Killer instinct ...
Piers Morgan is used to interviewing celebrities, but his latest TV project sees him tackling much darker subject matter. He tells Gemma Dunn about meeting some of America’s most notorious female killers: Piers Morgan is celebrity Marmite – but the British TV personality wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I prefer being slightly polarising,” the 51-year-old admits. “I couldn’t stand the pressure of being a saint; it would be unbearable, I don’t know how people do that.”
Fronting a brand new twopart ITV series, Killer Women With Piers Morgan, he treads new ground as he travels through the southern states of Texas and Florida, meeting some of America’s most notorious female murderers along the way.
Three complex cases are at the centre of the programme.
“It’s almost like that Netflix series Making A Murderer, which got everyone gripped,” Morgan muses. “It’s trying to journalistically unravel it yourself.”
It was the focus on women, in particular, that proved a fascinating draw for him.
“Women don’t tend to do pre-planned killings. That’s what the detectives told me,” he explains. “Most of the crimes are crimes of passion, committed in spontaneity, where something has upset them and they do something silly.
“To get women who have pre-planned killings of a barbaric nature is very unusual. That’s what appealed to me: it’s a very unusual genre of murder.”
One case that left Morgan astounded was that of Erin Caffey, a 24-year-old who was convicted of having her family savagely murdered when she was just 16.
“When you hear her sing like a little angel and look like a little angel at 4ft 11, you can’t believe she masterminded the mass murder. But she did.
“She looked so innocent. What would drive a girl like that with no record of bad behaviour, no trouble at school, to do that?
“We spoke to defence and prosecution lawyers, family members, friends, the victims’ families and so on, to try to build a picture around what these people were actually like,” Morgan adds.
He confesses he had to “have a couple of coffees and really calm down” after spending time with Caffey’s father, who not only survived the attack but has forgiven his daughter.
“I really felt for him,” Morgan sympathises.
“When he got emotional, I thought, ‘Could I forgive in the way that he has, if it was my daughter who had done that to my sons, to my wife?’ I don’t think you know until it happens to you. There’s unconditional love, and there’s unconditional love. He exudes the real power it.”
It’s not a show format that he believes could translate to the UK, however.
“The US is so much bigger, so it has many more stories like this, plus you don’t get the access to the prisons in the UK.”
As for prison sentences, he exclaims: “If any of the people I met had done what they’ve done here, they’d probably have got 20 years, 25 maximum. As it is, they’re all serving 45-50 years or life tariffs in the US, which for those young women, it’s their whole life.”
Beyond the prison bars, Morgan’s set for an exciting 2016, with another run of his hit talk show Life Stories, for which he promises an array of exciting celebs, and a newly announced one-off interview with Charlie Sheen this June.
Killer Women With Piers Morgan begins tomorrow on ITV.