The Last Call Killer — Richard Rogers and the Piano Bar Murders

The Case

The Last Call Killer case is one of the most disturbing American serial murder investigations of the 1990s, centered on Richard Westall Rogers Jr., a surgical nurse who targeted gay and bisexual men he met in Manhattan piano bars. Between 1991 and 1993, at least four men were killed, dismembered, and discarded in garbage bags along highways and at rest stops in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The case went unsolved for nearly a decade before a cold-case fingerprint match) identified Rogers and led to his arrest and conviction.

The Crime

The killer's pattern was chillingly consistent. According to investigators and later documentary coverage, Rogers would meet his victims in well-known Manhattan piano bars frequented by gay men — venues that gave the case its eventual name, drawn from the idea of the "last call" of the night. Once a victim left with him, he would take them to an unknown location where they were killed and then surgically dismembered.

Reporting on the case describes the bodies being disarticulated into roughly eight pieces and placed in eight garbage bags, which were then driven out of the city and dumped in roadside trash barrels, along turnpikes or at rest stops. The precision of the dismemberment suggested familiarity with anatomy, consistent with Rogers's background as a surgical nurse.

The Victims

Four men are most often tied to the Last Call Killer pattern. Peter Stickney Anderson was found on May 5, 1991, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, his remains left along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Thomas Richard Mulcahy, a 44-year-old businessman and family man visiting New York from out of state, was discovered on July 10, 1992 in Woodland Township, New Jersey, along Route 72. Anthony Marrero, also 44, was the second victim Rogers was convicted of murdering. Michael Sakara (sometimes spelled Sakaro), a regular at one of the piano bars, was the fourth man linked to the same pattern.

The victims were ordinary men — workers, regulars at neighborhood bars, husbands and partners — whose deaths drew far less public attention than they should have, in part because of the era's stigma around the gay community and the AIDS crisis.

Investigation

For years the murders sat largely unresolved. Detectives in multiple states recognized similarities — the dismemberment, the garbage bags, the highway disposal sites — but no single agency owned the case. Eventually a multi-state task force from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania began tracking the killer together.

The decisive breakthrough came from forensic evidence on the green plastic garbage bags themselves. Improvements in fingerprint recovery techniques allowed cold-case investigators to lift usable prints from the bags. On May 14, 2001, authorities announced that those prints matched Richard Rogers, who at the time was living in New Jersey and still working as a nurse. Investigators also noted Rogers's earlier history: he had previously been acquitted in Maine in connection with a separate killing, a fact that took on new weight once his name resurfaced.

Trial and Verdict

Rogers was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in New Jersey for the deaths of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero. Prosecutors built their case around the fingerprint evidence from the garbage bags, the consistent modus operandi, and the connection between Rogers and the Manhattan piano-bar scene. In 2006, a New Jersey jury convicted him of both murders, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was not tried for the deaths of Peter Anderson or Michael Sakara, although investigators and journalists have long considered him the prime suspect in those cases as well.

Today

The Last Call Killer case has been re-examined in recent years as part of a broader reckoning with how law enforcement and the media treated crimes against gay men in the 1980s and 1990s. Journalist Elon Green's acclaimed book "Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York" brought renewed attention to the victims as individuals and to the communities that were left to mourn them. The book has since been adapted and discussed in television documentary coverage and multiple podcasts. Rogers remains incarcerated, and the case is frequently cited as an example of how cold-case forensic work — particularly advances in fingerprint analysis — can close investigations that once seemed unsolvable.