that Anthony hit on her at Monica’s 50th birthday party. She immediately orders Anthony out of her house, and he responds by waiting outside until he’s able to find an unlocked door, let himself back in, and threaten her. Just then the police arrive; that quite imposing woman police chief in Fairfax has figured out his identity by discovering a surveillance photo of him taken with Tonita way back when as he was escorting her from the bar to the motel room where he killed her. Anthony tries to escape by taking a Silver Streak bus back to D.C., but the woman police chief and Det. Lareto are onto him. They have the bus re-routed off the highway and order the driver and all the other passengers off so they can arrest Anthony. Anthony Robinson is due to be sentenced in May 2026, and the real Monica White told The Washington Post that she’s been too scared by the whole experience to date again. The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is actually pretty good Lifetime fare, redeemed by Elisabeth Röhm’s direction and an appropriately chilling performance by Jarod Joseph as Anthony. It’s true that this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the hottest, sexiest guy in the cast is the villain, but Joseph brings the role a kind of smoky intensity that makes his performance special even though of course we can’t stand him. Just as I got a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom because I’d been so impressed by Billy Zane’s performance as the bad guy in James Cameron’s Titanic I wanted to see a movie in which he’d been the good guy, so I’d love to see a film in which Jarod Joseph played a character I could root for and lust over!