True crime documentaries have been the cream of Netflix's popular shows. Among them, the most popular would be Mindhunter, which documents America's most infamous serial killers through the eyes of a fictional protagonist. However, another show of this genre has been a sleeper hit for a long time - I Am a Killer.
This show has a pretty different approach than other true crime documentaries. Instead of telling the stories from a third-person perspective, the perpetrators are directly interviewed, which gives the audience a glimpse of their minds and makes the show intriguing.
I Am a Killer has been on Netflix since 2018. On August 30 of this year, the show was renewed for a third season. In the previous two seasons, the documentary covered ten death row convicts in 10 episodes. The latest season only covered six convicts in six episodes, but that doesn't make the show less interesting.
Every convict interviewed in this show is sentenced to death, but the US government has not determined the execution date. As nothing mattered to them, they were frank in the interviews.
Thus, the audience gets to know what they thought before committing murders, why they committed them, and if they regret after all these years. There is no graphical representation of their heinous acts, but their spoken details of them are enough to be spine-chilling.
The show isn't just about the convicts' interviews; it also takes account of the people who were part of their lives and the investigators from a neutral standpoint. This is where the statements sometimes conflict.
For instance, the third season's first episode features convict Victoria Smith. She murdered her husband Chris Isaac brutally in 2013 and confessed her actions to law enforcement immediately. She was proven guilty and sentenced to death. However, her sister Betty is still fighting to overturn the death penalty today.
On her account, Victoria has been a victim of past abuse and suffers from reported suicidal and homicidal tendencies. So how did the murder happen? Is it the murderous nature or the trauma that culminated in the killing? The mystery of criminal psychology remains.
I Am a Killer is a compilation of several murder convicts who murdered their victims in various atrocious ways. Some convicts confess immediately, some never do, and some feel no remorse for their actions.
So why are they like this? This documentary gives the audience the chance to peek into the dark minds of criminals and think about them.
