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.
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 onl
y 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.”
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