Review: ‘Handsome Devil: Charming Killer,’ starring Mila Montanez, Sara Miller, Andreas Gardiner, Patricia Bell, Rich Montecalvo, Alexis Williams and Lee Hollander

January 28, 2026

by Carla Hay

“Handsome Devil: Charming Killer”

Directed by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross

Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” features a predominantly white group of people (with one person of South Asian heritage) who are connected in some way to habitual criminal Wade Wilson, who was convicted of the 2019 murders of 35-year-old Kristine Melton and 43-year-old Diane Ruiz in Cape Coral, Florida.

Culture Clash: Wilson, who had a prior criminal record for violence, pleaded not guilty to the murders, and he courted a controversial fan base consisting mostly of women, many of whom expressed their romantic interest in him.

Culture Audience: “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries that focus more on hyping up the criminals than giving information about the victims and survivors.

“Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” is more sensationalistic than investigative. The editing for this derivative docuseries is like a tacky soap opera about convicted murderer Wade Wilson. It’s not a good sign when the murder victims’ family members are not interviewed in a documentary. “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” (directed by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross) has a good mix of interviews with legal officials who were involved in the murder investigations and trial, but this three-episode docuseries is severely lacking in other perspectives that a responsible documentary would’ve had.

Wilson’s murder trial and its outcome received a great deal of publicity, so there’s no “whodunit” mystery about this case. Here are the basic facts: On October 7, 2019, Wilson (who was 25 years old at the time) murdered 35-year-old Kristine Melton and 43-year-old Diane Ruiz separately within a 24-hour period in Cape Coral, Florida. His only apparent motive, say prosecutors, was he wanted to get thrilled from killing. On the same day, Wilson brutally assaulted his estranged girlfriend Melissa “Mila” Montanez, in between committing these murders.

Wilson confessed to the murders but pleaded not guilty, with his defense claiming that on the day of the murders, Wilson was in the midst of a drug binge that turned him into a killer. He went on trial in 2024 and was convicted of the first-degree murders for Melton and Ruiz, battery against Montanez, burglary and theft, which were all part of his crime spree that took place on October 7, 2019. After his conviction for these crimes, Wilson got the death penalty as his sentence. He is not interviewed in the documentary.

It’s not stated in “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” if the documentary’s producers tried to interview any of the murder victims’ family members, but it’s hard to imagine that there wasn’t an attempt to interview them. Perhaps these family members didn’t want to be involved in this documentary because they knew that the documentarians’ intentions would be to focus mostly on the tabloid-like aspects of this case, rather than showing full and proper respect for the victims, whose lives are barely discussed in the documentary.

The documentary’s only footage where the murder victims are talked about as real human beings comes from archival courtroom footage, which includes the victims’ loved ones talking about the victims in court testimony or victim impact statements. The loved ones who speak in this footage include Melton’s cousin Samantha Kelly (also known as Samantha Catomer), Melton’s friend Stephanie Johnson, Ruiz’s son Zane Romero, Ruiz’s fiancé Scott Hannon, and Ruiz’s father Victor Ruiz. Johnson is interviewed in the documentary, but she’s mainly shown talking about what happened when she and Melton met Wilson at a bar the night before he murdered Melton.

Episode 1, titled “The Manhunt,” chronicles Wilson’s crime spree in October 2019, and the investigation that led to his arrest. Episode 2, titled “Wade’s Wives,” details the obsessive, cult-like fan base that Wilson developed after the media exposure about his arrest for murder. Episode 3, titled “The Death Penalty,” includes information about his childhood, in addition to showing a lot of the trial footage and discussing the outcome and aftermath of the trial.

“Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” doesn’t reveal much that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere. This docuseries relies heavily on previously filmed footage from other sources for almost everything that’s shown about Wilson. Most of the documentary’s video footage of Wilson comes from police body cameras, the jail where he stayed before his trial, and the trial’s courtroom. And even though the documentary’s title refers to Wilson, his personal background is breezed through in the documentary, which leaves out a lot of information about his past.

Wilson was born as Anthony Testasecca on May 20, 1994, to Kristina Gould and Steve Testasecca, who were teenage parents. At the time of the birth, Gould was 14, and Testasecca was 15. Gould had drug problems, and Testasecca was a juvenile delinquent, so they gave their son up for adoption. He was adopted by Steve Wilson and Candace “Candy” Wilson, who renamed him Wade Steven Wilson, and raised Wade with two siblings (who are not biologically related to Wade) in Tallahassee, Florida.

The documentary has an audio recording of Candy talking about Wade, although the documentary doesn’t make it clear if this is an interview that she did exclusively for the documentary or if it was an interview that already existed from another source. In her commentary, Candy describes Wade as a “happy” and “good” child who was protective of other children. “Wade always stood up for the underdog,” she says.

Cindy says Wade began to change when he was about 15 or 16, when she allowed his biological mother to contact him. Candy believes this contact was ultimately harmful to Wade: “He started having an identity crisis. I could see it.” Wade became angry and violent and started to get arrested for crimes.

His adult criminal record dates back to 2012, mostly for theft, assault and illegal drugs. He went on trial in 2015 for sexual assault, but he was acquitted. What the documentary doesn’t mention is that Wade also had several head injuries when he was a child and adolescent. A high percentage of sadistic murderers have had head injuries, which often led to drastic changes in their personalities.

A woman, identified in the documentary only by the name of Janelle, says she dated Wade when they were in high school. She still has the initials of his name tattooed on her chest. Janelle describes him as a “decent boyfriend” but “not the best boyfriend.” Janelle says that Wade’s personality changed from good to bad when he was under the influence of drugs. She also says that Wade was struggling with his identity when he was a teenager: “I don’t think he ever really knew himself.”

“Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” uses a lot of video footage from an interview that Wade’s biological father Steve Testasecca did with the true crime YouTube channel Lockdown 23and1 in August 2024, the same month that Wade received the death penalty. In this interview, Testasecca talks about how when Wade was a fugitive for the murders, he called Testasecca to brag about the murders. Testasecca knew where Wade was and notified law enforcement, who arrested Wade. Testasecca says he doesn’t regret doing the right thing by turning Wade in to the police, even though it was painful for him to do as a parent.

Wade killed Melton at her home, where they went after meeting at Buddha Live, informally known as the Buddha Bar, a popular nightclub in Fort Myers, Florida. Wade was a regular customer at the Buddha Bar, which went of business in 2025, reportedly because of building infrastructure problems that became too costly for the owners to repair. Melton and her friend Johnson went with Wade back to Melton’s house in Cape Coral. Johnson eventually left to go back to her own home. According to Wade’s confession, after Johnson left, he and Melton had consensual sex, and then he murdered her by strangulation. Melton’s body was found in her home later that day. Investigators believe that Wade sexually assaulted her after she died.

After killing Melton, Wade called his girlfriend Montanez, who had a volatile relationship with him because she said he was physically abusive to her. She had him arrested in the past for physical abuse, but she declined to press charges, so the case was dropped. On the night before the murders, Montanez and Wade hung out together at the Buddha Bar, but the night ended on a sour note for her because he stole her car because he said he wanted to go somewhere to buy drugs.

Montanez is interviewed in the documentary. She says that on the night that Wade stole her car, she made up her mind to break up with him once and for all. She left the bar to go home and did not know until much later that Wade went back to the bar that night and left with two women, who were murder victim Melton and Melton’s friend Johnson. Montanez doesn’t say in the documentary what types of drugs that Wade was going to buy, but she admitted in court testimony that she and Wade were doing cocaine the night before the murders.

On the morning of October 7, 2019, Wade called Montanez in obvious distress about a woman he said he met at the bar the night before, but he didn’t tell Montanez that he had murdered this woman. Montanez was the owner of a spa located in a strip mall, so she invited Wade to meet her at the spa and offered to give him a massage. When Wade showed up, he was driving Melton’s car. He viciously beat up Montanez and fled by car when Montanez called for help, and there were witnesses who came to help her. Police arrived at the scene and found Montanez bloodied and injured.

According to law enforcement and Wade’s own confessions, after he assaulted Montanez, he randomly saw Ruiz walking on a fairly deserted road. Ruiz was a single mother who worked as a bartender and was headed to work when Wade saw her. Wade asked Ruiz for directions, with the intention of luring her over to his car, kidnapping her, and murdering her.

In a very disturbing jailhouse phone confession to his biological father, Wade described how he strangled Ruiz in the car, but she was able to briefly escape until Wade ran her over with the car repeatedly until she was dead. He then hid her in a nearby location that he later disclosed to the police. In a phone conversation with Wade in jail, Wade’s biological father convinced Wade to tell police where Ruiz’s body was. Wade was persuaded when he heard about Ruiz’s youngest son Zane Romero, who was 14 at the time, being in agony over not knowing where she was.

Tim McCormick of the Fort Myers Police Department is interviewed in the documentary. He was the cop on the scene in response to the call about Montanez being assaulted by Wade. Body cam footage shows that police were able to locate Wade in Melton’s car in a parking lot. Wade denied knowing anything about the assault. Wade drove away when McCormick said he was going to detain Wade for questioning about the attack on Montanez.

At the time, police did not know that Wade had murdered anyone. McCormick, who was by himself when he confronted Wade, said he made the decision to not chase after Wade after Wade drove away because the attack on Montanez was considered a misdemeanor battery offense. It’s appalling that the types of injuries that Wade inflicted on Montanez, which are clearly seen on the police body cam video, would be considered just a misdemeanor, not a felony.

Eventually, police were able to determine that Wade was the prime suspect in the murder of Melton and the disappearance of Ruiz. Nicholas Jones, a detective with the Cape Coral Police Department, was assigned to lead the investigation into the Ruiz case when Ruiz was reported missing by her fiancé Hannon. Jones is interviewed in the documentary and says Wade became a suspect when police discovered he used Ruiz’s cell phone after Ruiz went missing.

According to law enforcement’s timeline of Wade’s crime spree that day, he left Melton’s house at around 7:10 a.m. local time, he attacked Montanez around 9 a.m., he murdered Ruiz at about 9:45 a.m., and he hid Ruiz’s body shortly after that. After Wade fled from police officer McCormick, he ditched Melton’s car in the parking lot of a restaurant called Joe’s Crab Shack, and stole the car of the restaurant owner, who was a casual acquaintance of Wade’s. Wade then called his biological father, who gave police the crucial information needed to arrest Wade.

Wade’s arrest got the media’s attention in many countries, and his mug shot went viral. He was nicknamed the Deadpool Killer because Wade Wilson is also the name of the Marvel Comics wisecracking superhero Deadpool. Ryan Reynolds, who has played Deadpool in several movies, has a very slight resemblance to what murderer Wade looked like in 2019, before Wade got his face heavily tattooed. Deadpool’s full name is Wade Winston Wilson.

The Marvel Comics version of Deadpool is bisexual or queer. And so is murderer Wade. His ex-girlfriend Montanez says that Wade told her once that he assaulted a guy he had been having sex with, but he never got caught for this crime. The documentary has other hints or implications that Wade uses and abuses men sexually, just like he uses and abuses women.

While he was in jail awaiting his trial, Wade got his face heavily tattooed, including having tattoos that looked like stitches on the corners of his mouth, similar to how Heath Ledger’s villain Joker character looked in the 2008 Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” based on DC Comics characters. The Joker’s motto in “The Dark Knight” is “Why so serious?,” which is also tattooed on Wade’s face. Wade also has a few tattoos of Nazi swastikas.

This physical transformation did not deter many fans from becoming his devoted followers. Rich Montecalvo, a chief assistant state attorney in Florida, was one of the main prosecutors in the trial. Montecalvo comments on Wade attracting a fan base: “He was building a cult following.”

Montanez, who admits that she’s attracted to “bad boys,” says she still feels tremendous guilt over not pressing charges against Wade when he had previously assaulted her. She says people warned her that if he got out of jail, he would kill her or someone else. Montanez believes that Wade would have killed her on October 7, 2019, if witnesses had not been there to come to her rescue.

Montanez is featured prominently in the documentary and comes across as the very definition of a co-dependent person who was trapped in an abusive relationship. She can be sympathetic but frustrating to watch for people who can’t relate to all the ways that she enabled Wade. And she comes across a bit shallow, especially when she says she was upset that she ruined her makeup before a court appearance because she was crying so much.

Another ex-girlfriend of Wade’s who is interviewed is a single mother named Alexis “Allie” Williams, who says that she fell deeply in love with Wade while he was in jail awaiting his trial. Wade and Williams (who also says she has a thing for “bad boys”) interacted only by phone and over the Internet. But she says she was so “in love” with Wade, she was ready to marry him. Williams even got a tattoo of Wade Wilson’s name on her wrist, and she says it’s the first and only time she had someone’s name tattooed on her body. In the documentary, she also shares some of the correspondence and recorded conversations that she had with Wade.

Williams says that for a long time, she believed Wade’s lies that he was framed for the murders. Williams comments, “Hearing his confession, I didn’t know how to handle it. I still tried hard to believe he was telling me the truth, even though everything was hitting me in the face.” Williams went to his trial every day and was eventually convinced that Wade was guilty, after she heard the testimony in the trial and was particularly moved by the testimony from Ruiz’s youngest son Zane Romero.

“Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” has a tabloid-like way of reporting how Wade amassed a following of hundreds of thousands of ardent fans (mostly women) on the Internet after his murder arrest mug shot went viral. The docuseries has a salacious tone when it plays audio recordings of women, including Williams, who have sex talk conversations with him. There’s also a lot of footage of his fans making comments on social media.

According to several people interviewed in the documentary, Wade had admirers from all over the world. Many of them would send him money and other gifts that Wade often asked them to send. He spent hours in phone conversations and on the Internet making relationship promises, including marriage, to numerous women. The most obsessive female fans were nicknamed Wade’s Wives.

Wade’s influence and power of persuasion went beyond a typical con artist sweet-talking his way to get people to fall in love with him. A woman named Bonnie Wiggins was arrested and imprisoned for trying to smuggle drugs into jail for Wade. While he was in jail, Wade had a cellmate named Brandon Lee Schuttig, who became such an ardent admirer of Wade’s, he got similar tattoos of stitches on the corners of his mouth and was later arrested for murder.

What the documentary doesn’t do is answer this question: How could a suspect who’s in jail for murder have all those privileges to speak on the phone and communicate over the Internet with all these people, most of whom never met in person? Wade also wrote letters sent by regular mail, but he used the Internet to con so many women into believing that they were his only true love, that level of deception involves a lot flexible time and resources that are very difficult to get while incarcerated.

A big indication that “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” has muckraking tendencies is in the documentary’s selection of which type of media people to interview. There are no journalists interviewed for this documentary. Instead, the only media person interviewed is a TikTok personality named JumpsuitPablo (that’s not his real name, of course), a self-admitted ex-con whose claim to fame is posting scathing critiques about Wade and Wade’s supporters.

Other people interviewed in the documentary include an unnamed man (identified in the documentary only as Juror #97), who was a juror at the trial; criminologist Casey Jordan; Amy Slobozian, a friend of Montanez; and Lee Hollander, who was one of Wade’s defense attorneys. Hollander became Wade’s defense attorney after Wade went through about five other legal teams. Hollander admits in the documentary that he regretted volunteering to take the case. He also remembers telling swastika-tattoo-branded Wade: “I’m Jewish. Do you have a problem with that?”

Hollander acknowledges that his defense team was so unprepared, they didn’t even have an opening argument in the trial. Because Wade had already confessed to the crimes (some of these confessions were in recorded jail conversations), Hollander says he and the rest of Wade’s legal team were limited to using a defense that basically said, “The drugs made him commit these crimes.”

Even though Wade’s defense team and his adoptive mother Candy said Wade was diagnosed with being bipolar when he was a teenager, Miller says there was no evidence of that diagnosis. The documentary doesn’t investigate this discrepancy and doesn’t clear up any confusion by these conflicting statements. During the trial, Wade’s defense team also claimed that Wade was diagnosed with schizophrenia, anti-social personality disorder, depression and brain damage.

The unnamed juror interviewed in the documentary doesn’t have anything interesting to add. He says he didn’t believe the argument that Wade’s mental health issues caused Wade to kill. But that’s an obvious statement because the jury convicted him of first-degree murder, which means the perpetrator was of sound mind and knew the difference between right and wrong when committing the murder. The juror doesn’t reveal how he voted in the penalty phase, which does not require a unanimous jury vote in Florida.

The documentary fares best in its interviews with law enforcement officials who were involved with the case. Other law enforcement officials who are interviewed include Cape Coral Police Department detective Patricia “Trish” Bell, assistant state attorney Andreas Gardiner, assistant state attorney Sara Miller, and former Palm Beach County state attorney David Aronberg. Miller is one of the best people interviewed and doesn’t hold back on what she thinks of Wade and how much she wanted justice served in this case. “He’s a psychopathic killer who likes to harm women.”

On a darkly comedic note, Miller tells a memorable story about how she decided to teach the Wade Wives a harsh lesson by naming several of them in a courtroom statement about the numerous women Wade was lying to while he was in jail. It was the first time many of these Wade Wives (including Williams) found out that Wade was “cheating” on them with other women. This revelation caused a lot of Wade’s fan base to implode.

Wade liked to brag about how he could use his good looks to charm anyone, according to several people in this documentary and according to his own words in archival footage. Ironically, the same shallow reasons that his “fans” seemed to be attracted to him (his physical appearance) are the same reasons why he has lost a lot of fans. Toward the end of the documentary, it’s revealed that Wade has gained a lot of weight because he used a lot of the money gifted to him to buy junk food in prison. He has also gotten into all sorts of trouble while in prison (assaults, drug possession), and his mental health is reportedly on a downward spiral.

The problem with “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” is that so much of this tawdry documentary is presented as a case of “How to Be a Murderer Who Uses the Internet to Con People Around the World,” instead of taking an informative approach of how this type of person becomes such a vicious criminal in the first place and the best ways that people can protect themselves from these types of criminals. The murder victims are presented as collateral damage in the documentary, instead of people who had meaningful lives that were cut short. There is also no discussion of the “nature versus nurture” debate that usually comes up when a person who was adopted as a child becomes a murderer.

Those who survived Wade’s path of destruction and who are interviewed in the documentary are never asked on camera if these experiences have taught them to make better life choices. For example, Montanez and Williams both admit to having a long history of dating “bad boys,” but viewers of this documentary never find out if Montanez and Williams are completely done with dating dangerous criminals, or even if they’ve been in the type of therapy/counseling that they obviously need.

In every episode of this exploitative documentary, there’s an unidentified song where a woman sings, “Something ’bout this isn’t right.” It sounds like a song that you’d hear in a trashy reality show. These lyrics are heard repeatedly, and it could describe the entire tone of this misguided documentary, which doesn’t even bother to identify the song in the end credits. This subpar documentary seems a little too much in awe over how Wade Wilson used his persuasion skills to build a short-lived cult of infatuated and fickle followers, instead of the documentary taking a comprehensive look at the murder victims and the people whose lives have long-term damage because of his heinous actions.

Paramount+ premiered “Handsome Devil: Charming Killer” on January 20, 2026.