Case 354: The Gilgo Beach Serial Killings (Part 1/2)

[Part 1 of 2] *** Content warnings: Sexual assault, rape, femicide *** In the late 2000s, women started going missing after travelling to Long Island, New York. Initially, their disappearances were only noticed by their families, but when a fifth victim named Shannan Gilbert went missing on May 1 2010, the search for her would reveal a series of horrific crimes… --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Erin Munro Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/case-354-the-gilgo-beach-serial-killings-part-1-2 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  In the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, December 11, 2010, 59-year-old Officer John Malia made his way to Ocean Parkway, a 15-and-a-half-mile, four-lane highway that stretches along Long Island in the state of New York. Initially designed to be a pleasure drive due to its sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean and South Eastern Bay, the highway provides access to the area's beaches and barrier islands that run parallel to the South Shore. But Officer Malia wasn't there for recreational purposes. A young woman had gone missing in the nearby neighborhood of Oak Beach more than six months earlier, and no trace of her

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  had been found. A month after she first went missing, the Suffolk County Police Department's Missing Persons Bureau asked Officer Malia, a 31-year veteran of the force, to search for the woman with his partner, a seven-year-old German Shepherd named Blue. Officer Malia had trained Blue as a pup, teaching him to be a cadaver dog. Missing persons cases often served as ideal training exercises for cadaver dogs, who were taught to identify the scent of human remains and notify their handlers of their discovery. Officer Malia and Blue had searched Oak Beach together throughout the summer months of 2010, focusing mainly

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  on the southern side of Ocean Parkway. It hadn't been an easy task. Parts of the terrain were thorny with brambles. Blue had sustained scratches while searching the overgrown area, parts of which were too dense for him to enter. There was poison ivy growing there as well, which gave Officer Malia a rash. The two persisted despite the unpleasant conditions and the fact their searches hadn't yielded any results. Sometimes, they even went looking outside of office hours, with Officer Malia using his own time to search with Blue. By December, the heat of the summer months had given way to the cold of winter,

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  which made for easier search conditions. Some of the thick overgrowth had thinned out, making previously hard-to-reach areas more accessible. On Saturday, December 11, the top temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius, or 43 degrees Fahrenheit, and by the afternoon, the skies were sunny and clear. Yet, the scene felt remote and desolate due to the distinct lack of people. It was a marshy area not conducive to walking, and the heavy vegetation provided a kind of barrier from the highway, concealing the passing traffic. Officer Malia

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  and Blue first scoured the southern side of Ocean Parkway, searching the Oak Beach area where the woman had gone missing. Finding nothing there, they crossed over to the northern side of the Parkway. Thick shrubs, brush, trees, and marshland ran between the road and the water. They headed west for around three miles, sticking close to the Parkway's shoulder due to the thick brush. Blue's nose was glued to the ground as he sniffed. Then, his tail suddenly started wagging. He pushed his nose into the dirt and started digging. Leaning in to see what Blue had found, Officer Malia saw a heavily disintegrated burlap

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  sack. Inside it was a human skeleton.

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  Three and a half years earlier, in July 2007, a 25-year-old named Maureen Brainard-Barnes desperately needed money. She and her housemate were a couple of months behind on rent and were facing eviction if they couldn't provide it within a few days, before a scheduled court date on Tuesday, July 10. Maureen was a dreamer and the oldest of three siblings. Born Maureen View, she'd grown up in Groton, Connecticut, an industrial port town about two and a half hours east of New York City. Her mother had worked constantly to provide for her family, and Maureen's father hadn't been especially involved in his children's

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  lives. Consequently, the people Maureen was closest to were her sister Missy and her brother Will. The three of them formed a tight-knit trio. As a teenager, Maureen was a voracious reader and a poet who wrote rap songs. She fantasized about making it big with her songwriting and becoming a star. Maureen had notebooks filled with all her song lyrics and poetry. In 1998, when she was 16 years old, she found out she was pregnant and left school to have her baby, a daughter named Caitlin. Maureen married her boyfriend, Jason Brainard-Barnes, and took his last name. The young couple had

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  moved in with Jason's grandparents, but their marriage ended amicably within a few years. Caitlin lived with Jason due to better schooling options in the village where he was living, and Maureen moved in with her siblings. Tragedy struck in June 2003 when Maureen's father died on her 21st birthday, drowning in an accident. Maureen encountered further hardships after beginning a romantic relationship with a man named Steve, who didn't want to spend time with any of Maureen's family or friends, and separated her from her siblings. Maureen and Steve's relationship was strained from early on, and money was

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  always a struggle. Maureen worked a variety of jobs and found work in casinos as a blackjack dealer and a slot attendant. But she hadn't given up on her dreams. She made use of the new social networking site MySpace, which launched in 2003, to share her songs and connect with other aspiring rappers. While scrolling the site, she noticed advertisements for modeling, which led her to a website called modelmayhem.com. There, she discovered that she could submit pictures of her own for potential bookers to pursue. Hoping this might lead to the breakthrough she was hoping for, Maureen created a portfolio of photographs.

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  Maureen was petite, at 4'11", and about 105 pounds, or 48 kilos. She had bright blue eyes and chestnut-brown hair that she wore with a sweeping side part. Almost as soon as she submitted her portfolio, Maureen started receiving emails from apparent modeling agencies inviting her to work with them. She quickly discovered that these offers were for nude modeling and even escort work, and they offered a lot of money. Realizing that this would be a way to provide for herself and her daughter, Maureen looked into the possibility of sex work. If she signed up with one of the agencies reaching out to

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  her, then she would have to give them a cut of whatever she made. But if she worked independently, then she could keep all of the profits. The online classifieds platform Craigslist featured ads from women who worked for themselves and could determine when, how much, and where they worked. Maureen began advertising as well, using the alias of Marie. She was aware of the dangers sex work could pose and how it might cause her to interact with dangerous men. In July 2005, she shared the anxieties troubling her on her MySpace page, writing, "Having serial killer dreams again. Love is hemorrhaging

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  in my head, fading away with every beat. Maybe all it takes to keep alive is smoking it to death."

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  That same year, Maureen discovered she was pregnant with her second child, a son this time, to her boyfriend Steve. She ceased sex work and returned to working in casinos, but when her relationship with Steve ended in 2006, Maureen and her infant son Aiden were facing financial hardship. She began working in telemarketing, where she became close friends with a colleague named Sarah Khanz. But the pay was very low. Maureen applied for other jobs, without any luck. To supplement her income, she returned to escort work. She would travel to New York City, which was roughly two and a half hours from her apartment in Norwich,

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  a Connecticut city close to her hometown of Groton. There was more money and more clients there, as well as anonymity. The size of the metropolis made it far less likely that she'd be booked by someone she knew. Maureen would stay in a hotel room while in New York, and clients would visit her there. She always took someone with her for safety. In time, that person became her friend Sarah Khanz, who began performing sex work as well.

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  While Maureen was working, her sister Missy looked after her children if they weren't with their respective fathers.

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  In early July of 2007, the now twenty-five-year-old Maureen was in desperate need of cash. She was behind on rent and facing eviction. With a court date scheduled for Tuesday, July 10, she needed to come up with the money before then to secure her home. She and Sarah decided to travel to New York City for the weekend of July 7 to 8 and stay at a motel in Times Square, with the hopes of making enough to backpay the rent.

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  But business was slow. Maureen had a contact who she paid to manipulate the Craigslist ads in order to ensure hers stayed at the top of the page. This usually ensured a steady stream of clients. When she got into an argument with him, however, he began flagging her and Sarah's profiles.

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  By the morning of Monday, July 9, Maureen still didn't have enough money. She decided to stay one more night and hopefully she'd be able to make what she needed. But Sarah was ready to go back to Connecticut and didn't think Maureen should stay by herself. It went against their rules to work solo. She tried to convince Maureen to go back with her, but Maureen was determined to stay.

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  At around 11:30 a.m., Sarah left Maureen in the hotel room they'd shared to drive home with two friends.

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  They hadn't even left the West Side Highway in Manhattan when Sarah received a call from Maureen. Exhausted, Sarah ignored the call and called up on the car's backseat for a nap. When Sarah was back in Connecticut that night, she spoke to an acquaintance who'd received a call from Maureen, saying she'd been robbed by some guys who'd taken $5,000 from her. Baffled how Maureen had even made that much in such a short window of time, Sarah tried calling her. There was no answer.

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  But Maureen's sister Missy did hear from her that night. Maureen called at 11:30 p.m. and chatted with Missy, not saying anything about being robbed or urgently needing cash. She instead told Missy that she was calling from the busy transit hub of Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan and asked if Missy's husband, Chris, could pick her up. Missy explained that it was too late. Chris had to work early the next morning and couldn't make the five-hour round trip, so Maureen agreed to take the train home instead.

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  The next day, Missy called Maureen, but she didn't answer her phone. Missy wasn't overly concerned, figuring Maureen might be sleeping off a big weekend or had run out of phone credit. She wasn't aware that Maureen was due in court that day and thus didn't hear anything when Maureen failed to appear. The following day of Wednesday, July 11, Missy's brother, Will, called to say he'd been trying to contact Maureen, but her phone went straight to voicemail.

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  By Thursday, July 12, Missy and Will were officially worried. It wasn't like their sister to go days without contact and she would never abandon her two children. They reported Maureen missing to the Norwich Police Department, but when the officers learnt that Maureen was a sex worker, they quickly lost interest. They told the siblings that Maureen was probably just trying to make the money she needed and would reappear when she was ready.

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  With no help from the authorities, Missy and Will began looking for Maureen themselves. Will and Missy's husband, Chris, travelled to the motel where Maureen had been staying in Times Square. The staff claimed to have no recollection of Maureen, but their records showed she'd checked out on Tuesday, July 10, the day after she'd called from Penn Station trying to get home. Missy logged into Maureen's email using the password Maureen had given her, but there were no leads there.

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  There was a brief spark of hope when the police notified them that Maureen's food stamp card had been used in Norwich. Their hope vanished when they discovered that a friend of Maureen's had used the card. According to this friend, Maureen had given the card to them along with everything else she owned. Her apartment had been entirely emptied of all her possessions. As the weeks went on, police started to take Maureen's disappearance more seriously. They obtained her cellphone records, which revealed that on Friday, July 6, three days before she went missing, Maureen had been contacted by a burner phone, a prepaid mobile phone designed for short-term use and anonymity.

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  Over the next four days, there were sixteen interactions between this number and Maureen's. At 11:56 p.m. on the last day, Monday, July 9, Maureen's phone pinged a cell tower in Midtown Manhattan near the 59th Street Bridge. That was its last activity for several days. It activated again on Thursday, July 12, three days after she was last heard from. Two outbound calls were made from the device to check her voicemail. These calls had been made near the Long Island Expressway that connects Manhattan with Long Island in Islandia, a village in Suffolk County.

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  Missy found out about these developments months after her sister's disappearance, after a detective took pity on her due to Missy's constant calls for information. He also mentioned that one of the last individuals to contact Maureen on Craigslist was a New York police officer who'd subsequently been cleared of any involvement. Missy was also told that after Maureen's phone had pinged in Long Island, searches had been conducted there using cadaver dogs and helicopters. Nothing was found. Missy couldn't understand how her sister or her phone could have ended up in Long Island, which was forty miles east of Manhattan. As far as Missy knew,

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  Maureen never worked there or did out calls, which involved leaving her own space to visit a client in their home. That went against her rules. Missy wasn't Maureen's only loved one who received concerning information that didn't seem quite right. On Monday, July 23, exactly two weeks after Maureen disappeared, her friend Sarah received a phone call at around 6:30 p.m. The caller's number was blocked, and Sarah usually ignored blocked calls. Maureen had warned her that those could be from police officers conducting an undercover sting. But for some reason, Sarah answered this one.

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  She was greeted by a male voice, who said, "Hi, I saw your ad on Craigslist. Do you know Marie?"

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  Marie was Maureen's alias. Immediately alert, Sarah asked the man what Marie looked like. The man accurately described Maureen, saying she was short with shoulder-length brown hair and had a tattoo on her right arm.

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  "Yeah, that's my friend," Sarah replied. "Where is she? She's been missing in Connecticut for the past two weeks."

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  "Oh, she's fine," the man reassured her. "She's at a whorehouse in Queens." This made no sense to Sarah. She knew that Maureen only wanted to work independently and wouldn't be at a brothel in New York City. She asked the man if he could call back with the address, unblocked, so his number would be visible and she could share it with the police. He said he would, and Sarah waited to hear back from him. But he never called again.

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  Two years later, in early July of 2009, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Melissa Bartholomew was looking forward to seeing her little sister Amanda again. Amanda was nine years younger than Melissa and lived with their mother Lynne in Buffalo, New York. Melissa had grown up in Buffalo, where she'd graduated from high school with straight A's and then worked in a pizzeria for a little while. In 2004, she enrolled at a beauty school where she earned her cosmetology licence. She then worked as a hairdresser at a couple of different Buffalo salons, but Melissa yearned for more. She dreamed of opening her own salon and making enough money to buy her mother and her sister anything they wanted.

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  Confident, funny and bold, Melissa was the type of person courageous enough to take risks in pursuit of her goals.

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  In 2006, Melissa relocated to the Bronx in New York City, about a six-hour drive from Buffalo on the opposite side of the state. Melissa was excited about the better employment prospects in the bustling metropolis and had already met someone who'd offered her a hairdressing job. His name was Johnny Terry, but he went by the nickname Blaze.

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  Melissa settled into her new city, though a few months after moving, she told her mother that her job had fallen through because the salon closed down. Now she was working as a topless dancer at a nightclub instead.

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  Lynne was a little shocked by this, as well as worried, but Melissa reassured her she was safe and never worked alone.

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  In reality, Melissa had started doing sex work shortly after her arrival in the city. New York was expensive, and sex work provided a way to deal with some of the financial pressure. She'd also become romantically involved with Blaze, who acted as a pimp for a number of women in the city. He became Melissa's pimp as well. She would travel into Manhattan and head to Times Square to meet clients.

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  Over the next few years, Melissa settled into her new city while making sure to visit her family when she could. Whenever she returned home, she brought plenty of gifts. She particularly doted on her little sister Amanda, whom she was very close to. When Amanda was preparing to start a new school year, Melissa sent her $500 to buy new clothes. In the summer of 2007, thirteen-year-old Amanda travelled to New York for the first time to stay with her big sister. Melissa had since broken up with her boyfriend and was living in a basement apartment with a number of stray cats she'd adopted. During the day, Melissa took her sister out on fun excursions, shopping together or

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  visiting the Bronx Zoo. At night, Melissa headed out to work and told her sister not to leave the apartment. She would call to check in on Amanda before she went to bed and came home after Amanda was sleeping.

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  In spring 2008, Amanda visited Melissa again. She noticed Melissa using her laptop to post advertisements on Craigslist under the name Chloe. By this time, Melissa was finding almost all of her clients online, which felt safer than going to Times Square at night. Rather than working out of her home, Melissa did out calls to New York City, travelling via a car service to bars, restaurants and hotels, mostly on Manhattan's west side.

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  Amanda realised that her sister wasn't just dancing at a nightclub, she was doing escort work. But she didn't know how to broach the topic with Melissa. Amanda didn't ask any questions and nor did she mention the situation to her mother when she went back home.

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  The latter half of 2008 was challenging for Melissa. On Friday, September 12, she was arrested for solicitation and went to court. Melissa pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five days' community service. Months later, in December, Melissa returned to Buffalo for Christmas.

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  She was her usual generous self, giving extravagant gifts and treating her mother and sister to massages at a spa, but she seemed unhappy. Lynne's partner encouraged Melissa to move back to Buffalo, saying he knew someone who could get her a job at a cosmetology school. Melissa replied: "Not yet, I'm almost ready, though."

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  Melissa went back to New York, and by July, she was keen for Amanda to visit again. Late at night on Thursday, July 9, 2009, she texted Amanda, encouraging her to come and see her.

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  But a couple of days later, no one in Melissa's family could reach her. Calls went unanswered, as did text messages.

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  Lynne cancelled Amanda's impending visit to her sister and began calling hospitals in New York City in case Melissa had been admitted after an accident. She wasn't the only one who was worried.

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  Melissa's landlady lived in the residence above her basement apartment, and she grew concerned after hearing Melissa's pet cat crying and scratching at the door. Lynne tried to file a missing persons report, but the police told her Melissa was an adult with no history of mental illness. She was entitled to take off for a few days without contacting her family.

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  When Melissa's family retained an attorney, investigators were even more candid in their response, telling him that they wouldn't assign a detective for a sex worker in this situation.

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  At 12:40pm on Friday, July 17, just over a week since Melissa's family last heard from her, Amanda's cellphone rang. She was excited to see her sister's name appear as the caller ID.

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  Answering the call, Amanda asked: "Melissa?"

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  "Oh, this isn't Melissa," came the reply.

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  Instead of hearing her sister's voice, fifteen-year-old Amanda was met by what sounded like a middle-aged white male. He was relaxed and soft-spoken, asking in a monotone voice: "Have you figured out who this is?"

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  "No," Amanda replied. "Where's my sister?"

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  The man didn't answer, instead asking: "Are you going to be a whore like your sister now?"

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  When Lynne took the phone from her young daughter and tried to speak to the man, he hung up.

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  The next day, a missing persons report for Melissa was finally filed, though investigators didn't do anything with it.

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  On Thursday, July 23, at 6:42pm, Amanda received another call from her sister's phone. She was met by the same cool-voiced man as the last time, who again berated her with verbal and sexual insults. He told Amanda that he had raped her sister. When the attorney retained by Lynne told the police about these calls, they began taking Melissa's case seriously.

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  Looking into her final known actions, it was confirmed that on Friday, July 10, Melissa had gone to the bank and deposited $1,000 into her account. She also withdrew $100 before leaving. That afternoon, a neighbour saw her sitting on the curb outside her apartment. It looked like she was waiting for someone. That was the last time she was seen, but a couple of people heard from her after that. She'd texted a friend in the evening to say she was meeting a man and would be home the next morning. She also tried calling her on-again, off-again boyfriend Blaze, but he didn't answer.

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  Police spoke to Blaze, who said that Melissa had started working independently, a decision that had caused some conflict between them. She'd told him she'd lined up a date for the night she went missing, somewhere on Long Island, and the client was paying $1,000. Blaze offered her a ride, but she declined.

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  Cellphone records revealed that Melissa had some contact with a burner phone in the days leading up to her disappearance. The burner phone first reached out to Melissa's Craigslist profile on Friday, July 3, one week earlier. It called her again three days later, on Monday, July 6.

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  On the night of Friday, July 10, Melissa had travelled into Manhattan, probably in a taxi.

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  Hours later, at 1:43am on Saturday, July 11, her phone pinged a tower near Massapequa, a hamlet on the south shore of Long Island. It was used to check her own voicemail, as well as making the two calls to Amanda's phone.

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  Investigators also arranged to trace any further calls Amanda received. On the evening of Wednesday, August 5, almost a month after Melissa went missing and two weeks after the last call, Amanda’s phone lit up with Melissa’s caller ID again. It was 6:50pm.

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  “Is this Melissa’s little sister?” the same male voice asked. “I hear you’re a half-breed.”

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  This racist taunt appeared to reference Amanda’s parentage. She and Melissa had different fathers. Melissa’s father was white, while Amanda’s father was black. The caller’s remark indicated that he knew what Amanda looked like, possibly from scrolling through photos on Melissa’s phone. He hung up after a short exchange, only to call back multiple times over the next 20 minutes. He kept the calls brief, but investigators were able to trace the general location of Melissa’s phone by checking which cellphone towers it pinged. The phone was on the west side of Midtown Manhattan,

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  connecting with towers at 4 Penn Plaza, 275 West 39th Street, 249 West 36th Street, and 408 West 34th Street.

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  After these calls, detectives asked Amanda to try to draw the caller out if he phoned again. She should engage him in conversation and try to keep him on the line. It had to be Amanda, as the caller had refused to talk when Lynn answered. He was clearly fixated on speaking to Melissa’s 15-year-old sister.

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  Amanda was distraught by the calls and sank into a depression. Not only was she being forced to listen to a man tell her about distressing things that he had done to her sister, Amanda then had to repeat those details to her mother and the detectives. She began staying home from school, where she’d always been an exemplary student. Still, the calls gave her family hope. Perhaps the man was keeping Melissa hostage somewhere and would eventually reveal her whereabouts. She and Lynn waited anxiously for another call from Melissa’s phone.

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  There was nothing for almost two weeks.

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  Then, on Wednesday, August 19, it rang at 7:23pm. In a calm, cool voice, the man told Amanda, “I’m going to watch her body rot.”

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  This call, like the others, was made from Midtown Manhattan.

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  Exactly one week later, on Wednesday, August 26, Amanda’s phone rang at 11:29am. This time, Amanda told him that she wanted to see her sister again. The man’s response was devastating. “I killed Melissa,” he said. He spoke of watching her body decompose, adding, “Maybe I’ll come show you one day.”

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  With those words, Melissa’s family lost all hope of ever seeing her alive again. That was the final call Amanda received. At the end of the month, a television news report about Melissa’s case mentioned the harassing calls, and the unknown man never rang Amanda again.

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  On Friday, June 4, 2010, 11 months after Melissa Bartholomew went missing, 22-year-old Megan Waterman boarded a bus in her hometown of Portland, Maine, for a six-hour ride to the state of New York. She was hoping it was one of the last such trips she would have to make for a while. Megan had had a difficult upbringing. Born on January 18, 1988, she was primarily raised by her grandmother after her mother surrendered custody of Megan and her brother Greg. The reasons behind this arrangement were fiercely disputed by the parties involved, but the end result was that Megan had grown up with abandonment issues and at one point attempted suicide.

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  She had a lighter side, however. She loved to make people laugh and liked to play pranks. Her grandmother, Muriel, described her as “vivacious and fun, a strong-willed girl with many friends.” As a teenager, Megan began to rebel. She attended a school where many children came from affluent families, in stark contrast to Megan’s relatives, who were living paycheck to paycheck. Megan began struggling both socially and academically and started shoplifting. These infractions caught the attention of local police. She also struggled with substance use, which led to her being sent to juvenile rehab in 2005.

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  17-year-old Megan stopped attending school and started working odd jobs instead. At the same age, she became pregnant to a man who was twice her age and worked as a DJ.

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  In mid-2006, she gave birth to a girl who she named Liliana. She adored her baby, doting on her constantly, and those around her marveled at how much calmer and happy Megan was as a mother.

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  Money was a struggle, though. Megan received about $400 per month in government assistance and was working at two different sandwich shops, which both paid minimum wage. She worked hard to support her infant daughter, but wasn’t making enough to provide for Liliana in the way that she wanted.

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  Megan began working as an escort after becoming involved with some men that Portland police knew as the New York Crew. These were a group of young men who travelled from Brooklyn to Portland to sell diluted drugs for an inflated price, far beyond what they could make in New York City. They hung out at the city’s nightclubs, where Megan met them. One of them groomed Megan and trafficked her into sex work. She began making more money, which allowed her to move into a nicer home. She told her grandparents she was working as a dancer, and they babysat Liliana while she was out.

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  This work led to Megan taking drugs again and forming a relationship with a man one year her junior, named Akeem Cruz, who became her pimp.

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  Megan was head over heels in love with Akeem, who came to her rescue after her previous pimp, a friend of his, was abusive towards her. When Megan’s family members later discovered the truth about her life, they came to believe that the two men had deliberately orchestrated this scenario to make Akeem appear like Megan’s savior. Akeem promised Megan a future. They would get married, and she and Liliana would be provided for.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  By May of 2009, Akeem was taking the now-21-year-old Megan on trips to Long Island, which was close to where he had grown up in Brooklyn and where there were more clients to lure in. Megan posted ads on Craigslist, offering to do both in-calls and out-calls.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  She had some negative experiences from these encounters. On one occasion, she was arrested and charged with prostitution after an undercover officer responded to an ad, and she was twice robbed by clients, despite Akeem supposedly providing protection.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Akeem was not the savior he’d presented himself as, but an abuser. A friend of Megan’s once saw him beat her up, grabbing her by the hair and hitting her face into the side of a house. Sometimes he would threaten to burn all of Megan’s possessions, then comfort her with promises of a home together and a baby.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  In May of 2010, Akeem was arrested after the police raided a hotel room where he was staying and discovered drugs and weapons. He spent a couple of weeks in jail before being released because the police hadn’t secured a search warrant. Megan met him at the jail on Monday, May 31, and they planned another trip to Long Island in a few days’ time. Megan reassured her friends she wouldn’t be making many more such trips. She just needed a little more money to fund daycare for Liliana and a new home, so that she and Akeem could have the baby they’d talked about. Then, she would no longer have to perform sex work.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Akeem travelled down to New York first to stay with family in Brooklyn, and Megan caught a bus to Long Island a few days later, on Friday, June 4, arriving in the afternoon.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  She checked into a Holiday Inn Express Hotel in Horepog, a hamlet that sits roughly midway along the Long Island Expressway in Suffolk County. The expressway was frequented by commuters who drove from their homes on Long Island to Manhattan for work, and the hotel sat on a narrow service road adjacent to it. This made it an ideal spot to meet clients.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  On Saturday, June 5, Akeem joined Megan by 8pm, and the couple were captured on the hotel’s CCTV, leaving together. Half an hour later, Megan returned alone. She called her grandmother, Muriel, at around 9:50pm and spoke briefly to her four-year-old daughter, Liliana. Megan phoned Muriel again at around midnight and said she’d call again in the morning.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  After getting off the phone, Megan posted a new ad on Craigslist. At 1:15am, she spoke to Akeem over the phone. Fifteen minutes later, the hotel’s security camera filmed Megan walking out of the lobby and out into the night.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  At around eleven o'clock the next morning of Sunday, June 6, Meghan’s grandmother, Muriel, received a phone call from Akeem. He was worried because he couldn’t find Meghan. He’d been out drinking with some friends the previous night when he’d received a call from Meghan saying she was heading out to get something. When Akeem returned to her hotel room at 6 that morning, she was gone and her phone was going straight to voicemail. Meghan never turned off her phone.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Akeem asked if Meghan was with Muriel. She wasn’t, and Muriel had no idea where she could be. Akeem told Muriel that they had to wait forty-eight hours to report her missing. The police wouldn’t do anything until then.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Two days passed by with no word from Meghan. This was highly out of character. Ordinarily, she called multiple times a day to check in on Liliana. On Tuesday, June 8, Meghan Waterman was reported missing. Police searched Meghan’s hotel room at the Holiday Inn Express and found her clothes, makeup, and other personal belongings. It appeared that she’d intended to return.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  A witness who’d seen her leave the hotel said she’d appeared to be walking down the service road to a nearby convenience store. Maybe she’d been going there to meet Akeem away from the hotel’s video cameras.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  He wasn’t considered a trustworthy witness.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Meghan’s family were particularly suspicious of him, regarding him as a human trafficker with a violent streak who’d already harmed Meghan’s life.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  The area was also known to attract some unsavory characters, so perhaps Meghan had run into somebody dangerous. Or maybe she’d been going to the convenience store to meet a client for an out-call, someone who hadn’t want to be seen at the hotel. Meghan’s phone wasn’t among the items found in her hotel room, but police were able to obtain its records. They showed that a burner phone had contacted Meghan on Saturday, June 5, the day before she went missing. Meghan’s phone had contacted the burner phone at 1:31 a.m., one minute after she was captured on CCTV leaving the hotel.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  The records also revealed that Meghan’s phone had travelled southwest out of Hop Dog, as though it and she were being driven away. Its last cell tower ping was at 3:11 a.m. on Sunday, June 6, in Massapequa Park, a village in Nassau County, roughly twenty-three miles from Hop Dog. Located on the south shore of Long Island, Massapequa Park was a family-friendly neighbourhood, popular with families and professionals who worked in New York City but wanted to return to a quiet suburban home at the end of the day. There was no record of Meghan Waterman’s cellphone after that.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  At a loss to comprehend Meghan’s sudden disappearance, her family plastered “missing persons” posters across the area where she was last seen. They provided a detailed description of Meghan. She was five foot five inches tall and 145 pounds, with brown hair bleached blonde. No real leads resulted from the posters, but Meghan’s family reassured her four-year-old daughter that they were doing everything they could to bring her mother home.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Six months before Meghan Waterman went missing, a 27-year-old woman named Amber Lynn Costello left her home in Clearwater, Florida for a fresh start north in the Long Island hamlet of West Babylon. Her older sister, Kim, lived there, and Amber was in need of family and support after going through an increasingly difficult time.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Life had always been hard for Amber. As a child, she lived in the city of Gastonia, North Carolina, with her sister Kim and parents, Margie and Al.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  When Amber was six years old, she was sexually assaulted by a 26-year-old neighbour. Her mother, Margie, had walked in on the neighbour in bed with her young daughter and called the police. But no charges were overlaid and no arrest record exists, making it unclear how the crime was handled. Amber’s father, Al, would later say he’d purchased a shotgun and threatened to blow the neighbour’s brains out, but the police intervened before he could make good on his threat.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  The abuse devastated the entire family, leading to Margie suffering a mental health crisis and being hospitalized. Everyone went on to struggle with substance use disorder. Amber was left with both emotional and physical scars. She later told people that she couldn’t have children as a result of what had been done to her.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Those who knew Amber described her as sweet and innocent, someone who would go out of her way to help others. When Amber was 13 and Kim was 19, their parents both became sick, making Kim, who was working as a waitress while attending college, the sole provider. Her job didn’t earn her nearly enough money, and she was lured into sex work by a friend several years her senior. Years later, Amber joined her sister at the same operation.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Both sisters began using drugs, and Amber became addicted to heroin. In 2006, after her mother died, Amber moved to Florida and rebuilt her life. She stopped using drugs, joined a church community, and began working as a waitress. She also fell in love, and in 2007, Amber married a man named Don Costello. She was the happiest she’d ever been. She became even happier when she and Don fostered a baby boy whom Amber adored. The couple hoped to adopt the baby, but the adoption fell through. In March 2009, Don and Amber’s marriage fell apart, and Amber’s struggles resurfaced.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  She began shoplifting and started using drugs again. She also returned to sex work and became involved with some dangerous people.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Seeking comfort, Amber would call her sister, Kim, who had relocated to Long Island. Kim often handed the phone over to her on-and-off boyfriend, Dave Shaller, who was happy to chat to Kim’s little sister. Realising that Amber needed help, Dave convinced Kim that they should bring her to Long Island and get her into rehab. Kim agreed, and in December 2009, Amber flew to New York and entered a 28-day drug treatment programme.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  After she completed the programme, she moved into Dave Shaller’s home in West Babylon. She also brought a friend with her, a man named Bjorn Brodsky, who went by the nickname Bear, whom she’d met in rehab. The trio became like a family, and Amber opened up to the two men.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  At one point, Amber told Dave and Bear that she was considering doing sex work. If she did, would they protect her? The two were reluctant to encourage Amber to pursue this line of work, but eventually agreed, hopeful that the money she made would allow Amber to build a new life.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  She began advertising on Craigslist and the website Backpage under the names Carolina and Mia. In a nod to her North Carolina upbringing, she described herself as a southern belle and provided photos and a physical description. She was petite at five foot one and 100 pounds, with brown hair and green eyes. Her rules were that she would dance for clients, but they weren’t allowed to touch her, and she would only do in-calls at home. In order to stay safe, Amber and her housemates came up with secret codes. If Amber put on a particular song, it meant she needed their help right away.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Dave and Bear saw the client’s cars when they pulled up at the house and were struck by how many number plates or logos that indicated they worked for Suffolk County. Some of Amber’s clients were police officers, others worked with the district attorney’s office. Sometimes, they asked if they were entitled to a discount because of their professions, despite the fact that sex work, as well as buying sex or offering to pay for sexual services, is illegal in the state of New York.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  In order to prevent Amber from having to go further than she wanted to, Dave and Bear began engaging in what is known as a badger scam. They would hide in a rear bedroom as Amber welcomed in a client and secured payment. Then, before things progressed further, one of them climbed out of the window and walked around to the front door, feigning that they’d just arrived home. Then, they would barge in and pretend to be Amber’s angry husband, threatening to shoot the client. The client would typically flee the premises, allowing Amber to keep his money without having to provide a service.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Clients seemed like easy marks. They were unlikely to report the scam to the authorities, lest they be charged with solicitation. Those who were married with families were even less likely to raise the alarm.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Over time, Amber and Bear began using heroin again. In June of 2010, Dave decided to try it as well. As their drug use escalated, the group’s need for money increased. This led to a loosening of the rules that Amber had enforced around her work. She began having sex with clients instead of just dancing for them. She also started making out calls, allowing clients to pick her up and take her away from the property, where Dave and Bear couldn’t protect her.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  By August, the home’s atmosphere had grown dark and more dangerous. The badger scam that had previously worked so well was now being avoided. Customers who were angry about being ripped off had posted about the encounters on online forums, which had led to Amber receiving death threats on the prepaid phone she used for work. One client who’d fled from the house naked even filed a police report. Amber changed her number but continued inviting clients to the same house. Neighbours called the police regularly, upset about the obvious drug use and Amber’s clients frequenting the street.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  On one occasion, a client beat Amber and threw her out of his car after she refused to perform a particular sex act.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Late at night, on Wednesday, September 1, Amber was contacted by a prospective client who found her ad on Backpage and she invited him to visit her home for an in-call. He arrived at the residence just after midnight. Amber let him in and took his money, before Dave burst into the room to carry out the badger scam, something they rarely did anymore. He saw that the client was a large, middle-aged, white male who looked to be in his mid-40s. He was between 6’4 and 6’6, with dark, bushy hair and big, 1970s-style overly glasses. To Dave, the man looked like an ogre.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Dave played the part of an outraged husband, telling him to get out. The huge, hulking man did as he was told, while telling Dave he was just Amber’s friend and adding, “Tell her I’ll give her a call.”

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Dave noticed the man’s dark-green SUV parked in the driveway outside. It was a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche. About an hour later, at 1:18am, Amber received a text message from the client stating, “That was not nice, so do I credit for next time.” The client reached out to Amber again later that day of Thursday, September 2. He wanted to see her but didn’t want to return to the house because of her boyfriend. He would pick her up at around 11 that night and bring her back home the next morning between 6 and 7. He would pay her $450 for two hours,

• 55:05Speaker 00

  or $1500 if she stayed overnight, but he wanted her to leave her phone at home.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Tempted by the larger-than-usual amount he was offering, Amber agreed to his terms.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  At 11:17pm, dressed in a pink hoodie and jeans, she left the house with Dave, who escorted her to the home’s ladder box. He gave her a hug, then Amber turned and walked down the block to meet the client at his car. Dave thought it was odd that the client hadn’t pulled up out the front, but recalled that he’d told Amber he didn’t want cars loitering outside of his house. Maybe that’s why she’d arranged to meet him further down the street. Dave headed back to the house, glancing over his shoulder before going inside to see a dark-coloured SUV pass by from the direction Amber had walked towards.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Amber didn’t return the next morning as promised, nor did she come back in the days that followed. She hadn’t taken her phone with her.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  After three days passed, Dave called Amber’s sister Kim, who was interstate in North Carolina, to share his concern. Kim reassured him that Amber would reappear soon. When she didn’t, Kim didn’t know what to do. Amber was known to use drugs and Kim believed the police wouldn’t take her disappearance seriously. Maybe Amber had just taken off somewhere else for a while.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  She decided not to report her sister missing.

• 56:55Speaker 00

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• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Four months before Amber Lynn Costello went missing, a 24-year-old named Shannon Gilbert had been cruising around Manhattan in her friend Michael Pax’s black Ford Explorer on the night of Friday, April 30, 2010. Shannon lived in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, and would go to New York to perform escort work. Shannon’s passion was for performing. She dreamed of becoming a singer or an actress and had entered escort work as a way to provide for herself in the meantime. She’d had a difficult upbringing, spending much of her childhood in foster care, separated from her three younger sisters due to an unstable home life.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Shannon had returned to live with her family briefly when she was 14, but went back into foster care after an incident with her mother’s boyfriend. Funny, warm and affectionate, Shannon was a brilliant student, finishing high school two years ahead of most of her peers. But while she was book-smart, her mother Marie said she wasn’t street-smart. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age. She initially worked for an escort agency until it went out of business. After that, she began working as a waitress. But she struggled to make ends meet on the much smaller income, so she eventually went back to escorting

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  and began working for herself by posting ads on Craigslist. This way, she could keep all of the money she made and deal directly with clients. She’d met Michael about eight months earlier through his work as a driver for various escort agencies. He kept Shannon on after she left hers, driving her to appointments with clients and waiting outside until she was done, acting as a kind of bodyguard as well as a chauffeur.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  The night of Friday, April 30 was quiet, with very few responses to the Craigslist ad Shannon uploaded. That changed close to midnight, when Shannon received a call from a man named Joe Brewer.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  A 46-year-old financial adviser, who was in the process of separating from his wife, Joe lived in a small gated community called Oak Beach, located about 90 minutes east of Manhattan on Long Island. Joe wanted Shannon to come to his home for a couple of hours, which would justify the long trip out to his address. Shannon, who'd done call-outs to Long Island before, agreed, and Michael drove her there via Ocean Parkway. Oak Beach sat on the eastern end of Jones Beach Island, a barrier beach off Long Island's south shore. It had no streetlights, making it exceptionally dark,

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  and the roads and houses were framed by thick brambles and tall marsh grass.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Michael Pack pulled up outside Joe Brewer's house on Fairway Drive at around 2:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 1. It was a double-story wood-frame residence with a large patio that had water views.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  The secluded gated community was even quieter than usual at the late hour.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Shannon headed inside with Joe, who was on the heavier side with thick shaggy hair, while Michael waited in his Ford Explorer, playing poker on his phone to pass the time. After a little while, Joe and Shannon left briefly in Joe's car, presumably to purchase some drugs. They returned after about 15 minutes, going back inside the house.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  At about 4:00 a.m., Shannon called Michael to tell him that Joe wanted to extend the date by another hour. The hour hadn't fully elapsed when Michael heard a knock on his car window at 4:51 a.m.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Looking over, he saw Joe Brewer, who asked: "Can you get her out? She won't leave."

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Michael wasn't surprised that the appointment had run long. He knew that Shannon would try to extend a visit to Long Island to make the trip worthwhile. But it was unusual for a client to speak to him. In fact, it had never happened before. Joe didn't seem upset, but he appeared a little impatient. Michael went inside with Joe, noticing as he stood inside the front door that the house was messy and cluttered with belongings. He couldn't see the floor, and the dining table was covered with food and other items. Shannon was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, fully dressed.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Michael spoke to Shannon from the front door, suggesting that they return home. "You guys are trying to kill me," she replied, looking and sounding scared. Michael tried to coax her out to no avail, prompting Joe to try wrapping his arms around her from behind. When Shannon screamed, Joe reacted by saying "fuck this" and leaving the room.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Michael continued trying to lure Shannon out, but she crawled behind a couch, calling out that she'd find her own way home. Unsure what to do, Michael sat at the dining table and wondered if Shannon was pretending to be having some kind of drug-induced breakdown.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Then he realized she was speaking into her phone, providing details of her whereabouts. It sounded like she was talking to a 911 dispatcher, which didn't make sense. Michael knew that escorts didn't phone the police. Worried for his own safety, he turned and rushed outside to his car.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  Shannon had called 911, telling the dispatcher: "There's somebody after me." She repeated the phrase four times, while the dispatcher asked for details of where she was. Saying she didn't know the address, Shannon asked the dispatcher to trace her call, but the dispatcher said that wasn't possible. Sounding confused and nervous, Shannon said she was somewhere on Long Island and continued to beg for help.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Michael could be heard in the background encouraging her to return to Manhattan, while Joe was overheard telling Shannon that he would go upstairs, and she had to leave. "What are you going to do to me?" Shannon asked several times. "Are you going to kill me?"

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  The audio then picked up the sound of Shannon screaming and running away when Joe attempted to approach her again. She fled out the front door, ran down the patio stairs, and up the road into the darkness, while still connected to 911.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  At this point, Michael Pack had returned to his car and was wondering what to do when he saw Shannon run past.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Four houses down the street, just inside the entrance to the gated community, an orderly man named Gus Coletti was up at 5:22 a.m., shaving in preparation for a long drive up state, when he heard heavy pounding at his door. Answering it, he saw Shannon Gilbert with her cellphone in her hand. She was screaming incoherently, and Gus managed to hear her cry out the word "help." "What's the matter? Is somebody after you?" Gus asked. He invited Shannon to sit down on a chair in his home while calling 911. He told Shannon to relax and let her know that police were on their way.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  As soon as he mentioned the police, Shannon resumed screaming and took off running again, out the back into Gus's yard. She crouched down between a car and a boat Gus kept there, hiding.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  A moment later, Michael Pack's Ford Explorer drove towards the Coletti residence with its high beams on, slowing to a stop outside. Michael had come looking for Shannon. Gus headed over to speak to Michael about the bizarre situation that was unfolding. While Michael was distracted speaking to Gus, Shannon bolted once more. This time, she ran towards a side street called Anker Way, which flanked an enormous uninhabitable marsh area spanning 49 acres. She knocked on a door there, but received no answer, so continued along to a street named The Bayou, where she found another home. Shannon pounded on the front door.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  The resident, a woman named Barbara Brannan, looked outside, but didn't answer.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  Barbara lived alone and was scared by the screaming woman who was shouting about men trying to kill her.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  She saw Shannon on her cellphone and called out to her. Shannon didn't reply.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Barbara called 911, making yet another report about a distraught woman in the area. By the time she hung up the phone, Shannon was gone.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, Michael Pack continued looking around for Shannon. Not seeing where she had gone, he headed up to the community's entrance gate and looked for her along the access road that led back to Ocean Parkway. Not seeing Shannon anywhere, he finally left the area.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Police arrived at the scene at 5:40 a.m., but found no trace of Shannon. Realizing her driver was no longer around, they assumed the pair must have left together.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  When Shannon didn't return home the next day, her boyfriend Alex Diaz began to worry. He tried calling her, but her phone didn't even ring, suggesting it had been turned off, for its battery had died. Tracking down Michael Pack's number, Alex phoned him and was angry to learn that Michael had left without Shannon. Michael explained how strangely Shannon had been acting, which made Alex even more concerned. The description of Shannon's behavior didn't sound like anything Alex had witnessed from her before.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  The two men called various hospitals and police stations in the vicinity of where Shannon was last seen, but none had any record of her. Finally, Alex decided to reach out to Joe Brewer, the client who'd booked Shannon.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Joe claimed that he'd tried to grab onto Shannon and calm her down inside his home, but she'd panicked and taken off, terrified. Alex couldn't understand what would cause Shannon to panic all of a sudden after spending several hours with Joe. He decided to drive up to Oak Beach to take a look around.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Joe Brewer agreed to meet Alex, and the two spoke by the community's gate. Joe invited Alex to take a look inside his house, but Alex didn't feel safe doing so. He convinced Joe to accompany him to a local Suffolk County police station to file a report. Joe was doubtful that the police would take the disappearance of an escort seriously, but agreed. When they went to the station, Alex noticed how the police officers laughed and joked around with Joe, like they already knew him.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  They didn't take Alex's concern seriously, laughing and smirking as he explained why he was worried. "Check your house. Maybe she's there now," they said. They also told Alex that he had to file a missing persons report in Jersey City, where Shannon lived, not in Suffolk County.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  A missing persons report for Shannon Gilbert was filed in Jersey City, but Alex and Shannon’s other loved ones knew the key lay in Oak Beach. Alex drove back to Oak Beach to door knock and look for Shannon, and Shannon’s mother Marie and her sisters later did the same. One individual Alex spoke to was a doctor named Peter Hackett, who lived near Barbara Brennan, the last person to have seen Shannon. Doctor Hackett was a trusted member of the community and something of an Oak Beach representative. He asked Alex questions about Shannon and diligently took notes, telling Alex he’d get in touch with the Suffolk County Police Department about the case.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  He encouraged Alex to go home and relax while he got the ball rolling. But Doctor Hackett never reached out to the police.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Instead, he called Marie, Shannon’s mother, after obtaining her number from Alex. Doctor Hackett told Marie he ran a home for wayward girls out of his Oak Beach residence. He said he’d seen Shannon the night before. She was incoherent, so he’d taken her home to rehabilitate her, and the next day a driver came to pick her up. Doctor Hackett asked Marie if Shannon had made it home alright.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Doctor Hackett would later deny making the call, although phone records would prove him wrong. It was unclear why he had inserted himself into the investigation in this way, or why he’d not contacted the police as he’d promised, though he was known to be one who would make grandiose claims about himself, and sometimes make up stories.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  There were also rumours about Joe Brewer, who Shannon’s loved ones were suspicious of. Shannon had never panicked or freaked out while with a client before, so they believed Joe must have done something to upset her.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Although Joe had been a financial adviser, he was currently unemployed and living off family money. There were rumours that he hosted wild, drug-fuelled parties at his home with sex workers and other guests.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Despite the concern of those closest to Shannon, the authorities didn’t seem worried. There were no news reports about Shannon’s disappearance or massive searches of the area.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Suffolk County Police would later attribute their slow response to the failure to connect Shannon’s panicked 911 call with those of Gus Caletti and Barbara Brennan. The latter two had both phoned from their respective home’s landlines, which directed their calls to Suffolk County Police. Because Shannon had called from her cellphone, she’d been asked where she was calling from. Being unsure of her location, she’d guessed Jones Beach, a nearby state park that was under the jurisdiction of state police.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  There were lots of signs referencing Jones Beach on the way to Oak Beach, so the name had likely stuck in Shannon’s mind. And because Shannon hadn’t provided her name on the call, the call wasn’t tied to Shannon Gilbert until her missing persons investigation filtered down from Jersey City.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  However, even when this link was made, it didn’t spur on the Suffolk County Police Department to launch a more thorough investigation. Shannon Gilbert’s disappearance was treated as a missing persons case rather than a potential crime. The one thing that the police department did do was refer the case to their Canine Unit.

• 1:16:35Speaker 00

  Missing persons cases were considered a good training opportunities for the county’s search dogs and their handlers. That was how Officer John Malia and his German Shepherd, Blue, came to be involved in Shannon’s case. Officer Malia took Blue out along Ocean Parkway throughout the summer of 2010, searching the brambles and grass for Shannon. The enormous marsh area near where Shannon had last been seen alive was never thoroughly searched due to being deemed a hazardous environment. Investigators would later say the resources required for such an undertaking couldn’t be justified when Shannon’s disappearance was such a mystery. So instead, Canine Officers focused on the Ocean Parkway area.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  On Saturday, December 11, seven months after Shannon went missing, Officer Malia and Blue set out again, this time focusing on the northern side of the roadway. It was at this bleak and isolated location along the shoulder of the Parkway, where Blue uncovered a badly disintegrated burlap sack containing human remains.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  The body found by Blue and his handler, Officer Malia, had decomposed to such an extent that only a skeleton remained, but it was expected to be Shannon Gilbert. Investigators told the media that they believed they’d found Shannon’s remains and notified Shannon’s mother Marie as well. While Marie was still processing this devastating development, she received another call from Suffolk County Investigators with an update. The body wasn’t Shannon after all.

• 1:18:21Speaker 00

  Shannon Gilbert had been given a titanium plate in her jaw after her boyfriend Alex Diaz severely assaulted her. These remains had no such feature. Blue had found another unidentified woman.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Homicide Investigators cordoned off the area and returned two days later to do an evidence search in the immediate vicinity of the body. Officer Malia also returned with Blue. While Blue still sat in Officer Malia’s car, the police officer began looking around the dense scrub by himself. It was a cold and windy winter’s day, but Officer Malia barely noticed the weather as he scoured the area. About 500 feet from where the body had been found, he stumbled across something significant. It was another burlap sack. Inside the sack were more female remains.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  By the afternoon, a total of three more bodies had been recovered along the edge of Ocean Parkway next to Gilgo Beach, bringing the tally to four. Police officers marked each of their recovery sites with orange flags. All of the remains were skeletal and three were wrapped in burlap. The four victims were all found in similar positions and were bound with either belts, camouflage burlap straps, or duct tape. They appeared to have been deliberately placed at an equal distance apart from one another at intervals of roughly 500 feet or 150 metres. All were between 22 and 33 feet,

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  or roughly 6 to 10 metres, from the edge of Ocean Parkway.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  It looked as though whoever had left them there had likely pulled up on the shoulder of the roadway, taken the remains from their vehicle and carried them a little way into the brush, then tossed or placed them on the ground.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  The FBI was called in to assist with the recovery of the remains, but the environment made for poor preservation of evidence. The site was exposed to wind, sun, and salt water, which caused forensic evidence to deteriorate. Investigators found little evidence aside from the remains themselves.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  Once reporters caught wind of the grisly discoveries after hearing them broadcast over police scanners, they flocked to the area and congregated in a nearby parking lot. Trucks from local TV and radio stations were joined by those from cable networks. The police were tight-lipped, but the identity of Shannon Gilbert’s client got out, prompting journalists to confront Joe Brewer with questions. The police had searched his home and car and found nothing. Joe also claimed that he’d passed a polygraph, which was later confirmed by investigators. Shannon’s driver, Michael Pack, was also subjected to a polygraph test and passed.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Both police and the press were convinced that one of the four bodies must be Shannon Gilbert, but the remains would have to be identified through missing persons reports and DNA.

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  Investigators began scouring hundreds of reports relating to local women who had gone missing, before soon realising that their victims were likely not local at all. They suspected that all four women had been escorts brought to Long Island by their killer.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  As soon as Missy Cahn, the younger sister of missing twenty-five-year-old Maureen Brannard-Barnes, saw the news stories about four bodies being found on Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach, she knew her sister had to be one of them. Missy hadn't heard from Maureen in almost three and a half years, since she'd called on the night of Monday, July nine, two thousand and seven, seeking a lift from New York City's Pan Station.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Missy had thought about Maureen constantly, worrying that she'd been abducted and trafficked. Her brother Will was equally worried, though his concern manifested in anger and despair.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  On Friday, August fourteenth, two thousand and nine, more than two years after Maureen went missing, Will was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident when he was just twenty-four years old. After Maureen didn't show up for his funeral, Missy knew that her sister was gone forever too. It would be another sixteen months until Missy discovered how.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  The news about the women at Gilgo Beach immediately struck a chord. Three days after Maureen was last heard from, her cellphone had activated and was used to make two calls to her own voicemail. These calls had pinged cell towers in Suffolk County near the Long Island Expressway, about twenty-seven miles from Gilgo Beach.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Missy had never been able to understand how her sister's phone could have gotten to Long Island, as she'd never been known to work there. Missy submitted her DNA to be compared to the four victims. A result finally came in late January, two thousand and eleven, almost two months after the bodies were found. Maureen was one of them.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  She had been bound with three leather belts around her legs and ankles. One of the belts was embossed with somebody's initials at one end.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  Depending on which way you looked at it, the initials were either HM or WH. A second belt had been cut off at the end, where similar embossed initials might have been.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  Lyn Bartholomew hadn't seen her twenty-four-year-old daughter Melissa in almost eighteen months. After Melissa went missing in July, two thousand and nine, her family had been tormented by phone calls made from Melissa's own cellphone. The caller seemed fixated on Melissa's fifteen-year-old sister Amanda, and had claimed that he'd killed Melissa and was watching her body decompose.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Police had traced the general vicinity that the calls had come from, but weren't able to identify the caller. The final call had been placed on Wednesday, August twenty-sixth, two thousand and nine.

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Sixteen months later, Lyn was at work at her fiance's diner in Buffalo, New York, when she saw a television news report about four bodies having been found on a beach in Long Island. All four victims were believed to have been sex workers. The news caused Lyn to immediately burst into tears. She would later find out that her daughter Melissa was the first victim to have been found, and her discovery led to the other three being recovered as well.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  Twenty-two-year-old Megan Waterman had gone missing one month after Shannon Gilbert in early June of two thousand and ten, and her name was linked to the Gilgo case very quickly.

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  On Tuesday, December fourteenth, the day after the body count had risen to four, Megan's name was floated as a missing person who'd last been seen in the surrounding area. Megan had left the Holiday Inn Express in Harpock, about seventeen miles from Gilgo Beach, at one fifteen a.m. on Sunday, June sixth, and hadn't been seen or heard from since.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  Investigators reached out to Megan Waterman's mother, Lorraine, to alert her that her daughter might have been found. They obtained Lorraine's DNA for a comparison.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  The match was confirmed on January twenty, two thousand and eleven, the day after what would have been Megan's twenty-third birthday.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  The remaining victim wasn't Shannon Gilbert, as many had expected. It was a woman who'd gone missing four months after Shannon, in September, two thousand and ten, just three months before the bodies were found.

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  Twenty-seven-year-old Amber Lynn Costello had never been reported missing after she vanished during an appointment with a client.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  Her sister Kim hadn't wanted to get in trouble with the authorities, and had told herself that Amber had likely just taken off somewhere new. By December, two thousand and ten, Kim was living in North Carolina and heard about the Gilgo Beach discoveries from a friend who saw it on the news. Kim, in turn, reached out to Suffolk County Police and arranged to send them a swab of her DNA.

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  The following month, the fourth and most recent victim was confirmed to be Amber Lynn Costello.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

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• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  Sprawling one hundred and eighteen miles eastward from New York Harbor, Long Island has a number of different faces. The New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are part of the island, before it gives way to the more sprawling Nassau County, a densely populated area characterized by suburban sprawl.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  Not as bustling as the city, but still relatively fast-paced, Nassau County is popular with commuters and young families who want the proximity to New York, while not sacrificing as much space.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  Suffolk County makes up the rest of the island, and is more than three times the size of Nassau County, at nine hundred and twelve square miles.

• 1:30:15Speaker 00

  Its police department is one of the largest and wealthiest local police agencies in the United States. That wealth is primarily due to the neighborhoods that sit at its easternmost tip, Montauk and the Hamptons, a collection of highly affluent seaside communities popular with celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers, who typically retreat there for the hot summer months.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  Oak and Gilgo Beaches have a very different feel and tone. Located more to the Nassau end of the county, they're quieter, more isolated, and lack the ostentatious wealth on display in the holiday-maker neighborhoods. For many people traveling to or from Long Island, they're places to pass by rather than stop at. Now, with the news that multiple bodies had been found at these locations, they suddenly became a national headline.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  The discovery of four women disposed of in near identical ways, carefully spaced apart on the same stretch of roadway, led to immediate speculation that Long Island had an active and unidentified serial killer. Richard Dormer, the then Suffolk County Chief of Police, acknowledged that it seemed likely a single person had disposed of all four women, stating at a press conference: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that four bodies ended up in this area. That’s a good direction to go, that they were all dumped here by the same person or persons.” When asked outright if he believed there was a serial killer frequenting the area,

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  Dormer wouldn’t go that far, but conceded police were looking into the possibility.

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Serial killers weren’t a foreign concept for Long Islanders. From 1989 through to 1993, a Long Island resident named Joel Rifkin, an unemployed gardener, had murdered at least nine women and was suspected of killing eight more. Aged in his early 30s, Rifkin had targeted sex workers, murdering and dismembering several of them in his family’s home in the hamlet of East Meadow, Nassau County.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  Also, during the early to mid 90s, a 42-year-old postal worker named Robert Shulman murdered five sex workers. He typically took them back to his apartment in Hicksville, another Nassau County hamlet, where he’d beat and dismembered them before disposing of their remains in neighboring cities, or in one case, on the shoulder of a busy road. Both of these men had long since been caught and convicted, with Robert Shulman dying of natural causes in 2006.

• 1:32:59Speaker 00

  The region had been shocked by their brutal crimes, but there had been more focus on the fact that the perpetrators had appeared to be ordinary suburban men. Although there was sympathy for the victims, the fact that they had been marginalized women whose lives involved sex work, substance use, homelessness, and other instabilities meant that most Long Islanders felt somewhat removed from the crimes. Now, more than a decade and a half later, it appeared that another serial killer was living among them and targeting similarly vulnerable victims. On Monday, January 24, 2011, the Suffolk County Police Chief, Richard Dormer, and District Attorney, Thomas Spota,

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  held a press conference to announce the names of the four victims. Spota also sought to reassure the local community, stating: “To the residents of Suffolk County, the chief and I say to them that the victims of these homicides were engaged in a high-risk business, and that these homicides appear to us to be directly related to that business.”

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  While some members of the community were comforted by this message, the victims’ loved ones felt it was nothing short of dehumanizing victim blaming.

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  Although the authorities wouldn’t publicly state they were dealing with a serial killer, privately, they knew that they were. The identification of the victims made it clear that their murderer had a type. All four were petite white women in their early to mid 20s who lived in various nearby states but travelled to New York for work. All posted advertisements on Craigslist and other online sites. Moreover, when they looked at the dates of when the four victims had gone missing, it was clear that the perpetrator had started operating more frequently. There had been a two-year gap between the disappearance of Melissa Bartholomew and Maureen Brainerd Barnes.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Then, Megan Waterman had been murdered 11 months later, before Amber Link Costello was killed three months after her. Investigators hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Shannon Gilbert was a victim too, who was yet to be discovered.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  Police Chief Richard Dormer set up an investigative task force to tackle the case, which was overseen by three supervisors. The team had 12 detectives, who set about interviewing those who knew the victims. They interviewed Amber Link Costello’s housemate, Dave Shalhoub, who’d told them about the yoga-like man who’d had an appointment with Amber and drove a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche. Efforts were made to locate the Avalanche via records from New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles, but nothing was found.

• 1:35:56Speaker 00

  Other members of the team included experts in cellphone technology and computer forensics. Chief Dormer also requested support from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. In February 2011, a team of FBI agents visited the sites where the bodies had been found, examined what little available evidence there was, and built a cursory profile of the killer. He was most likely a white male aged between mid 20s and mid 40s. He was married or had a girlfriend, was well-educated, employed, and financially stable. He owned an expensive car or truck and had lived on or near Ocean Parkway.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  The dumping site he’d used wasn’t something he’d randomly stumbled across. He was familiar with the area. While he likely lived in Long Island, the data retrieved from his victims’ phones and the burner cells he’d used to communicate with them suggested that he worked in Midtown Manhattan, as many Long Island residents did. The taunting phone calls he’d made to a friend of Maureen Brainerd Barnes and Melissa Bartholomew’s sister indicated he took sadistic pleasure in the suffering his crimes created and wanted to exert dominance over his victims, even after death. Some investigators speculated that he might be a current or former member of law enforcement

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  because he’d kept every call under three minutes, not providing enough time for his exact location to be pinpointed. He’d also made them from busy areas, such as Times Square, where it would be harder for authorities to identify him in crowded footage from surveillance cameras.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  Police had continued to search the Oak and Gilgo Beach areas until late December 2010, when snowfall impeded them. They would return in a few months, after the snow had thawed but before the dense foliage grew back.

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  The search recommenced at the end of March. Police officers and dogs were focused on a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of brush along the parkway on either side of where the previous bodies were found. Nothing was located on the first day, but on the second, a police officer noticed something as he drove slowly east along Ocean Parkway. He was scanning an area of sand dunes about a mile from the original crime scene. It had already been searched by cadaver dogs, but the officer noticed something by the side of the road. It was a partial set of badly decomposed human remains. A skull, hands, and a forearm were recovered,

• 1:38:46Speaker 00

  but the rest of the body was missing.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  The lack of a titanium plate in the jaw quickly revealed that the officer hadn’t found Shannon Gilbert, but yet another victim. She would ultimately be identified as Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old who was groomed and trafficked into sex work before being murdered almost eight years earlier. Originally from upstate New York, Jessica was living in Manhattan when she went missing on Monday, July 21, 2003.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  At the time Jessica went missing, she’d been working near the Port Authority Bus Terminal on West 41st Street in Midtown Manhattan. She’d presumably been picked up by her killer and later driven 70 miles to Manorville.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  Shortly before she’d gone missing, she called her mother and made plans to visit her in Poughkeepsie a few days later for her birthday. When she never arrived, Jessica’s mother notified law enforcement.

• 1:39:50Speaker 00

  Five days after Jessica went missing, a woman had been walking her dog in the Suffolk County hamlet of Manorville, about 45 miles east of Gilgo Beach. She was heading down a small paved road just north of an overpass for the Long Island Expressway when she discovered Jessica’s naked body. She was lying on a plastic sheet on a pile of sticks and scrap wood in some tall grass. Her hands and head had been removed, and her killer had mutilated her breasts. He’d also tried to remove a tattoo Jessica had, presumably to prevent her identification. The medical examiners were able to reconstruct the tattoo, which led to Jessica being identified.

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  Investigators spoke to a witness who’d been in the wooded area roughly 13 hours before Jessica was found and had seen a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup truck backed up near where Jessica was left.

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  Jessica’s cousin would later tell the Long Island press that Jessica had been loved, describing her as “a true force”. “She had a huge heart, and she’s incredibly loved and missed. She was an inspiration and somebody that I looked up to. She also had a feisty streak and would stand up for herself when necessary.”

• 1:41:14Speaker 00

  Five days after Jessica Taylor’s skull, hands and forearm were located near Gilgo Beach, more dismembered body parts were found about a mile and a half further east. A head, a right leg from the mid-calf down and two hands were recovered along Ocean Parkway and labelled Jane Doe Number Six. Like Jessica Taylor, the rest of this victim’s body had already been found many years earlier and in the same wooded area of Manorville.

• 1:41:46Speaker 00

  On Sunday, November 19, 2000, a hunter’s dog found a female body wrapped in garbage bags near the intersection of Halsey Manor Road and Mill Road in Manorville. The location was near a local access road and adjacent to power lines. The victim had ligature marks, her breasts had been mutilated and several foreign human hairs had been found on her body, including one near the victim’s left wrist. Unlike Jessica Taylor, however, this victim had remained unidentified.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  The similar manners of disposal led investigators to believe that the murders of Jane Doe Number Six and Jessica Taylor were definitely connected. Both had been dismembered with a hand-powered saw before being dumped in the same locations. But for the investigators working the Gilgo Beach case in 2011, it was less clear whether these two crimes were related to the first four victims found along Ocean Parkway.

• 1:42:49Speaker 00

  About 150 feet, or 45 metres, east of where Jane Doe Number Six’s head, leg and hands were found, searchers found more remains belonging to the youngest victim yet. Wrapped in a blanket and placed deep in a thicket of bramble were the skeletal remains of a child estimated to be between one and four years old. Unlike all of the other victims so far, who were white, she was African-American. She wore gold hoop earrings and a gold chain necklace. Investigators would name her Baby Doe.

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  On the same day, the skeletal remains of one more person were found close to where the original four victims had been recovered. This victim was Asian, most likely Han Chinese. Estimated to be between 17 and 23 years of age and about 5 feet 6 inches tall, Asian Doe had XY chromosomes, indicating that they were biologically male.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  But they were dressed in women’s clothes, suggesting that Asian Doe had been a trans woman. Damage to the skull indicated that this victim had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head. It was estimated they’d been murdered between five and 10 years prior to their discovery. Investigators dubbed this unknown victim Asian Doe.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  The body count had risen to eight. It would increase again just one week later, on Monday, April 11.

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  Roughly eight miles west of where Baby Doe had been found and six and a half miles west of the Gilgo Beach remains, more dismembered body parts were recovered in a plastic bag dumped near Jones Beach State Park in Nassau County. Inside the bag was a set of skeletal arms and legs. On the arms were two gold-coloured bracelets in a similar fashion to the gold jewellery found on Baby Doe. And like Baby Doe, she was African-American. This victim was dubbed Jane Doe Number Three and ultimately found to be Baby Doe’s mother.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  DNA would later link Jane Doe Number Three to a human torso found almost 20 years earlier on Saturday, June 28, 1997. A group of people hiking in Hempstead Lake Park, about 20 miles north-west of Gilgo Beach, found a large, green plastic container that flies were buzzing around. Inside the container was a pillowcase, a red towel and a black garbage bag. Inside the bag was a human torso belonging to an African-American woman who was missing her arms, legs and head. She had a tattoo of a peach on her left breast, prompting investigators to name her Peaches until they could make a positive identification.

• 1:45:56Speaker 00

  They released a photo of the tattoo, hoping it would prompt someone who knew her to come forward, but no credible leads ever resulted.

• 1:46:05Speaker 00

  Also recovered in Nassau County on the same day as Jane Doe Number Three, almost exactly between Jones Beach State Park and Gilgo Beach, was a woman’s skull and several teeth, sniffed out by a cadaver dog. DNA testing would link these remains to a pair of severed legs with red-painted toenails that had been found in April of 1996 in a garbage bag on Fire Island, a popular barrier island 16 miles east of Gilgo Beach. That victim had been known for almost a decade and a half as Fire Island Jane Doe and remained unidentified.

• 1:46:48Speaker 00

  By mid-April of 2011, investigators in Long Island were confronting the fact that they suddenly had 10 murder victims found along the same stretch of roadway, some of whom had been identified while others hadn’t. And debates raged as to whether the 10 victims had all been murdered by the same person or whether there were multiple killers using the same region as their dump site.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  Initially, investigators suspected that they were dealing with multiple murderers. There seemed to be so many discrepancies between the first four victims who were found, Melissa Bartholomew, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman and Amberlin Costello, who would come to be dubbed the Gilgo Four, and the six victims found after them. For starters, the Gilgo Four had gone missing in a fairly tight three-year timeline. All had been left intact, bound and evenly spaced out from one another. All but one was wrapped in burlap. All had been sex workers who used online advertisements to meet clients and all were contacted by a killer who made use of burner phones.

• 1:48:02Speaker 00

  They had similar appearances and ages, being short women in their twenties with petite builds. In contrast to the Gilgo Four, the other six victims included several individuals of different ethnicities, ages and gender identities. Four of them had been dismembered, with much of their remains having been scattered elsewhere. This signature was inconsistent with the more recent burlap-wrapped victims.

• 1:48:31Speaker 00

  But as the months dragged on and some of the initially unidentified remains were linked to earlier murders of other sex workers, investigators changed their minds.

• 1:48:43Speaker 00

  By late November 2011, Suffolk County Police Chief Richard Dormer was telling media outlets that his team now believed a single person was behind all 10 murders. A lone serial killer native to Long Island who had honed and evolved his disposal method over time. He’d started out picking up women in person during the 1990s, before switching to meeting them over the internet when technology advanced.

• 1:49:12Speaker 00

  In an interview with NBC New York, Dormer stated: “The common denominators that we have now indicate that it’s possibly one killer. We’ve had the same dumping ground, sex workers, young women, even though there were the Asian male and the toddler, but we think they were connected to the sex trade in some way.” Dormer explained that the toddler might have been the child of an escort who accompanied her mother to a job, and perhaps the Asian victim was a trans sex worker. “These common denominators indicate we have the one person committing these crimes,” he said.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  One of Suffolk County’s chief detectives sought to reassure Long Island residents that despite the fact there was a serial killer in their midst, there was some consolation that the killer wasn’t targeting just anybody. “He’s not selecting citizens at large, he’s selecting from a pool.” For the families and loved ones of the women killed, this message was more of an insult than a consolation.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, the woman whose disappearance had led to the revelation of a serial killer was still missing. Shannon Gilbert’s mother, Marie, continued advocating loudly for her daughter throughout 2011. Conspiracy theories about Shannon’s case were cropping up online. Some people thought that the police might be involved due to their delayed investigation and reluctance to release the audio from Shannon’s 911 call. Others started pointing the finger at Dr Peter Hackett, the Oak Beach spokesperson who had inserted himself into Alex Diaz’s investigation, promising to call the police but failing to follow through, and calling Shannon’s mother with a strange story about

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  taking Shannon into his home for wayward girls. Aside from Shannon’s mother, Dr Hackett hadn’t made this claim to anyone else, nor said that he’d seen Shannon at all. Some Oak Beach residents pointed to the lack of security footage from the night Shannon went missing. CCTV cameras at the gated community’s entrance should have captured some of Shannon’s movements that night, including which direction she might have run after leaving Barbara Brennan’s house. Footage from these cameras were uploaded to a hard drive and stored there for one month, but police didn’t inquire about the cameras until eight months after Shannon

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  went missing, by which time the footage had been scrubbed. Those who suspected Dr Hackett of being involved in Shannon’s disappearance thought he might have erased it, but others who knew the doctor said he was just a great guy whose one weakness was making up stories for attention. They believed he’d tried to big-note himself by calling Shannon’s mother, not realising the severity of the situation or the scrutiny that would follow. Police publicly dismissed the notion that Dr Hackett could be a suspect. Although Police Chief Richard Dormer believed all of the recently discovered victims were linked, he was adamant that Shannon was not.

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Because a driver had taken her to Long Island, her case didn’t fit with the pattern. In late November of 2011, Dormer told the media that it seemed likely Shannon wasn’t even a victim at all, perhaps she’d just had an accident. This assertion angered Shannon’s family, who remained convinced she had met with foul play. The huge publicity around the case, due to its association with what had become known as the Long Island Serial Killer, meant that the pressure to find Shannon didn’t stop. In early December 2011, the one-year anniversary of the discovery of the bodies on Gilgo Beach was fast approaching, and the search for Shannon resumed.

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  This time, police were finally going to focus their efforts on the 49 acres of marsh which lay next to where Shannon had last been seen. The swampy marsh had been deemed too difficult to search because of the way it was filled with brackish, cold water, and thick vegetation. In the summer, it was home to mosquitoes, ticks, and thick poison ivy. Pipes beneath Oak Beach were supposed to drain the marsh after heavy rain, but were typically too clogged and damaged to do so. Storms that had hit Long Island throughout 2011 had damaged Ocean Parkway, requiring significant repairs and reconstruction.

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  These fixes resulted in the marsh’s water levels lowering significantly, making it easier to search. On Tuesday, December 6, 2011, the police used an amphibious, heavy-duty rotary mower to cut through the marsh, opening up accessible paths. Ten officers followed behind on foot, cutting at reeds taller than they were with weed whackers, while dogs and their handlers brought up the rear. It was hard work, with some officers becoming stuck in waist-deep water. The search paid off. Searchers found Shannon’s purse with her ID inside, as well as her phone, shoes, and her jeans, which were torn.

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  A week later, early on the morning of Tuesday, December 13, police found a partially decomposed body on the far side of the marsh, about a quarter of a mile or 400 metres from where Shannon’s belongings were found. The body was wearing a black jacket but no pants, and had a metal plate in the jaw. The police had finally found Shannon Gilbert. Chief of Police Richard Dormer speculated that Shannon had become disoriented after running into the thick bramble while it was still dark. She’d lost some of her possessions in her distraught state, and her jeans were torn off by the rough vegetation.

• 1:55:29Speaker 00

  Or perhaps Shannon had removed them after suffering from hypothermia, which sometimes results in a paradoxical undressing, where an individual feels overheated despite freezing to death. Then she succumbed to hypothermia or accidentally drowned. But Shannon’s family refused to believe this, citing Shannon’s fear of water. To them, it made no sense that she could have willingly entered the marsh. They believed she’d been put there by somebody else. Several weeks after Shannon Gilbert’s body was found, Suffolk County Chief of Police

• 1:56:11Speaker 00

  Richard Dormer retired, after having held the position for eight years. The departure of Richard Dormer marked the end of some public disputes about the Long Island Serial Killer case that had been making headlines ever since the bodies were discovered. While Dormer had repeatedly stated that he believed a single individual was responsible for all the murders uncovered along Ocean Parkway, the county’s district attorney, Thomas Spota, vehemently disagreed. Days after Dormer posited the single killer theory, Spota held his own press conference in which he asserted that it was more likely multiple people, perhaps as many as three,

• 1:56:52Speaker 00

  had used the same isolated stretch of beach and road as a dumping ground. This argument went back and forth between the two men for the better part of 2011. One former Suffolk County police officer later told journalist and author Robert Colcar that Spota had been incensed by Dormer’s single killer announcement because he believed it would cause the community to panic. At the beginning of 2012, a new police chief was appointed by the Suffolk County Executive. He chose a man in his late 40s by the name of Jim Burke, after receiving a couple of recommendations for him, including one from DA Thomas Spota.

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  Burke had been a Suffolk County Narcotics Detective before going to Thomas Spota’s office to work as Head of Investigations for 10 years. Being promoted from a DA’s officer to the Chief of Police was essentially a four-rank jump for Burke. He now held the top position in one of the largest, best-paid, and wealthiest local police agencies in the United States, and was responsible for overseeing the notorious Long Island Serial Killer case. Almost immediately, the Suffolk County Police Department changed its entire approach to the investigation. It ceased collaborating with neighbouring Nassau County, and blocked the FBI’s work on the case.

• 1:58:21Speaker 00

  Federal agents who had been in the process of analysing cellphone data related to the case were suddenly told that their work wasn’t relevant to the investigation, and were sent away. Detectives were instructed not to share information with the FBI, and told to notify their supervisors if they were contacted by outside law enforcement agencies. Former Suffolk County Detective Rob Trotter alleged that Burke refused to pursue subpoenas for cell tower records in an attempt to identify the burnerphones used to contact victims, stating that it would be too invasive. For reasons unknown, it appeared that the man newly in charge of solving the Long Island

• 1:59:03Speaker 00

  Serial Killer case was doing everything possible to thwart the investigation. To be continued, next week.

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