‘Wednesday’ fans want to know: Is there really a Kansas City Scalper serial killer?
Season 2 of Tim Burton’s hit Netflix series “Wednesday,” which debuted this week, featured references to Kansas City that have left fans puzzled.
The new antagonist for young psychic Nevermore Academy student Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega, is a Missouri serial killer/pet groomer she dubs the “Kansas City Scalper,” revealed in May to be portrayed by Haley Joel Osment.
Cue the rush of fans Googling “Is there really a Kansas City Scalper,” which just might be a reference to one of Missouri’s most prolific serial killers.
Wednesday has spent her summer hunting down the murderer in our fair city.
In one scene, a row of small, modest houses is shown with the Kansas City skyline behind them. Local fans on social media were excited about the shoutout.
But some were skeptical about whether that was a real Kansas City neighborhood and wondered whether the show filmed here.
That’s our skyline but those aren’t our houses, one TikTok user commented.
And they were correct.
Yes, there has been a lot of high-profile movie-making going on in town, beginning last summer when Hallmark filmed one of its popular Christmas movies here.
And the cast and crew of “Ted Lasso,” including Overland Park-raised Jason Sudeikis, just wrapped up two weeks of filming around the Missouri side of the metro.
But “Wednesday” didn’t come here.
The show’s first season was filmed in Romania — “fittingly,” says the website Game Rant, since the country is known as Dracula’s homeland. But Season 2 was filmed in Ireland, where the forests and gothic castles stand in for fictional Jericho, Vermont, where the show is set.
“Everything about Ireland fits the sensibility of the show. We have incredible woods, we have beautiful castles, we have the lush greens, the gray skies,” showrunner Miles Millar told Time Out entertainment website. “There’s something magical about the light that really lends itself to the show.”
For the first episode, the show transformed Trinity College in Dublin into Newark Airport in New Jersey. And the Kansas City Scalper’s home in Kansas City was actually in a housing development in Newcastle, Ireland, a town in County Wicklow.
That calls to mind how scenes in Steven Spielberg’s new movie, which allegedly take place in Kansas City, were filmed earlier this year in New York and New Jersey.
As for the Kansas City Scalper, entertainment website The Tab believes the villain to be a composite of two real-life killers.
“There isn’t a real life Kansas City Scalper, but the story looks to have taken two horrendous stories of serial killers and merged them together. Therefore creating the most horrific story possible,” the website notes.
Serial killer Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard was convicted in 2007 for killing six women in Kansas City but is believed to have raped and strangled two girls and 11 women, most of whom had worked as prostitutes, from 1977 to 1993.
He was accused of preying on the women and picking them up for sex before strangling them with a shoelace, electric cord or article of clothing.
The married trash-collection supervisor was sent to prison for life.
When British talker Piers Morgan interviewed Gilyard in prison in 2018 for his “Serial Killer” series, British media dubbed “the former bin man” the “Kansas City Strangler.”
In that interview, Gilyard claimed he was innocent and became angry at being called a “serial killer.”
Morgan pressed him, asking why his semen was found on the victims if he was innocent and challenged him when Gilyard couldn’t remember what his defense in court was.
“You were charged with killing 13 women by strangulation and you have no idea what your defense was?” Morgan said. “Do you think I’m an idiot, Lorenzo? Do I look an idiot to you?”
Gilyard walked out of the interview at that point, telling the film crew, “Have a good day, y’all. Thank you.”
That interview, and the “Serial Killer” series, is streaming now on Peacock.
The Tab suggests that British killer John Sweeney, named the “scalp hunter” by the media, also inspired the “Kansas City Scalper” moniker. “The other part of the killer name in ‘Wednesday’ is also true,” the web site writes.
Sweeney is serving life in prison for attacking multiple women in the 1990s. He murdered and dismembered two former girlfriends, then dumped their remains in canals in London and Rotterdam.
Wednesday winds up trapped in the Scalper’s home in Kansas City, but we won’t share any spoilers here. (But watch out for creepy dolls.)
Season 2 premieres in two parts. The first four episodes debuted, appropriately, on Wednesday. The next four will be released on Sept. 3.
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