”Ten minutes short of three o’clock on a moderately warm Sunday afternoon, a turnpike maintenance worker was emptying the green barrels at a rest area”Ten minutes short of three o’clock on a moderately warm Sunday afternoon, a turnpike maintenance worker was emptying the green barrels at a rest area in Lancaster County on the westbound side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was looking for aluminum cans to sort, when he pulled hard on a plastic trash bag that he simply couldn’t lift. A strong five foot six, he’d never had a problem emptying the barrels in the six years on the job. What’s in this bag that I can’t lift?
Annoyed, he rooted around for a stick, and opened the bag. ‘But every time I opened one bag there was another bag,’ he recalled years later.
Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag.
He assumed it was a deer carcass. Now he realized it was, in all likelihood, something more sinister.
When he finally got the last bag opened--eight in total--he couldn’t make out what it was.
‘It looked like a loaf of bread,’ he says. ‘But then I saw freckles.’”
It all begins with a John Doe.
But the story doesn’t begin with a dead body. This John Doe had a life before he was found brutally murdered. He had family and friends who cared about him. He had a successful career. We can hope that the discovery of his dismembered body in a turnpike trash can isn’t the end of his story. There are questions that need answers. His narrative must continue, and the only people who can insure that it continues are the detectives investigating his murder. They must write the end of his story.
They must find his killer.
This murder is just a random act of brutal violence until they find another dismembered body and then another. The killer doesn’t disarticulate the bodies, but saws them apart through the bones. He double bags and double knots to make sure the bags don’t leak fluid. The bodies are of small men, middle aged men, and as they begin to ID these men, they start to realize a pattern.
They are all gay men. They are in the closet. They are all successful men, except one.
It is the 1990s, and violence against gay men is at an all time high. The AIDS epidemic has made a bad situation worse. Roving bands of “heterosexual” men feel justified in beating the crap out of random men in New York they perceive to be gay. They are, in their small minds, cleansing the earth of a pestilence, and at the same time, they get to take out their failures and frustrations on a demographic that society has deemed contemptible.
I moved to San Francisco in the late nineties to pursue an opportunity to work for a prestigious bookstore. I can still remember when a staff member showed up to work with cuts, contusions, and a limp. He and a friend had been jumped and beaten coming home from a bar late at night. These attackers weren’t interested in robbing them. They were only interested in hurting them. It was hard for my friend to fathom the source of the rage that inspired these men to beat them so viciously. The older gay staff members all felt lucky to be alive as they had buried so many of their friends who had died horrible, lingering deaths from AIDS. After growing up in Kansas and going to college in Arizona, I was now getting a full education on what it meant to be gay in America.
They feel cursed because they are vilified, and God, if there is one, has turned his face away from them. They are seen as a weakness, a perversion in society by those who don’t understand how intelligent they are, how creative they are, and how caring they are. Still, I believed we were steadily moving forward to a more tolerant civilisation until 2016.
The problem back in the 1990s was to get the police to see that these crimes are not the murders of deviants and criminals, but the murders of people not that dissimilar from themselves. One police chief rails at his staff to leave their prejudices at home. Now, if these murdered men had been pretty women instead, then every effort would have been made to apprehend and stop the killer. The press would have demanded nothing less.
The author, Elon Green, is careful not to paint all the police with the same brush, but the police are a reflection of our society, and when we are racist, homophobic, and sexist, they feel very comfortable being so as well.
This killer picks his victims from patrons of gay bars and deems himself, appropriately, The Last Call Killer. Unlike other serial killers who have a wikipedia page with an in-depth listing of their notorious deeds, no such page exists for The Last Call Killer. It is as if there is a collective decision by those in the know to make sure these murders remain hidden from the public eye. Elon Green has rescued this disconcerting history from the dusty archives. It is a tale some believe best forgotten. This book is the story of the victims, the role of society in their deaths, and of the perpetrator who preyed on these vulnerable men. The victims were men who had the audacity to seek, at least for a few hours, the safe haven of a gay bar with heavy pours, a show tunes piano player, and the atmosphere of normalcy towards the aspect of their character that the rest of society deemed perverse.
Green will weave you through the events of a decades long hunt for the killer. You will feel anger, bafflement, frustration, but in the end you will see the killer caught. It will feel like a muted justice though because, like me, most of you will think to yourself, why don’t I know about this? Why were these events kept out of the glare of the public eye for so long? Why was this narrative left for Elon Green to tell in 2021?
This story is much bigger than just a series of murders. It is about queer New York in the 1990s and the resilency of a community under the threat of AIDS, under the threat of being beaten or murdered, and their ability to adapt to societies demands that they remain closeted. Don’t forget this was the era when Don’t ask Don’t tell began. Ignoring this story for so long was keeping the spotlight off of our collective prejudices. Thanks to Elon Green this dark time has been recast against the backdrop of the current issues with sexual orientation that continue to plague our society. The past and the present collide, but it doesn’t mean that we have to let the same issues cloud our future. Maybe we can achieve collective acceptance.
I would like to thank Lauren Dooley of Celadon Books for offering me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
”Philip extended his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.’
‘Everybody thinks about the death of their s”Philip extended his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.’
‘Everybody thinks about the death of their spouse; everybody fantasizes a nice clean escape from the trap. There’s a tricky thing about marriage, though. Once you’re in it, you never really get out.’
‘But the things I wish for come true,’ Philip said.”
Philip and Amanda Oliver are a power couple, glamorous, beautiful, rich, and suave. They are the type of people that everyone invites to their dinner parties and people wiggle up to the dynamic couple in the hopes that some of that special sparkle will rub off on them. There is this special synergy created when two extravagantly attractive people pair up. They become larger than their component parts, and once one drifts from the other, neither ever regains that mystical, awe-inspiring glow. A blurb on the back of the book says, ”The Great Gatsby meets Raymond Chandler.” Well, this isn’t Gatsby; this is actually Tender Is the Night. Philip and Amanda are Nick and Nicole Diver, and the Rosemary Hoyt of this story is a bodacious, Italian artist named Claudia Silva.
Philip and Jackson Wyeth, art dealer, are really good friends, and when Philip sees Claudia’s picture in a magazine, he calls up Jackson for some intel on her.
’’’What’s the scoop--is her art as good as her ass?’
‘You won’t know what to grab first.’”
We never know what conversations will prove to be important.
If we want to tie in The Great Gatsby, Jackson Wyeth is the character that has the role of Nick Carraway. It seems like Jackson is a part of the inner circle, but he is always the third wheel, and at the end of the evening, the glamour pair always leave him on the other side of the bedroom door.
It is shocking when Philip leaves Amanda for Claudia. All their friends are shocked. This isn’t supposed to happen. They were the ideal, and if the ideal can’t make it work, how are the rest of us supposed to make it work? To further complicate things Philip is suffering from a syndrome that is slowly eroding his brilliant mind. Was his disease fueling his lack of Claudia inhibitions, or is this just old-fashioned lust? Maybe it is a midlife crisis, and he wants to roll the cosmic dice to feel young once again?
Amanda doesn’t stay home to cry and brood. She takes up with a young, handsome artist named Paul Morse.
Infidelity is as common in the art community as a tube of titanium white. Even Jackson, when he was married, was a serial adulterer, and so was his French wife. Stepping out on a marriage is one thing, but actually leaving the wife for the mistress in the 1990s was still a bit shocking. Philip is too rich to care. Philip’s ex-wife Angela, before Amanda, sort of sums up their sins succinctly: ”We’ve all screwed ourselves and each other. We deserve whatever we get.”
So Amanda is shot through the back of the head in their deluxe apartment in the sky, and Philip’s compromised brain isn’t sure whether he murdered her or not, but the still working, analytical part of his brain thinks he must have. Jackson and his cop friend Ed Hogan team up to try and determine who had the motive to kill her besides her husband, Philip.
In the course of their investigation, Jackson discovers that there is a pedaphile ring circling around Melissa, the beautiful, precocious twelve year old daughter of Philip and Angela. He sets up a sting to take them down. I kept thinking, as Jackson becomes immersed in the underworld of child pornography, that he is doing something I just couldn’t do. It takes real courage to expose yourself to such filth, but the question becomes, as Melissa toys with him, has he triggered something in himself that he didn’t even know he desired?
If F. Scott Fitzgerald had decided to write a hardboiled crime novel, he might very well have written a plot very similar to the one written by Richard Vine. ”There’s a fine art to murder” after all. Vine is the managing editor of the magazine Art in America, and his background in art adds clever nuances that give the book an extra edge of authenticity.
The lies are as tangled as Sparky Griswald’s Christmas lights, and as the truth begins to untangle some of those lies, new lies crop up until even the truth is too untrustworthy to believe. The truth sometimes is just the version of the truth we choose to believe.
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