In Oxygen’s newest true-crime show, “Serial Killer With Piers Morgan,” the famed TV personality sits in a giant, cleared out room in a prison, just two feet away from America’s most dangerous serial killers, with only one guard watching over them from the other side of the room.
“It’s pretty intimidating, I can’t pretend otherwise. Lorenzo Gilyard, the ‘Kansas City Strangler,’ strangled at least 12 people and he’s just sitting two feet away, there’s only one guard standing at the other end of the room,” Morgan, who almost bumped knees with the murderers as he interviewed them, told TheWrap. “These are the most dangerous criminals imaginable and on one level, you think, surely nothing will happen, but at the other point, he has nothing to lose. It’s an intimidating dynamic and you have to keep your wits about it. But you gotta watch it because before you go in, you get warnings about them.”
In the first two episodes of the show, Morgan interviews Mark Riebe, who was convicted of one murder but confessed to the abduction and killing of 12 more women. He later withdrew these confessions. Morgan also speaks to Gilyard, who went to prison for six murders but is suspected of seven more. During both interviews, the subjects get visibly irate with Morgan’s questioning and threatened to leave the interview, eventually doing so.
“It’s a very weird dynamic because I’ve never interviewed people like that before,” Morgan added. “There is no contract really, there’s no payment for them so they don’t have to stay there — they can get up anytime — and if they do, you don’t have an interview and you don’t have a show. You are playing a cat and mouse with a criminal, and they have this self-delusion for what they’ve done, yet they were described to me by the detectives as some of the most dangerous people they’ve ever met in their entire lives. You know you are dealing with hugely dangerous people. “
Morgan admitted that it was hard to leave the respective prisons and go back to living a normal life after the interviews had concluded.
“I think it was very awkward afterwards, going back to my hotel room, having dinner and watching TV and pretending I didn’t just sit with the most despicable people ever,” he said. “It’s hard, and it’s tough.”
For him, interviewing Gilyard was “more compelling” given his what seemed normal life outside of allegedly murdering these women.
“He was more articulate, he killed more people and got away with it for a lot longer time,” he said. “There was also that twist because he had a domesticated and happy marriage. I think I’m fascinated with crime — these killers have to be intelligent to have carried out these crimes and that adds another dimension to these criminals, I think that’s what appealed to me — can I get inside their twisted heads or bring any comfort to people who lost a relative? I want to make compelling television, and ultimately bring comfort to relatives, a sense of — not closure — but comfort and I got some very gratifying messages from family members.”
Many might have seen Morgan’s other true-crime docuseries, “Killer Women,” on Netflix, in which Morgan interviews some of the most notorious female killers in the United States. He said there is one major difference between both shows.
“In the case of ‘Killer Women,’ there were some I felt empathy, and some I felt that their punishment far outweighed their involvement in the crime,” he said. “There was this degree of empathy, but with ‘Serial Killer,’ I felt nothing but loathing and quite frankly, I had to control myself not to punch them in the face.”
In the end, Morgan has no doubt that these two men did commit the murders they are doing time for.
“I don’t have any doubt by the end when you see the vast array of evidence,” he concluded. “What they are good at is delusion, manipulation and control, and they’ve had years to think about every tiny aspect of their lives — they think they know more about it than I do, and they think they get to prove their innocence to me. I know they are guilty … they are highly intelligent, but they can’t explain the unexplainable. It’s a moment of reckoning for both.”
The first episode featuring Riebe aired on July 16, and the second episode featuring Gilyard will air on tonight. Episode three will premiere later this year.