Perspective is one of the most important decisions that ends up getting made in the course of telling a story like this.

Why did you focus on Carrillo and Salerno and the victims instead of the Night Stalker? Ramirez remains largely an off-screen presence in the series. It was such a rich canvas to paint on and be able to evoke. This is one that no longer exists anymore - the long, hot summer of 1985 in L.A. The interesting thing is that all of these stories present countless different versions of Los Angeles because the city is constantly being reinvented. You realize this fits into a continuum of stories. crime stories and L.A noirs dating back to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett all the way through James Ellroy and more contemporary stuff. Why did the fact that it unfolded in L.A. And yet no one had done the definitive, multi-part telling of it. This is a story of iconic cops chasing an iconic killer in an iconic city. I thought what a gift from the cinema gods. We went out to dinner with Gil Carrillo, the detective, and as a I sat down with him in this bygone diner/bar/restaurant and listened to him unfurl the story, I saw how profoundly impacted he was by it in terms of its emotional hold. At the time, I was writing for a Dick Wolf TV show and a fellow writer and friend Tim Walsh came in with me and said he just sat down with the homicide detective who worked the Night Stalker case and he thought there might be an amazing documentary there. I knew the name, I knew the headlines, I knew the bones of the story.

As someone who spends their entire professional career sifting around crime stories, it was, of course, a story that I knew.

Night stalker netflix