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It’s been nearly six years since a Suffolk County cop found the corpse of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, a prostitute from the Bronx who was missing for over a year, by Gilgo Beach.
Police would go on to find the remains of nine more sex workers by Gilgo Beach, all connected to the same killer. The identity of the killer and the motivation remains a mystery, but filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Rachel Mills decided to take a closer look at the case and clear the mystique surrounding it all.
Their finished product is the eight-episode documentary series “The Killing Season,” premiering at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Sunday, October 9, at the United Artists Cinema in East Hampton at 11 a.m., about a month ahead of its television premiere on A&E on Saturday, November 5, at 9 p.m. Mr. Zeman and Ms. Mills co-directed all eight episodes after conducting two years of research and interviews with detectives and families of the victims.
“I did a previous film called ‘Cropsey’ about a serial killer in Staten Island,” Mr. Zeman said. “People talked to me about doing another movie on crime, and there were all these other mysteries going on. We felt like this was one we should take a look at.”
Mr. Zeman said he and Ms. Mills followed the basic facts of the case: the victims’ remains were found in various locations along Gilgo Beach, and the victims were prostitutes who were reported missing. When the two met with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (“Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”), he encouraged them to go deeper.
“Alex told us to follow the bigger picture issues in the story, like the sex workers,” Mr. Zeman said. “There are women walking along the Holiday Inn in Hauppauge by the [Long Island Expressway]. Having these sex workers mixed with the murders makes the story more interesting.”
“Programs like ‘Serial’ became such a big hit. These true crime stories are like dramas,” Ms. Mills said. “They can be translated into these expansive documentaries.”
While some crime documentaries have reenactments of murders or events for dramatization purposes, “The Killing Season” offers nothing like that.
“What you see in our show isn’t contrived,” Mr. Zeman said. “We always wanted to make sure that the information we got couldn’t easily be found on Wikipedia. We read through every bit of information to make sure what could be confirmed for the show.”
“The case is so large,” Ms. Mills said. “There are 10 to 17 bodies found around Long Island connected to the case and a lot of them were Jane Does that couldn’t be identified at first.”
“The biggest issue was that after five years, no justice has come out from the case,” Mr. Zeman said. “It was difficult speaking to the families of the victims because you want to be sensitive to them, but you have to push for information. We were able to answer a lot of questions and debunk myths about the case. We wanted to demythify the Hollywood tropes of a lot of cases like this, like how the killer is an evil genius. We avoided the ‘C.S.I.’ effect because cases don’t get solved in a half hour.
“The biggest issue for us was trying to show the beauty and tragedy in real life of this case,” he continued. ‘We kept asking ourselves, ‘How do we make people care?’”
on Sep 26, 2016