Melissa Cann, the sister of victim Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Photo: Netflix

Liz Garbus never stopped caring about the Gilgo Beach murders. “As soon as the arrest was made, I touched base with the families I’d gotten to know all those years ago,” Garbus says. She’d first met the families of the victims when researching her 2020 film Lost Girls, a fictionalized retelling of Mari Gilbert’s search for her missing daughter, Shannan, that led to the discovery of several victims on Long Island. “I know this story, and there are so many aspects to the story that I think are important in getting it right. I wanted to, you know, be the person with those loved ones as they navigated this new phase of the case.” In the years since Lost Girls’s release, however, there have been a whole new wave of updates: a changing of the guard in the Suffolk County Police Department, a new task force, and an arrest of a suspect, Rex Heuermann. Putting the women — the victims and their predominantly matriarchal families — at the center of her feature was relatively easy, all considered, given that these were the only known aspects of the case at the time that Robert Kolker’s book on the topic was adapted for Garbus’s film.

The new phase of the case rounds out Garbus’s new docuseries Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, out now on Netflix. “The typical ‘true-crime doc’ has a drum beat of investigation. One of the challenges in this story from the start is that the investigation was stalled. It wasn’t happening at all, really,” Garbus says. Over the course of three episodes, Garbus goes back into the Gilgo Beach killings, the police conspiracy that delayed the investigation, and the eventual arrest of Heuermann. While Gone Girls does move chronologically through the years of the case, it’s not motivated by an investigative cadence. “It was challenging, I think, navigating perceived audience expectations of what an investigation should be and the idea of the nothingness and the waiting that sits at the core of this story.”

A title card toward the end of Lost Girls reads: “Ten to 16 victims were ultimately attributed to the ‘Long Island Serial Killer.’ No suspects have been charged in the case.” But rather than close out on the ominous notion that the killer who was, in fact, still out there, Garbus shifts the focus back to Shannan Gilbert’s mother, Mari (played by Amy Ryan in the film), and how her dogged search kept the case in the news before her untimely death. The film ends there in part because that’s where the case left off — dangling, unsolved. The initial investigation in 2010 was stalled out, in part, due to a strain of misogyny that granted the police and Suffolk County government some laxness in their exploration of the case. Despite many of the victims sharing a background in sex work (as well as a general physicality), then–District Attorney Thomas Spota argued against the theory that this was one single perpetrator, booted the FBI out of the investigation, and prolonged inaction for years. Garbus wanted to fight back against the assumption that these were women who had simply fallen off the grid due to their work. “They all had family members who they were in touch with on the regular,” she says, adding that one of the victims, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, was rarely without her friend Sara Karnes outside the night she went missing. These family members are present throughout the series, sharing not only their frustrations with the half-hearted investigation but also memories of the women: siblings, nieces, daughters, friends, and mothers.

Part of keeping the women at the center meant that Garbus didn’t want to give in to any overt fascination with, or potential diagnosis to, the alleged killer. She cited a quote from Michelle McNamara, the late author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, who wrote, “Murderers lose their power the moment we know them. We see their unkempt shirts, the uncertain fear tightening their faces as they’re led into a courtroom. You know their names now and it’s often just Dave.” “At the end of the day, when it comes to serial killers, there’s only so much you’re ever going to be able to understand,” Garbus adds. That mystery behind how Rex Heuermann allegedly pulled off these violent and premeditated crimes was less interesting than the lives of these women.

Garbus returns to the women and everything they left behind, refusing to let Gone Girls drift too far into a territory that is lurid or manipulative. Garbus has always prioritized giving a voice to those who are silenced, as she did in Who Killed Garrett Phillips?, a documentary about an unsolved murder in upstate New York. Still, the series barely scratched the surface of each of these women’s lives. “Each of the women who was lost in this case had a complex life and story. There was so much more to know about them than we’re able to include,” she says. At the end of the series, the families sit together once again, as they have for years, missing Mari Gilbert and Megan Waterman’s mother, Lorraine Ela, who both passed over the course of their fight for justice. “We all grieved differently,” says victim Melissa Barthelemy’s sister Amanda as she sits with the other family members. They all nod — it’s true — but that hasn’t stopped them from keeping each other company all this time.

“When Amy Ryan was preparing for the part [of Mari Gilbert], there was this great podcast series called Mothers of the Movement, and it was about mothers who had lost their children to gun violence and the solidarity that they had formed. When you see that, and you can see that here in this case, too, there’s something really remarkable about the power that can give people,” Garbus says. There would be no Gilgo Beach case without the families bonding together and forging ahead — for answers, justice, and closure.