Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hillside Strangler: Devil In Disguise’ On Peacock, A Docuseries About The ‘70s Serial Killer That Terrorized Los Angeles (2024)

The Hillside Strangler: Devil In Disguise is a four-part docuseries, directed by Alexa Danner, that recounts the terror that women around Los Angeles felt during 1977 and ’78 as victims’ bodies were found in an area of East Los Angeles that included Glendale. The docuseries not only goes over the murders of the 8 women that were found during that time period, but also the investigation that took until 1979, when Bianchi was arrested in Washington state after murdering two women there.

THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER: DEVIL IN DISGUISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Fuzzy video footage of Ken Bianchi being questioned in 1979.

The Gist:In the first episode, Danner interviews a members of law enforcement that investigated the case, as well as reporters who covered it. The key interview, however, is with Sheryl Kellison, who was Bianchi’s girlfriend during most of his killing spree. As women’s bodies were found, she got increasingly scared, but Bianchi kept telling her he’d keep her safe. Little did she know why that was true.

The first victims were prostitutes, which generated some media attention but not a lot of concern or outrage. Dr. Lois Lee, founder of Children of the Night, discusses how she got a report about one victim, a sex worker who didn’t call in when she got to her client’s house, and could have saved her if the police took her information seriously. It was only when the victims started to be women who weren’t sex workers, including a 12- and 14-year-old, that a task force was created.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There have been so many docuseries about notorious serial killer cases from the ’70s that you can just throw a dart and get a good show for comparison. On Peacock, theDevil In Disguise franchise previously covered the John Wayne Gacy case, so let’s go with that.

Our Take: Whenever we see a docuseries about a serial killer case that was pretty extensively covered and is well known, the question we always ask ourselves is, “What can this series show us that we don’t already know?” The Hillside Strangler case is right up there among the most famous serial killer cases of the 1970s, but there are likely a lot of details about the case that the average person who was around then likely forgot.The Hillside Strangler: Devil In Disguise does a good job of filling in those blanks, with a no-frills, informative style.

Danner doesn’t try to embellish the case via reenactments or ginned up audio. As the story is told, each commercial break is bracketed by the interview footage with Bianchi, who tried to explain away his actions by saying he would disassociate when he murdered his victims. So the footage shows Bianchi as calm and reasonable at turns and curing and yelling at others. But what the show is also trying to demonstrate is that, given the way the bodies were laid out for law enforcement to find, he didn’t act alone. Eventually, his cousin Angelo Buono was also arrested for those murders.

The interview with Lois Lee points out a factor about the case that people likely didn’t consider 45 years ago: The fact that, because the first victims were sex workers, there was little effort to link them together. It’s yet another case where both the public and law enforcement didn’t consider the murders of sex workers as important as the murders of everyday citizens, because the assumption is that’s one of the risks these women take. It’s a lesson that only time has been able to teach us, and it’s one that’s worth repeating in every case where sex workers are among the victims.

Of course, when you do reexamine a case that’s almost a half-century old, it’s harder to find investigators or reporters that have vivid memories of it — if they’re even still alive. Luckily, Danner finds more than enough people who were active in that case and remember it vividly despite the decades. The more of them a filmmaker can find, the less they have to rely on gimmicks to tell the story.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Kellison, through tears: “Ken knew that no one was going to hurt me, because the Hillside Strangler was sitting right there in the house.”

Sleeper Star: It’s fascinating to listen to Kellison talk about dating the charming Bianchi, and seeing him obsessing over the news reports about the Hillside Strangler. All these years later, it must still be tough for her to wrap her mind around the fact that a) she was actually dating him and b) she was likely the safest young woman in Los Angeles because of it.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of the investigators cite the city’s media for “creating havoc” in the city by reporting on the Hillside Strangler, and we see scenes of women taking self-defense classes. The condescension dripping from his voice when he talks about it is palpable. Why wouldn’t women want to figure out how to possibly escape someone who might be looking to strangle them?

Our Call: STREAM IT.The Hillside Strangler: Devil In Disguise is a straightforward retelling of the famous serial killer case. But it definitely gives information and perspectives that people who paid attention to the case four decades ago might not have either gotten or remembered.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.