Somebody was “picking up,” killing and dismembering gay men and dumping their body parts across rural New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the early 1990s.

And because the victims were gay and the little evidence at hand said they were “pick-up crimes,” commited after these men met their killer in a gay bar, it wasn’t hard to get the sense that the various police jurisdictions involved just didn’t give a damn.

“Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York” is a quietly-compelling four-part documentary based on the true crime book by Elon Green, a film almost guaranteed to draw you in and just as certain to make you grind your teeth in fury at the missed opportunities, missed-clues and misapplication of justice by judges and juries when it came to punishing crimes against gay men.

Director and series co-creator Antony Caronna interviews lots of policemen who took on the various corners of this case, and a judge and a prosecutor. But he focuses most closely on the surviving family and friends of victims Thomas Mulcahy, Michael Sakara, Frederic Spencer, Anthony Marrero and Peter Stickney Anderson in painting a portrait of a slow-shifting American culture, a slow-footed justice system and the even slower-to-evolve attitudes of police about policing gay bashing.

When Caronna asks, off camera, “if there’s anything I didn’t ask” that should be brought up of two aged Pennsylvania State policemen, their defensive response, decades later, is that “the gay thing wasn’t really relevant to the investigation.” Thus, we “get it” even if they don’t.

With gay bashing on the rise and right wing governors and legislatures passing pro-discrimination and anti LGTBQ legislation folded into their inflamtory, violent rhetoric, we get the sense of what one activist describes as “being hunted” by hostile bigots, some of them moved by the violence of the rhetoric of that day, wasn’t just a fact of life 30, 40 and 50 years ago.

Homophobia feeds a “You deserved it” mindset about assaults and killings that hasn’t been buried to this day, and increasingly “militarized” police can be “indifferent” or downtright “hostile” to investigating crimes against gay and trans people, “Last Call” asserts.

Early episodes of the series give us details of this “closeted” father, that “dapper” banker and the other victims. Lives are fleshed-out beyond simple newspaper coverage. The mourning, for some relatives and friends, goes on.

Police investigators who agreed to appear on camera (and in phone interviews) second-guess themselves on what they missed here, what they NYPD and other jurisdiction compatriots screwed-up there.

And activists who once worked on the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and hosts of Gay News cable programs offer stats, maps and their take on the atmosphere of the day and the slow-to-change attitudes that alarmed them when the cases were active, and infuriate them still as America’s far right tries to turn the slightly-less-bad-days back to the awful old days of being gay in America.

We learn that the “gay and trans panic defense” can still be trotted out by gay bahsers/killers in more backward corners of the country.

The series’ somewhat excessive (repetition, etc.) length means we’re allowed to ponder the 50 years of history that play out in the milieus of the story’s various chapters, from “just after Stonewall” to AIDS era gay phobia and gay bashing to today.

Pop culture fans might note that this crime spree resembles William Friedkin’s then-scandalous thriller “Cruising,” which came out in 1980, over ten years before New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey police first realized they had multiple victims chopped up, plastic-bagged and left in dumpsters in multiple states.

But in that fictional and somewhat sensationalized film a dedicated cop goes deep undercover and comes to doggedly pursue the case until he gets his man. The so-called “Last Call” killer never inspired that level of dedication, and as activists complained, then and now, when there’s “no sign of the NYPD taking it seriously,” how can anyone feel safe?

Rating: TV-MA, violence.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Caronna, created by Caronna and Howard Gertler, based on a book by Elon Green. An HBO release.

Running time: Four episodes @:53-:60 minutes each