John ‘Jigsaw’ St John
UK indie Golden Possum Productions (GPP) has licensed the rights to develop a TV series adaptation of Jane Howatt’s true crime book Jigsaw & Jane: Thirteen Years of Murder and Mayhem with Badge Number One.
Published last year by Chimney Road Press, the book is set in LA from the early 1980s into the 1990s, when Howatt was a suburban mother and aspiring writer.
She set out to write a book about LAPD homicide detective John ‘Jigsaw’ St John, spending 13 years accompanying him through several high-profile murder investigations.
St John has been the subject of a TV project before, when US network NBC aired Jigsaw John, a 1976 crime drama starring Jack Warden.
GPP’s upcoming adaptation expands the outfit’s growing slate of projects based on true stories. Last year, the prodco secured the exclusive life rights to Julio Estrada, the Cuban baseball trainer at the centre of one of Major League Baseball’s most explosive scandals.
Naomi Harvey, executive producer at GPP, said: “True crime is an evergreen, but I am not in the business of IP that glorifies or fetishises the criminals. What interests me is the people who spend years standing in their shadow – the detectives, the families, the witnesses and, in this case, this extraordinary woman who decided she was going to document it all.”
Source: www.c21media.net
