Five years ago, acclaimed documentarian Liz Garbus made her narrative film debut at the Sundance Film Festival with Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name about the women whose bodies were found on Long Island and unsolved case of the Long Island serial killer. “The film was about the surviving women — not about the sex work that these young women engaged in that ended up being how they were defined in their death. It was really about the family members and their search and their desire for justice. The living legacy of these girls was the love of their family members,” Garbus told Refinery29 at the time of the film’s release on Netflix in March 2020. With five years’ hindsight and a suspect arrested, Garbus returns to Netflix this March with a docuseries that goes back to the cold, swampy beaches of Long Island.
In both the feature film and the new documentary, Garbus is keen to avoid the traps of sensationalizing the nature of missing women as a point of lurid fascination, unwilling to blame or indulge in any victim-blaming on account of the women’s shared backgrounds in sex work. At the heart of this case is the story of misogyny as well as police indifference, incompetence, and ultimately corruption.
The series focuses on the piecemeal nature of the investigation but also the way in which the investigation was only advocated for by the families of the women whose bodies were found, a grieving sisterhood united in advocacy. Garbus also directed the docuseries adaptation of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, explaining to Vulture at the time that, “the other important thing is not to endow the perpetrator with a point of view. Point of view is everything in filmmaking. When you give it, you’re giving power. It was a conscious choice to remove the power from the criminal’s perspective, which in this kind of story generally fetishizes women.” In turn, Garbus prioritizes the stories of these women — who they were outside this case and how those who loved them fought for them for decades — amid the violence and injustice they suffered.