CONSPIRACIES
Joe Scalise, Jr., lives with his wife in a house at the far end of the Bayou, the long east-west road in Oak Beach that connects to the Hacketts’ street, Larboard Court. His father, Joe Sr., lives next door to Joe, and his sister, Dawn, is nearby, too, in a house with her husband. Together, they’ve assembled a little compound. Still stinging from the association’s attempt to oust the whole family in the nineties, the Scalises do their best not to mingle with most of their neighbors.
Joe’s father first bought a bungalow in Oak Beach in 1971, when the taxes, including association fees, were under a thousand a year. Services like sanitation and power were spotty at best in the winter, and most people flew the coop in the colder months. Today each house in the neighborhood pays about twenty thousand dollars a year in taxes, and the association fees are close to $3,800. What hasn’t changed, according to Joe Sr., is the way the people of Oak Beach feel entitled to more than their share of privacy. “The interesting thing about Oak Beach,” he told me, “is within that gate, it’s like its own little country. You can do anything you want behind that gate.”
Since Shannan’s disappearance the previous May, Joe and his father have stood in disgust at the behavior of their neighbors, at the indignation over the investigation, as if they were only being threatened by the backflow of traffic clogging the quiet streets. Both the elder and younger Scalise were accustomed to feeling disgusted with Oak Beach. They would be the first to admit harboring a grudge against many of their neighbors for years—at least those who voted to have them drummed out. Come April, they watched as Hackett denied Mari’s claim that he’d called her, and they watched Barbara Hackett deny it, too. For the Scalises, who had been listening carefully to every rumor floating around the neighborhood for the past year, their neighbors’ paranoia made more sense: The killer, the Scalises said, was one of their own.
Neither Joe nor his father had ever liked Peter Hackett. He was friendly with Gus Coletti, who had led the charge against them. Beyond that, Joe and his father thought the doctor was a strange guy. “He’s a wannabe cop,” Joe Sr. said. Father and son heard a rumor that Hackett would offer neighbors a deal to be their doctor for life for twenty thousand dollars. Joe Jr. remembered the way Hackett used to tell people about a supposedly surefire way to ace a lie-detector test—by pressing a tack into your hand or foot each time you answer truthfully, giving the machine a faulty baseline to work off of when you lie. Joe Sr. remembered one night when there was a jumper on one of the bridges over the Great South Bay. “I get there, and there’s Peter Hackett saying, ‘I got this, Joe.’ He must have been listening to the scanner.”
Once they heard the reports on the news that Hackett might have called Mari Gilbert and said he’d helped Shannan, a lightbulb went off. Joe Scalise and his father became convinced that their neighbors had been covering up for a friend. They had no proof, of course. And Hackett repeatedly denied having ever seen Shannan. But Joe Jr. was offering Mari and the victims’ families something every bit as powerful as proof: unfettered testimony from an Oak Beach insider. In late June, two months after Mari started pointing her finger at Hackett, Joe Jr. made his debut as the self-appointed Deep Throat of the Long Island serial-killer case. Using the pseudonym Flukeyou, Joe posted close to a hundred times on Longislandserialkiller.com over the next several months.
The Dr. is a true psychopath!!!!!! He’s been flying under the radar for years and has a whole pack of loyal followers inside the community. These are really sick people! There are only 72 houses in the association . . . everyone knows everyone’s business and there is definitely something going on with the Dr!!!
One morning after a volley of e-mails and phone calls, I drove out to Oak Beach to visit with Joe and his father and hear them make their case against Hackett in person. The younger Joe is tall, handsome, and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and dark eyes. In his thirties, he works from home mostly as a financial consultant. His father has the tanned, leathered skin of a year-round beach resident; he still supervises the Jones Beach lifeguards every summer. “There are seventy-two houses here,” the younger Joe told me over coffee in his airy kitchen. “There’s about twenty-five people that are totally uninvolved, twenty-five that are in bed with Hackett, and about twenty-five that are, you know, free-thinking normal people that will go, ‘What’s going on here?’ ”
The Scalises are used to gossip. In their view, everyone is suspect. Joe Brewer is a slob, a party animal, out of control. Gus Coletti is a toady for the association, forever tainted in their eyes. And Peter Hackett? Over coffee, Joe Jr. unspooled his suspicions and theories, all as vividly and elaborately worked out as they were colored by his hatred for the man. He noted how Shannan and Joe Brewer had left the house briefly toward the start of their date, and that while no one knows where they went, he assumes, like a lot of people following the case, that they went to get drugs. Hackett, as a doctor already well known for treating his neighbors, would be—according to Joe Jr.—an ideal resource for anyone in the neighborhood who wanted a prescription. Hackett didn’t seem to have a job at all, hadn’t for years. Maybe he could use the money. What if Hackett sold drugs to all the teenagers, too? What if Hackett was Brewer’s connection that night? And what if it wasn’t the first time?
All through the summer after Shannan disappeared, Joe Jr. said he’d been hearing scuttlebutt from the neighborhood that when Shannan pounded on Barbara Brennan’s door, Barbara didn’t just call the police. She called a neighbor named Tom Canning, another active member of the association, and then Canning called Hackett, which would have put Hackett in a position to help Shannan, just as Mari said he professed. It made sense that neighbors would have called Hackett because of the role he’d always played at Oak Beach. He was even listed in the Oak Beach phone directory as the “medical director” of the defibrillator the community kept on-site. For anyone looking for evidence that Tom Canning had been involved that morning, they needed only to look in the Post a few days after police found the bodies in burlap, to see his son, Justin Canning, talking about the scene with a lot of familiarity. “She was in a panic,” Justin said. “We thought she was on drugs.”
In the Scalises’ theory of that night, Hackett wasn’t merely a Good Samaritan who tried to help Shannan and then was left with a body on his hands. Joe Jr. believed Shannan wasn’t the first girl to get caught up in a party gone bad at Oak Beach, and he believed Hackett was one of the hosts that no one knew about. “Shannan was hunted down that night,” he said. “These games have been going on at Oak Beach for years.” He said he believed Hackett had killed the other four girls, and that Shannan was the one who’d almost tripped him up. He said Hackett’s neighbors were in on it, and as proof, he mentioned a recent report about a black escort whom police found running down a highway on Long Island, saying she was part of a drug- and sex-trafficking ring and that people were trying to kill her. According to the Long Island Press, the woman spent some time in Nassau University Medical Center’s psych ward before being released. “I’ve lived there my whole life, and for a girl to disappear, something happened,” Joe Jr. said. “It’s not a satanic cult. But there’s a lot of shit that’s not kosher about Oak Beach.”
There was barely enough time to digest everything before Joe and his dad offered to show me where they thought the doctor got rid of the bodies. We got into Joe Jr.’s car and slipped up the Bayou to Larboard Court, stopping outside the Hackett cottage. Joe noted how close the doctor’s place was to Barbara Brennan’s house; then he noted that Hackett’s house was right up against the edge of an enormous marsh. This marsh, Joe and his father said, was where they thought Shannan was now. The police hadn’t searched there yet, despite how close the marsh was to where Shannan was last seen. The Scalises thought her body might be there because of the way they said Hackett reacted when he’d heard that the marsh would be drained as part of a mosquito-abatement project. “They wanted to dredge all back in the wetlands,” Joe Jr. said. “If you
Google Map it, it looks like a giant bathtub with one major artery that runs through it and a bunch of off-sprits. And one of those runs right to the back of Hackett’s house.”
Joe Jr.’s sister had led the movement to dig out and restore the marsh. The board didn’t know about the project, Joe said, until his sister told them. “Peter Hackett starts calling my sister, asking, ‘When are they gonna be digging?’ ” This, he said, was just a few weeks before—“lo and behold,” Joe Sr. said—the four bodies were discovered on the side of Ocean Parkway.
They had more to show me. Joe drove down Anchor’s Way—the street Shannan is believed to have run down from Coletti’s house to Brennan’s—and stopped at a pair of storage sheds about a hundred yards from Hackett’s house, near what used to be a tennis court. From the car, Joe pointed toward the marsh again, then the sheds. “If the bodies weren’t behind Hackett’s house,” he said, “then he was storing them right back here.” Both sheds were empty now. But the Scalises believed that as soon as Hackett learned the marsh would be drained, risking the discovery of Shannan’s body, he had to take action and dispose of the four girls in burlap he had hidden in the shed near his house.
Why just four bodies? I wondered. As long as Joe Jr. was saying Hackett killed them all, why wouldn’t Shannan have been in the shed, too? Because, Joe explained, the attack on Shannan hadn’t gone as planned. There wasn’t enough time. She’d gone running, and people had seen her, and the police had come. After the chaos that early morning, she’d ended up in the marsh. Joe imagined that Hackett probably thought no one could possibly find her there—until the mosquito project was announced.
Ever since the morning Shannan had vanished, Joe and his father assumed that Hackett had been working to cover his tracks. They believed that Hackett had erased the security video. They thought that he was tipped to the search by his next-door neighbor, a Suffolk County cop. And they thought the doctor started acting especially guilty afterward. “Peter’s a showboater,” said Joe Jr. “He can’t help himself. Which is why, if he wasn’t involved in this, this would be his great moment. His big chance to catch a serial killer.” In other words, the fact that Hackett had shied away from the limelight was, to the Scalises, at least, only further proof that he was hiding something.
We drove out of the gate, down the access road, and over to the far side of the parking lot to the old community center built by the Reverend John Dietrich Long, the building where the association holds its meetings. Next to the community center was a driveway, a direct egress to Ocean Parkway. The Scalises said that anyone in Oak Beach could have driven four bodies out via the driveway without ever being caught on the gatehouse security video. Only a few people had a key to the lock on the metal chain securing the driveway. The Scalises said that Hackett—the self-appointed emergency-preparedness expert of Oak Beach—was one of those people.
“Once you pop out through this thing,” said Joe Sr., “you can actually make a left across the parkway, and you’ll be almost to the dump sites.”
The problem with conspiracy theories is what they don’t say. Mull over any theory long enough, and suddenly, everything you see around you is proof. Aside from the fact that an astonishing number of neighbors would have had to be in on it, one of the biggest problems with the Scalises’ theory is the simple lack of corroboration. Aside from Mari and Sherre, no one, except one CBS radio reporter, who didn’t have a direct quote, had stepped forward to confirm hearing Hackett say he saw Shannan that night or tried to help her.
It would have been no exaggeration to say that ever since the first reports surfaced, every reporter working on the serial-killer story had been trying to find someone who had heard Hackett say he saw her. No one had found a thing. The closest I came myself was hearing from a private investigator, working briefly on behalf of a supporter of the families, who said that “everyone was calling Hackett” the morning Shannan disappeared. This investigator had gleaned this not by looking at phone records, which only the police possessed, but through interviews. Maybe everyone really was calling Hackett that morning. Or maybe everyone was repeating the same gossip that the Scalises had heard.
During my visit, the Scalises said they’d finally found the corroboration everyone was looking for. Joe Jr. said that one morning not long after Shannan vanished, an Oak Beach neighbor named Bruce Anderson had been standing near the front gate, talking with Coletti and Hackett, when Hackett said, “I was the last one to see her alive.” The doctor then apparently told Bruce and Gus that he’d sedated Shannan and she’d stayed inside his house for a short time. When she was conscious, around seven in the morning, he said, he put her in Michael Pak’s car.
If Bruce really had heard Hackett say this—and if it all really happened that way—then Hackett had harbored Shannan inside his home on Larboard Court, sedated, at the same time when the police responded to the 911 call. Hackett, the theory goes, must have known from his neighbors that the police were on their way.
After my visit with the Scalises, I reached Bruce Anderson at his second home in Florida to ask him directly. “Doc Hackett is a very strange individual,” he said. Without my prompting, he told me what he’d heard—or thought he’d heard. “Hackett was telling everybody, including Gilbert’s mother, that he found her that morning, gave her that sedative, he has a home for wayward girls in his house, and that she left the next day.”
At the very least, Bruce had been hearing a lot of the same things that the Scalises had heard. What wasn’t clear was whether he’d heard them straight from Hackett’s mouth. I asked Bruce: Did he ever personally hear Hackett say anything about seeing or treating Shannan that morning?
“No, not personally heard him,” he said, “but I heard through other people that he said it. And then I got talking with a couple of the detectives, and they said that he told the mother that.”
Once again, an echo chamber: First Mari says Hackett called her, then the police tell neighbors about her claim, and then neighbors come away believing it.
As Bruce kept talking, he suggested that the police had more of an interest in Hackett than Dormer had ever let on. “The cops caught wind of this,” he said, “and brought him in for questioning, and after a few hours he said, ‘Well, I just said that.’ ”
Why would he just say it?
“He makes up a lot of stories,” Bruce replied. “All kinds of crazy stuff, he makes up. So people say, ‘Oh, that’s just Peter, he wants to be a big shot.’ ”
And how did Bruce know that the police were looking into Hackett?
“Because they came door-to-door, saying, ‘How well do you know this guy Peter Hackett?’ ” Bruce said. “And I said to them, ‘You know, I wave to the guy, he waves back. I really don’t socialize with the guy.’ I heard through the grapevine he’s a wacko. There’s enough wackos in Oak Beach. I don’t know if it’s the salt air or the water. One of the locals told me it was the water.”
Bruce had revealed something about the doctor and the police’s suspicions. But he hadn’t confirmed hearing anything directly from Hackett about seeing Shannan. When I circled back to Joe Jr., he said he wasn’t surprised that Bruce had denied hearing anything firsthand. Like everyone else in Oak Beach, he said, Bruce didn’t want publicity. He was careful. His wife had panicked when the police came to talk to him. He didn’t want to be known as the neighbor responsible for fingering Hackett.
All that really mattered, Joe said, was that Bruce had told Mari everything. Joe had arranged the phone call himself, sometime after my visit. Thanks to Joe and Bruce, Mari felt she had confirmation that the doctor had said what he said, even if the police didn’t seem to care. If nothing else, Mari was relieved. Before speaking with Bruce, she said, she had begun to wonder if she had dreamed up the whole thing.
Gus Coletti spent much of his time sitting on the porch of his two-story house on the Fairway, down the road and around the corner from the Scalise family, watching for strange cars coming through the Oak Beach gate. He and his wif
e, Laura, have lived in Oak Beach for thirty years. They bought their bungalow for twenty-two thousand dollars, and they used it as a summer home while Gus spent eight years building it up. He hired an engineering company to put in a foundation. Then he rewired the house and had the plumbing done. He replaced the windows and doors, added a room, redid the bathroom, and insulated the whole thing. By the time he added siding and replaced the roof, he’d spent more renovating the place than he would have if he’d knocked it down and built a new one.
The longer he stayed, the richer he and Laura got, at least on paper. A few years ago, they were offered $850,000 for their house. Gus wasn’t ready to sell. It might have been the wrong decision. Now he didn’t think he could get $500,000 for it. He got slammed twice: first by the economy, then by Shannan Gilbert and the bodies on Gilgo Beach. Two houses that were already sold, the buyers had backed out. Now they were both in court. One of the sellers refused to return the deposit: Where in the contract did it say that dead bodies nullified the deal?
In his golden years, Gus had indulged his two great loves: restoring old cars and caring for pigeons. On the wall of his little living room, amid photos of his five grandchildren, was a plaque in his honor, bestowed by the Nassau Suffolk Pigeon Fanciers Club: For your untiring efforts throughout the years. (Gus is the president of the club.) Now that Oak Beach has become a possible crime scene, Gus remains the only neighbor who saw anything and is willing to talk. He’s old. His story changes, the details shift: exactly when Shannan came to his door, whether he called 911 while she was there or after, whether he went to the front gate as soon as she ran away or waited a bit. What didn’t change, in every telling, was that Gus behaved nobly. He talked to Shannan. He tried to help her. He even let her into his house—something Mari didn’t believe was true, based on the excerpts of the 911 call that the police shared with her. Gus pointed to where she stood: a swath of carpet in front of a woodburning fireplace. There hadn’t been much room for her to go beyond that. Gus said that when Shannan was there, Laura had been sleeping on the lower level, to recover from a knee replacement.
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