“What stood out for me most was the voice – it was very robotic. It did not express a lot of emotions.”
It was 2008, and investigative journalist Hillel Levin had been talking to a serial killer Larry Hall, who was convicted for the 1993 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, Jessica Roach, and suspected of killing up to 30 other young women. Hall’s first alleged victim – 14-year-old Dean Marie Pyle Peters – disappeared in Michigan when Hall was just a teen.
“A robotic voice is not unusual either. With a lot of serial killers, it’s deeply organic – there has typically been some kind of brain damage, either before they’re born or in early infancy, and that may be related to why they lack empathy – to the point where they are killing people,” says Levin. “What I found most interesting about Larry,” he continues, “was how wrong popular fiction and nonfiction is regarding serial killers – that, in fact, a lot of what we think we’ve learned from these TV series, from books about FBI profilers, is really wrong.”
That might be about to change. Hall is the focus of Levin’s 2010 memoir of James “Jimmy” Keene: In With The Devil, which has been adapted by Apple TV into a dark and compelling six-part miniseries, Black Bird.
It tells the mind-boggling true story of Jimmy Keene (played by Taron Egerton), former high-school football star and Illinois golden boy turned big-time drug dealer, who is busted and given a 10-year sentence without parole. A few months into his sentence, in 1998, he is approached by the FBI and offered a deal. He can walk away a free man, but first he must enter Springfield Missouri – one of the worst prisons in America – and befriend Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), who was preparing to appeal his life sentence for the murder of Jessica Roach. The FBI needed to find the remains of other girls in order to keep him behind bars. No bodies, no freedom.
The show – which is executive produced by Keene – suggests a disturbing premise: both Jimmy and Larry are tied together through their obsession with women. One is a womaniser using sex to ignore childhood trauma; the other is an incel who could never get girls until he killed them.
Egerton, as Jimmy, embodies everything that Larry is not – chiselled, muscular, and charming. Larry on the other hand suffered severe acne and shyness, while his better-looking twin brother was the player. As a result of twin-to-twin transfusion – where the blood from one identical twin crosses over to the other, who gives less back – Levin describes how the babies had a “parasitic relationship”. Gary “literally thrived at the expense of Larry”.
In the show, Keene first meets Hall as he is returning to his cell in the darkness of night. Keene gets up from his bed and approaches the bars. He stares out, and Keene comes to his door, until the two men are staring at each other through their bars like zoo animals in adjacent cages. Keene attempts friendly conversation several times, and Hall refuses to engage. But when Keene defends Hall and his friend in the TV room, from a bullying inmate who keeps changing the channel away from their show, he ends up in a violent fight and is punished with a night in solitary confinement. On his return, Hall’s interest is piqued. “Why do you stick up for us?” Enamoured by this seeming act of loyalty, Larry latches onto Jimmy, telling his psychotherapist that he has made his first friend. “He looks at me, not through me,” he tells her. “I’m not alone anymore.”
In reality, Keene recalls in his memoir saying, “Hey, you look cool. Do you know where I can find the library?” Hall explained where it was, and then asked: “You think I’m cool?” Keene replied that he did, making Hall laugh. Hall went every day at 2:30, he said, to read the papers, and Keene would make sure to go at the same time. Eventually, Hall invited Keene to breakfast with him and his friends – known by other inmates as the “baby killers”.
But this “friendship” becomes twisted. Larry – who in his cell keeps a stack of pornographic magazines in which he has defaced and mutilated the bodies of models – asks Jimmy intrusive questions about how he has sex with women. He closes his eyes in sick rapture when Jimmy bluffs that the youngest girl he ever had sex with was just 14 years old. “Did she fight back?” Larry asks in a creepily infantile voice, contorting himself with pleasure, before getting aggressive when Jimmy won’t tell him exactly how he gets women. “I just talk to them and they take their clothes off,” says Jimmy. Larry is nonplussed. “But you must have a line? That can’t just be it?” he shouts. “No women will ever just talk to me.”
The breakthrough finally comes when Jimmy and Larry are alone in the wood workshop. Larry has been carving 21 falcons – to watch over the 21 women he has killed. Jimmy pretends that a guard called Larry a “kiddy diddler” and a “kid killer”, and Larry emits a delighted high-pitched giggle. “I’ve never raped anyone in my life James. I had sex with them,” he says, before describing killing another victim, 19-year-old Tricia Reitling. He tried to kiss her, and she scratched him, so he “ragged her” with gas fluid, before strangling her with two belts tied together. Afterwards, he folded her clothes.
That evening, Larry calls out to Jimmy to say goodnight. But he is met with no response: Jimmy is sobbing into a tightly clenched fist, unable to speak. At night, he has a grotqesque nightmare in which his past sexual exploits become the murdered corpses of Larry’s victims, his own hands tightening around their throats as his face become's Larry’s.
The thematic link between the two becomes explicit. Does Levin believe that the FBI made a similar connection between the men? “For Jimmy to somehow be able to communicate with him,” says Levin, “it has to touch on some of those similar nerves... he has to seem sympathetic with him, before Larry would confess. And that was the button that he could push.
“Keene had to be honest about his own relationship with women, which helped him get inside Larry’s head. It was a really unusual meeting of the minds, because you would think there couldn’t be two more opposite people.”
While Hauser’s performance as Hall is chilling, the show suggests that Jimmy might feel sorry for him too. Sometimes, there is even a look of admiration, such as when Larry leads a clean-up after a nasty prison riot, confidently commanding the men around him like they are about to launch into battle.
Another time, he tells Jimmy about his passion for the Civil War, and belonging to a local all-male group that portrayed union soldiers. “That’s common,” says Levin, “it’s what one researcher [of serial killers] called the mask. They want to assume the mask of someone else in society that they can hide behind. Like John Wayne Gacy dressing as a clown.
“For Larry, instead of being a clown, it was this incredible fascination and then emulation of being a Union soldier in the American Civil War, where he even grew these mutton chop sideburns that made him extremely noticeable... but in a very surface way that he could hide behind.”
Larry uses what life was like in the 1800s to justify his crimes, obsessing with the idea that girls back then were women from the age of 12-13, and that the age of consent was only raised by the government to make money from high schools. “They weren’t children,” he tells Jimmy of his rape victims. “At least...not in the 1800s.”
In the show, Hall is torn between disgust at the “horrible” dreams in which he murders women and a sense of pride in helping his victims feel “seen” by murdering them. The real Hall told detectives that these “nightmares” made him depressed. There were times when he felt lonely and had an “urge” to be with women, and that urge was something he had to satisfy, he said, to feel better. Detectives found notes in his car that appeared to contain commands: an instruction guide to serial rape. One of the few complete sentences was: “I can’t see the faces, but I can hear the screams.”
Some of these detectives dismissed him as a wannabe, a fascinated sicko. Friends and family defended Hall as a gentle, calm soul – far less likely to be guilty of violence than his brother. In prison, the real Hall was treated with respect by the guards. He knew how to operate things like water systems, boilers, and made himself valuable to the guards. And so he was permitted to walk around the prison freely – something newer prisoners like Keene could never imagine.
In the show, and as detailed in Keene’s memoir, Jimmy eventually blows his cover when he sees Larry drawing a map in the woodwork shop, with red dots locating where all the bodies are buried all over Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Keene insists that he sends this map to the victims’ parents. But he refuses, “because I am going to win my appeal”, he says. After realising Jimmy is undercover, they end up violently fighting, and Jimmy is sent to solitary confinement. In the show, he draws the map he has memorised using his own blood on one of the walls. In reality, says Levin “Hall's psychologist got the prison authorities to throw Keene into solitary before he could inform his FBI contact about the map. Hall's brother Gary told police that after a call from Larry (while Keene was in solitary), his father burned the map in a barrel.” Nevertheless Keene was deemed to have done enough and was released after 17 months, in 1999.
Hall lost his appeal, and tried to take his life as a result. Now 59 years old, is currently serving his sentence in the Federal Correction Institute Butner, North Carolina – home to terrorists, Mob bosses and Ponzi lynchpin Bernie Madoff.
When Levin spoke on the phone with Hall to corroborate Keen’s story, he found him to be somewhat defiant. “It’s not like he said, ‘I’m innocent. I never did any of this. They totally set me up.’ Instead, it was, ‘the prosecutor really hated me. Really. I didn’t like him either.’”
Levin says that when he brought up Keene, Hall’s treacherous friend, Hall became very uncomfortable. “His demeanour really changed at that point. And I think he was not just frightened of Jimmy, but frightened of what he told Jimmy and what that could do to any of his chances of ultimately getting out.”
Levin believes that Hall’s relationship with his twin is what’s “absolutely key to understanding him” – how “abandoned” he felt when the brother left the house to live with a girlfriend. “He had lost not just his best friend, but a huge part of his life – almost like a part of himself – and no surprise, a lot of the women killed looked a lot like that first girlfriend the brother had.”
Hall continued to play with law enforcement throughout the years, providing enough information to convince them that he is the killer, but not enough to provide any actual evidence they could use to indict him. In 2010, he confessed to the murder of Laurie Depies – although he has not been charged, because her body has never been recovered. “I felt that Larry did want it off his chest, which is typical of serial killers,” says Levin. “They go through this back and forth of wanting to tell people what they've done and then denying it.”
Keene – who now works as a consultant helping authorities profile serial offenders – was released from Springfield in 1999. But he was deeply affected by his time in Springfield, surrounded by the worst or most insane offenders in America, men with “no soul left” and no hope of release, unpredictable and violent. In a letter to his sister, Keene wrote: “The inhuman screams of the patients around me sounded like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno.”
So what is it about serial killers that keep audiences coming back for more? “There's obviously to a certain amount of sexual behaviour involved, of this sex drive that has gotten out of hand. So there's that kind of prurient interest – even though we don't want to necessarily admit that to ourselves.”
“But I think, when you do realise how deeply organic it is, that there's something driving these people, that gets to the point where they really cannot control themselves.”
Black Bird is now on Apple TV+
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