WORDS WITH…
Elon Green In Last Call, the journalist reconstructs the murders of a series of gay men in 1990s New York BY TOM BEER
How did you discover this story? |
young readers
Natalie Sparaccio
The story begins in May 1991, when a maintenance worker discovered several suspicious trash bags at a rest stop in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They turned out to contain the disembodied remains of Peter Anderson, the first of several gay victims of a serial killer who prowled the gay bars of Manhattan. It would be nearly 15 years before a Staten Island nurse, Richard Rogers Jr., was tried and convicted of two of the murders. The case, long since forgotten and not widely covered in the mainstream press, is painstakingly re-created in Elon Green’s Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York (Celadon, March 9). Green spoke with us by Zoom from his home in Port Washington, New York; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When I signed with my agent, he was interested in my expanding on a story I’d written about a series of unsolved murders [of gay men] in San Francisco in the mid-’70s called the Doodler murders. I went out there and spent a couple of weeks doing more research and didn’t get anywhere—the material simply was not there [for a full book]. But I couldn’t really shake the different threads of that story—a neglected community on a local and a national level, a community being disproportionately picked off and destroyed, and the way that the media was covering it. I thought I [could] find a similar case and [came across] an old issue of the Advocate from, like, October 1994. The cover story was about anti-gay violence, eight or nine pages, and buried halfway through were three paragraphs about this case. What really caught me were the descriptions [of victims] Peter Anderson, Tom Mulcahy, and Anthony Marrero, and maybe Michael [Sakara] was mentioned—I was really struck by the different stories. And my first thought was, how do I not know this case? I was a gay man living in Manhattan at the time, but I didn’t remember these murders. Just to give you a sense of how poorly remembered [the case] is: I interviewed a lot of people, and a lot of [them] were living in Manhattan at the time, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and gay. I met one person in three years, not connected to the case, who knew about it. And he remembered it because it affected how he conducted his dating life. It made him way more cautious, and that caution stuck with him his entire life. And that was it. The Townhouse Bar was one of a small handful of gay bars where the killer met his victims. Could you describe it? It was founded in 1989, which surprises everybody, including the people who went there, because it’s just so stuck
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nonfiction
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crime supplement
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