Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York’ On HBO, A Docuseries That Takes A Look At 1990s Police Indifference In The Face Of Gay Men Getting Murdered

The unwieldly-titled docuseries Last Call: When A Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, directed by Anthony Caronna and produced by Howard Gertler, documents a series of murders in the early 1990s that rocked New York’s LGBTQ community, and the general indifference the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies had towards those murders.

LAST CALL: WHEN A SERIAL KILLER STALKED QUEER NEW YORK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A distant shot of a car with its headlights on, sitting on a very dark road. Someone with a flashlight walks towards it.

The Gist: The series starts off in 1992, when a dismembered body is found along the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. The body was identified as Thomas Mulcahy, a fifty-something businessman from Massachusetts; the director interviews his daughter, Tracey O’Shea, who describes him as a worldly type who traveled a lot, either with his family or for business. He didn’t come back from a business trip to New York.

It turns out that the last place anyone saw Mulcahy was an Upper East Side gay bar named The Townhouse, where older, sophisticated men met each other, or met younger men attracted to their type. For the first time, the NYPD reached out to the LGBTQ community, namely the New York City Anti-Violence Project, to get insight into The Townhouse and other things that they might overlook. Still, it didn’t seem that the case had any urgency to the NYPD, as reps from the AVP talk about during their interviews.

The police did manage to find similarities between the Mulcahy case and one from the year prior, when Peter Anderson’s dismembered body was found in Pennsylvania. The police in that state managed to trace Anderson’s steps to The Townhouse, including interviewing Tony Hoyt, a former (and equally closeted) boyfriend; the two of them hadn’t seen each other in a couple of decades before that fateful night. But then the trail went cold.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Last Call is pretty much a standard true crime docuseries format, along the lines of Mind Over Murder.

Our Take: While the docuseries Last Call: When A Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is ostensibly about what the title suggests, it’s also a treatise on what the LGBTQIA+ community in New York and elsewhere were dealing with at the dawn of the 1990s. And that aspect og the series might be more powerful than the serial killer case itself.

Through extensive archival footage and interviews with people who participated in the AVP in particular and New York’s gay scene in general, we are reminded of just how dangerous it was for people who were just being themselves, usually via violence perpetrated by people who made a practice out of queer-bashing.

But the other side of this equation is how the NYPD, not to mention other law enforcement agencies out of the area, didn’t seem to put their full energy behind trying to find the person who killed both Anderson and Mulcahy. The excuse is the usual cross-jurisdiction woes, because the bodies of these men weren’t found in New York City, even if their last known location was at The Townhouse. But the reality is brought home by the members of AVP and Edgar Rodriguez, a former NYPD sergeant and a member of the Gay Officers Action League, who discussed the rampant and open homophobia in the department, which was so severe that Rodriguez knew it was unsafe for him to come out while he was a cop.

This is illustrated in a really telling scene during the interview with the two Pennsylvania State Police, when the director asks them if he missed anything during the interview and one of them pointedly says, “Why is the emphasis [of the interview] on the gay part?” To them, the fact that Anderson was gay was irrelevant, but it’s important for a lot of reasons that they just can’t wrap their minds around.

As the four-part series continues, and more bodies are found, we’ll see more about the difficulties the community had in New York to have these cases linked and to get law enforcement resources to look into the case.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Nick Theodos, a former New Jersey State Police Detective, talks about getting the call that he dreaded: Another dismembered body was found in the woods.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Tony Hoyt, talking about his loving and warm relationship with Anderson, and being matter-of-fact about the idea that people didn’t come out in the 1960s when they met; they married the opposite sex and had families and that’s just the way it was.

Most Pilot-y Line: The reenactments used by the docuseries are fairly subtle, but they are there; we just wish there wasn’t any at all.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The reason why Last Call: When A Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is watchable is that it’s not just about a bunch of related murders, but about just how uphill of a climb the LGBTQIA+ community had in New York and elsewhere during a time that wasn’t all that long ago.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.