Diligence is rewarded

Is there a new rule that movies about serial killers have to last as long as the actual investigations? Last year, “Zodiac” clocked in at a butt-numbing 158 minutes, and now we have “The Capture of the Green River Killer” occupying four hours on the Lifetime Movie Network starting Sunday and finishing up on Monday. That’s a lot of television for one story.

Fortunately it’s a really good story, if you like them ghastly and grisly -- and who doesn’t? Both chilling and imaginative, “The Capture of the Green River Killer” returns us to the glory days of made-for-TV movies “based on real events.” One of the many drawbacks of the endless “CSI” franchising is that it pretty much put true-crime dramas out of business on the networks. For those of us who look back longingly to the days of “83 Hours ‘Til Dawn,” “Fatal Vision” and Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy, this is a darn shame. There is something morbidly fascinating about a dramatic re-creation of a real crime -- less upsetting than a documentary but more titillating than pure fiction, it allows us to explore the horrors of the human soul -- serial killing, kidnapping, infanticide -- from a safe distance. Look, there’s Peter Strauss, there’s Karl Malden; how terrible can it be?

The Lifetime channels have, surprisingly, provided safe haven for the genre for years (often with the aid of Valerie Bertinelli), possibly because so many of the most ghastly, grisly -- which is to say TV-worthy -- crimes are committed against women. This is pretty terrible if you think about it, so let’s not. Let’s think about “The Capture of the Green River Killer,” which follows the 20-year odyssey of Washington State Det. Dave Reichert from the moment the second strangled corpse washes up on the banks of the Green River until the monster responsible for the death of at least 48 women is finally apprehended.

Reichert, who wrote a book about his experiences and now is a U.S. congressman (R-Wash.), is played by Tom Cavanagh, best known for the title role on “Ed.” With all the meat-and-potatoes integrity of a young Mr. Lincoln, Cavanagh is the perfect choice, reassuring yet compelling, a resilient, at times tormented, hero-in-the-making. We would wish him well if he were teaching third grade, much less investigating a string of murders. And by all accounts, including his own, Reichert was an ordinary dedicated cop. Only through the banal act of picking up a ringing telephone on a normal day at the office is his fate irrevocably wedded to one of the deadliest men in American history.

Hampered by initial disorganization, limited by the primitive forensics of the day -- the killer was finally caught by a then-new DNA testing method -- Reichert and the task force that finally forms watch in stunned disbelief as the body count rises and the few leads that they have come to nothing. Year after year after year.

If nothing else, “The Capture of the Green River Killer” -- written by John Pielmeier, based on Reichert’s book, and directed by Norma Bailey -- is an excellent reminder that all those “CSI” spinoffs and knockoffs are indeed fiction; catching a pathological killer is excruciatingly difficult, painfully devoid of ah-ha moments.

But this is the Lifetime Movie Network, so the film is narrated by a young woman named Helen (Amy Davidson), whose troubled life draws her ever closer to the killer’s orbit. Helen, or Hel, serves as a symbol of all the murder victims, troubled girls, mostly prostitutes, who lived on the fringes of society, easily missed, easily dismissed -- it was their number rather than their identity that finally caught the media’s attention. Red-haired and porcelain-skinned, Davidson is far lovelier than most abuse victims turned street-walking cokeheads, but Hel is a heartbreaker, doomed by circumstance and poor choices that seem inevitable. In her spooky, little-girl voice, her narration raises questions about God and morality, about fate and individual power that, while dipping now and then into the maudlin, provide a surprisingly effective spiritual spine for a story that could have easily fallen into the weary but valiant homicide investigator rut.

Not that this doesn’t happen -- hey, in four hours about a serial killer, ruts will be fallen into. As Reichert’s wife, for example, Michelle Harrison spends most of her time wrapping a robe abound her nightgown (another late night!) and warning her husband that he is becoming obsessed. She does have one wonderful moment when, upset that her husband has brought crime-scene photos into their home, she tells him he really needs to ask for help. He assures her that he is praying daily for guidance and she looks at him sideways. “I meant you should get a computer,” she says.

There are many similar light moments, which in true-crime films are as important as tension. Make it too dogged, too earnest and we get bored. We want to see people in action -- troubled and laughing, frightened and strong, struggling to put the pieces together but always, though it may take 20 years or four hours, seeing justice done. Beautifully shot, appropriately creepy, chilling and at times heartwarming, “The Capture of the Green River Killer” delivers on all counts. Oh, maybe they could have done it in three hours rather than four, but maybe not. And this way, you get two true-crime dramas instead of one.

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mary.mcnamara@latimes .com

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‘The Capture of the Green River Killer’

Where: Lifetime Movie Network

When: Part 1, 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday; Part 2, 8 to 10 p.m. Monday

Rating: TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for violence)