The Real Serial Killers Who Inspired ‘Prodigal Son’ Will Give You Nightmares
@Emily Tannenbaum
Did you watch the premiere of Prodigal Son on FOX last night? Oh, you can’t answer because this is an article? That’s cool, I’ll fill you in just in case you missed it. The blue-eyed Tom Payne plays criminal profiler Malcolm Bright, whose real name is Malcolm Whitly. The former FBI special agent changed his name because his father, Dr. Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen), is—wait for it—the infamous serial killer the Surgeon. One of the Surgeon’s experiments? Find the most agonizing way to kill someone. He’s a real charmer (actually, he kind of is, which is weird).
After being fired from the FBI for being reckless and violent, Malcolm returns home to NYC and a very fancy apartment—where he has to chain himself to the bed thanks to some very brutal night terrors. “It’s not fun. But on the bright side, they’re ruining my life,” he tells his new boss at the NYPD, the same guy who arrested his father 20 years ago.
Anyway, after visiting his father for the first time in a decade, Malcolm is able to crack a case involving the Surgeon’s copycat. Now, he will keep checking in with the man who caused his traumatic childhood and current struggles with PTSD in order to fight crime.
If this sounds way too Silence of the Lambs to be true, that’s because it is. Executive producers Sam Sklaver and Chris Fedak were interested in telling the story of a complicated father/son relationship when they had this whacky idea. “Chris and I were really just playing around with characters and what makes them interesting on TV,” Sam said during a TCA panel. “We were wondering about parents and how they can affect children. What if your father were a serial killer—but also a really good dad?”
Still, the two lead actors needed to find inspiration somewhere, and they looked toward real cases to do it. Tom revealed the one particular story he focused on during Prodigal Son’s press tour. “There’s one [podcast] called Happy Face, about the daughter of a serial killer, and it follows her and her journey to talk to people who were affected by her father, directly and indirectly, and with her mother, her relationship with her father, and the fears that she has and the intense pain that having a father who’s a serial killer caused,” he said.
“It’s really hard to listen to and made me cry many times, because there’s a lot of pain and hurt there. And the character in the show is in pretty much the same position and has a lot of walls up but is intent on trying to understand his father and the similarities that may or may not exist between them.”
The Happy Face Killer, aka Keith Jesperson, raped and murdered eight women back in the 1990s. After a couple was wrongly convicted of one of his crimes, Keith left confessions in truck-stop bathrooms, signed with a smiley face. His daughter, Melissa Moore, has spoken at length about her relationship with her father and coming to terms with his crimes. Like Malcolm in Prodigal Son, her memories of life even before her father’s arrest are haunting. Here’s just one story she revealed to BBC magazine:
“When I was 5, I found these beautiful little kittens in the cellar of our farmhouse and I took them outside to play with. When my dad saw what I had in my hands, he took them, casually hung them up on the clothes line, and began to torment them. I remembered his enjoyment as I screamed and pleaded with him to take them down. Later on, I found their little bodies in the back garden.”
Michael, who plays the lonely, chaotic murderer, looked into serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman, otherwise known as Doctor Death. Shipman, a family GP working in Hyde, Manchester, killed 218 patients with lethal injections from 1975 to 1998 when he was finally caught.
The actor also says he researched a killer who tried to reclaim a relationship with a daughter and grandchildren, but he didn’t name names.
FOX’s Prodigal Son airs at 9 p.m. EST Mondays.
