It was bright but cold and windy when the reporters and camera crews started rolling into the parking lot. Kritzia joined the others, a good distance away from the media. Michele Kutner, the girls’ biggest Facebook fan, was with them, telling everyone that there was no way Shannan just drowned. She and two others had spent a few days determining the exact site of each victim, then marking each location with spray paint on the side of Ocean Parkway so that they could erect four crosses before the vigil. Each family made their own except Kim. Melissa Wright in Wilmington made a beautiful white cross for Amber and had it shipped there for the occasion.
As they all waited for Mari, they were crying, embracing, and marveling at the coincidence. The reporters, watching from a distance, weren’t quite as amazed. They’d been coming to Oak Beach for a long time, and cynicism was taking over. “I can’t believe they’re doing all this for a whore,” said one member of a TV crew.
Kim turned up, too, as promised. She brought a friend, a woman who was helping her stay sober. But she had dark circles under her eyes, and the tears never stopped flowing. When Missy saw Kim, they hugged, but then Missy looked at her like she was a dead woman walking.
Gus Coletti came by. Michele Kutner broke away from comforting the families and gave him a hug. “Where’s Hackett?” she said.
“He’s in my living room,” Gus said.
Kutner took that to mean that Hackett was hiding from reporters. But a little while later, Hackett came out, too. Kutner went over to him. “Thank God they found her. Aren’t you happy?” she said.
“Yeah,” Hackett said, smiling a little. “You guys thought I did it.”
Michele saw his hands shaking.
Finally, Mari arrived, wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses, her blond hair flowing. She locked into an embrace with Missy and Lorraine as the camera crews closed in on them.
Kim refused to get up with the other three. “I’m not doing that shit,” she said. “I fuckin’ hate these people. I’m here for my sister.”
Soon there wasn’t room for her, anyway. The other three were frozen in their hug for minutes on end as the reporters crushed in, snapping away. A minute or two later, they gathered behind a collection of microphones, Mari in the center, Missy to her left in a plaid flannel jacket, Lorraine to her right in a blue parka. Mari’s arms were around the others, clutching them for support. There was more media today than ever before—more than the June balloon release, more than any of Mari’s guerrilla attacks on Oak Beach.
Mari spoke. “First of all, I’d like to say this is a sad but yet happy moment. Today marks the one-year anniversary that the bodies were found, and I want to be here to support the families and to be with them. And as much as today may be Shannan, it’s not just Shannan. It’s all of us. Every one of us and our families and friends and everyone that was affected by this.” She trailed off. “It’s too hard,” she finally added. “I can’t even talk. I don’t even have words to say how I’m feeling right now.” Then she looked to either side, at Missy and Lorraine. “But I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Missy. They all hugged.
“Don’t be sorry,” said Lorraine. “Like we told you, Mari, don’t ever be sorry.”
“And just like you’re here to support our girls,” said Missy, “we’re here to support Shannan. And we’ve been here since the day that we found out that Shannan was a part of our girls. And we won’t ever leave. Please believe that.”
The three embraced again.
The reporters were surrounding them, video cameras in the back, photographers down low in front. When the embrace lasted longer than a few seconds, the reporters took that to mean it was time for questions. The first question was the one everyone wanted to ask: “Do you believe it was an accident?”
“No, no,” Mari said, running a hand through her hair. “I will not believe that, for the simple fact that Shannan was a strong woman.”
The next questions baited Mari into unloading on the police, and she was more than happy to oblige. She wondered why the police seemed so certain it wasn’t murder when they hadn’t even conducted an autopsy. And she blasted the entire investigation as too little too late. She ripped into the 911 call again—the time it took the police to come after her call. “I believe that when she was initially reported missing that they didn’t care. They treated her like her ‘job’ and not as a person and as a human being. And I think if they started to search early and continued it longer than they did the first time, we would have found her sooner, and this case would be so much further ahead than it is.”
Another question, posed tentatively by a reporter in the back: “Is there any thought that this guy is . . . uh . . . is still . . . doing it? I mean—”
Lorraine spoke up. “I almost a hundred percent guarantee that this man is sitting in his home right now, watching what is going on on the TV, getting the biggest thrill of his life, seeing what he has done to these families.”
There was one last question. “Mari, if the autopsy proves the police’s theory”—if it indicated that she’d fallen and drowned, as opposed to sustaining any obvious wounds—“do you feel like Shannan had a purpose to solve this case?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Mari said. “She brought loved ones home.”
“She brought us together,” said Missy. “Because this is our family, you know? Our bond.”
A few police cars led an SUV filled with family members to visit the sites along Ocean Parkway where the bodies were found. Counting Kritzia, at least one person who knew and loved each of the girls had come to visit the crosses. Mari came, too. On the way there, it was lost on none of them that they were tracing the killer’s route and making the same stops.
These were their only few minutes alone, without the media on top of them. In the car, Mari was subdued, fuming about everything that she’d been put through, and now this. She whispered that there was no way Shannan had died by accident.
Missy asked Kim, “Where’ve you been?”
Kim’s answer chilled her: “I’m trying to catch our girls’ killer.” Missy didn’t know what to say after that.
Kritzia went to work on her. “I know you think this is never going to happen to you,” she told Kim, “because you think you know what you’re doing, but guess what, your sister thought like that, too.” Kim just looked at her.
At each stop, they crouched down in the bramble, laid flowers, and tied a bright red heart-shaped balloon. Missy was the only one who didn’t cry. She’d been there for two days, and mourned her sister for four and a half years, and was all cried out. Not so for Kritzia; when she saw Melissa’s cross, she threw herself to the ground. “Get up,” Lorraine said. “What are you doing? Get up.”
When Kritzia finally stood up and looked around, something clicked. This stretch of Ocean Parkway was like a little netherworld. Nobody lived there, and there were no stores. It was the perfect place to dump a body: no signs, no streetlights. That was why he felt so confident that he could throw the bodies right there, she thought, right in the street.
Call Joe Jr. biased, call him vindictive, but he had been right all along about the marsh. As Flukeyou, he spent the next several days crowing about it online. They found Shannan’s personal items right behind the doc’s house, he wrote.
The Hackett theories abounded on Websleuths. Some commenters said he was completely innocent. Others said he was a calculated killer who called Mari after the murder in order to lull her into a false sense of security and give his partners more time to hide the body. Others split the difference, saying Hackett was just a patsy who tried to respond to a hysterical, incoherent girl, and when Shannan panicked and ran into the brush behind the house, he was left with her belongings and forced to stash them in the marsh. Still others said he gave her a sedative that interacted badly with the drugs she’d taken earlier, leaving Hackett with a corpse on his hands.
Now Joe Jr. was waiting for the police to connect the dots to Hackett, saying it was only a matter of time
before the police had him in cuffs. They only get one shot at this punk in court, he posted, so they’re taking their time to build a case. He built new theories all the time online, as Flukeyou. Shannan was placed there after she died . . . They can put a man on the moon, but take eighteen months to find a girl in a field? . . . Barbara H was not home the morning that SG disappeared . . .
The day after the vigil, Mari was in anguish. Not knowing hurts but knowing really hurts!! she posted in Shannan’s Facebook group. As Missy, Lorraine, and others tried to support her, Mari worried about what the autopsy might reveal. She started doing damage control preemptively. If there are any chemicals in Shannan’s body, and if they are NOT “street” drugs, then who gave what to her? She called the cops “liars or stupid,” concluding, I KNOW Shannan WAS Murdered!!!! And she made a pledge: Shannan will have Justice AND so will Maureen—Megan—Melissa—Amber!! If NOT by $ than by they way the SCPD CHANGE how they treat escorts!!!!
Two days later, she was even madder. F Dormer!!!!!!!!!! she wrote. Let me go running, and see how fast my jeans fall off my body!! Give me a F*in Break!!!
On Facebook, Mari posted an illustration of Jesus holding a photograph of Shannan. Others in her group posted photos of Shannan as an angel, and angels holding Shannan, and Shannan ascending to heaven. Johanna Gonzalez got a new tattoo of an eye, modeled after one of Shannan’s wide anime eyes. Another friend suggested that Mari could be the next John Walsh. Still another called her “Mama Mari.”
A week after the body was found, Mari convened another press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. Dormer, days from retirement, shrugged when he was told about it. “The thing’ll never die down,” he said.
Mari asked all her friends to wear blue in honor of Shannan. When she emerged from her car, she was head to toe in bluish-purple velour. Another car pulled up with her, and out stepped Mari’s new lawyer, a Long Island plaintiff’s attorney named John Ray. A notorious dandy, Ray was wearing a derby hat and a plaid vest with a matching suit and a long plaid overcoat. As a final flourish, he was carrying a gnarled corkscrew-shaped shillelagh. Following Ray’s sartorial lead, his younger associate was wearing a well-tailored brown suit with his own matching derby.
Ray’s remarks were stagey, almost Sharpton-esque, designed for maximum impact. He likened the Suffolk homicide squad to something out of Mayberry, and Dormer’s investigation to a Pink Panther movie. He said the police had dropped the ball with Shannan from the very start. He tore into the 911 call. He said that it didn’t matter if the autopsy said she’d drowned—who had drowned her?
As he talked, his associate circulated copies of a letter Ray had sent the police on behalf of Mari Gilbert and the other victims’ families. The letter called upon the police to hand the case, which Ray considered hopelessly botched, to the FBI. It closed by saying that if the FBI didn’t take over the case, Mari would sue.
Then Mari spoke. Her sentences were clear and short, perfect newspaper quotes. “Ask yourself what you would do if this was your daughter,” she said. She was more composed than she’d been the day they’d found Shannan. Now she was resolved, a crusader. She took just one question: Did she believe Shannan was a victim of the serial killer? “Yes,” she said, her head jerking forward.
The news crews were breaking down their equipment and packing when Gus Coletti pulled up in his car. He was ready to shoot the breeze with reporters, as usual. Before he could get out, Joe Jr. approached the driver’s side of the car and started screaming into Gus’s face. “You’re the mayor of Oak Beach! There were two 911 calls that night! Why didn’t you save the security tape!”
It was quite a sight: young, handsome Joe, completely unhinged, shrieking at a stooped old man, sitting in a car. Mari’s lawyer was upstaged. The news crews rushed over. Joe kept shouting. Gus gave as good as he got: “The only thing wrong with Oak Beach is you!”
Gus couldn’t drive off—there were too many people around it—but he made a show of pulling out his cell phone and calling the police. “I don’t have to put up with that,” he grumbled.
Joe was still yelling as the reporters followed him. “What are you gonna do now, Mayor? Are you gonna do your poor-little-old-man act? You’re the mayor of Oak Beach! What about that tape! Why are you covering up for the doctor!”
Missy Cann watched the press conference on the Web from her home in Connecticut. She had trouble understanding what she was watching. All she’d known ahead of time was that Mari was going to announce she had a new lawyer. “He hasn’t talked to any of us,” she said.
Mari had acted unilaterally. None of the other families had been told a thing about her new legal strategy. No one had shown them the letter to the police that John Ray supposedly had written on their behalf. The request to get the FBI involved particularly threw Missy. “The FBI already is assisting. If Suffolk County wasn’t doing their job, the FBI would have already stepped in.” Missy thought criticizing the police was a misguided strategy—that the police knew more about the case than they were letting on, and for all anyone knew, they might not be bungling it at all. The best guess Missy could make was that the tactic was just a lot of posturing. “It’s a little premature. I’d have waited until the autopsy came back before I said this.”
Once John Ray’s office passed Missy a copy of the letter, she became furious. “ ‘On behalf of the sex worker murder victims’?” she said a few weeks later, quoting the letter. “So Shannan is Shannan, and the other girls are sex workers? I never talk to that man for a day, and he’s working on behalf of my sister?” She couldn’t believe what Mari had done, how she had decided to stick a thumb in the eye of the people investigating the case. The police, Missy said, arrived ten or twenty minutes after Barbara Brennan called, not counting Shannan’s call as the start of the response time. “They did way better than the police did for us or the other girls. She should be a little grateful.” If you thought about it, she said, Shannan had more resources than any of the other girls. She’d been treated better, too. “They didn’t bring anything of Maureen’s belongings to my mom or me to look at.”
Missy had been holding her tongue for a while about Mari: her volatility, her vanity, her need to fight everyone who threatened to pull attention away from her. Now she was unburdening herself. She made a crack about Mari’s “groupies” on Facebook, winding Mari up, feeding her ego, egging her on. She called them all “yes-men” and suggested that any dissent ended with being punished—banishment from the group. “We have to walk around eggshells around her, too,” Missy said, “which is kind of bullshit. Me and Lorraine have been avoiding her. She changes her theories more than anyone. I just try to be as supportive as I can be and go on my way. ’Cause Mari’s the type of person who, if you disagree with her, she starts blasting you to everyone.”
She was fed up. “Six days after Shannan is found, she gets this lawyer and goes on TV? I was talking to Lorraine, and she said, ‘Sorry, but she does not act like a grieving mother.’ When my mom found out, my mom talked to nobody. I felt the same way. I guess everyone’s different, but I know I would have waited for my daughter’s autopsy before saying anything. And then she switches and said she thinks Shannan is part of the serial-killer case? I think she just wants attention for Shannan. That’s so sad. I’d rather just know it was an accident.”
Her voice had flattened as she spoke. She was so immersed in every detail of the case that stoicism had set in. For Missy, all the questions that obsessed other people about Shannan’s disappearance were not quite so mysterious. Of course Shannan died accidentally, she said. Of course she wasn’t connected to the others. “I definitely don’t think Shannan got murdered by the same serial killer,” she said. After repeating some of Dormer’s arguments—none of the other girls had drivers; they didn’t have anyone with them—she added one more: the time line of the murders. Shannan went missing after Maureen and Melissa but before Megan and Amber. If the killer got Shannan, too, Missy said, “she would have got placed in the same place
, in burlap bags.” The theory that the killer changed up his pattern for Shannan—pressured by her attention-getting dash through Oak Beach—didn’t hold water with her.
The thickness of the brush, she suggested, could be why Shannan took off her jeans—“because they were weighing her down,” she said. “You’d be surprised what a person would do to survive.” Besides, she added, “I don’t think anyone could put her body where it was.”
Missy didn’t necessarily agree there was a police screwup in Shannan’s case. The 911 call had jurisdictional problems; things like that just happen. “I’m sorry, but I think this is ridiculous. They couldn’t search that area because it was engulfed with water at that time. They couldn’t bring dogs in. I think they did the best that they could, given the situation. They treated Shannan as their own separate case, which was good. And then they worked on the serial-killer case. But when they found these girls, they didn’t just forget about Shannan. They just kept looking.”
If Shannan’s death had been an accident or a crazy coincidence, Missy thought the serial killer was a john who was a regular to all four of the girls. “I think that he knew them, gave them trust,” she said. “Amber was very experienced in that field, and she obviously knew this person very well. She let her guard down.”
What upset Missy more than anything was the disagreement between Dormer and Spota. “It makes you wonder how close they are to catching this guy if they don’t know if it’s one or more killers.” The only certainty, she said, was that the first four girls to be found were connected. Until someone could prove to Missy that Shannan was connected, too, she said, she’d believe the police and not Mari.
As a new year began, the disagreement created a schism—Mari and her Facebook followers in one camp, Missy and Lorraine in another. Missy started planning Stunts 4 Justice, a stunt-bike show, in collaboration with the old motorcycle club of her late brother, Will, to raise money for the Crimestoppers reward for the case. She scrambled to get local DJs to attend. She wanted to raise five thousand dollars. As soon as it was announced, Mari made it known that she was hurt that only the four girls’ names were being mentioned in the publicity, not Shannan’s.
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