‘Last Call’ Is About a Murderer—and, More Importantly, His Gay Victims

“Oftentimes, in true crime, we let the police and the perpetrators run the show,” Caronna says. “It was important to Howard and me to let queer people tell this story,” especially since systemic homophobia and the antipathy between the LGBTQ+ community and the police apparently helped Rogers commit his crimes without fear of consequence.

That said, police officers and case investigators also appear prominently in Last Call, though the series pulls few punches when it comes to depicting what Gertler delicately refers to as “awareness gaps in the cultural competency of law enforcement.”

One such moment comes later in the series, when an investigating officer verbally stumbles and falls silent when describing what a collection of Golden Girls video tapes might say about its owner. “I feel like every time we sat down with an investigator, I didn’t have the intent to make them look bad, or have a gotcha moment,” Caronna says. “But I am looking to just understand, even just for myself, where the cultural blind spots lie in this investigation.”

Using a vast amount of archival footage—including 1950s-era stranger-danger films from local police departments, 1990s talk show interviews with anti-gay figures, and political speeches from the times—Last Call illustrates how homophobia wasn’t only responsible for the investigation’s failings. According to Caronna, Rogers himself was motivated by anti-gay sentiments, even though it’s widely believed that Rogers was gay.

“There’s no question that this was that this is absolutely anti-gay violence,” Caronna says. “Richard grew up hearing all of those things that the gay basher in episode one heard, that Anita Bryant heard, that we’ve all heard growing up in America.”

It’s a tricky thing, in 2023, to tell a story about a reportedly gay serial killer without inadvertently validating the increasingly homophobic far right. That challenge isn’t lost on Caronna, who says the portion of the series that discusses Rogers’s sexual orientation “went through probably more iterations and any other section in the show,” as they knew how it might be received by those looking for even more reasons to marginalize the LGBTQ+ community. “I knew this was a very difficult story to tell, which is why I was afraid to tell it in the first place,” he says.

Those fears went away, Caronna says, as he started researching the case, and visualizing how a series might look. “Yeah, it is messy. But still, I think it’s way more important to tell this story than to be afraid that we’re gonna ruffle some feathers.”