Lost Girls (34 page)

THE REMAINS

They found two more bodies after New Year’s. On February 17, 2012, a man and his dog discovered a new collection of skeletal remains in the pine barrens of Manorville, a short distance from where two of the Gilgo Beach victims’ body parts had been found years earlier. On March 21, a jogger stumbled on yet another set of remains, also in Manorville. Each set of remains had been left in two distinct areas, both remote and densely wooded, the perfect spots to dispose of a body. The police urged the public not to assume these discoveries were connected to the Gilgo murders.

These discoveries didn’t seem to register with the media, either. New stories upstaged the serial-killer case. In Manhattan, the police had raided a posh Upper East Side brothel, and the madam, Anna Gristina, made the front page of the
Post
after threatening to reveal the names of some of her more famous and powerful johns. In Nassau County, three high-ranking police officials were indicted on bribery charges, sending the Websleuths world into a long discussion about whether the police in Suffolk were any better. Those following the serial-killer case saw conspiracies everywhere: Could the cops in Suffolk have been bribed by powerful interests in Oak Beach to call Shannan’s murder an accidental drowning? Even the brush fires that plagued Manorville all spring seemed suspicious, a perfect way to obscure the investigation even more.

By spring, Suffolk County’s new homicide squad chief, Detective Lieutenant Jack Fitzpatrick, suggested another change in strategy, saying that “The case is going to be looked at again, from perhaps a different perspective.” At the same time, he went out of his way to knock Dormer’s single-killer theory, saying he believed “it’s very unlikely that it’s one person.” Over in the DA’s office, Spota was pleased. “We are in sync again,” he said. “Not one detective familiar with the facts of this case believes one person is responsible for these homicides.”

Mari, in a turnaround, went back to Oak Beach to voice confidence in Fitzpatrick. Michele Kutner, the families’ local booster, explained that Mari was trying to be a little less down on the police and more positive in general. Possibly, Mari realized she’d overplayed her hand with her threatening letter to the police, and that she still needed them to share the results of the medical examiner’s report.

Lynn tried not to get her hopes up. “I just hope it’s not too late,” she said, “because it’s been a long time.”

On May 1, 2012, two years to the day after her daughter went missing, Mari, her lawyer, John Ray, and Shannan’s three sisters drove to police headquarters in Suffolk County for a private meeting with the Suffolk County chief medical examiner, Yvonne Milewski, to learn the findings of the medical report.

The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Milewski and new detectives assigned to the case were mostly quiet as Hajar Sims-Childs, who had performed the hands-on work, did most of the talking. Sims-Childs, according to Ray, was the medical examiner who had told Dormer in December that it was possible Shannan had died of exposure. At this meeting, she told the Gilberts that after over four months of analyzing Shannan’s remains, they knew little more than they did before they started; in a sense, they knew less.

The cause of death remained a huge question mark. Sims-Childs said Shannan’s skeleton had been discovered almost entirely intact. All that was missing, besides a few finger and toe bones, were two of the three hyoid bones—the small, fragile bones in the upper part of the neck. A broken hyoid bone is a hallmark of strangulation cases. That the bones were missing suggested that Shannan, like the first four victims, was strangled. But Sims-Childs said that without knowing whether those bones were broken or just never made it out of the marsh, it was impossible to tell for sure. The medical examiner tried to explain that away by saying it was common for small bones to disappear; the hyoid tended to come loose quickly, and it was small enough for, say, a rodent to take away. On the other hand, there are 206 bones in the body. How likely would it be that the only bone selected by an animal happened to be the one bone that could link Shannan’s cause of death to the other murders?

The drug question also remained only partially answered. Sims-Childs said they had some challenges analyzing Shannan’s remains. They needed bone marrow but couldn’t find any in a femur bone, and for reasons she didn’t explain, they didn’t crack open any other bones to search for marrow. Instead, they used a smattering of tissue from the brain and a small clump of hair, which they tested for signs of cocaine use. The tests were negative. While that didn’t eliminate the possibility that Shannan had done coke—especially since the hair had spent eighteen months deteriorating in a saltwater marsh—it did make it less likely that she had. Even if nothing she’d taken that night had seeped into her bones, the theory that she was high that night, and a drug addict in general, was less plausible if Shannan didn’t have traces of some cocaine in her system.

What stunned Mari and her lawyer was that the medical examiner didn’t appear to test for any other drug, not even pot. Bone marrow might have yielded more information about any number of drugs: pot, meth, psychotropics, everything but alcohol, which evaporates. Based on what Sims-Childs was saying, she hadn’t searched for marrow beyond that one femur bone. In light of the assumption that Shannan was hysterical and irrational that night, wouldn’t they want to test for any psychotropic or psychedelic drug they could think of in order to confirm their theory? Sims-Childs did not have an explanation.

Then there was the matter of Shannan’s clothes, which the police had yet to test for anything—blood, DNA, semen—that might indicate who was with her that morning. Ray and Mari had to wonder what the police had been doing for five months.

After the meeting, Mari spoke to reporters. “I’m more frustrated and angry than ever,” she said. “I was hoping for something more substantial and solid. But all I got was . . . ”

She thought for a second or two before settling on the right word.

“Betrayal.”

A few days later, John Ray and some members of his law practice went to Oak Beach at five
A.M.
to retrace Shannan’s steps in the marsh under what he believed were ideal conditions: the same time of day and the same time of year when Shannan made the trip. He’d been told by the medical examiner that the marsh was in roughly the same condition now that it would have been two years earlier—most important, the water level was the same. To try to keep the conditions as close to the real thing as possible, they walked through the parts of the marsh that the police hadn’t mowed, just to see how hard it would have been for Shannan to run through there. Ray even brought a woman about Shannan’s size to simulate what she must have experienced, what she could and couldn’t see.

It wasn’t hard at all to walk in the marsh. The soles of Ray’s shoes barely got wet. It was easy to see, too. Ray and the woman with him found that their sight lines extended past the reeds. From the thick of the marsh, they could see houses, the highway, everything. It was difficult to believe that Shannan was lost at all, and even harder to believe that she might have drowned or died of exposure. Ray remembered the ME saying that all of Shannan’s bones had been bleached by the sun in such a way that her body seemed to have been lying down for a long time. When Ray asked if that meant Shannan could have been placed in that spot after she was dead, Sims-Childs would neither concede nor deny the point.

How else might Shannan have died? Sudden heart failure from drugs? They couldn’t know, because the remains were tested for only one drug. Strangulation? They couldn’t know, but the absence of two hyoid bones sure was suspicious. Granted, Mari was Ray’s client, and he had a vested interest as her lawyer, and he had gone to the marsh already suspecting that Shannan had been killed and dumped there, her things flung in the marsh at a different time. But after his morning stroll, Ray was more convinced than ever that the police theory was wrong. The police explanation of hysteria not only didn’t make sense; it was practically Victorian in its view of prostitutes, as if Shannan had died of sorrow, or fright, or sadness, or heartache. Against all common sense and with willful ignorance of Shannan’s own words that night, the police seemed to be saying that Shannan Gilbert had died because her soul had been rent asunder by a life in the streets.

It was left to Mari to champion her daughter. Months after Lorraine and Missy spurned her, some of the most devoted followers of the case would also drop out of Mari’s Facebook group, even the steadfast Michele Kutner. “I hung by her,” she said, “but I’m not going to stay there and be abused.” None of the conflict seemed to rattle Mari, although conflict had always resembled her natural state. She spent the summer ushering in new Facebook friends who had heard about the case through repeats of the
48 Hours
episode. She was casting about for a way to get Shannan’s case on John Walsh’s TV show,
America’s Most Wanted
. During a midsummer visit with John Ray on Long Island, Mari went out of her way to be kind about Lorraine, if a little patronizing. “Lorraine is sweet. She’s a little slower at talking, because she wants to make sure it’s right.” And she didn’t resist the chance to judge Missy, suggesting she hadn’t done enough to help Maureen while she was alive. “I hurt for her the most,” Mari said. “Because I hope it’s not haunting her, the choices she made.”

Mari was more comfortable forgiving herself, even if it meant not questioning what part, if any, she might have played in her daughter’s tragedy. “I can’t be plastic,” she said, adding that she wished Shannan had been a little more like that. “I think if Shannan inherited anything from me, it was being able to do what she chose to do and not care what people thought. I wish she were more street-smart.” Mari was trying hard to be philosophical, in her own way. “Sooner or later, things will catch up to a person. You do the best you can when you’re in that situation. And everything is meant to be. You cannot disrupt the order of life. You just can’t, because it’s gonna happen anyway. So you do the best you can. You roll with the punches. You get knocked down, you dust yourself off, you keep going.”

By then even Sherre had lost patience with Mari. They didn’t speak over most of the summer. “I think my mom’s a hater,” she said one afternoon in a park near her home in Ellenville. “She’s lost a lot of her friends. She’s closing herself off from people. We’ve always had our ups and downs, but it’s gotten much worse since Shannan’s been gone.” Sherre spent much of her time carefully vetting all the coverage of the case, protesting whenever anyone used the word
prostitute
to describe her sister.
This wasn’t the life she wanted,
she wrote in a message to friends.
The world can’t see if she would’ve changed, what her life may have become . . . Before you judge her or judge us, make sure your life is perfect because none of our lives are!
Privately, Sherre didn’t spare herself any criticism. “I just feel bad because I never really tried to stop her. I never talked about it with her.”

Despite staying active online, Sherre felt isolated. Not talking to Mari meant having fewer people with whom to mourn Shannan. Even before she vanished, Shannan had such an ephemeral place in her family’s world—living at home on and off, making such foreign choices—that Sherre couldn’t stop wondering, almost in an endless loop, what might have made her sister’s life so different from her own. “I just feel like Shannan always wanted to be loved,” she said, fighting back tears. “And she never felt like that. And I think her doing what she did, it was something that she didn’t really care about. You know how you’re supposed to cherish your body? Maybe if she felt loved. But I don’t think she did.”

What seems to hurt Sherre and Mari the most—the complaint they share with Missy and Lorraine and Kim and Lynn—is the way the police’s theory of the case blamed Shannan at the exclusion of everyone else. Joe Brewer was still a free man. So was Michael Pak, who, as her driver, posted her calls, which to some made him a de facto pimp. Why was Shannan the only one to answer for what happened that night? Murder or no murder, Shannan and all of the others were failed by the criminal-justice system not once but three times. The police had failed to help them when they were at risk. They’d failed again when they didn’t take the disappearances seriously, severely hobbling the chances of making an arrest. And they’d failed a third time by not going after the johns and drivers. Sherre and Mari know that no matter what happened in Oak Beach, Shannan’s profession had sealed her fate. Even before she disappeared, she ceased to matter.

Alex Diaz said he hadn’t been able to get and stay with a girl since he lost Shannan. “It’s always in the back of my head. I want to know what happened to her. It’s kind of hard to move on, not knowing.” He got a straight job, earning three hundred dollars a week as a dispatcher for a valet company. Michael Pak, still living in Queens, said he’d gotten a job, too, though he wouldn’t say where.

Alex’s life was further complicated by the way he was perceived by people aware of Shannan’s case. “The media tried to make it seem like I’m a pimp,” he said, “because they found out I didn’t have a job. And the family used to trash me and say I was using her.”

Mari and her family were happy to let Alex twist in the wind. He was matter-of-fact when he defended himself, much the same way Blaze was when talking about Melissa Barthelemy. “If I was using her, you guys are just as guilty,” he said. “They knew what she was doing. And the mother would take the money, the sister would take the money. And they would judge me? You want to put me in that category, then we’re all bad people. We’re taking the money, and we know where it’s coming from.”

In the summer, Peter Hackett’s neighbors at Oak Beach noticed that his car had a brand-new set of Florida plates. The doctor spent much of the year on Sanibel Island in the Florida Keys. Back in December, Hackett had told me that had been the plan for some time. “I’ve been hurt so many times in my life that I’ve had to use the money to help my children with their habits—like eating,” he’d said sardonically. “You’ve caught me in the last couple of years of making sure my kids all grow up in the same place, have the same memories. Now I need to move somewhere warm so I won’t slip on the ice.”