Is The Hunting Party's Premiere-Episode Serial Killer Richard Harris Based on a Real Killer?
The Hunting Party's first serial killer Richard Harris shares some chilling similarities with these real-life murderers.
This story contains spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1, Episode 1, "Richard Harris."
The Hunting Party's serial killer Richard Harris is the stuff of nightmares.
The fictional Harris, who is the focus of the premiere episode of NBC’s latest thriller, brutally murdered seven women, who were tortured and blinded before meeting their ultimate end.
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After Harris escaped from the top secret government prison created to hold Harris and other notorious killers, simply known as "The Pit," FBI Agent Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) was tasked with tracking Harris down in the series' first episode as part of the titular Hunting Party before he could find and kill his next victim in a pulse-pounding race against time.
But is Harris, portrayed in the series by Tobias Jelinek, based on a real-life killer?
The short answer is no, Harris is not modeled after any one specific killer. But he does share characteristics with several actual serial killers who were once free to roam the streets as they claimed the lives of unsuspecting victims.
Designing The Hunting Party's fictional serial killers
When NBC Insider spoke with series creators and showrunners JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn, they confirmed that the dangerous killers they're introducing week to week are (usually) an amalgamation of real-life killers rather than carbon copies.
"We had a term in the writers’ room. You talk a lot about the MO of your killer, right? We always had an ‘OG MO,’ the original MO, and then there was the Pit, and then there was the post-Pit MO. And … there’s always a change to what they’re doing based on the time in the Pit," Bailey explained. "So there’s investigating that has to happen, obviously, but it always comes back to their experience in the Pit and how it’s changed their behavior and how [the team] then get ahead of them."
"'What's the craziest killer we can come up with? The weirdest thing?'" Bailey added of their process. “At times it was a blend.”
During our joint interview, Coburn poked fun at Bailey for being a true crime junkie. “He has the longest drive into the office and every day he’s just listening to true crime podcasts. So it’s fun to be working with somebody who has that kind of deep knowledge," he said.
Read on below to find out more about which actual serial killers could be compared to the fictional Harris:
What real-life serial killers does The Hunting Party’s Richard Harris resemble?
Dennis Rader, aka BTK
Agent Henderson, The Hunting Party’s highly-skilled FBI profiler, described Harris as an “organized” killer, or someone who meticulously plans out each aspect of the attack.
For these killers, the thrill they get from the anticipation and meticulous planning is just as essential as the actual kill itself.
One notable real-life example of an organized killer is Dennis Rader, who went by the moniker BTK for “bind, torture, kill.” Over three decades, Rader killed at least 10 victims in Wichita, Kansas, beginning in 1974 with four members of the same family, according to Oxygen.com. Rader, once a married father of two and respected church leader, was known to stalk his victims, bind them, and torture them.
"It was all about the process of killing and it was almost like foreplay for sex, where it would lead up to the ultimate moment where he would kill them, but that's not really what he lived for," criminologist Scott Bonn, PhD, told Oxygen.com. "What he lived for was the process."
Ed Kemper, aka The Co-Ed Killer
Henderson believed — at least initially — that Harris’ prime motivation for killing his blonde, female victims was a twisted sense of revenge against his own mother, who subjected him to intense physical and emotional abuse.
“She would lock him in the basement in complete darkness for days at a time,” Henderson explained to the team trying to track him down. “As an adult, he would revisit that trauma by finding women that he viewed as a surrogate for his own mother. He would abduct them, sedate them, and inject ammonia sulfate into their eyes. He’d blind them, plunging them into the same darkness that he experienced as a child.”
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This disturbing motive is reminiscent of notorious serial killer Ed Kemper, who had his own set of mommy issues. Kemper, who is often referred to as The Co-ed Killer, has described his own mother Clarnell Strandberg as an abusive alcoholic who forced him to live in the basement and constantly told him he’d never amount to anything.
“So, he’s angry at mom,” former FBI Special Agent John Douglas explained in the Oxygen special Kemper on Kemper: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer. “But rather than strike out at mom at this point, he’s going on the hunt. It was the only way he felt he had power.”
Kemper killed six women in Northern California before ultimately turning his rage onto his mother, who he bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer in 1973.
Charles Albright, aka the Eyeball Killer
The Hunting Party’s fictional Harris had a terrifying habit of blinding his victims, adding to their sense of helplessness, before taking their lives.
Texas serial killer Charles Albright had the same fascination with eyes — although he’d cut his victims’ eyes out completely. Albright’s obsession with eyes began after his overprotective mother introduced him to taxidermy at the age of 11 and he began to carefully scoop out the eyes of birds and other animals he stuffed, according to Texas Monthly. Although he always wanted to use the expensive eyes found at taxidermy shops, his frugal mom told him to use sewing buttons instead.
Albright, who would later become known as the Eyeball Killer, used the skills he’d picked up as a child to meticulously remove the eyes of three Texas prostitutes. Although he continued to proclaim his innocence, Albright, a charismatic, modern-day Renaissance man with a penchant for breaking the law, was convicted in 1991.
Fred and Rosemary West
The shocking final chapter of The Hunting Party’s series premiere revealed that Harris had not acted alone in the heinous murders. Although it was long believed that his intended eighth and final victim Nicole Westin was rescued just in time as law enforcement moved in to make his initial arrest, the reality was much more chilling.
After Harris escaped from the Pit, Agent Henderson suspected he would try to finish what he started and kill Westin. They used her to lure him into their trap, but after Harris was shot and killed, Henderson made the unnerving realization that Westin had been his love interest and accomplice, not his victim.
Before she was taken into custody herself, Westin even made the disturbing declaration that she had “made him into the monster that the whole world was afraid of” by teaching him how to tie girls down and block out their screams.
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While one may hope this disturbing dynamic can be relegated only to the world of fiction, there have been some haunting examples of real-life couples who kill, such as Canada’s Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka — often referred to as the Ken and Barbie Killers — and the “Lonely Heart” Killers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck.
One of the most notorious pairs, however, was England’s Fred and Rosemary West. The couple raped, tortured, and killed at least 12 people, including two of their own children.
The couple turned their children’s basement playroom into a torture chamber where young female victims were raped, beaten, killed, and buried beneath the cellar floor or below their garden, according to the Peacock docuseries World’s Most Notorious Killers. The married pair often targeted hitchhikers or young lodgers who stayed in their home, using Rosemary’s presence to lull their victims into a false sense of security.
Among the 12 bodies investigators later discovered were the remains of Fred’s daughter Charmaine, who he shared with his first wife, Catherine “Rena” Costello, Costello herself, his daughter Heather, who he shared with Rosemary, and his children’s babysitter Ann McFall.
While Harris and Westin were ultimately stopped in the premiere, putting their savage killing spree to an end, Henderson’s team has only just begun to track down all the notorious serial killers now on the loose.
To find out who they find next, watch The Hunting Party on NBC or stream episodes on Peacock.
– Reporting contributed by Caitlin Busch
