Lost Girls (19 page)

Producers for cable TV news have a stable of pundits they turn to during hot crime stories—medical examiners, criminologists, forensic scientists, former prosecutors—and the serial-killer category has its own roster of subspecialists, ready to chime in on what could be learned from bones exposed to weather for eighteen months or longer, and what the burlap and the location might say about the killer’s signature. They could fill the airtime talking about how Gary Ridgway was called the Green River Killer because he buried his victims in shallow graves near the river of that name in the state of Washington, and how Denis Rader became B.T.K. when it came out that he bound, tortured, and killed his victims. “It’s a calling card,” explained Vernon Geberth, a retired commander from Bronx homicide who has become something of a scholar of serial killers. Based on the placement and reported condition of the bodies, Geberth told
The New York
Times
that he was convinced the killer was a local, familiar with the area. “He has a reason to be there,” he said. “The biggest thing on his mind now is whether or not he’s going to be linked to this.”

Geberth wasn’t alone in that opinion. As early as the first week, CNN was airing speculation that this killer was a clam fisherman who could come to the barrier island undetected from the Great South Bay. Geberth went deeper with the idea on his media rounds, suggesting to the
Daily News
that the killer had placed the bodies so that he could find them again, returning to the burial ground “to relive the murders for sexual gratification.” Others concurred that the killer was every bit as systematic and intentional as Joel Rifkin—that his need for intimacy announced itself in the care he took; that he shrouded them in burlap, protecting them from the elements; that he seemed to want to control every aspect of their lives through their deaths, and to continue his relationship with them past death. Now that the bodies had been discovered, Geberth suggested that the killer was “in a panic state,” but that was no reason to believe he wouldn’t kill again.

For the ultimate expert opinion, the
Daily News
approached Joel Rifkin himself. Living out his days in an upstate prison, Long Island’s most famous and prolific murderer couldn’t resist critiquing this new killer for leaving all the bodies in one place; Rifkin, at least, had been savvy enough to sprinkle his victims’ remains across the tristate area. Yet he suspected that they had a lot in common: growing up lonely, mocked, and bullied; grappling with anger. “America breeds serial killers,” Rifkin said. “You don’t see any from Europe.” As for the victims, Rifkin said that prostitutes were obvious targets for any serial killer. “No family,” he explained, occasionally breaking into laughter. “They can be gone six or eight months, and no one is looking.” This was not a novel insight about serial killers and their choice of victims: The Green River Killer, during his admission of guilt at his 2003 sentencing, had said essentially the same thing.

There was one important and obvious difference between this killer and his predecessors. In Rifkin’s day, Craigslist and Backpage didn’t exist. Neither did cell phones with GPS. Common sense dictated that technology would help find this killer. The original Craigslist killer, Philip Haynes Markoff, left a digital trail traceable through the Erotic Services page of Craigslist in Boston. He wasn’t even a serial killer: He had just one victim, and he’d been found in a matter of days. How hard could it be to find a killer of four?

When, in late January, the DNA samples from all four sets of remains were positively identified, the idea of a signature became impossible to ignore. Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello were all about the same age. They all did the same thing for a living. And they all came from other towns, some settling nearby to work. Shannan’s disappearance had taken place in the middle of the time line of the other four: Maureen went missing in 2007 and Melissa in 2009, but Megan disappeared just a month after Shannan, and Amber vanished that September. If all five were linked, it meant the killer continued to abduct and murder women even after Shannan’s disappearance.

On January 25, Dormer and the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas Spota, formally acknowledged that the police were looking for a serial killer. Spota took the extra step of appealing to other women to come forward with any information about missing friends or suspicious johns. “I find it very hard to believe that people engaged in the same business as them [don’t] know something,” he said. But Spota didn’t seem to understand how dramatically the business was changing, or had already changed. In the Craigslist era, no one knew anyone. Pimps and madams were becoming a thing of the past. Escorts can work from a hotel with a laptop, or in a car on a smartphone. Alone. A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.

Are you fuckin’ kidding me, Maureen?

Sara Karnes had been gone barely an hour from the Super 8 in Times Square, and Maureen was already calling. It was 12:27
P.M.
, and Sara was in Matt’s car, stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway. All Sara wanted was to get some sleep. She didn’t answer.

Back in Connecticut that night, Sara got a call from Al, the big Italian guy she’d met at Tony’s porn office on her first weekend in the city. “You hear from Maureen?” he asked.

“No.”

“She called me.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause she couldn’t get ahold of you. She got robbed. She said that guy you guys met last night—the guy with the dreads—robbed her for five grand.”

Right away, something seemed out of place. “How the fuck did he rob her for five grand? She didn’t have that much when I left.”

“Well, she obviously must’ve pulled something out of her ass,” Al said.

Sara hung up and called Maureen’s phone. No answer. She left a voice mail: “I heard what happened. You need to call me back.”

That same night, Maureen had called her sister Missy, at home in Groton with her husband, Chris Cann, and their three children. On the phone, Maureen kept things light. She didn’t say anything about getting robbed or being in trouble, or how she had to be in court the next day, or that she needed cash or she’d be out on the street. She said she was calling from Penn Station. “Can Chris come pick me up?” she asked calmly.

“Maureen, it’s eleven-thirty,” Missy said. “Chris has to work in the morning.”

“I’ll call Will.”

A moment later, Missy’s phone rang again. Will had to work, too. Maureen said she had enough money to take the train and would take the next one.

On Tuesday, Missy called Maureen, but she wasn’t answering. Maybe she was sleeping, she thought, or maybe her phone was out of minutes.

Will called Missy on Wednesday. He hadn’t heard from Maureen, either. Her phone was going straight to voicemail.

On Thursday, Missy and Will called the Norwich police. As soon as they learned what Maureen was doing in Manhattan, the officers stopped taking them seriously. She was an escort in financial trouble; maybe she’d dropped off the grid until she made enough money to set things right. Missy knew that couldn’t be true. Maureen would never be willingly out of touch with Caitlin and Aidan for that long.

Missy learned from Sara Karnes where they had been staying. Will and Chris got on their motorcycles for Manhattan. The clerks at the Super 8 blithely claimed to have no memory of the dark-haired woman who had just spent days on end in room 406. The hotel records showed Maureen checking out not on Monday but on Tuesday, the day she was supposed to be back in court. They learned later that she had not kept the appointment to look at the sublet. She didn’t get back in touch with Al, either.

Missy rushed to her sister’s apartment in Norwich. The entire place had been cleared out. All her sister’s things were in a dump truck out front or gone—all of her composition books and all the books she loved to read aloud to her children. Her clothes were gone, too. A friend of Maureen’s had taken them all, telling Missy that Maureen had said she could. A short time later, the police told Missy that Maureen’s food-stamp EBT card had been used in Norwich. Missy and Will started searching all over Norwich until they discovered that the same friend was using it.

Missy logged in to her sister’s e-mail—Maureen had shared her password—searching for clues but also for anything left of the sister she knew. She moved on to the Web, looking for photos of Maureen on adult websites, stories of unidentified bodies, or even women with amnesia. Weeks turned into months, and Missy never stopped calling the police in Groton and New York, pushing for word on any progress. When an internal-affairs detective took pity on her, Missy learned that one of the last people known to have responded to Maureen’s Craigslist ad had been a New York police officer, a Staten Island resident ultimately cleared of any involvement in her disappearance. Then came more silence, more waiting, until Missy learned that the police had picked up a ping from her sister’s cell phone—someone trying to access her voice mail, perhaps. The signal registered at a water tower on Fire Island. Police with cadaver dogs and helicopters searched the area but didn’t find anything. At the time, Missy was confused; as far as she knew, Maureen never did outcalls on Long Island.

Missy didn’t know what to do with her frustration. Once, when she thought of Maureen, it had been about what book she was reading, or who would do the shopping for the kids’ birthday parties. Now it was about Craigslist, and incalls and outcalls. She began neglecting her kids, her husband, her job. She forced herself to think of any scenario in which Maureen might be alive. She ran into Maureen’s friend Jay DuBrule and started talking about how Maureen might have gotten drugged up and abducted by a sex slaver and forced to work for a human-trafficking ring. Jay found himself hoping right along with her. Better, at least, to think she was alive.

While Missy became obsessed, her brother cast about, adrift, enraged, and morose. And then, he, too, was gone. On August 14, 2009, Will—the baby of the family, a muscular, square-jawed, hard-partying football star from Fitch High School, whose anguish over the loss of Maureen was so intense that he had his sister’s name tattooed on his chest—was on his Harley before sunrise near Exit 78 on Route 95, a tricky merge that has since been marked by a traffic sign. Will had been at a party that night with other members of his motorcycle club. A few of his friends were with him on the road. He was out in front, as usual. There was a truck in front of him; the police said its lights were either off or dim. Will seemed to notice the truck only when he was a few feet from the back of its trailer. He slammed his brakes, but it was too late. The bike broke in half, and Will died on impact.

When Missy was seventeen, she’d almost died in a car crash. Maureen, nineteen and already a mother, had sat with her at the hospital, coaxing her back into consciousness. Maureen, Missy, and Will had always taken care of one another. Now there was just Missy, left with nothing but an inkling that it was never supposed to work out this way.

As horrible as Will’s death was, even that presented Missy with a strange sense of possibility—a new scenario. She couldn’t help playing it out like a movie trailer in her mind: Maureen running away and reinventing her life somewhere; Maureen walking through the door, embracing her, ready to grieve for their brother as a family, ready to come home.

When Maureen didn’t show up at the funeral, that put an end to it. Missy knew she was gone for good.

Amanda received eight calls in all. Whoever it was always phoned in the evenings, speaking briefly and calmly, taunting Amanda in a low voice. “Is this Melissa’s little sister? I hear you’re a half-breed.”

Amanda’s father was black. The caller knew what Amanda looked like.

Her mind flooded. Had this man captured Melissa? Was he holding her prisoner? Was she dead already? Or was this some sort of joke? Amanda seemed to be the only one he would talk to. The time Lynn answered, he hung up.

Steve Cohen, the Barthelemy family’s lawyer, told the police about the calls. Only then did they seem to take Melissa’s disappearance seriously. Starting with the third call, police traced the signal to cell towers in Times Square and Madison Square Garden. Detectives showed Melissa’s picture around at strip clubs. They wondered if the caller worked in midtown and commuted from Long Island. The calls were too short to narrow down the location.

After the third call, Amanda, just fifteen years old, was being asked to function as bait. If he called, she was supposed to draw him out, keep the conversation going. She and her mother spent the next several weeks waiting for another call. Every time the phone would ring, she’d wonder,
Is this him, is there another clue?
Once, the caller seemed to toy with Amanda, asking if she knew what Melissa did for a living. Another time he said, “Are you gonna be a whore like your sister?” Little by little, he dropped more hints. He said he knew where she lived, and he suggested he might come after her. Amanda thought he knew exactly what he was doing; that he was enjoying it, controlling every second, revealing himself with steady precision.

The last call came on August 26, 2009: “I’m watching your sister’s body rot.”

Amanda was driven almost hysterical by the calls, not just because Melissa might be dead but because she had been keeping her sister’s secret. She had been the only one in the family who traveled to New York and spent time with Melissa, the only one with anything close to an authentic glimpse of what her life was like. Lynn had heard about how they went for mani-pedis and visited the Statue of Liberty. Now Amanda told her the rest: how she would hear Melissa on the phone making dates, and see her on the computer posting photos of herself. She told her mother that Melissa had a car service ferry her back and forth while Amanda waited in the house for her to call and say she was okay.

Lynn had always considered her older daughter a force of nature, independent and self-reliant. Now all she could do was wonder what more she and Jeff could have done to persuade her to come home.