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.
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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. 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