Lost Girls (29 page)

The East Village neighborhood around Bear was gentrified now. Apartments went for millions, and the park even had a playground. But the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park, near Avenue A and Seventh Street, was still known as Crusty Row. Crustys are society dropouts, and famously so: covered with tattoos and piercings, and several rungs further out of the mainstream than Deadheads or Phish-heads or those who used to be East Village squatters. Bear walked among the Crustys and was largely accepted, though he was not one of them. He could supply them with dope when they wanted it, and that counted for something. “If you’re homeless in New York,” he said, “no place is better than the Lower East Side. I just have enough swag to be out there on Avenue D. I get along with everyone. I’m a likable person. I’m a good person. I have a good heart. I get arrested, I’m not fucking snitching. I’ll eat that. I’ll go to jail. I don’t deal with fucking cops. I don’t do that shit.”

He was not in touch with Dave, though he said he loved him like a brother. Even Kim he still liked, though he recognized her limitations. “I’m not saying Kim is a bad person, because she’s not,” he said. “But even if Amber was strung out, she’d still give you the shirt off her back. She’d do anything in the world.” That was how she differed from her sister. “Amber cared about others. That’s just the bottom line of it. Amber cared about others; Kim cares about herself.”

Did Kim treat Amber well?

“Kim used Amber a lot, I think,” Bear said.

How?

“To her advantage, you know what I mean? Through these postings, and these ads, you know? She used Amber to keep that house available to her at all times. A lot of manipulating. A lot of lies.” He was quick to add that there were deceptions all around. Amber, he said, “would have to act like she was on the phone with Kim to calm down Dave,” who couldn’t stand the way Kim ignored her little sister. Even so, “Dave was so blindly in love with Kim. That man loved this woman more than you could possibly know. Like, Dave is the biggest sucker for love there is in this world.”

As he went on, Bear made it clear that Kim hadn’t been the only one to fail Amber. He didn’t call the police, either. And yet he knew how much she loved him.

“For some reason, I was her number one priority. I wanted her to learn to love herself a little bit.”

It didn’t take long for Bear to turn sorrowful, and when he did, he employed the vernacular of rehab, perhaps because he thought that was the format in which I would best receive it, or maybe it was a way of connecting with the memory of meeting Amber. “My choices have ruined my life,” he said. “My life is in shambles.”

In his twenty-seven years, Bear had been in rehab for alcohol, Xanax, crack, intravenous cocaine, weed, and dope. “I’m no longer opiate-dependent,” he said proudly—which, to clarify, meant to Bear that he was down to a bag of heroin a day. “And I don’t shoot it. I sniff it. Once in the morning, every other couple of days.” He circled back to rehab again and again, coming up with new reasons not to bother trying. “I’ve gone to every hospital, every rehab, every detox in this fucking city more than once, and it’s never worked. It’s rough, man. I got real bad post-traumatic stress. And that whole thing with Amber did not help at all.”

II.

THE DOCTOR

In December, they started searching the bramble again. The announcement from the police came on November 30, just one day after Dormer made public his theory that one killer murdered them all except Shannan. Now the police were saying they had information that Shannan’s body might be at Gilgo Beach after all—out along the parkway, not far from where the first four bodies were found.

To Mari and the others, this felt like more window dressing, a chance to demonstrate that the case was alive as the anniversary approached. Then again, they couldn’t just ignore it. What if the police were acting on a new tip?

In a few days, the police settled that question when a spokesperson said the new search was about information they’d been sitting on for months. The high-resolution aerial photography conducted by the FBI in the spring had yielded a few questionable spots—“ninety points of interest,” they called them—that they’d decided needed reexamination. The spokesperson said they had to wait until the brush thinned out in winter to search again.

To the families, this inspired even less confidence: Allowing a serial killer to remain on the loose is all right as long as a cop doesn’t get poison ivy? Again they felt shunted aside: If the victims had been from middle-class homes in gated beach communities, the response from police, they assumed, would have been different.

On Monday, December 5, in heavy fog, seven teams from the New York state and Nassau and Suffolk County police forces were back along the northern shoulder of Ocean Parkway, searching the bramble. Oak Beach was a media magnet all over again. No neighbors were commenting except Joe Scalise, Jr., and his father. They were hopeful about answers, even as they remained confident that the police were searching in the wrong place. If nothing else, Joe Jr. said, it put a little heat on their neighbor. “The FBI has a camera now on Hackett’s house,” he said. His father said Hackett had been seen at a local Chase bank branch, trying to get another mortgage. A rumor was circulating that he was planning to pull up stakes and relocate to Florida.

In rare agreement with the Scalises, Gus Coletti also suspected that the police were out searching on the highway just to look good. “If you go down there right now and you ask them, they’ll all tell you the same thing: ‘We’re going through the motions.’ ”

It seemed as good a time as any to walk down Anchor Way to Larboard Court and knock on the doctor’s door.

The doctor’s home is small but charming, a beach bungalow with a sign over the entrance that reads
BE NICE OR LEAVE
. I knock a few times before he limps to the door; I can see him coming through a tall vertical window next to the threshold. He looks younger than he seemed in the photos and TV news clips, and I’m reminded that he is still only in his mid-fifties. His hair is messy and graying, but his face is boyish. The stubble on his face does little to conceal the patchiness of his skin. His eyes are wider, more spaniel-like, in person than they seemed on television. Between the limp and the potbelly, it isn’t easy to imagine him as a master criminal who bewitches young women and controls a small community.

When the door opens, I see his half-smile. Maybe this is a doctor’s self-regard or a wince of pain from his prosthesis. Or maybe he’s frustrated by yet another knock. He wasn’t expecting me; I came back to Oak Beach because of the rebooted search for bodies, and I hoped to hear from Hackett himself about the rumors.

He seems annoyed from the start, irritated, ready to say no. He shakes his head and says he’s turned down many requests for comment. He says there’s no sense trying to disprove things that are so obviously not true: “What would be the point?” he says, as if it’s the most ridiculous question in the world.

Then, suddenly, he glances left and right. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “Come on in.”

It’s not at all clear, at least to me, what changed his mind. Some people simply aren’t comfortable
not
talking, and Hackett seems to be one of those. The unfortunate by-product of this impulse is that he can come off as a dissembler, even when he might not be. He overanswers questions to the point where it seems like he’s hiding something, because he’s gone out on a limb, talking about things he doesn’t know anything about. Some might say that’s because he’s a blowhard—or, as Laura Coletti charitably puts it, an overelaborator. Others, like the Scalises and Mari, would say it’s because he
is
hiding something.

Hackett offers a tour. He heads straight back, and as he enters the next room, he snaps, “Here’s my clinic.” Then, quickly, he says he’s joking; he’s referring to the rumor that he treated Shannan here. It’s a storage room, neat but lived in—he calls it “a workroom”—filled with years of boxes and tools and belongings amassed by a large family. Hackett limps swiftly through a doorway to a back room that contains a bed and an easel and paintings made by Hackett’s daughter Mary Ellen, who is visiting for the holidays. Around a corner is a folded futon couch with a pillow and comforter on it. That’s for his son, he says. His two daughters, both in their twenties, are living on their own now, though he’ll later say that one daughter, along with his wife, was there the morning when Shannan disappeared.

He heads out of the room and up a short staircase to the main room of the house, a double-height living room that sits right in the entryway, capturing the southern light from large slanted windows. The room has a galley kitchen in the far corner, opening up to a table with barstools. The table is indeed large enough and at a good height to double as an examination table, as the doctor once said. We sit on the stools. The far wall of the room is floor-to-ceiling with books, including a copy of
Writers Market
. Hackett says offhandedly that his father was a writer.

As he talks, Hackett insists that the whole controversy about him does not usually occupy a second of his time or attention. He says that, contrary to the gossip, no neighbors called him the night Shannan went running down the street, pounding on doors. In fact, he says that days later he told Gus Coletti and Barbara Brennan that they
should
have called him; that he might have been able to help the girl. It strikes me when he puts it this way that this quite possibly could be what Bruce Anderson really overheard: Hackett saying he
would
have treated Shannan if he’d seen her, not that he
had
treated her, the way Joe Jr. believed. I wonder if Hackett had said the same sort of thing to Mari on the phone—not that he had helped Shannan but that he
wished
he had helped her.

Even that wouldn’t explain Hackett denying ever having spoken to Mari, then later admitting as much. That could have been his haplessness, or it could have been a deception. Yet as Hackett answers more questions, he continues to be fuzzy on information that he should have figured out stock responses to a long time ago. He says the first time he heard anything about Shannan was several days after she disappeared, when Alex Diaz and Michael Pak came to the neighborhood with flyers. He suggests that he felt a little sorry for them. “They were nice guys, but they didn’t know how to go about getting information from people.” He says he told them to go to the local police where Shannan lived and to report her missing, and then he gave them his card and told them he’d be happy to help out if they needed anything. He remembers thinking that “from a police standpoint, this was not a child that has gone missing.” In other words, she was a grown-up, and the police might be inclined to think she’d gone off somewhere on her own and would come back when she felt like it. It never occurred to him that anything else would come of it. “This is a twentysomething woman who has disappeared before,” he says. “Or at least that’s what I understood.”

He remembers all of this. But he doesn’t remember the call he made to Mari. At first he says he didn’t speak with Mari on the phone, when he clearly admitted that in his letters to
48 Hours
. A moment later, he acknowledges that there is a phone record confirming that he and Mari had spoken.

“I don’t know. It’s a possibility someone called. I don’t want to appear to be disputing what she said. I get thirty-five calls a day. I don’t know if maybe she called me to talk. But I never saw the girl. I never talked to the girl. I don’t have any recollection of talking to the mother.”

Out of nowhere, he recalls something else. “Hold it,” he says. “It’s possible she called me and I called her back wondering who she was. It was a three-minute phone call.”

In a way, you could argue that this is refreshing honesty—guilelessness. But in the middle of a murder investigation, with his name all over the news and police searching the bramble on a beach three miles away, it is also a little foolish. And yet it’s impossible for me to tell if it is because he’s genuinely hiding something or because he is naive about just how eager some people are to pin Shannan’s disappearance on him. I can’t help but think of Richard Jewell, who discovered the pipe bomb at the Atlanta Olympics only to be fingered for a long time as the bomber. Is Hackett the Richard Jewell of the Long Island serial-killer case? Or is he Joel Rifkin?

Hackett continues to insist that the whole line of inquiry is ridiculous. “I’m a family practitioner: an emergency physician, a former director of emergency medicine for Suffolk County, New York, and then emergency department director at Central Suffolk Hospital. Can you imagine my putting my reputation on the line, saying I ran a clinic?”

For a moment, it’s possible to sense Hackett’s plight and even sympathize. He’s a talker. Maybe he said something Mari misinterpreted, something about how he works in emergency medicine and knows about rehabs. Everyone knows that Hackett has enemies in the neighborhood; maybe those enemies are only too happy to believe he’s up to no good and that there’s a cover-up. Is it possible that this is a perfect storm of gossip and the doctor had nothing to do with it at all?

He throws up his hands. How does one prove that one is, in fact, not a murderer? “I’ve been over this so many times, it doesn’t get clearer with repetition,” Hackett says. The best he can hope for is to be forgotten. “All you’re doing is trying to tread lightly and lightly and more and more lightly until you recede into the background and eventually no one can see you anymore.”

I ask about the security video. Hackett sighs. “The police wanted the security video. The police took the security video. Being on the board, I saw when the police told the board they wanted it. So yes, we gave it to them.”

Did he have a look at it beforehand?

“Of course, early on we said we should be looking at the security video. But that would be tampering with evidence.”

I stay an hour. He answers every question. The doctor and I shake hands. We agree to stay in touch.

And twenty-four hours later, the police find Shannan’s belongings in the marsh behind his house.