Lost Girls (18 page)

Alex and Michael walked through the neighborhood and saw Hackett, this time at the doctor’s cottage on Larboard Court. Hackett took notes again, asking about Shannan’s medical history, what drugs she took. Alex gave him Shannan’s picture to put on a flyer. Hackett offered to give Alex and Michael a ride around the neighborhood, down roads Michael hadn’t known about the night he was there. “I’m gonna keep an eye on it around here,” Hackett said. “Don’t worry.”

Before they parted ways, Hackett told them a story. Long ago, he said, he was stranded on a boat in the water in the dark, all alone, thinking he’d die there. But then he saw a boat from far away. He shot a flare gun. The flare hit the boat, but all was well; he was rescued. Later, he said, he became a doctor who specialized in emergency medicine. His specialty was saving lives.

No question about it, Dr. Hackett liked to talk.

Mari Gilbert had trouble remembering the details. It had happened so long ago, before she understood that Shannan might be gone. The content of the phone call, as she remembered it, was very strange.

Mari heard the man say that his name was Dr. Peter Hackett, and that he lived in Oak Beach, Long Island, and that he ran a home for wayward girls. She remembered him saying that he had seen Shannan the night before—that she was incoherent, so he took her into his home rehab to help her, and the next day, a driver came and picked her up. He wanted to know if Mari had seen her since.

It was a quick call, no longer than a few minutes. In time, Mari would be questioned on every aspect of the call—when it took place, what was said, who really might have been the person calling. Alex and Michael would quibble about the timing, whether Hackett called Mari before they met him, as Mari said, or right after, the way they think it must have happened.

Hackett would deny calling Mari at all, at least at first. But Shannan’s sister Sherre was there for the call, right next to her mother. She would confirm what Mari heard. And in time, there would be others—including neighbors at Oak Beach—who would come to believe that Dr. Peter Hackett knew far more about what had happened to Shannan than he ever let on.

There was no public outcry, no crush of camera crews. No one called
Newsday
or Channel 12, Long Island’s cable news channel, to say that a woman had gone around the neighborhood banging on doors and screaming bloody murder before disappearing into the night. The police didn’t come back to search Oak Beach after that first morning, either. There had been no official missing-persons report, so there was no case, just a sheepish john and an angry boyfriend.

A few days after Michael and Alex’s visit, Shannan’s sisters made it to Oak Beach to knock on doors and pass out flyers. Mari went with them but waited outside the gate, afraid they’d be accused of trespassing. The neighbors who spoke with them had little to offer. It seemed to Sherre that most would have preferred if they hadn’t come at all.

Gus Coletti said he didn’t think about the girl again at all until the middle of August, when a Suffolk County police officer knocked on his door—the same officer who had responded to the 911 calls from neighbors on the morning of May 1. The officer told Gus that on the morning when Shannan vanished, he had searched the whole neighborhood and hadn’t found her. He said he’d put his hand on the hood of every SUV in the neighborhood to see if it was warm. He never saw the black SUV with the Asian driver. The officer was back, he told Gus, because a missing-persons report had been filed for Shannan in New Jersey. All this time later, there was a case. The officer wanted to know more from Gus about that morning: what Shannan was wearing, what she said, where she went.

“You know, it’s been months,” Gus said. “Somebody here dropped the ball.”

“Well, that would be New Jersey,” came the reply. This was the official line from the police: Only when the report was finally forwarded to Suffolk County did the police connect a 911 call from an upset girl in the early hours of May 1, 2010, with the reports from that same morning of a woman pounding on the doors of Oak Beach. It took that long because even after twenty-three minutes on the phone, Shannan hadn’t been specific enough about her location to get help, and she hadn’t been on the line long enough with the Suffolk County police for the operator to perform a trace. About three minutes into the call, Shannan said she thought she might be “near Jones Beach” and got transferred to the New York State police, because Jones Beach is their jurisdiction. No patrol car was dispatched. A police spokesperson later said the dispatcher couldn’t figure out where Shannan was: “We spoke with her, the call was lost, and she never called back.”

With no body, Shannan had become a run-of-the-mill missing-persons case, and the taint of prostitution didn’t add any momentum to a nearly nonexistent investigation. A jacket found on the ground near where Shannan was last seen was misplaced by the authorities. According to Gus, the police didn’t even show any interest in Oak Beach’s security video. Several cameras record who comes through the front gate at all hours; those cameras should have provided a full view of Shannan running up the Fairway and in and out of Gus’s house, maybe even which direction she ran after dashing past Michael Pak’s car. The video is stored on a hard drive for a month. According to Gus, the police first asked about the security video eight months after Shannan disappeared. “I told them who would have it, who was in charge of it,” he said, a neighbor named Charlie Serota, a member of the association. By the time the police came back, Gus said, the tape had already been erased.

The neighbors who acknowledged seeing Shannan—Gus, Joe Brewer, and Barbara Brennan—appeared to have let the matter drop. Maybe they assumed they’d done their part and the police would take it from there. Maybe they thought she made it home one way or another, that she was not their problem. Maybe, when they learned that she was an escort, they cared a little less. Or maybe of all the bad luck Shannan Gilbert had that night, the worst was coming to a community that, for the better part of a century, had wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

The Suffolk County Police Department is the twelfth-largest police department in the country, with some twenty-five hundred officers serving and protecting the people of eastern Long Island. Aiding those officers is a unit of twenty-two dogs. The canine unit is composed of purebred male German shepherds imported from Eastern Europe. It takes two full-time police officers to train the dogs. Each dog develops a specialty, like a major in college: drugs, explosives, cadavers. The dogs are trained on the real thing, and when they find what they’ve been trained to find, they bark, bite, and scratch to get the attention of their handlers.

The one thing that an open missing-persons case with a lack of leads may be good for, as far as the police are concerned, is a training exercise for the canine unit. Officer John Mallia was a thirty-one-year veteran of the Suffolk police, a fifty-nine-year-old former private investigator who, since 2005, had called his German shepherd his partner. Blue was seven years old, and Mallia had trained him since he was a puppy. While the accepted wisdom is that most police matters are resolved within forty-eight hours, Mallia looked at Shannan’s disappearance a different way. He assumed the girl was dead. Logic suggested it would be only a matter of time before someone found her. And Blue needed on-the-job training.

Over the summer, Mallia and Blue searched all of Oak Beach. Parts of the neighborhood had already grown too thick with bramble and poison ivy for a dog and his handler to walk. As summer turned to fall and the obstacles shrank, he and Blue fanned out along the southern edge of Ocean Parkway. When they found nothing, they moved across the highway to the north. Blue got scratched up, and Mallia broke out in a wicked rash.

Then, at about 2:45
P.M.
on Saturday, December 11, 2010, along the parkway near Gilgo Beach, Blue’s tail started wagging. He buried his snout and dug with his forepaws, and Mallia craned to have a look at what the dog had discovered.

That was when he noticed the burlap. And the skeleton.

BOOK TWO

I.

BODIES

They found three more just like it, two days after the first—four sets of bones in all. Each was a full skeleton, kept whole and shrouded in burlap. Each had been placed with an odd specificity, staggered at roughly one-tenth-of-a-mile intervals along the edge of Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. Right away, both the array of the bodies and the care given them seemed deliberate, precise, and methodical.

Convinced that at least one of them was Shannan, the police searched Joe Brewer’s house and seized his car. Almost as soon as the find came over the police scanner, the parking lot where the Oak Beach Inn used to be became a staging area for the media, filled with trucks from all the local New York TV and radio news stations—WCBS, WABC, FOX 5, WNBC, News 12 Long Island. The cable-news networks followed later, then
Dateline
and
48 Hours
. Surrounded by reporters, the man outed by the police as Shannan’s john was defiant: “I’m innocent in this case,” Brewer said, “so I have truth on my side.”

Brewer claimed to have taken a polygraph, and while the police didn’t describe the results or confirm right away that he had submitted to the test, they also didn’t declare Brewer a suspect or person of interest. The police talked to Michael Pak, too, picking him up and driving him out to headquarters on Long Island and interrogating him for the better part of a day. Like Brewer, he would say that he passed his polygraph. Unlike Brewer’s, his name didn’t leak out to the papers. The police wouldn’t charge him with anything, nor would they declare him a suspect.

The people of Oak Beach felt under siege. That much wasn’t unusual. But this time, the threat came from inside the gate. Where they once waved on the road, now they eyed one another as potential co-conspirators in a serial-murder case. Now it wasn’t just a question of what had become of Shannan that night but of why no one in Oak Beach had cared enough to help her. Most neighbors stayed inside their homes. The one exception was Gus Coletti, who tried to distance his community from the remains found down the highway. “What guy would murder four people and dump them right outside the door here?” he said. “That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.” Nothing he said made a difference. Even the most routine questions about Shannan’s last night seemed to hint at some broader conspiracy. When reporters learned there was no security video for that night, they wondered why the police hadn’t cared enough to recover the footage right away—and why, after a girl went screaming down the road and two neighbors dialed 911, anyone in the Oak Island Beach Association would allow the memory on that hard drive to be wiped clean.

The makings of a media sensation weren’t difficult to recognize. Four bodies on a beach. A neighborhood with secrets. A serial killer on the loose. Shannan, for her part, was the subject of a few cursory reports, most picking up on the line from her missing-persons file that mentioned bipolar disorder and drugs. All the questions in those first few days concerned her night at Brewer’s. With no video evidence, reporters requested Shannan’s 911 recording. When police refused to release it, no one knew that she had been bounced from jurisdiction to jurisdiction for the better part of half an hour. Shannan’s family filled the vacuum. Mari told reporters that she had heard about a moment in the recording when Shannan says, “You’re trying to kill me!” Sherre said the tape showed that Shannan had been trying to get away from someone.

The police weren’t in a hurry to confirm anything. Suffolk Deputy Inspector Gerard McCarthy acknowledged that Shannan “intimates that she’s being threatened,” but he also described Shannan on the tape as “drifting in and out, intoxicated,” concluding that “there’s nothing to indicate she’s a victim of a crime on those calls.” Sherre and Mari were appalled. At least three witnesses had seen Shannan screaming and running, and the police still weren’t acknowledging that there had been a crime.

Now there were four bodies to contend with, none of them identified. Off the record, the police confirmed that they were working under the assumption that all were escorts. The police and the press scoured open missing-persons cases, and within a day, on December 14, another name surfaced: Megan Waterman of Portland, Maine, last seen in June at a hotel in Hauppauge, about fifteen miles from Oak Beach. That night on CNN, Nancy Grace conducted a live remote interview with Megan’s mother. In her clipped New England accent, Lorraine Waterman said the police had contacted her about the case that day and she expected they’d be coming to her for a DNA sample. Megan’s mother answered barely three more questions before Grace cut her off, rhapsodizing about what Lorraine must be going through. “This is going to be one of the greatest Christmases of my life,” Grace said. “And when I think about what these mothers are going through, like the mom that is joining us tonight, this could possibly be her daughter that she has loved and nurtured for all of these years, and now she’s waiting to find out whether one of these skeletal remains is going to be her daughter.”

Lorraine’s interview was crowded out by speculation from a psychologist, Mark Hillman, author of
My Therapist Is Making Me Nuts!
; a former deputy medical examiner from Los Angeles, Howard Oliver, opining about the limitations of analyzing old bones found on a beach; legal correspondent Juan Casarez, stating, obviously, that “crime scene investigators are launching what I believe is going to be a massive, massive homicide investigation”; and CNN reporter Rupa Mikkilineni, live from Long Island, reporting that “all four of the bodies have very different levels of decomposition.” When, in a segment from Ocean Parkway, one police officer said that Long Island might be home to a serial killer, Grace broke in.

“
Hello?
” she said. “It’s a serial killer! The same man killed all four women! And there’s probably more!”

It’s been over fifty years since Richard Dormer came to America, and his voice still hasn’t lost its Irish lilt:
these
and
there
and
this
come out as
deez
and
derr
and
diss
. The Suffolk County police commissioner was born outside of Dublin and grew up in the small town of Newtown Crettyard, County Louth. Small but tough, he wanted to be a cop ever since he was eleven years old. When he was fifteen, his father died, and his only future in Ireland seemed to be working in the same coal mine that had employed his dad. He came to New York three years later, in 1958, and worked in the kitchen of a state hospital for five years, playing Gaelic football in the Bronx on the weekends, before finishing nineteenth out of more than a thousand applicants in the Suffolk County detective’s exam.

Dormer moved to Long Island, married, raised a family, and walked a beat. Over the next three decades, he earned an MBA, took classes at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and saw himself promoted all the way to chief of the Suffolk County police. When a new county executive pushed out the commissioner and all the chiefs with him in 1993, Dormer bided his time managing a private security company. In 2004, another new county executive, Steve Levy, brought Dormer back as commissioner. He was sixty-three, with white hair and thick glasses. Most of his peers were retired or about to be. But Dormer was thrilled, telling
Newsday,
“I get the chance to get back into the police department that I love.” In charge at last, Dormer alienated the rank and file with budget cuts, replacing Suffolk officers with redeployed state police, insisting all the while that he was a cop’s cop. He remarked on how surprised his officers seemed when he’d lumber into their patrol cars, an old coot asking to come along on their shifts. If anyone ever questioned his decisions or priorities, all he had to do was point to Suffolk County’s 20 percent drop in violent crime during his tenure as the man in charge.

By the close of 2010, the end was in sight. Dormer’s boss was on his way out. Steve Levy had switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, in an ultimately unsuccessful run for the governor’s office, and now the district attorney, a Democrat, was investigating Levy for misuse of campaign funds. A third term as county executive didn’t seem to be in the cards for Levy. His replacement was likely to bring in his or her own police commissioner. Dormer, who was turning seventy, expected to serve one final, quiet year and cap off his long career with dignity.

Which might have explained the pained look on his face when, on Thursday, December 16—three days after the second, third, and fourth bodies were found, and two days after Nancy Grace joined in the national chorus of speculation about a serial killer in his jurisdiction—he stood in front of a phalanx of news cameras on the scene at Ocean Parkway, the wind from the Atlantic Ocean tousling his short shock of white hair, and made his first statements about the case that had already hijacked his legacy, overshadowing every other memory of his career in law enforcement.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that four bodies ended up in this area,” he said. In the same breath, he almost tried to wish it away: “I don’t want anyone to think we have a Jack the Ripper running around Suffolk County with blood dripping from a knife.” Dormer blinked. “Which might be the impression that some people would get . . . ” He trailed off.

“This is an anomaly,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

Dormer and his team avoided all talk of a serial killer in the days that followed—“Anything is possible at this point,” said Deputy Inspector William Neubauer, “because there’s so many unanswered questions”—even as they kept searching for more bodies. They shut down ten miles of Ocean Parkway, between Tobay Beach and the Robert Moses Causeway, as teams of officers and dogs combed the bramble. The police from neighboring Nassau County were reviewing their open cases, too, searching for possible identities for the skeletons. On Friday, they joined the search effort along with the New York State Police, moving west toward Jones Beach, shutting down the highway most of the day. Snowfall was expected that weekend, adding to the pressure. “We want to make sure we don’t miss anything,” Dormer said.

What he wasn’t saying was how unprepared his people were. Four sets of remains found along a beach would be more than enough for any police jurisdiction to deal with. Suffolk County medical examiner Yvonne Milewski guessed the skeletons had been left there for a year or longer, though it was possible that the wind, rain, and salt air along the beach had accelerated their decomposition. It wouldn’t be long before, on TV and in print, criminologists and self-styled serial-killer experts would start speculating whether the killer ritualistically cleaned the bones of flesh before shrouding them in burlap and placing them at careful intervals along the highway. Many of the bones were so fully decomposed that it wasn’t clear at first whether all four sets of remains had been female. Milewski sent the four skeletons to the New York City medical examiner’s office, where a team led by a nationally recognized forensic anthropologist named Bradley Adams set about analyzing them for DNA and signs of trauma. As soon as his DNA analysis was complete, he would upload the information into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, to search for identity matches.

The one thing Milewski’s team didn’t need New York City’s expertise for was a ruling on whether any of the four bodies was Shannan. Alex Diaz’s punch had left Shannan with a unique distinguishing characteristic. There was no titanium plate in any of the four jaws. On December 16, the same day as Dormer’s first press conference at Oak Beach, the police announced that none of the bodies was a match for Shannan.

Joe Brewer, having decamped to his mother’s house in Islip, seemed only marginally relieved. Even if he really had no idea why Shannan had gone running that night, he knew he’d never be entirely free of scrutiny, and no matter where Shannan was, the four bodies on the beach would be linked to her case. “My life is ruined. I will still be judged forever. I’ll have to move. I feel for my daughter,” he said. “This has been a rough time for me, but I’m not the victim here. Those four girls are the real victims. I just hope there is some sort of ending that will give these families some peace.”

For the second time in under a week, Mari Gilbert was brought low. “I’m confused,” she told reporters. “Where is she?” Then she got angry, complaining that the police had ignored the case for months, taking it seriously only after four more bodies had turned up. “They were acting like it didn’t happen,” she said. A sister of Mari’s back in Pennsylvania, Lori Grove, brought up that the police hadn’t made it to Oak Beach until over an hour after the start of Shannan’s 911 call. “If somebody had gotten there within ten or fifteen minutes, my niece, most likely, would be alive,” she said. “She was on the phone with police for more than twenty minutes. Why did no one get there?”

Neighbors maintained their standoff with the news trucks in the parking lot, resenting the attention, wondering when life would go back to normal, and while the police awaited word from New York City on DNA matches, the search for Shannan went on. From the Robert Moses Causeway to the Nassau County line, the police charted out a search area, breaking it down into eight four-foot sections of maps they kept in a mobile command center. The highway was marked with bright orange arrows, pointing north to each spot where the remains had been found. Fluorescent orange flags were planted in the earth on each of the four sites. Officers started to weed through the bramble, fanning outward from the flags. Only when the first heavy snows came, just after Christmas, did the police bring the search to a halt. The plan was to come back after the first spring thaw, before new foliage had a chance to grow.

The people of Oak Beach had a reprieve, albeit a temporary one. The investigation entered a quiet period: no arrests, no confirmed identities for the bodies, and no more daily police updates from Oak Beach. Dormer created a task force with three supervisors and a dozen detectives, including specialists in cell-phone technology and computer forensics. The task force sought advice from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, and in February, a team of federal investigators spent a few days touring the sites, looking at the evidence, and sitting at a round table to brainstorm. Through most of January, they refused to speak publicly about the case. If they found a clue or a suspect, they weren’t saying.