Gone Girls, the highly anticipated Netflix docuseries on the Gilgo Beach serial killer case, debuts on March 31 amid a pivotal moment in the case — and it’s not the first time for the director.
Netflix’ long-planned release date for the first of the three-part series happens to fall shortly after the first day of a lengthy hearing in suspect Rex Heuermann’s case to determine if advanced DNA evidence can be used in his trial. Even more coincidentally, filmmaker Liz Garbus made her feature narrative debut in 2020 with Lost Girls, a film based on author Robert Kolker’s true crime book about the case — the trailer for which was released on the same day that Suffolk County police announced the first new details in the case in years at the time, before an arrest was made.
“I can’t say this with 100% surety, but I do think that they knew the trailer was coming that day,” Garbus, a Brooklyn-based, two-time Oscar-nominated documentarian, had told the Press in 2020 when asked about the curious timing of the presser and trailer for Lost Girls. “And they called the press conference the night before.”
Police wouldn’t comment on the timing. Garbus could not be reached for comment on the second coincidence in her second Gilgo film, which is one of several documentaries on the case in the works. But she explained her vision in published reports.
“In the course of the documentary, we got to examine what was going on in the police department and uncover a corruption scandal that made it clear why so little was being done for these women,” she told Tudum, the Netflix fan site.
The docuseries explores that theme in an interview with a former Press editor who covered one of the victims’ disappearances before the bodies were found in December 2010.
Jaclyn Gallucci, a former managing editor for the Press who is now an assistant managing editor for The New York Times, covered the missing person case of Megan Waterman and how her family felt police and the media downplayed her case because she was a sex worker. The story published five months after the victim went missing and two months before she was found dead was titled “Lost Girls: When Women Go Missing on Long Island, Some Matter. Prostitutes Don’t. Where is Megan Waterman and Why Does No One Seem to Care?”
Gallucci alludes to her coverage in the trailer for Gone Girls in which she was quoted as saying: “There’s very little coverage when a sex worker falls off the grid.”
Pondering the growing magnitude of the case in which Heuermann pleaded not guilty to seven murders — up from the three he was originally charged with — Gallucci closes the trailer with the burning question: “How many more victims could there be?”
Related Story: Gilgo Beach Serial Killer Suspect Rex Heuermann an ‘Ogre’ Who Defies Supervillain Myth
Related Story: Heuermann Charged With Murders of Jessica Taylor and Sandra Costilla, Alleging New MO
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