Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer Review: Gripping and Heartbreaking Docuseries That Will Leave You Frustrated - K-waves and Beyond
Director: Liz Garbus
Date Created: 2025-03-31 15:50
4.5
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer Review: Netflix has produced a lot of true crime docs over the years, but this may be the one that leaves me most angry and sad. Directed by Liz Garbus, this three-part docuseries dives deep into the horrifying case of a serial killer who preyed on young women, mostly sex workers, and left their remains along Gilgo Beach in Long Island. The case stretched over more than a decade, and although a suspect was arrested in 2023, the path to justice was paved with staggering corruption and negligence.
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer Review
I had high hopes for this one because Liz Garbus is known for making hard-hitting docs, and she put the pedal to the metal here. The storytelling is, by turns, riveting but also impossible to watch, especially when you understand how many people in power didn’t do their jobs.
Right from the first episode of Netflix’s Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, I was sad, frustrated and angry. The series opens with a mother looking for her missing daughter, and that’s when the horrifying revelations unfold. Body by body, they are found along the shores of Gilgo Beach, transforming what once seemed like a single disappearance into the largest serial killer case in American history.
But what made me angry the most was how law enforcement responded to everything. Or, I should say, didn’t handle it. Rather than treating the case as a serious matter, they prodded their way, turned aside major lines of evidence and even allowed corruption into the inquiry. It was hard not to be furious watching this unfold because it wasn’t just that these women had their lives taken in the most horrific way; their families basically had to fight tooth and nail just to get anyone to give a shit.
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The second episode of Netflix’s Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer was the most agonizing. And it’s largely about police corruption, and, I mean, it read like a crime movie, and, like, hard to believe this all really happened. Officers who should have been protecting the people of the city cared more about the secrets they were hiding than about solving a case that involved multiple murders. It’s disgusting to think of all the time that was wasted while a serial killer was out stalking people.”
By the last episode, the documentary turns to how the case began to finally move forward. A new team arrived, got down to business, and performed the things that should have been done 5 years ago. Yet for all that an arrest had finally been made, I began to wonder whether justice had come far too late for so many.
One thing I really enjoyed about this Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer docuseries was the way it was constructed. Liz Garbus does not simply throw facts at you, she makes sure you feel the burden of what happened. The interviews with victims’ families were gut-wrenching, and you could see how much suffering they have had to go through, not only because they lost their loved ones, but also because of the way the system failed them.
She’s also great at getting you thinking about the big picture. Why did it take so long for these women to get heard? Why did it take over 10 years before real progress could occur? It is clear that the fact that the victims were sex workers played a huge factor in why their cases weren’t prioritised. And that’s what is most disturbing because no one, whatever their profession, deserves to be treated like they don’t matter.
Summing Up
I won’t say this is an easy docuseries to sit through. It is dark and disturbing, and it will likely make you feel a combination of sadness and rage. But that’s precisely why it matters so much. These women have been deserving of justice long before 2023, and Gone Girls makes sure we don’t forget it.
It’s also a reminder of just how broken the system can be. Perhaps if the police had done their job in the first place, fewer women would have died. Perhaps families wouldn’t have needed to fight for years to be heard. It’s devastating to think it could have been prevented.
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is now streaming on Netflix.
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