WEEKEND TV : ‘SIMON’ BROTHERS DUEL IN TV MOVIES

Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker, who normally are compatriots on “Simon & Simon,” become competitors Sunday night in TV movies airing opposite one another on ABC and CBS.

McRaney is cast as a serial killer in “Easy Prey” (9 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), while Parker plays the husband of a woman (Mare Winningham) who receives a brain transplant in “Who Is Julia?” (9 p.m., Channels 2 and 8).

“Easy Prey” is a dramatization of the nine harrowing days that a 16-year-old Torrance girl, Tina Marie Risico, spent in the company of a sadistic rapist and murderer in April, 1984, traveling across the country with him as he eluded a nationwide manhunt.

Having been lured into Christopher Wilder’s car at the Del Amo Fashion Square shopping mall on the pretext that he was a professional photographer, Risico (played by Shawnee Smith) was assaulted and tortured by him and witnessed him murder one woman and savagely attack another. But finally, in a mysterious gesture that ran counter to everything else about him, Wilder bought her an airline ticket in Boston and sent her back home.

Admirably sparing the grisly details, writer John Carlen seeks in “Easy Prey” to understand this bizarre story--how it was that Tina and the other young women could have been charmed by Wilder, what happened to keep her from being murdered like the others, why he decided to help her return home.

Carlen and director Sander Stern can only guess at the answers, but the effort puts an intriguing layer over what might otherwise have collapsed quickly into exploitation. Unfortunately for the drama, the speculation is provided by outsiders, not Wilder and Tina, robbing viewers of making discoveries for themselves.

Some sanitizing has been done, not only of the brutal nature of Wilder’s crimes but also in Tina’s character, background and role in the abduction of the young woman in Indianapolis whom Wilder tortured, stabbed and left for dead.

The essential facts are correct, however, leaving us to ponder the strange, frightful twists that fate and human nature can take.

(“Who Is Julia?” will be reviewed in Sunday’s edition of Television Times.)