I went out there and spent a couple of weeks doing more research and didn’t get anywhere-the material simply was not there. When I signed with my agent, he was interested in my expanding on a story I’d written about a series of unsolved murders in San Francisco in the mid-’70s called the Doodler murders. Green spoke with us by Zoom from his home in Port Washington, New York our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 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). It would be nearly 15 years before a Staten Island nurse, Richard Rogers Jr., was tried and convicted of two of the murders. 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. The story begins in May 1991, when a maintenance worker discovered several suspicious trash bags at a rest stop in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
