TV REVIEWS : Devilish Plotting in ‘A Killer Among Friends’

The naked city is full of stories guaranteed to become TV movies. Take “A Killer Among Friends” (at 9 tonight on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

The trial, two years ago, made headlines. Two young women were convicted in Pasadena Superior Court of killing their best friend by drowning her in a creek in Angeles National Forest over the jealous belief that she had slept with their boyfriends.

As if that wasn’t emblematic enough of moral squalor in suburbia, equally shocking was that right after the murder (in 1985), one of the young killers ingratiated herself into the home of her victim’s grieving mother in order to better console her and complicate the investigation. But the girl’s most diabolical act was to insinuate herself into the role of her victim in order to become the mother’s surrogate daughter. Her devilish dissembling wasn’t uncovered for three years.

That’s the nightmare convincingly dramatized by Patty Duke, who plays the anguished mother. The production is compelling not only because it unraveled in our back yard (the girls in the story all attended San Fernando High together) but also because of its withering focus on the banality of middle-class kids who live in moderate comfort on shady streets and commit the unspeakable.

The mother (the real-life Irene Avila) is portrayed as the naive victim of her own foolishly trusting nature, the kind of mom (divorced and raising three other children) who makes a point of being a “friend” to her kids as opposed to a nagging parent figure.

Her pretty, ill-fated daughter (the sparkling Tiffani-Amber Thiessen as the 17-year-old real-life victim Michele (Missy) Avila) is seen as innocently sexy, even angelic, in the teleplay co-written by director Charles Robert Carner, Christopher Lofton and John Miglis, from a story by Lofton.

(In stark contrast to the script, one of the murdered girl’s brothers, in interviews published during the murder trial, described his sister quite differently from the movie--as a girl who after the sixth grade started using drugs and often missed school. “She fell in with a bad crowd,” brother Mark Avila told The Times. “She had to have low self-esteem to hang around with people like that.” Thus do scripts depart from other perceptions of reality.)

As the overweight, sullen, jealous ringleader of the girls involved in the brutal murder (harrowingly dramatized at the conclusion), Margaret Welsh is chilling as the real-life viper Karen Severson. She and her accomplice (the convicted Laura Doyle) got 15 years to life. Their first parole hearing is in 1997. (For purposes of the production, all the names in the story have been fictionalized.)