by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Lifetime movie from
the backfiles, The Alphabet Killer, which I recorded last March around the same time as Lifetime aired Romeo
Killer: The Chris Porco Story — which they were promoting
incessantly during the showing of The Alphabet Killer, pushing the fact that the real Chris Porco had
filed suit to block the screening of that film and had actually won in district
court before an appeals court ruled that this was precisely the sort of
prior-restraint censorship the First Amendment was designed to prevent, and the
ban was lifted so they could show the film. The Alphabet Killer was also based on a true story — the mysterious
murders of three pre-pubescent girls in and around Rochester, New York in the
early 1970’s — which got the nicknames “the alphabet murders” and “the
double-initial murders” because not only were the victims young girls whose
first and last names began with the same letter, their bodies were dumped in
towns whose names began with the same letter as the victims’ names. According
to the usual online sources, the Rochester “alphabet murders” have never been
solved, though a later series of four “alphabet murders” in California has been solved — the convicted killer was a man named
Joseph Naso who moved from upstate New York to California in the mid-1970’s —
which leads some people to suspect that the Rochester murders may have been committed
by Naso as well. Then again, Naso’s victims were adult prostitutes instead of
little girls, and it’s rare for a serial killer to change his victim profile
that radically. Besides, as some online sources pointed out, both Naso and the
Rochester killer could have copied the gimmick from Agatha Christie’s suspense
novel The ABC Murders.
But The
Alphabet Killer is hardly your
standard-issue Lifetime true-crime drama — indeed, it’s at least as enjoyable
if you don’t know it’s at least
nominally based on actual crimes — instead it’s a psychological horror-thriller
whose central character is not the killer but the lead police detective on the
case, Megan Paige (an absolutely first-rate performance by Eliza Dushku), who
when the film begins is living with fellow cop Kenneth Shine (Cary Elwes) when
the two pull the case of the first “alphabet murder.” (Incidentally, the real
first victim was 10 years old but the actress playing her here, Bailey Garno,
is 15.) Megan, it turns out, has a long history of mental illness but has never
been diagnosed before; it’s been responsible for many of her successes as a
homicide detective because it’s enabled her to get into the head space of the
criminal she was looking for and thereby figure out who he or she was. But when
she starts investigating this killing she finds the victim’s ghost literally haunting her, and ultimately within two acts she’s
so frustrated by her inability either to crack the case or to sleep that she
attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. Ken rescues her but she ends up in a
mental hospital being treated by Dr. Ellis Parks (Carl Lumbly, who for some
reason is made up to look less like an African-American human than a character
from Planet of the Apes), and
though she’s allowed to return to the police force she’s only given a desk job
in the records department and isn’t permitted to have a gun. Nonetheless, when
additional “alphabet” killings start occurring, she starts investigating them
whether she’s officially allowed to or not — thereby creating problems with
Ken, who’s no longer her boyfriend but is still on the force and is, in fact,
her superior officer. Eventually police think they have the Alphabet Killer
trapped in an attic, where she’s holding Elizabeth Eckers (Sarah Anderson) and
her father hostage — only not only is Eckers a sexually mature adult, she’s
always been called “Beth” and therefore doesn’t fit the double-initial pattern.
In a scene writer Tom Malloy probably copied, consciously or unconsciously,
from the end of Rebel Without a Cause Megan goes up the stairs to the attic and talks the suspect into giving
up his gun, only when the man appears at the attic window two of the officers
staking out the building fire their guns and blow him away.
The Rochester police consider the alphabet
cases closed, but of course Megan knows better; she discovers that all the
girls attended the same church, and her suspicion falls first on a priest
there, Father McQuarrie (Rocco Sisto), though we’ve already been given an
intimation that the real killer is Richard Ledge (Timothy Hutton), a member of
the therapy group Megan is attending. Yes, there’s the minor little detail that
Ledge is in a wheelchair when he attends the meetings, and the killer was
obviously someone who could walk, but as anyone who’s seen virtually any 1930’s
movie involving a wheelchair could have guessed, he really is the killer; he’s simply faked being disabled and needing the chair. (Virtually
all movie characters you saw in wheelchairs before 1938 didn’t actually need
them; the breakthrough finally came when Lionel Barrymore’s chronic arthritis got
so bad he needed a wheelchair in real life, so MGM started casting him as
people who needed wheelchairs.) He abducts Megan and takes her to the Genesee
River, intending to inject her with propofol, throw her into the river and let
the water and the currents do their work — but instead she manages to escape,
get to her gun (which she’s not supposed to be carrying at all) — or was it his gun? Director Rob Schmidt’s staging of the final
scene was a bit ambiguous — and blast away at him so he falls into the river. His body is never recovered,
and the police have already closed the case, so Megan goes back to her desk job
and, as the closing credits inform us, “In 2006, police exhumed a fireman’s
body and posthumously cleared him as a suspect. To date, the Alphabet Killer
has not been found.” (So this is another story, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Mystery of Marie Roget and
James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, that gives us a fictitious solution to a famous unsolved real-life
crime.)
What makes this one special is the relentlessly Gothic visual style of
Rob Schmidt’s direction, the obsessiveness of Tom Malloy’s script, and above
all the magnificent acting of Eliza Dushku as Megan: she perfectly captures the
inner conflict between the controlled cop and the madwoman, and is at her best
moments when she’s trying to appear calm and collected and inside is seething with trauma and
fear. There’s one remarkable scene in which she gives a passionate kiss to one
of her fellow (male) officers — and when he asks her afterwards, “Did you mean
that?,” she says, “Probably not,” leaving him disappointed because it’s clear
the answer he was hoping for was
yes. That gimmick of the villain faking disability is so old it’s groan-inducing, but otherwise The
Alphabet Killer is well above the Lifetime
norm (it apparently was filmed for Showtime pay-cable and then released to
Lifetime in an edited version with typical deletions like the “God-“ from
“Goddamn”), a genuinely moving film with a first-rate performance by the female
lead. This should have been a star-making
role for Dushku (indeed, one could readily imagine it being a series!), but
somehow she’s got stuck hovering at the edge of the “A”-list even though she’s
been in feature films with such “A”-listers as Robert De Niro and Leonardo
DiCaprio!
