Amazon MGM Studios Wins Rights To Buzzy Vanity Fair Article “True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer And The Texas Mom Who Stopped Him”

EXCLUSIVE: After circling rights for weeks to the buzzy Vanity Fair article “True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer and the Texas Mom Who Stopped Him,” Amazon MGM Studios has locked them down, Deadline understands.

Executive producer and production attachments on True Crime, True Faith are premature and cannot be confirmed at this time.

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While certain buyers had been looking at developing the piece for film, it seems that the Amazon adaptation will be a series. Details have yet to emerge about creatives involved behind the camera, and of course, discussions on casting have not started given the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.

Published by Julie Miller on August 9, the Vanity Fair article tells for the first time the full story of Margy Palm, a religious Texas mother who was abducted by serial killer Stephen Morin outside of a Kmart while shopping for Christmas gifts on December 11, 1981. Palm spent eight hours as Morin’s hostage before convincing him to set her free. She did so by appealing to him through a discussion of her faith, and stunningly, wound up developing a friendship with the murderer that followed through to his years in prison. She visited him there more than a dozen times, and Morin even converted to Christianity after being convicted of his crimes. He was executed by lethal injection in 1985 at age 34.

An iconic, 40-year-old publication with its own production company Vanity Fair Studios, Vanity Fair most recently teamed with Anchor Entertainment to produce a forthcoming doc based on the David Kushner story “Paradise Lost.” Other recent Vanity Fair Studios projects based on the publication’s IP include the FX docuseries The Secrets of Hillsong and Max’s Breath of Fire.

Amongst other recently adapted Vanity Fair IP was Michael Lewis’ 2015 article tributing author Tom Wolfe, which was made into Radical Wolfe, a documentary released to North American theaters by Kino Lorber in September.

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