Court TV Presents A Killer Lineup

"She owns me. She claimed me in her death and she runs my life and serves as my muse to this day."

When he tried to solve her murder in the '90s and write a book about it, it was "a big media event," he assured the critics, but he and the retired L.A. County sheriff's homicide detective who was working with him did not discover who killed her, which, Ellroy added philosophically, "doesn't matter because closure is [horseradish] and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his [heinie]."

Ellroy wanted to be sure the critics knew that his segment of the series will differ from those of the other four writers in that he will be "the complete on-camera host and I will script and narrate the entire program as well as appear on camera throughout the entire show."

"This show is in essence a paraphrase of my best-selling, award-winning 1996 memoir 'My Dark Places' -- you have that book in your press kits," he said, sounding for all the world like he was on a home shopping network.

When one critic asked why the writers thought viewers seemed so fixated by murder stories, like the Laci Peterson case that played endlessly on cable news networks to high ratings, Ellroy said, "We want to touch the darkness of crime and retain our immunity."

Another wondered about "the reality of serial killers versus the fiction of it."

Ellroy assured them "serial killers are a statistically minuscule anomaly" and that "your chances of running into a crazed, [nonsensical unprintable] are somewhere between slim and none -- you are much more likely to run into some lunatic crackhead who will knife your [heinie] for 20 bucks.

"Serial killers distance us as viewers because of their basic outlandishness and their statistical rarity," he continued. "They allow us to live in the fatuous notion of closure by their basic extremity."

At the end of which, Court TV's Schleiff assured critics that while Ellroy is going to host, write and produce his segment, "we will be editing his segment."