Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  A half sister, Amanda Gove, went to the pulpit and started to speak but broke down in sobs. Greg came up to finish her speech, but he, too, was overwhelmed. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. Megan had the best heart of just about anybody I’ve ever met in my life. There isn’t a thing that girl wouldn’t do for anybody.”

  Since Amber disappeared in September, Kim had been a hard woman to find. She changed her cell number constantly, avoided voice mail and e-mail, rarely texted, and visited her Facebook account once every three or four months. All her children went for months without knowing where she was or if she was all right. Whenever Kim resurfaced, it was usually with a wink and a smile. “Ahm not off the grid,” she’d say in her North Carolina drawl. “Ahm just hard to track.”

  Kim had a way of starting practically every sentence with “Ahm not gonna lie.” She wouldn’t, to a point. She had a way of muddying the waters when it came to subjects that, seen clearly, revealed her more calculating side—like who tried the hardest to get Amber into rehab (that would be Dave Schaller), and why she might not have filed a police report about her sister’s disappearance (she didn’t want to get into trouble herself ), and what she did with Amber’s ashes once the remains came back to her (she wouldn’t say). None of this meant that Kim didn’t love Amber dearly or that she didn’t feel the loss. What many of Kim’s detractors—and there are many among Amber’s old friends—choose to ignore are Kim’s own demons, her own addictions. The only one who might have understood Kim’s troubles was her sister. And now, with Amber gone, there was nothing left for Kim to do but run—from the law, from the guilt, from herself.

  The news about the bodies on Gilgo Beach found Kim in North Carolina as she visited her father at a Wilmington nursing home. A friend called her cell phone: “Girl, you need to put on the news.” She couldn’t avoid the truth anymore. After months of dodging Dave Schaller’s calls, she had known it was only a matter of time before an ID came back positive. She called the Suffolk County police and arranged to send a swab of her own DNA. She came back to Long Island in January, in time for the funeral in Lindenhurst. The service had been arranged largely by Dave, who had received money from a local pastor to cover the burial.

  Kim took Amber’s ashes and the cash from the pastor and promised to bury them in Wilmington and have another service, but that never happened. Kim was in the wind again, answering no texts. Dave, who had gone through a round of rehab himself after Amber vanished and was living sober, suspected her of absconding with the money. So did Amber’s old childhood friend Melissa Wright, who contacted the funeral home and learned that Kim had picked up the ashes. Since then, she said, Kim had called saying her car had broken down. Kim asked Melissa to wire her some money to bring Amber’s remains to Wilmington. Melissa sent some cash. Years later, she was still waiting for Kim to come to Wilmington with her old friend’s ashes.

  The second Missy saw the news about Gilgo Beach, she knew that Maureen had to be one of them. That cell signal from Maureen’s phone registering on Fire Island in 2008 finally made sense.

  While waiting for a DNA match, Missy became desperate for something to do. Prowling the Web, she read a news story about Megan and found her mother, Lorraine, on Facebook. Weeks before either Maureen or Megan were confirmed as victims, Missy and Lorraine were talking on the phone every day—Missy, the younger of the two yet three years ahead in dealing with the loss. Missy wanted to tell Lorraine that the pain would go away. “But it doesn’t,” she said. “It gets harder as time goes by. And you’ve just got to know that it’s coming and be strong.”

  By the time all the victims had been identified in late January, Missy and Lorraine’s circle had widened to include Sherre and Mari; then Dawn, Melissa’s aunt; and Kim. The Web, which once facilitated their lost loved ones’ careers, now brought them all together. They convened on a memorial Facebook page that Mari had started for Shannan, where she posted several times a day with complaints about the press coverage and an occasional poem she’d written about her daughter (I hold onto nothing but my nightmares / That one day I can finally leave this place / I hold onto nothing but my dreams / That one day both of us will meet again). Missy started a similar page for Maureen and the other three Ocean Parkway victims. Lorraine dutifully went on Facebook every night after coming home from classes, posting throughout the day about everything she felt and thought (Lorraine just discovered who loves her today; Lorraine just discovered who missed her today; On this day, God wants you to know . . . ).

  On the phone and on Facebook, they searched for connections that might help the investigation: Were their daughters and sisters linked in some way? Did they know one another or have the same drivers? They pinged one another with daily affirmations, memorial videos, text message prayers, and curses at the press and the police. They stood by one another during the funerals. They held out hope that the visibility of the case meant it might be solved, the killer found.

  And they called one another in shock when the police found more victims.

  The police started up again on March 29, staking out a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of bramble and poison ivy along Ocean Parkway, from Oak Beach to the Nassau County line. The first day they found nothing. But the next day, a cop driving slowly down the parkway, scanning dunes flanking Cedar Beach, noticed something on the side of the road and stopped the car. Cadaver dogs had searched many times already, but there it was: a fifth.

  Again they thought it was Shannan, and again they were wrong. There was no titanium plate. Moreover, this set of remains was different from the first four—located a full mile from where the other bodies were found, and not on the edge of the bramble like the others but some thirty feet in from the highway. Dormer knew the search had to continue, but the method had to change. They needed to search the entire swath of bramble, even the parts too thick for a dog to penetrate. Where before the goal had been to search for clues around the grave sites, now they had to clear the brush entirely: If there was even one more body part in the fifteen-mile stretch of Ocean Parkway and beyond, they needed to find it.

  More police came—150 officers on loan from the state police, the state park police, the police from neighboring Nassau County, and a busload of police recruits. They brought fire trucks with long ladders extended out and over the brush. Some sat in the elevated buckets and peered down; others scratched themselves up in the bramble below, wearing gardening gloves and high boots, using shovels and tree clippers and chain saws to slice through the brush and poison ivy. Still others donned diving gear and searched underwater, back off the dunes to the south and along Oak Beach, taking turns in pairs in Hemlock Bay. The FBI sent a Black Hawk helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft to conduct flyovers with high-resolution cameras said to be able to clearly depict any object bigger than an inch—burlap, bones, signs of digging. Workers from the city medical examiner’s office were on standby to look over all findings, distinguishing the animal bones from the human.

  Five days later, on April 4, they found three more bodies. None of these was Shannan, either, and the new bodies also didn’t fit the initial pattern. They were deeper in the underbrush, weren’t wrapped in burlap, and had been left for a longer period of time. One was connected to a torso found a few years earlier farther out east in Manorville, Long Island. (The remains discovered on March 29 would also be linked to a torso found in Manorville, a twenty-year-old prostitute named Jessica Taylor killed in 2003.) Another wasn’t a woman at all but a man, small and Asian, with what appeared to be women’s clothes. Still another was a child, no bigger than a toddler, wrapped in a blanket. All the new finds were sent to New York City. This time the DNA analysis was complicated by the body parts having been found strewn about. Rather than taking one sample from each find, they had to take multiple samples, extracting DNA from any number of loose bones. Once that work was complete, they could make comparisons among the sets, then cross-check any matches against the FBI’s DNA database.


  That sort of work can take months. Dormer struggled to manage expectations. “Please keep in mind this is not an episode of CSI,” he fumed at a press conference. But reports circulated that Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, had given Dormer a month to clean out his desk and leave, supposedly for sharing too many details about the bodies: “the burlap bags, that the victims were all on Craigslist, that they were prostitutes,” a source told the Post. Levy was forced to issue a statement of support.

  Daily rotations of camera crews descended on Oak Beach again. The neighbors couldn’t believe it wasn’t over. Oak Beach became the site of vigils, press conferences, and impromptu searches. Even Brewer said he thought that Shannan would be found soon. “I really do believe she’s alive. What did she do? Just drop dead walking down the road?”

  Few people following the case chose to believe that the killer’s trail couldn’t be traced in some way. A photograph from a traffic-light camera, say, outside Amber’s place on America Avenue or where Maureen might have been picked up at Penn Station. A commuter on the Long Island Rail Road caught on video calling Melissa’s sister from midtown. A voice recording of any person of interest—Brewer, Pak, even Coletti—that Melissa’s sister could listen to and say whether it sounded like the man who had called her almost two years earlier.

  Online, in print, and on TV, no rumor went unaired. The killer knows the area like the back of his hand . . . He’s a local clammer, with lots of access to burlap . . . He’s a cop, or a retired cop, or a disgraced cop . . . He’s my husband (the last of which came from two different women). For a time, four victims of a killing spree in Atlantic City several years before seemed linked; one victim had even spent a few weeks on Long Island before she vanished. Dormer denied any connection. Then two NYPD officers, one active and one retired, were said to be under suspicion. Police denied those reports, too. It wasn’t clear whether one of them had been the john of Maureen’s that Missy had been told about. When the FBI filed an application seeking access to Akeem Cruz’s laptop, reporters speculated on what Vybe might know about Megan’s last night at the Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge and whether he could have killed them all; that theory fizzled when the police didn’t bite. Amber, too, seemed to have some potential suspects in her orbit: angry, ripped-off johns who had posted on Longislanderotic.com, lambasting her and her sister. Could the killer have been out for revenge?

  The phone calls to Amanda had been well covered in Buffalo in 2009, and the media circled back to Melissa’s family for more details. One reporter even reached Blaze, who, quoted by his given name, Johnny Terry, claimed he’d also received strange calls—about thirty, he said, over eight months—from someone he described as a “white guy.” “He was threatening me,” he said. “He said, ‘You liked to do some crazy stuff with Melissa. I know where you be at.’ ” The police traced the caller’s number not to Melissa’s cell but to a disposable phone registered in the name of Mickey Mouse.

  The search continued for weeks along the parkway, fanning westward toward Fire Island, the case warping into something beyond anyone’s capacity to understand. Mari Gilbert started to dread the ring of her phone, expecting each time to hear news of another body. When the police stopped calling altogether, she felt shunted aside. She lost her patience when a lead detective in the case, Richard Higgins, asked her not to talk to the press. “Channel 7 calls me before the police,” she said. “If you’re not going to do anything, I’m going to talk.” On April 6, on her front porch in Ellenville with Channel 2, she claimed that her persistence was the only reason the police kept searching for Shannan months after she was gone—and, she implied, the only thing that had brought the officer and his dog to Ocean Parkway. The next day she told the Times that Shannan, so complicated in life, was in death simply a hero: “If it wasn’t for my daughter, these bodies never would have been found. Everyone has their destiny. Maybe this was hers.” Soon Mari was fielding questions she wasn’t ready for. Asked if she thought police would find Shannan with the other bodies, Mari paused before answering, “She’s not there.” Asked where she thought Shannan might be, Mari couldn’t answer at all.

  Like Lorraine, Mari was straining to recast her relationship with her daughter; to make amends. Kim was doing the same for her sister. Without fanfare, the same day Mari was opining from her front porch, Kim drove into the Oak Beach parking lot, hoping to see all the sites she’d been seeing on TV—Joe Brewer’s house, Gus Coletti’s house, the water, the beach, the highway. It happened that Kim had turned up on a day when the police were ferrying photographers on a bus to take photos of the ongoing search along the parkway. Kim boarded the bus and was quickly recognized. The reporters welcomed her; the day’s story got that much better. When the bus stopped along the highway, Kim was disappointed by what she saw. To her, the whole thing seemed staged—two dozen cops walking through the bramble, as if on cue, just as the photographers arrived. The real search seemed to be happening somewhere else, farther down the road. Kim was frustrated, and when the police learned she was on the bus and got angry that she had been allowed on, that sent her over the edge. The video from Ocean Parkway that ran on the news that night was the sister of a Gilgo Beach victim leaving the scene in tears. “It’s sad,” Kim said on the air, “and I just wanted to get a chance to see where my sister was, but now I can’t. And that’s all I have to say.”

  Nothing about the family members held the media’s attention for long. Soon enough, reporters went back to monitoring the search for new bodies. When some tried widening the lens of the story—discussing the dangers faced every night by escorts, hearing from a litany of advocates and activists who wanted to decriminalize prostitution, lock up johns, or shut down Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage—that only angered Mari more. Shannan hadn’t even been found and was being held up as a poster child for the dangers of prostitution. Some of the frustration seeped out when Mari commented on an online story about Shannan:

  Shannan Maria Gilbert did NOT use any heavy drugs. She was a wonderful daughter, a best friend, a great sister, a special aunt, a good friend, and a nice cousin. What she chose to do takes NOTHING away from who she is to the people who love her . . .

  Reporters waiting for word from the police in the Oak Beach parking lot kept knocking on doors, trolling for rumors behind the gate. On April 9, the Post published a story about an unnamed “forty-eight-year-old drifter with a penchant for strippers” said to have been at Brewer’s house the night Shannan came out. The story ran a quote from the mother of the drifter, saying she thought her son had gone to Georgia. The police would continue to insist that Brewer was not a suspect.

  Brewer offered more details of his evening with Shannan, all of which conveniently absolved him of any wrongdoing. Not only did he have nothing to do with Shannan’s disappearance, now he was saying he hadn’t even wanted to sleep with her. He told the Newark Star-Ledger that he’d been turned off by Shannan when she asked if he’d ever “come across any transvestites” when hiring escorts. Brewer said the comment made him wonder if she had something to hide—if she was really a man, or used to be. “I wanted her out,” he said. That, he said, was when Shannan’s behavior turned “erratic.” “She saw things weren’t going as she had hoped,” he said. Of all the theories, only this one seemed too implausible for any other media outlet to pick up.

  On April 11, the body count jumped to ten. The police made two more discoveries along the parkway to the west in Nassau County. Just a mile and a half from Jones Beach, they found human bones in a plastic bag. Four hours later, a Suffolk cop and cadaver dog found a human skull—most likely a woman’s—in a wildlife sanctuary a mile away, west of Tobay Beach. Like Jessica Taylor’s, these bodies would eventually demonstrate links to other unsolved cases farther out on Long Island. The head, hands, and right foot of a Jane Doe found along Ocean Parkway would be linked to a female torso discovered in Manorville in 2000. The head of another woman was discovered to be from the same victim as a pair of se
vered legs discovered in a black plastic bag in April 1996, along Blue Point Beach on the bay side of Fire Island, about a mile west of Davis Park.

  The signature of these new finds didn’t seem the same. Unlike the women in burlap, these remains had been scattered. The district attorney, Thomas Spota, suggested for the first time that while the four bodies in burlap were linked, the others might have been murdered by someone else, or even several killers. “It is clear that the area in and around Gilgo Beach has been used to discard human remains for some period of time,” he said. “As distasteful and disturbing as that is, there is no evidence that all of these remains are the work of a single killer.” The police’s theory seemed to be changing. Gilgo Beach and its environs were, it seemed, a dumping ground, and more than one murderer was on the loose. Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber were one small part of a continuum of murder that stretched for miles and miles along the South Shore of Long Island, from Jones Beach out east to Manorville.

  Shannan was still missing, and the search continued. Nassau and state police officers with protective gear were using chain saws to cut through the bramble around Tobay and Jones Beach, clearing the land for helicopter flyovers. Suffolk was sending more divers around the docks and jetties on the bay and south sides of Oak Beach. If any casual observer still seemed fixated on a killer or killers, the victims seemed all but overlooked. “I think they look at them like they’re throwaway,” Mari told the Times. “They don’t care.” Her cause wasn’t helped when, at a public-safety hearing in Suffolk County in early May, Dormer’s chief of detectives, Dominick Varrone, called it a “consolation” that the killer didn’t appear to be “selecting citizens at large—he’s selecting from a pool.” The girls who used Craigslist, he said, “are very available, they’re very vulnerable, they’re willing to get into a car with a stranger.”