Tales of the Grim Sleeper is a documentary of how government and a community systematically failed to protect black women as a serial killer killed them for over 25 years. The government never warned residents that there was a serial killer and did not arrest him even though a survivor, who was not a prostitute, reported the culprit and gave his location. The usual excuses are the claims that the victims were drug addicts or prostitutes, which some were, but Tales of the Grim Sleeper bravely exclaims, “So what?!? They are human beings and someone’s loved ones.”
There is gender privilege in what society deems as acceptable sins. Tales of the Grim Sleeper seems to imply that the killer’s employment and friendships helped the authorities look the other way. Tales of the Grim Sleeper explicitly states that the serial killer was seen as a vigilante cleaning up the streets instead of a sick individual getting his jollies off on other people’s pain and vulnerability. There is a pervasive cloying sense in their own words that some of his friends and family helped in this victimization, and his perversion was acceptable and not incongruent with his status as a nice guy. I was annoyed that this point was not clarified when someone admitted their culpability. I wanted the director to explicitly ask how far DID you go?
Tales of the Grim Sleeper is a must see because it tells a story that needs to be told, but it was frustrating because I think that it needed to be told chronologically instead of in the order that the director discovers elements to the story. The director is definitely a character in this documentary, and his insertion does not add anything to the story. It feels like the community is still suppressing the voices of black women regardless of Tales of the Grim Sleeper’s efforts to not do so.
After 4 minutes, a woman named Donna starts to tell her experience with the killer, but the killer’s friends scream at the director, and we never hear her story. It isn’t until near the end of Tales of the Grim Sleeper that we hear the voices of other survivors-survivors who were unknown either willfully or not by the media and the authorities because they were prostitutes and drug addicts. Tales of the Grim Sleeper is still dominated by the voices of the killers’ friends and families. There is only one woman, who is pictured in the promotional materials for Tales of the Grim Sleeper, who makes it her business to make sure that the documentary hears those voices.
While Tales of the Grim Sleeper wants to tell an untold story, it inadvertently replicates society’s privileging of which voices get the most time. There is room for improvement, and I hope that another filmmaker takes a swing at the subject matter.