Lost Girls (22 page)

The chief’s message was clear: If they had been successful and well educated, like the Son of Sam’s victims, all of Long Island might have been in a panic. But these were prostitutes. Of course they’d been killed.

Mari was losing hope. She had been patient—or patient enough—with the police, with the neighbors, and with the media, and her daughter’s disappearance was being subsumed by a murder case that threatened to overlook her altogether. She decided to go public with information that, until then, had been kept strictly between her family and the police.

On April 12—just after the ninth and tenth sets of remains were found—WCBS 880, a twenty-four-hour local news radio station in New York, introduced a new angle on what might have happened to Shannan. In a segment picked up right away by her competitors, Sophia Hall became the first to report that just a few days after Shannan went missing, Mari had received a call at her home from someone identifying himself as Dr. Peter Hackett. “The doctor told them that Shannan was incoherent,” Hall said. “So he took her into his home rehab to help her, and the next day, a driver came and picked her up.”

Asked to comment, Hackett—speaking publicly for the first time about the Gilbert case—didn’t confirm that he’d seen Shannan. But he didn’t deny it, either. Instead, he said he had spoken to the police about Shannan. Then he made an anodyne speech about the case: “This is important that this is done, because these people need closure. And we need to find this girl if she’s alive.” The word
we
seemed to suggest that Hackett, as much as anyone else, was playing an active role in the search effort.

The same day, ABC News went to Hackett and ran his denial about seeing Shannan: “Of course not,” he said. “That’s ridiculous.” It was too late. The next day, the local CBS News website recycled Hall’s radio story from the day before, reporting that Hackett “said he saw Gilbert running at night near Oak Beach, looking both sick and distressed.”

Hackett was not quoted directly in either report. There was no audio or video of him saying it. It was possible that the echo chamber of competing news reports had reprocessed Mari’s claim into a reported fact, something that happens all too often in the scrum of a competitive news story. But for anyone looking to point fingers at Oak Beach neighbors—or wondering why more of them weren’t speaking out—the Hackett subplot was a gift. The very possibility that he’d seen her that night shot new energy into the story. After months of reporters going back to Brewer and Coletti for new insights, the locked-room mystery of Oak Beach had an intriguing new character.

Reporters rushed to the doctor’s cottage. A TV segment captured him walking outside, tall with slumping shoulders, wearing a baggy untucked oxford with an errantly knotted necktie flopped over a boulder-sized potbelly. Hackett had a round and boyish face with a double chin, sandy-gray hair, and deep-set eyes with dark circles beneath them. The limp from his false leg came off as more of a robust lurch. He glared at the camera with what seemed like a sneer.

For two days, all any reporter at Oak Beach wanted to know about was Peter Hackett. Mari couldn’t help but be pleased, even if the doctor was still denying ever having spoken to her. On April 14, Hackett, wearing a tan windbreaker, a pink polo, and dark aviator sunglasses, was cornered by a camera crew from the CBS
Early Show.
“This has been a tough couple of days,” he said, with his wife at his side.

“Did you see Shannan Gilbert that night?” asked the reporter, Seth Doane.

“Never,” Hackett said.

“How could we?” said Barbara. “She was missing.”

“She was missing,” Hackett said.

The same day, Barbara came out of the cottage alone to talk with
Good Morning America
. “We’ve never met her,” Barbara said. “We’ve never treated her. We don’t treat rehab patients here.”

The reporter, Andrea Canning, mentioned that Hackett had been interviewed by police three different times: news to the Gilberts, who were watching. “Ma’am,” she asked Barbara, “why do you think that this woman had your husband’s name, the mother of this potential victim?”

“They went door-to-door here. They talked to everybody here. And that’s all.”

“So you think maybe the mother remembered your name?”

“That’s all I could figure,” Barbara said.

“She said your husband told her he was a police officer.”

“Do your research and you’ll know all about Peter,” Barbara said. “He’s worked for the police. He was the Suffolk County EMS director for a few years. He was a police surgeon, yes.”

“Would he ever hurt anyone?”

“No way. He’s a great guy. The only thing he’s guilty of is being late to dinner.”

The police seemed surprised that Hackett was getting this much attention, or at least unsure how to react. “I think that was pretty much debunked,” Dormer said during a news conference. “We spoke to that individual very early on, and he has been very cooperative.”

As soon as this made the news, Sherre lashed out at the police. She and her family had told detectives half a dozen times in the past year about the phone call. How, she asked, could they be surprised to hear about him now? And why would they be so quick to exonerate him?

For the first time in months, Mari felt a sense of momentum. The doctor was calling her a liar. So were the police. The first of May was approaching: the first anniversary of Shannan’s disappearance. Mari decided it was time to make her first trip beyond the Oak Beach gate.

They gathered in the parking lot at noon. About a dozen friends were there with Mari, including Sherre and Sarra; Mari’s best friend, Johanna Gonzalez; and Johanna’s daughter, Osheanna, who was close to Shannan. The plan was to retrace Shannan’s steps, knock on doors, and raise hell.

Reporters and photographers trailed the group as they walked down the narrow access road and into the gated community. The residents were appalled. On the way in, a neighbor in a car slowed down enough to ask, “Do you need all these people?”

Another neighbor shouted across the street when she saw Mari at someone’s door: “Just to let you people know, I am calling 911 now!”

Mari shouted back: “It’s gonna take forty-five minutes for 911 to get here!” Her friends all laughed.

They spent two hours walking the streets. They knocked on the door of Hackett’s cottage on Larboard Court, but there was no answer. Mari peered through his windows, searching for signs of burlap, TV cameras following her every move. She was energized, darting back and forth on the street, spoiling for a fight. At the end, they held hands in the parking lot while Shannan’s aunt Lori said a prayer. “This candle is for Shannan,” Sherre said. “May she come home alive and safe.”

Though nothing she did changed the fact that Shannan was still missing, Mari had made some noise, and the visit steeled her resolve. “A lot of people want to contact me anonymously, because they’re afraid,” she said. “They’re really afraid.” Walking those roads past the bramble for the first time also fueled her suspicions. The police weren’t talking. Either they were keeping secrets, or even they didn’t know what else was hidden at Oak Beach.

FAMILIES

I first met Missy Cann on the Monday after Easter, a little over four months after the body of her sister, Maureen, had been discovered along Ocean Parkway. We agreed to have lunch at a well-known lobster shack on a pier in New London, Connecticut, with a tranquil view of the Long Island Sound. That day, our goals had intersected. I was a writer, looking to learn more about the victims of a tragedy who seemed overlooked. She was there to make sure her sister’s case didn’t grow cold all over again.

Missy is more or less a twin of her older sister, though her eyes are brown, not green. As her children weaved around Missy’s legs beneath the picnic table, she went through the litany of tragedy that had followed her since Maureen disappeared. While the world was at Missy’s doorstep, she would not forget the four years when getting anyone to take the case seriously had seemed almost impossible. She would not forget the police in Norwich who had brushed off the first missing-persons claims because Maureen was working as an escort. She would not forget the two years it took even to get Maureen’s name onto the NamUs, the national registry of missing persons. In her soft, light voice, she talked about the two children Maureen left behind: the eleven-year-old girl, Caitlin, whom Missy saw on weekends; and the five-year-old boy, Aidan, whose father has kept out of contact with Maureen’s family. Aidan is the same age as one of Missy’s children and one of her brother’s, too. The fact that all the cousins can’t be together is yet another loss.

As she spoke, Missy seemed determined to list every misery afflicting her just to exorcise them all. She was building up to her family’s second great tragedy—Will’s death, two years after Maureen disappeared. Missy took to Facebook to post tribute videos of her sister and her brother as she found herself becoming obsessed with her sister’s case. She lost her job as a hostess at Mohegan Sun. She didn’t care. “I was like, ‘I can find another job, but I can’t find another sister.’ Going on with my life felt guilty.”

While, given the chance, she would shout from every rooftop to remind the world that they existed, there were others in Maureen’s family who didn’t appreciate the very public role she played, including her mother. Marie Ducharme’s position was clear: Her daughter’s life had been her own business, and nothing anyone said could change the fact that Maureen was gone, or correct the course of her life now that it was over. Missy and her mother didn’t talk much anymore. Missy had once worried that the world would forget her sister. But now her greatest fear, apart from the absence of justice, was that Maureen would be misunderstood. Missy was struggling to reclaim the narrative of Maureen’s life—to protect the best memories of her and perhaps soften the darker aspects of a woman who lived dangerously.

“I don’t like how they’re talking about her,” Missy said. “I understand they only know what she was down there doing, and that’s what they look at her as. But it doesn’t
matter
what she did. She was still a mother. She still meant the world to her daughter, she meant the world to me.” She was tearful now. “We needed her in our lives. The world lost such an imaginative, creative person. You don’t know—she was in her mid-twenties. She had her whole life ahead of her. Who’s to say that she was going to be doing this her whole life?”

Toward the end of lunch, Missy revealed another reason why she had agreed to come that day. She and members of the other four families had been in close touch since January. With the new bodies bringing more visibility to the case, they’d come together to plan a vigil at Oak Beach in June. Missy was excited by the idea, as much as she could be. She and Lorraine had been the only family members to meet face-to-face, and now there was a chance to meet some of the few people who had shared the same awful experience.

I suggested they come together in New York for a group interview to help publicize the vigil and put a human face on their daughters and sisters. Missy agreed and set off to convince the others.

Two weeks later—May 2, 2011, a year and a day after Shannan disappeared—Lorraine took a flight to New York City from Portland, Maine, her arms folded around her laptop like she was embracing her daughter. Kim left her father’s hospital bed in Wilmington, North Carolina. Lynn and Jeff shut down JJ’s Texas Hots in Buffalo for a few days and brought along Melissa’s teenage sister, Amanda. Mari, having just spent a full day knocking on doors at Oak Beach for her daughter’s first anniversary, took a car back to New York from Ellenville, grateful for a driver who let her smoke the whole way down. Missy, too afraid to make the trip on her own, begged her husband to drive her after he worked the night shift at the navy base in Groton. “I have the best husband ever!” Missy posted on Facebook the night before, and several of her new friends agreed by clicking the “like” button.

We met in the lobby of a hotel in Tribeca. As they trickled in, we filled a long rectangular table at the hotel’s restaurant. My task was to moderate the conversation. I wanted to talk about the case: those phone calls to Amanda, Amber’s relationship with Kim, the circumstances of Shannan’s last night at Oak Beach. I said very little and just listened while they started talking—tentatively at first, then warm and even raucous. Together, they made up a kind of grim sorority. Missy vented her anger at people who judged the victims because they were escorts. “I’ll always love my sister, and I’m proud of her no matter what anyone says,” she said. Mari agreed. “Some TV station said they were women whose families just didn’t keep in touch,” she said. Missy was glad to be with people who understood her. “It’s amazing. I feel like I’ve known all these people my whole life.” Mari added that “it’s hard to talk to family. It’s easier to talk to a stranger.”

Only Mari seemed ill at ease. She knew that the rest of the women at the table at least knew where their loved ones were. They had a closure that she lacked, and she felt alone. On top of everything else, she knew it was her daughter’s disappearance that had helped find them all. Mari wasn’t sure whether to be jealous or grateful that she still had hope of finding Shannan alive. Either way, being there felt like a betrayal, a quiet acknowledgment that Shannan really was gone. “In retrospect, I shouldn’t be here,” she said stiffly. “Because my daughter has not passed.”

Before they even ordered, they were speaking in a special shorthand.

“Melissa had Nextel,” said Amanda. “Nextel, you can’t do anything to trace it. It’s prepaid.”

“Well, my daughter had Sprint, she had five cell phones,” Mari said. “She just turned on her fifth cell phone two weeks before this happened to her.”

“What I did is, I called Boost directly,” Missy said. “I called the customer service and I was like, ‘Listen, my sister’s missing, I need these phone records right now.’ I said, ‘I can give you my social security number, if anything happens, you can file charges against me, I just need her phone records now.’ And he e-mailed me her phone records and the password to her Boost mobile phone line.”

“One time he turned Melissa’s cell phone on,” said Lynn, “and they picked up the tower. It was Massapequa, and that’s, like, right there.”

“Oh, okay,” said Mari. “And my daughter’s cell phone and purse have never been found.”

“Megan’s hasn’t been found, neither,” said Lorraine.

“My sister had her phone,” said Kim, “but four people worked off of that phone, too. After my sister went missing, there were still phone calls with girls using her ad. You just can’t go off the phone records, at least not my sister’s. And computer trails aren’t as easy as you think, because the guys don’t get you on the e-mail. You post a number, a cell-phone number, and they call a number. How do you track that? There wasn’t any text at the time she went missing. And I spoke to her that day.”

That got everyone’s attention. What did she and her sister talk about?

Kim smiled. Then she looked down, shook her head, and laughed. “We were in a fight.”

The others laughed softly.

Lorraine indulged herself with an uncomplicated version of her daughter. “Megan was fun, caring, a loving mom,” she said. “If you ever met Megan, you would fall right in love with her.” But her descriptions of Megan were fuzzy at best. Soon she owned up to being a drunk for most of Megan’s life, and she said that since Megan disappeared, her own mother had been looking after Megan’s daughter, Lili. “I have more bad days than I have good ones.”

Missy nodded. “We got into arguments about things that I thought that she was doing,” she said, “but no one could keep Maureen from doing something she wanted to do.”

“Melissa wanted to make money for a salon of her own,” said Lynn. “And originally, when she moved to New York, she was working in a salon. We think the salon was a cover for her pimp here.”

The women were too polite to zero in on Amanda right away, but it was lost on none of them that Melissa’s sister was the one person who may have spoken with the killer. “The media pounded the shit out of us to get the content of the calls,” Lynn said. “And we’re like, ‘We can’t let you know anything more than what’s already out there, because the only other person who knows what was said besides the police is the killer.’ ”

The others couldn’t resist a question or two. “Can I just ask you,” said Kim, “did he sound husky, or brusquey, or what?”

“No, he didn’t have an accent,” Amanda said. “He was white.”

“Did he sound like a New Yorker?” said Kim.

Amanda struggled to answer. “Not really. It was just kinda plain. You know, he was white, probably in his thirties, forties, maybe.”

“So he’s not from New York?” Missy asked.

Amanda shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “He could have been.”

The questions came faster: Was he angry, happy, nasty, mocking?

“He was calm, in control,” Amanda said. “He knew what he was doing.”

We left the hotel at lunchtime. Missy gasped the second she stepped through the hotel’s revolving door. It was a bright spring day in New York, warm and breezy. But it was as if, at that moment, the fact sank in that this was the city where her sister was last seen. A few of the others also seemed anxious, unfamiliar with the city and suddenly wishing they were somewhere else. Back inside, a crowded, creaky elevator triggered screams. Every chance they got, everyone but Kim rushed back down the stairs and outside to smoke.

Kim had a little leverage in the gathering. An escort herself, she knew all about the money, how calls were arranged, the risks, the drugs. “The money is just as addictive as drugs,” Kim said. “I’ve done this, and it isn’t really about being naive. In the beginning you make the money, and you’re making it without the drugs and without the bullshit. And then you get addicted to the money.”

I asked Kim if she had a drug problem, too, like her sister.

“I’ve had my own, I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s not exactly affiliated, you know, but eight out of ten calls nowadays are affiliated with drugs. Because drugs and this go together hand in hand. I was telling Lorraine that it’s not uncommon for a girl to meet someone who sells crack or coke and team up with him and go on a call because both of you are gonna make money. I’ve had guys go, ‘Look, if you can’t bring coke, don’t even come.’ ”

I opened the floor to others. Was anyone else at the table surprised by details like these?

“I hate to be so vivid about it,” Kim boasted.

The others saw it almost as a trick question. To say they were surprised made them seem naive. To say they weren’t made them seem complicit.

“Basically, my sister explained it almost exactly like that,” Missy said.

“You know, it’s so interesting,” said Jeff Martina, sitting next to Lynn and Amanda. “Melissa wasn’t into drugs.”

“Yeah, Maureen wasn’t into drugs, either,” Missy said.

“But I know there are girls that she’s talking about,” Jeff said.

Kim seemed a little baffled. “I mean, I
lived
it.”

“I mean, she drank to the point where she blacked out,” Lynn said.

“The drinking is better than the coke because it’s legal,” Kim said. “Methadone? There’s no difference. They call it hillbilly heroin.”

Jeff tried to change the subject. “This is a dangerous profession,” he said.

“I think they all knew him,” Missy said, gently changing the subject back to the killer.

“I don’t know whether they knew him or not,” said Jeff.

“I think so,” said Lynn.

Missy winced. “My sister would have never gone with someone—”

“My sister and I talked about that,” Kim said. “The precautions you take. Like, the worst thing that ever happened to me was the guy’s wife came home.”

To one degree or another, all of the women had taken on the role of amateur homicide investigator. “It’s like a little detective crew,” Kim said. So little was known about the nights the other girls disappeared that the women tended to focus on the night Shannan went missing, replaying the details of what happened again and again, searching for clues to who the killer might be. No one engaged in that exercise more than Mari.

Everything about the day she’d just spent at Oak Beach made her feel like the people there were trying to wish her daughter away. “It’s not even about the prostitution,” Mari said. “It’s about how all their clients were wealthy. Look where she was. They don’t want the attention. There’s doctors there, lawyers there, cops there. They don’t want to be associated with that kind of behavior. That’s why they don’t care. Money can take care of anything.”

For the first time, Mari talked publicly about her suspicions of the driver, Michael Pak. “During the twenty-three-minute 911 tape, she’s screaming, pounding on doors. We were given an excerpt of it: ‘Help me help me he’s gonna kill me help me help me.’ It was the driver she’s getting away from. My daughter says his name. And in the background is this person, ‘What are you talking about, I’m trying to help you, you’re lying,’ and the tape went dead.”

Shannan’s coat was found on the road, she said, but then the police misplaced it. “Come on, a big huge coat? How could they have lost it?” The errors didn’t rile her as much as the apathy—and what she thought was a whitewashing. Mari didn’t believe that John Mallia and his dog had been searching for the bodies when they came across them. She thought the police were just trying to look good, that the recent discoveries were more of a coincidence than a piece of crack police work. “The cop stopped along the side of the road to let the dog do his business,” Mari said with a wave of her hand. “The dog
accidentally
found the remains.”