‘Gone Girls’ Director Liz Garbus on Returning to the Long Island Murders and Focusing on Victims Instead of ‘Damaged’ Serial Killers

variety.com:

Hunter Ingram SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about the Gilgo Beach murders case and details about “Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer” docuseries, now streaming on Netflix.

Liz Garbus remembers exactly where she was the day she learned Mari Gilbert had been killed. In 2016, the Oscar-nominated documentarian was at a dinner with a few journalist friends when she got the text from author Robert Kolker that Gilbert had been killed by her daughter Sarra during the chaos of Sarra’s psychotic break.

Garbus was in the midst of adapting Kolker’s book “Lost Girls” into a film, and had met Gilbert once a year earlier. The force-of-nature mother and activist left quite the impression — and was at the center of the story Garbus would be telling about a prolific serial killer on Long Island, New York who had not yet been caught. “The whole dinner just kind of stopped when I mentioned it, because everyone was suddenly talking about what happened and all the layers and ripple effects of the case,” Garbus tells Variety.

However, the case the table was enraptured by wasn’t just Mari’s tragic end, but rather the chain of events set off by the disappearance of her eldest daughter, Shannan, back in 2010.