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On a spring evening in 2010, a young woman named Shannon Gilbert went missing after placing a frantic 911 call to police from Oak Beach, an oceanfront community in Long Island. Several months later, four female bodies were found on a stretch of Ocean Parkway in Long Island between Gilgo Beach and Oak Beach. They were wrapped in burlap. The corpses had a deliberate, graveyard staging, spaced evenly apart. None belonged to Gilbert, but they shared with her one very important characteristic: The women, like Shannon, had all made money answering escort ads on Craigslist. The story became national news, and incited a flurry of interest from amateur internet detectives, who posted their theories about LISK (short for Long Island Serial Killer) on the message boards of WebSleuth.com. Over the course of the next several months, more bodies and remains were found in the area, bringing the total up to 10. Despite several promising leads, the killer was never discovered.
In 2013, true crime writer Robert Kolker published Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, about the first five victims of LISK. The book revealed several disturbing details, including instances of corruption and incompetence within the police departments that handled the cases.
Six years later, we're no closer to finding out what happened to these women, or the identity of LISK, than when the bodies were first discovered. But a new true crime docuseries on A&E, The Killing Season, uses the LISK murders as a starting point to examine the disturbing progression of serial murders of sex workers across the country. Produced by Alex Gibney (Going Clear), The Killing Season follows two documentary filmmakers, Joshua Zeman (Cropsey) and his partner, Rachel Mills (Killer Legends), as they travel from Long Island to Florida to New Mexico and beyond, searching for answers to this alarming and underreported trend.
I met with Zeman and Mills on the appropriately spooky night of Halloween to discuss The Killing Season and whether they worried that putting themselves on camera could potentially turn them into a madman's next target.
Observer: I read Kolker's Lost Girls and found it riveting. Is that what inspired you and Josh to start this series?
Rachel Mills: Such carnage, right? A year...