TV & Movies
BBC’s Strike: Troubled Blood Takes Inspiration From Real Serial Killers
The series is not without controversy.
The Christmas telly schedule is starting to take shape, with the fifth series of BBC One’s Strike gracing screens across the UK. Based on the Cormoran Strike series by J.K. Rowling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the crime drama stars Tom Burke as the titular private investigator alongside Holliday Grainger as his assistant and business partner Robin Ellacott. This time around, they’re investigating a cold case from the early 1970s. But did this crime actually happen? Is Strike: Troubled Blood based on a true story?
In Troubled Blood, Strike is tasked with solving a decades-old cold case of a woman that went missing in 1974. The private investigator soon settles on a prime suspect, a man called Dennis Creed, who wears a women’s coat and wig to deceive and kidnap his victims. The plot was heavily criticised at the time the book was published, it has to be said. However, the cold case itself is entirely fictional, but the character of Dennis is “loosely based” on two serial killers, Jerry Brudos and Russell Williams.
Brudos was an American man whose obsession with stealing women’s shoes turned deadly, leading to the murder of four women in the 1960s. Fans of the Netflix crime drama Mindhunter will be familiar with Brudos, as he was featured in Episode 7 of the first season. Williams is a Canadian ex-colonel who killed two women in Canada in 2010, in addition to “two home-invasion sexual assaults, and dozens of fetish burglaries targeting women’s lingerie.”
In the months leading up to the publication of Troubled Blood, Rowling shared several transphobic remarks on social media in addition to a statement in which she shared her concerns about “new trans activism” that, in her opinion, is “pushing to erode the legal definitions of sex and replace it with gender.” When the fifth novel of the Strike collection was published, fans accused Rowling of further transphobia through the depiction of Dennis luring his victims by wearing women’s clothing.
