Lost Girls (30 page)

THE MARSH

The largest marsh in Oak Beach—forty-nine acres, about the same size as the inhabitable portion of the community—borders Anchor Way, where Shannan was last seen, and Larboard Court, where the Hacketts live. With every storm, the marsh fills up like a bathtub with rainwater, then drains through pipes beneath the roads of Oak Beach, down toward the old Oak Beach Inn parking lot and eventually into the Fire Island Inlet. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. In reality, the pipes get crushed by storms or clogged with sediment, and the marsh fills even higher, until the ground starts to look like muck and the cordgrass and reeds and poison ivy grow so thick that no resident would ever try to hack through it.

The mosquitoes come next. They like nothing better than a freshwater marsh. The mosquitoes multiply, and so do the ticks, and the people of Oak Beach cry out for help from the town of Babylon. Every few decades, the town acquiesces and sends a team from Vector Control to dredge the marsh, building and repairing drainage ditches. You can see the trenches in aerial view: a long one down the middle and short splints off to the sides, like a spine with little ribs. As Joe Scalise, Jr., pointed out, one of those ribs runs right behind Hackett’s cottage—a trench that anyone running through the marsh at night wouldn’t see.

The marsh and the people of Oak Beach have coexisted this way for over a century. In the early nineties, the town of Babylon ceded control of the marsh to the state of New York in a land swap; in return, the town got control of a portion of the Oak Beach parking lot, which it intended to transform into a public park. Just before that happened, in 1989, the town dug out the mosquito ditches one last time. A main drainpipe to the inlet was replaced with a new pipe that lacked a flapper valve—meaning that in the decades since, salt water has drifted up into the freshwater marsh. Salt meadow cordgrass followed. So did salt grass and common reed, along with the seaside lavender, black grass, marsh elder, groundsel bush, and more poison ivy.

The marsh became a Frankenstein of plant life, universally avoided by the people of Oak Beach. Everything grew there, and no one ever seemed to go in. Until, on a cold morning in December, eighteen months after Joe Brewer’s last party on the Fairway, the police, John Mallia and his dog, Blue, among them, discovered—nearly fully intact, just steps from the shoulder of Ocean Parkway—the remains of Shannan Gilbert.

They found her purse first, with her identification inside. Then they went back and found a phone, some shoes, and a torn pair of jeans. They could get in now because of the repairs, which had drained the marsh for the first time in decades. Inspector Stuart Cameron of the Suffolk County police said that the pipe “drastically increased our visibility in there and assisted us in being able to find things.”

The police chose that day, December 6, to search the marsh because the tide seemed low. They used a large amphibious vehicle for the densest areas and cut new trails with a brush hog, a rotary mower with blades on hinges so they bounced up and over rocks and stumps. Ten officers went in on foot behind the vehicles, using brush cutters—high-powered WeedWackers—to clear paths. A dozen more came in with dogs. Rounding out the search party were six emergency services personnel and three members of the crime-scene unit. A few of the officers used metal detectors in the muck. Some of them reported working in waist-deep water and getting stuck.

“She’s in there someplace,” Dormer said at a press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. It was late afternoon and misty and rainy and cold as the commissioner spoke, vowing to keep looking “into the foreseeable future . . . Hopefully, we will find the remains.”

With Shannan’s belongings as his first solid clue but still no body, the commissioner wasted no time fitting it into his theory. He said that Shannan was high that night, and paranoid, and she ran into the marsh, seeing the lights of the cars from Ocean Parkway beyond it. But in her condition, he said, Shannan had no concept that those cars were as far as a quarter mile away, and since she didn’t know the area, she had no idea that she was about to fling herself into a dense, murky marsh that even the neighbors avoided. So, Dormer concluded, Shannan tripped—most likely in a drainage ditch—and drowned.

If this was true, it would be amazing, almost poetic irony. First Shannan’s disappearance leads to the discovery of ten other sets of remains, and then the hunt for the serial killer makes Shannan’s case so prominent that police have to come back to Oak Beach and search for her. Without the serial-killer case, they might have called off the search for Shannan. But without her, they might never have known there was a serial killer.

The girls all found one another.

Even if they did find Shannan’s body in that ditch, there were many questions—chief among them, who killed the other girls? The people of Oak Beach would still have a lot to answer for. What happened in Joe Brewer’s house that made her feel so threatened? When she and Brewer left the house briefly, were they buying drugs? If so, from whom? Once she came back, what happened that made her want to run away not just from Brewer but from her own driver? And did some neighbors—if not Hackett, then anyone—see her before she disappeared in the marsh?

Most of the people of Oak Beach had spent the better part of a year denying that she was there, behaving as if something horrible hadn’t happened in their secluded beach community. Now there was proof that something had.

The police showed the belongings to Mari, who confirmed that the pocketbook and phone were Shannan’s. Then she hunkered down at home, avoiding reporters, consumed with grief. Her family and friends were puzzling over the convenient timing of this search and the discovery, so close to Dormer’s retirement. Some were wondering about Hackett. Mostly, they didn’t want to believe that Shannan just wandered off and got lost and tripped and died. They wanted her death to mean something, and they wanted a culprit.

A day passed, and the police found nothing. Another day passed, and Shannan was still missing. When the weekend came, some of them harbored hope that Shannan wasn’t there; that she wasn’t even dead. “I’d rather her be alive somewhere,” said Shannan’s sister Sarra.

All the families were angry and bound together by that anger. Soon they were all declaring love and loyalty for one another. The most prolific was Kritzia Lugo, who, never having met any of the women in person, told the story in a long string of Facebook comments on how each one of them had saved her. Many of them replied to Kritzia, and soon they were all feeling it.

KRITZIA LUGO
It’s weird but I learned from you guys one night I was so sad it was late I called Melissa Cann and she was there for me!

MELISSA CANN
I will always be there for you . . . And I know it is likewise with you also. :)

KRITZIA LUGO
That time I cut my wrist and was in the hospital for like a week Melissa Brock Wright was there for me it was late but I got to tell her all I was feeling

KRITZIA LUGO
Dawn Barthelemy talks to me once in a while and gives me advice

KRITZIA LUGO
Mari Gilbert showed me that there are mother’s out there who do love their children

MELISSA BROCK WRIGHT
None of us will ever have to fight any battle alone! We are all a unit, and if one of us is having a hard time then we all are. If someone messes with one of us then they’re messing with all of us!

KRITZIA LUGO
Kim Overstreet showed me the power of sisterhood when she is willing to sacrifice her life to get her sis justice

MELISSA CANN
Yes I agree

KRITZIA LUGO
Sherre Gilbert showed me children are a blessing—don’t be so uptight—love them and learn how to have fun with them and enjoy them

Mari hung Christmas decorations around her place in Ellenville: garland around the fence, lights hung from the porch, and giant plastic candy canes on the lawn. In the middle was a pink sign:
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU
. “Christmas is about dreams, dreaming, wishes coming true,” Mari told a
Newsday
reporter. The sign included a map of the Gilgo Beach area and a list of names: Jessica Taylor, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello. “They’re my extended family now,” Mari said.

Mari’s youngest daughter, Stevie, was there, too, helping to decorate the home. She told the reporter that the family would put up a stocking for Shannan, and that she believed Shannan was still alive. Even if Shannan’s remains were found, Stevie said, “there’s never going to be closure unless I have her home. I’m just praying that Shannan comes home.”

Taking advantage of the press attention, Mari noted a few inconsistencies in the search. She said she wasn’t able to confirm that the shoes belonged to Shannan, who’d been seen in strappy sandals earlier that night, and the police had found what looked like ballet slippers. She said she believed that Shannan’s things were planted in the marsh—by whom, she wouldn’t say. She couldn’t be sure of anything until Shannan was found, and even then, she vowed to fight. “I think Dormer just wants to find the remains, say she drowned, and close the case before he retires. That’s what I feel, but I’m not gonna let that happen.”

The question hung over every Facebook thread for days: Could Shannan really have run into a marsh and died?

“I mean, that would just be
my
fuckin’ luck,” Kim said.

On the phone that week from her place on Long Island, Kim said she could see Shannan being coked up and paranoid enough to run away from Michael Pak; Kim had been in situations a little like that. “And she’s bipolar,” she said. “Whatever meds she’s taking for that, there are just some things you can’t mix together. I know that through experience, with myself and my sister. My sister would have drug-induced seizures. Some people have drug-induced schizophrenia. I’ve seen that shit.”

Which brought Kim to the purpose of her call. She’d been thinking of calling the detectives and turning them on to a menacing trick she’d had not long before Amber disappeared. “It weighs on me heavy,” she said. “My instincts are usually not too wrong.” The john was all the way out on the East End of Long Island. He gave her five hundred for the hour and wanted full service. Dave Schaller was with her, so she said no to the date. But the next day he called and offered another four hundred, “and he says he’s going to score some rock.”

She went. He was a white guy, he drove a truck, and he said he owned a tugboat business. He lived in a basement apartment, nothing spectacular. Inside, he showed Kim a box of dildos, “probably a hundred different vibrators and women’s shit. And that struck me as weird at first, but some guys get off on it, so it didn’t strike me too hard.” Where things turned scary, she said, was when she gave him full service; that was when he reached for her throat. “Some guys do this,” Kim said. “Some guys like to do it, but I don’t like it. You’re not going to do to it to me. That can change the situation real quick. And I didn’t let it go farther than it did, so I got up and told him, ‘I’m not comfortable, I’m leaving, and you’re not getting your money back. That was uncalled for.’ ”

Kim said she left and didn’t think anything of it. They texted afterward but never met up again. A few days before Amber vanished, Kim said she told her sister about him and passed along his number. “I told her I had some guy,” she said. “I’d seen him twice and I made a G off him in two days. I was like, ‘I’m not guaranteeing anything, but you can try it.’ I told her that he was kind of an asshole. But we never said anything else about him.” Now she can’t help but wonder: “Did she call him that week, or maybe she called him and he called her back? You know what I’m saying?”

The story, as she told it, seemed a little wobbly: Kim had been afraid of this john at the time, but not so afraid that she wouldn’t pass the lead along to her sister? No matter: She wanted to find him again, confront him directly: “How do I know you didn’t do it? What were you doing that night?” So far, she hadn’t been able to find anyone to go with her to find his house. Ever since she’d appeared on the A&E show, all her crack and escort connections had been avoiding her. “They think I put myself out there too much,” she said. “My dealers are like, ‘What the fuck?’ I’m like, ‘My sister got killed! Every man for their fucking self at this point. Shit!’ ”

The killer dominated her thoughts. She’d decided that he was thinking about her, too. “It eats at me every day. I dream about this fucking guy. It’s a war right now between him and me.” She was talking even faster. “This is the rest of my life. It’s all I think about day and fucking night. I cannot shake it. I can’t. Because if it was Amber here, that bitch would be on TV every two days, they would lock her up just to keep her from getting the publicity. I’m telling you, that’s how she was. She was a crusader. She was a moneymaker. If there’s something to make from it, she’s going to make it. And I’m telling you, she would fucking do it. So how can I not, you know what I’m saying? It ruined my life. It took almost my whole heart out of my chest. It’s ruined my fucking life. It’s put me back out on the streets. I’m running as hard as I was from day one.”

She’d been fighting some version of this war long before the killer entered her life. She’d been running since she was a little girl, since Coed Connection and maybe before that. So had Amber. They ran together. They hustled together. Those guys Amber and her friends robbed, they had it coming. “They got treated the way they treated her, and that’s just the way it is,” Kim said. “That’s life. A lot of people don’t understand that. But it’s because there’s war in the streets, for any type of hustle, whether it’s drugs, whether it’s guns, whether it’s ass, whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same war. It’s war. And people don’t realize that, and they live their normal little lives and stuff. Girls on the Backpage, it’s not a fucking choice, it’s a last resort. It’s a white-knuckle way of survival. It’s just the way it is.”