Rogers was tried but not convicted of murdering a male roommate in 1973, and it is likely that his killing rampage exceeded the number of victims found by chance on roadsides in the early ’90s. In the chapter devoted to his life, he is described in all the ways a person never wants to be remembered unless he is an opportunistic murderer: normal, average, gangly, introverted, unassertive, round-shouldered and sunken-chested, someone who walked without swinging his arms. In 2000, thanks to advances in forensic science, the trash bags were reanalyzed for fingerprints, which led back to Richard Rogers Jr., a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital who lived on Staten Island. Ultimately, that strength is also the book’s weakness. We are never allowed a moment of perverse awe for the murderer. He provides an adrenalized police-procedural plot without ever losing sight of the fact that these were innocent human beings who were duped, butchered and discarded.
As a result, Green proves a conscientious crime writer. He also fills the narrative void by telling the stories of bar patrons and employees, including those of the cultishly popular piano players who serenaded the victims and their murderer. With great compassion, he widens his scope to explore the social value of gay bars to the queer community and the vital work of grass-roots groups like the New York City Anti-Violence Project, which fought for fair treatment for gay crime victims during a period when they were often treated like career criminals. Green seems to anticipate this journalistic conundrum. Gay men pressured to hide their sexuality at the height of the AIDS epidemic are particularly susceptible to all-consuming tragic narratives. One of the perils of writing about marginalized murder victims is that their lives can be framed as one long sorrowful arc of victimization - in a sense fated to be found dead in a trash bag on the side of the road.
Closeted gay people do, of course, lead rich, satisfying existences, even if they leave fewer traces. To be visibly whole.” I would have put the emphasis on visibly rather than on whole. Here was a generation of men, more or less, for whom it was difficult to be visibly gay. In the book’s epilogue, he explains that he was motivated by the lives that these men “ wanted but couldn’t have. This proves a thorny task when dealing with men who led pointedly secret lives. Instead of focusing on the killer, Green opts to humanize his victims.
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The most prolific serial killers exploit the vulnerabilities of the social order the “Last Call Killer” took advantage of gay men’s need for discretion and the endemic homophobia of law enforcement. Two more men would be added to the body count in 1993: a struggling prostitute known to operate out of the Port Authority and the “hustler buffet” in the East 50s and a mild-mannered patron of a West Village piano bar. So begins Elon Green’s terrific, harrowing, true-crime account of an elusive serial killer who preyed upon gay men in the 1990s, perfidiously turning the safe havens of gay bars into hunting grounds, and semi-anonymous late-night hookups into an opportunity to kill with impunity.
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Both victims - older, white-collar professional men, with the heterosexual vestments of marriages and children - had last been seen at an upscale Midtown Manhattan gay piano bar called the Townhouse. In a notable concession to the overriding paranoia of the era, the maintenance worker was advised to take an AIDS test, even though he hadn’t come in direct contact with blood.Ī little over a year later, a second dismembered body was discovered wrapped in bags off a remote New Jersey highway. On a Sunday afternoon in May 1991, a maintenance worker emptying garbage barrels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike made a grisly discovery: Wrapped inside eight knotted trash bags was the mutilated body of a 54-year-old man, killed by stab wounds to the abdomen, his severed penis shoved in his mouth.
LAST CALL A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York By Elon Green