Is The Hunting Party's "Dr. Darkness," Ezekiel Malak, Based on a Real Killer?

The only thing more chilling than killing an unsuspecting victim is killing them over and over again.

The Hunting Party’s elite squad, led by FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) matched wits with one of its most sophisticated and sadistic killers yet in its fourth episode as they chased down Dr. Ezekiel Malak, a man with an unhealthy obsession with death.

Coined "Dr. Darkness" by the media in The Hunting Party, Malak, once a hospital psychiatrist, was responsible for killing at least 24 people by injecting them with a deadly dose of digoxin. 

“Malak was motivated by power and control, so in a very real sense, he decided which patients lived and which died,” Bex explained to her team.

Although the world believed Malak was executed for his heinous crimes, he was secretly revived so that he could be studied in a covert government prison, the Pit. When an explosion freed Malak and other notorious killers, the squad responsible for tracking him down learned he’d made a chilling evolution in his killing methods.

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Now motivated by his own resurrection, Malak mercilessly killed and then revived his victims over and over again as part of his own twisted psychological experiment.

The fictional Malak proved to be a formidable foe — even kidnapping Bex in one final, harrowing encounter — but was his character inspired by any real-life counterparts? 

Although Malak is not based on any one real-life killer, he does share some traits with actual headline-making murderers.

To learn more about some of these real-life cases, read on below: 

Christopher Duntsch aka Dr. Death

Malak may have been known as "Dr. Darkness," but this convicted killer went by another ominous nickname: Dr. Death.

Spinal surgeon Dr. Christopher Duntsch earned the terrifying moniker after prosecutors said he injured 33 of his 38 patients in less than two years. Duntsch, whose alleged negligence also led to the death of two of those patients, became the first doctor ever convicted of aggravated assault for care provided in the operating room, according to Oxygen.com.

After getting his medical degree from the University of Tennessee, an overly confident Duntsch — who was the subject of Peacock’s docuseries Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story and the dramatized limited series Dr. Death — settled in Texas, often boasting to colleagues that he was the best minimally-invasive surgeon in Dallas. But after he botched one surgery after another, including an operation on his best friend Jerry Summers that left him a quadriplegic, other doctors began to question his skills. 

According to a report in ProPublica, there were also rumors that Duntsch was using drugs and had spent much of his time in medical school focusing on research rather than honing his skills in the operating room. Duntsch finally put down his scalpel after he was arrested for the aggravated assault of Mary Efurd, an elderly patient who woke up screaming in pain, according to a profile in D Magazine. Duntsch severed her nerve root and left spinal fusion hardware lodged in her muscle, leaving her in agonizing chronic pain. He was convicted in 2017 and is now serving life behind bars.

Dr. Harold Shipman

While Malak was linked to the murder of dozens of innocent patients in The Hunting Party, British General Practitioner Dr. Harold Shipman’s death toll reached into the hundreds. For more than two decades, starting in the mid-1970s, Shipman quietly killed his victims by injecting them with “massive doses of diamorphine,” according to the British Medical Journal.

A formal public inquiry into the shocking case would conclude that Shipman murdered at least 215 people during his deadly career, per BMJ. Chillingly, Shipman had been beloved by his patients, with one declaring she felt like she was “winning the lottery” to have him as a physician, according to The Lancet. The cunning doctor often targeted elderly women — and in at least one instance had written himself into the will. 

He was convicted in 2000 of 15 counts of murder and received 15 life sentences.

Dr. Joseph Michael Swango

As a high school valedictorian, Joseph Michael Swango seemed destined for success. But the convicted serial killer would use his intellect to poison colleagues and patients, first as a medical student and paramedic and then as a physician, according to Columbus Monthly.

Much like Malak, prosecutors would later conclude after reading Swango’s journals that he killed because he loved to watch others die and relished having the power to control the fate of others, The New York Times reported in 2000.

“Basically, Dr. Swango liked to kill people. By his own admission in his diary, he killed because it thrilled him,” then-Assistant United States Attorney Gary R. Brown told the media at the time.

It’s estimated he may have killed as many as 60 people during his reign of terror at multiple hospitals. After federal authorities obtained a warrant for his arrest in 1994, Swango fled to Zimbabwe and then Saudi Arabia, where it’s believed he continued his killing spree, according to Columbus Monthly. He was arrested after returning to the U.S. in 1997. Swango was convicted of federal fraud charges and later convicted in the deaths of three patients. He was sentenced to life without parole.

Ted Bundy

Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy may not have had a medical degree, but he did share one thing in common with the fictional Malak: Both men enjoyed reviving their victims, only to kill them again.

A 1992 multi-agency report by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Bundy repeatedly choked his victims in and out of consciousness, according to People. 

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“Although Bundy had sex with most of his victims, it is doubtful that he committed only rapes,” the report said. “He was more interested sexually in semiconscious or unconscious victims.”

Before his 1989 execution, Bundy — who often targeted young or college-age women — confessed to 30 murders, but it’s believed he may be responsible for even more deaths, per Oxygen.com.

To find out what other dangerous killers are still on the loose in The Hunting Party, watch Mondays at 10/9c on NBC or stream next-day on Peacock.