The first minutes of Night Stalker: the Hunt for a Serial Killer, a new Netflix true crime mini-series, focus not on the titular killer, real name Richard Ramirez, but on the city he terrorized in the 1980s: Los Angeles, sun-kissed yet long marked by a grisly streak of noir crime both real (the Black Dahlia, the Manson murders) and fictional (the works of Raymond Chandler, an entire genre of films).

Night Stalker incorporates many staples of the true crime genre – extended slo-mo montages, the click-click flitting through crime scene photos, seedy bar aesthetic – for the story of a serial killer with unusual indiscretion.

Russell, a veteran of true crime series interested in the Law & Order-style chase since his days as a local crime reporter, entered the Night Stalker story 30 years on through the recollections of Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, the two Los Angeles police detectives who tracked the crimes over five harrowing months in 1985 and who largely serve as the series’ dual narrators.

Night Stalker is thus four episodes of true crime in which the violent offender thankfully recedes to the offended.

The focus away from Ramirez was a deliberate attempt, Russell said, to avoid the “very strange and surreal afterlife” of the Night Stalker story in which Ramirez became, to a small group, something of a Satanic sex symbol.

There’s nothing cool about this.” In Night Stalker, Russell paired the detectives’ recollections with family member testimonies to “deliberately not fall prey to the exploitative or sensationalistic nature of the Ramirez myth, by immersing you in the stories of these people whose lives were massively and dramatically and irrevocably impacted by Ramirez.”.

Whether through retracing the police investigation, replaying the ample man-on-the-street local TV interviews, or reliving the feverish summer in cutaways to family members and bit players in the eventual arrest of Ramirez, Night Stalker aims for a tableau of Los Angeles, 1985, rather than a serial killer mystery

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is available on Netflix on 13 January