Elon Green - Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York

May 5, 1991

Ten minutes short of three oclock on a moderately warm Sunday afternoon, a turnpike maintenance worker was emptying the green barrels at a rest area in Lancaster County on the westbound side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was looking for aluminum cans to sort, when he pulled hard on a plastic trash bag that he simply couldnt lift. A strong five foot six, hed never had a problem emptying the barrels in his six years on the job. Whats in this bag that I cant lift?

Annoyed, he rooted around for a stick, and opened the bag. But every time I opened one bag there was another bag, he recalled years later.

Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag. Another poke, another bag.

He assumed it was a deer carcass. Now he realized it was, in all likelihood, something more sinister.

When he finally got the last bag openedeight in totalhe couldnt make out what it was.

It looked like a loaf of bread, he says. But then I saw freckles.

Grabbing a radio, he called his supervisors, who notified the Pennsylvania State Police.

The maintenance worker had been an emergency medical technician years before, so he was unfazed by the remains. Later on, though, after he transported the body to the morgue in Lancasteran unorthodox turn of events, as no one else on scene drove a truckhe shivered with unease when it was suggested he take an AIDS test. He hadnt come into contact with blood.

It was a time of heightened, often irrational caution; only a few years earlier, William Masters and Virginia Johnson warned that AIDS could be transmitted via a toilet seat. Eleven hundred and fifty six Pennsylvanians died of the disease the year before. In February, Jean White, whose teenage son Ryan had died after becoming infected during a blood transfusion, addressed an audience at nearby Elizabethtown College. People need to be educated about AIDS, to understand the disease and how it is transmitted, wrote the editors of the local paper. AIDS is a frightening disease. But with education and awareness, people can learn how to take precautions against AIDS and to treat those who are HIV positive as real people, not as monsters.

Queer Pennsylvanianstrans Pennsylvanians, disproportionatelywere the targets. It was believed that AIDS dripped off the walls of the Tally-Ho Tavern on Lancasters West Orange Street. The citys queer bookstore, the Closet, would be bombed twice that summer; the second timeafter the proprietor had been shot atfour sticks of dynamite leveled the store, blowing a hole straight through the back wall. The rainbow flag in the window was partially incinerated.

State police are assigned to cases large and small, pressing and inconsequential, in jurisdictions that lack their own police departments. Such was the case in Rapho Township. The criminal investigations unit, considered the elite members of the troop, handled everything from criminal mischief to murder. It was a one-stop shop.

Jay Musser, a tall, fresh-faced officer with bangs cut straight across his forehead, was off-duty that Sunday afternoon. He arrived at the rest area at milepost 265.2 to find his colleagues already at work. Hed been a trooper for ten years and was part-time SWAT, which meant, his boss would say with admiration, he wasnt prone to negotiation. Musser was a member of Troop J, charged with Southeastern Pennsylvanias Lancaster and Chester counties, and this was his territory. It was a lonely, forgettable stretch of road. The last incident that raised an eyebrow occurred thirteen years earlier when the white Lincoln ferrying Governor Milton Shappand driven, as it happened, by a trooperwas logged doing nineteen miles an hour over the speed limit.

A dead, naked man with visible chest and back wounds, found in a trash barrel on the turnpike about thirty feet back from the road, was a significant event in these parts.

A few years earlier, Musser was subject to a modicum of press coverage for his involvement in the case of the Amish Hat Bandit. As recounted by the Associated Press: a middle-aged man from Kirkwood, a little farming town, claimed that two assailants, one carrying a gun, broke into his and a nearby relatives home and stole nearly twenty of his familys hats, valued at several hundred dollars. The state police were called in. They suspected he had pilfered the hats himself, in part because he wasnt in church when theyd gone missing. But there was little proof. Musser, however, deployed an interrogation method that exploited the mans religiosity.

You look me straight in the eye, he told the perpetrator, and swear to God that you didnt take them hats, and Ill believe you.

Unable or unwilling to do it, the hat thief confessed.

But the larger Lancaster County had seen worse. In 1990, there were thirteen homicides. Most of those occurred in the city of Lancaster. Beyond those borders, however, things tended to be more peaceful. Nothing but forest and farmland, as Musser put it. To murder a man and leave him here, at mile marker 265.2, where there was nothing around but road, trees, and sky, was strange. This aint like New Jersey, where the mafia is dumping bodies, noted a trooper.

Musser, in seven years on the criminal investigations unit, had seen only one other dead bodya stillborn baby left by the side of the road in Amish country. He tended to compose himself well, not betray his emotions. In later years, he would fall apart only once on account of the jobs horrors, when a young boy who resembled Mussers son hanged himself on Thanksgiving Day.

The rest area was little more than a barren strip on the edge of dense woods. The sight was gruesome: an emaciated man who, in addition to chest and back wounds, had his penis severed and shoved into his mouth. In times of absurdity, we sometimes resort to the ridiculous and banal, and Musser, as he surveyed the wound, was no different.