Jessica Roach was only 15. She dreamt of flying airplanes but the high school sophomore disappeared in September 1993 while riding her bike in Illinois. Her remains were found in an Indiana cornfield. Larry Hall — a former janitor who travelled widely as a Civil War re-enactor — was charged with the kidnapping. Reportedly, Jessica wasn’t his only victim.
The story is far more complicated. He confessed to crimes as easily as he recanted. A serial confessor? Or a serial killer? Helping the police was another convicted man — Jimmy Keene, a former high school football star and son of an attentive policeman father. But Keene’s biggest problem was drugs. Ultimately the law caught up with him and he was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. The only path to freedom involved cutting a deal with the authorities that involved moving to the prison where Hall was locked up to elicit a confession from the suspected serial killer.
The real-life story finds a narrative in the upcoming Apple TV+ miniseries, Black Bird (Dennis Lehane is showrunner), which has a July 8 premiere date on the streaming platform. Based on the book In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption (by James Keene; in the show he is called Jimmy), Taron Egerton plays the role of Jimmy Keene while taking on the role of Larry Hall is the brilliant Paul Walter Hauser while Greg Kinnear plays detective Brian Miller, who understood what Hall was up to.
With a lot of bad things happening around us, it took courage on the part of Hauser to play the role of the criminal who sported mutton chops. “It deals with true events and that’s a heavy thing to partake in and do. But the writing is incredible. The collaborators and actors are incredible. And I’ve always wanted to play the role of something like a serial killer, something that would be difficult; I could kind of test my talent,” says Hauser over a late-night video call.
The very picture of Larry Hall is enough to conjure up fear. What’s most disconcerting is his cool demeanour when questioned by police officers and detectives. The way he speaks, the way he walks… everything about him is terrifying. It was important for Hauser to get in and out of his character as soon as possible.
“When I’m on set of a movie or TV show, I like to joke around, I like to have intimate conversations with people, I like to be very personable. And playing Larry would have been really hard to do that. So I kind of made sure that I was only Larry between action and cut. I didn’t do any method acting. I wasn’t sitting in a corner, pulling my hair out while listening to dark music. I wasn’t doing anything crazy like that. I just knew that when the director yelled ‘action’, it was my job to overcommit. Between takes, I’d answer text messages but when I am playing Larry, I’m full tilt,” says Hauser.
The late Ray Liotta makes his final screen appearances as the policeman father (Big Jim) of Jimmy Keene in the miniseries
Perhaps the biggest problem he faced was finding clips of Hall to get his voice right; there is hardly any footage available. “There is no video footage of him; there was only like 10 to 20 seconds of audio available through these documentaries I found on YouTube. So there wasn’t much to go off on. I just tried to play in his vocal range, his vocal register. I did things that felt right — Larry’s posture, the things that he’s attracted to, the cadence or pacing of how he speaks, how he eats his food.”
Most of the scenes we see Hauser in involve Egerton, who plays Jimmy Keene, a man on a mission. “He’s a fun guy to work with. He’s got a great sense of humour… a smart sense of humour and has a great laugh. If you can make him laugh hard, his mouth opens up like a piece of machinery,” says the actor, who has to his credit films like I, Tonya, BlacKkKlansman and Cruella, with a smile. “And he made me laugh. To be honest, such sets are so difficult at times because the material is so depressing and dark, you kind of have to find things to laugh about, you kind of have to cut some of the tension with humour just to stay sane.”
The Indiana world
Keeping the character of Larry Hall on his toes is detective Brian Miller, played by the versatile Greg Kinnear. Miller is the man who got the case against Hall moving.
“I was born in a very small town in Indiana, about 15 miles down the road from Larry Hall; I didn’t know that. I wasn’t familiar with the story. But I do know the culture of the Midwest, having grown up there till I was about 10. I then moved overseas, and we went all over the place. But I had a real great snapshot as a kid of what the Indiana world was like, and I love the tapestry of the Midwest. In the backdrop of this story there is Brian Miller, whom I play as a former Vietnam veteran, a bomb detonator, somebody who is very good at his job… very specific, Larry Hall was nervous of the character I play, he was concerned that I was kind of closing in on him because I just didn’t buy his bulls**t,” says the 59-year-old actor.
Kinnear and Hauser have at least one thing in common — they both love the book which the miniseries is based on.
Sepideh Moafi and Greg Kinnear in the miniseries
“I really liked the story. It reminded me of Departed with (Leonardo) DiCaprio, it felt very much like the Departed set in prison. It was like the Departed meets The Shawshank Redemption or something like that. A bit of a cosmic gumbo of the two. I really enjoyed the book. And I thought what Jimmy Keane did was incredibly brave. I don’t know that I could have done the same thing if I were in his position,” says Hauser.
For Kinnear, Black Bird is not like any other true crime story. “I feel like many of the other shows were made for their entertainment value, kind of at the expense of the victims. I didn’t feel that is the case here. I feel we had great respect for Jessica Roach; I felt like we had great respect for the people whose lives were compromised by Larry Hall.”
The respect Kinnear talks about can be seen in the format of the story — a miniseries instead of a film. “I think a movie would have tried to pack too much into, say, two and a half hours. I think a limited series is perfect. And I also like that it is a six-episode series and not 10-12 because that would have dragged out the story,” says Hauser.
In case you are wondering about the real Jimmy Keene and Larry Hall, today Keene is a real estate investor living in Chicago and is also developing properties for film and television. Larry Hall remains in prison in North Carolina for the kidnapping of Jessica Roach.
Also, watch the show to catch a glimpse of Ray Liotta’s final appearances as the policeman father (Big Jim) of Jimmy Keene. Liotta agreed to the part soon after reading the scripts. It was ultimately his last completed television role before he passed away in May 2022. “The performance he gave? It was a master class. He wholly embodied a man who realises that his lifetime of cutting corners and flitting along the edges of corruption have hung an albatross of very bleak options around the neck of his own son,” says showrunner Dennis Lehane.