‘Last Call,’ a new HBO docuseries, recounts the 1990s serial killings of gay men from Philadelphia. Here’s how we covered them.

In May 1991, Center City socialite Peter Stickney Anderson went to Manhattan to attend a fundraising party for a Philadelphia City Council candidate. It was the last time he was seen alive.

Two days later, his dismembered body was found in a trash barrel along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County. But police wouldn’t publicly identify a suspect in his murder for a decade.

Today, Anderson is believed to be the first victim of Richard W. Rogers Jr., commonly known as the “Last Call Killer,” over the serial killings of gay and bisexual men in the early 1990s. He is suspected in at least four killings, and was convicted of two murders in 2005.

The killings are the subject of Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, an HBO docuseries that began airing last weekend. Based on author Elon Green’s 2021 nonfiction book Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, the series covers the three-year period in the 1990s in which four gay men disappeared from Manhattan gay bars, with their dismembered bodies later discovered near highways in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.

A four-part series, Last Call chronicles the search for the killer through interviews with investigators, victims’ partners, and LGBTQ activists who called for a stronger police response to the increase in hate crimes against the gay community. The series airs Sundays at 9 p.m.

Rogers would not be caught until 2001. He is serving two consecutive life sentences at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.

Here is how The Inquirer and Daily News covered the Last Call Killer:

Anderson was the first victim publicly linked to Rogers. The 54-year-old banker had traveled to Manhattan in May 1991 for a fundraiser for longtime friend and City Council candidate Tony Brooks. The event was held at the home of Robert Browne, a Manhattan real estate agent and gay rights activist, according to a 1991 Inquirer report. Anderson at the time was the chairman of the Brooks ‘91 Committee, The Inquirer reported.

Anderson later went to the Townhouse, a gay bar on the East Side, and wasn’t seen alive again.

His dismembered body was found in a 55-gallon trash barrel near the Lancaster exit on the westbound Pennsylvania Turnpike on May 5, 1991. He had been stabbed to death, and was “sexually mutilated,” The Inquirer reported.

Police used dental records from the National Guard, where Anderson was a staff sergeant, to identify him, according to an Inquirer report. He was believed to be heading to Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville, Lebanon County, for a drill before his death.

Anderson was unemployed, and living on a “comfortable inheritance” at the Wanamaker House in Rittenhouse Square after having separated from his second wife, with whom he had one child, The Inquirer reported. Friends described him as a “lost soul,” reeling from his unemployment and in a “depressed state.”

The Gay and Lesbian Community Center later announced a $1,000 reward for help in solving the case. But police would report no leads or suspects for years, and wouldn’t publicly tie the killing to the killer that would turn out to be Rogers until 1993, according to an Inquirer report.

About a year after Anderson was killed, more victims started being discovered under similar circumstances.

In July 1992, police announced the identity of a dismembered body found in seven plastic garbage bags in two locations in New Jersey. Parts of Thomas R. Mulcahy, 57, a father of four from Massachusetts, had been found at the Bustler Place rest area along Route 72 in Woodland Township, Burlington County, and at the Stafford Forge Picnic Area along the Garden State Parkway in Stafford Township, Ocean County, The Inquirer reported in 1992.

Police initially identified Mulcahy through a wallet found with his body parts, and later confirmed his ID through dental records, The Inquirer reported.

Mulcahy had last been seen alive in Manhattan, where he made a sales presentation at the World Trade Center, a few days before his murder. He, too, was last seen alive at the Townhouse.

When he didn’t arrive home, his wife, Margaret, went to her local police department to file a missing person report. But, The Inquirer reported, moments before her arrival, the station had received a call from the New Jersey State Police about the discovery of his body, and the department informed Margaret that Mulcahy was dead.

Mulcahy’s family later issued a statement calling him a “devoted father and husband.” Following Rogers’ sentencing 14 years later, his children described him as a “loving father who grappled with alcoholism and his bisexuality,” The Inquirer reported.

Murders tied to Rogers continued in 1993 with Anthony E. Marrero, 44, who lived in New York after leaving the Philadelphia area, according to an Inquirer report. Described in Inquirer reporting as a gay sex worker, Marrero was last seen at the New York Port Authority bus terminal in early May.

His dismembered remains were found days later in six plastic bags on Crow Hill Road in Manchester Township, Ocean County. He had died of multiple stab wounds, and like Mulcahy, his body had been cut into pieces.

Another victim found under similar circumstances emerged two months later with the discovery of the body of Michael J. Sakara, 56. A typesetter from Philadelphia living in New York, Sakara was an openly gay man who was last seen alive at the Five Oaks bar in Greenwich Village on July 30, 1993.

The following day, a man found luggage with Sakara’s belongings at an overlook on New York’s Haverstraw Bay, and took the items to police. Hours later, The Inquirer reported, a hot dog vendor found Sakara’s head and arms in garbage bags dumped in a trash barrel nearby. And nine days after that, his other remains were found about 10 miles away in Stony Point, N.Y.

Sakara, like Anderson, Mulcahy, and Marrero, had been cut into pieces. But unlike the other victims, he had been bludgeoned to death in addition to being stabbed, police reported.

Police continued investigating the murders throughout the 1990s, including forming a cross-state task force in 1993, and asking for assistance from the FBI. But they made little headway.

Then, in May 2001, the NYPD arrested Richard W. Rogers Jr., then 50, in Staten Island. Rogers, who is also gay, had been a registered nurse at Mount Sinai Medical Center for more than two decades.

Authorities had enough evidence to charge him with the murders of Mulcahy and Marrero, the two killings for which he was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. He was charged in New Jersey, because state law allows authorities to file criminal homicide charges in the county where a body is discovered.

After Rogers was arrested, authorities matched fingerprints taken from trash bags that contained body parts to him. That was made possible by authorities in Maine, who had gone online with their Automated Fingerprint Identification System that month.

Maine had Rogers’ fingerprints, it turns out, due to a 1973 incident in which he was charged with killing a man with a hammer. A grad student at the University of Maine at the time, Rogers was accused of killing Frederic A. Spencer, who lived in the same apartment building. He was accused of dumping Spencer’s body along a nearby road wrapped in a nylon tent, the Daily News reported in 2001.

Rogers was acquitted, claiming he had killed Spencer in self-defense, The Inquirer reported in 2001.

Rogers remained a suspect in the murders of Anderson and Sakara, but was never officially charged in those cases.

Rogers was indicted on first-degree murder and hindering apprehension charges in Mulcahy and Marrero’s murders in 2003. Prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty, and instead pursued life imprisonment.

The trial began in October 2005. Nearly three weeks later, he was convicted on all charges.

“We’re just pleased,” Mulcahy’s widow, Margaret, told the Associated Press at the time. “We feel justice has been done.”

He was sentenced in January 2006, with Court Judge James Citta giving him the maximum penalties. He was, Citta said, “an evil human being.”

“My father died senselessly, at the hands of a monster, and I can only hope that it never happens to anyone else,” said Mulcahy’s daughter, Susan, then 40.