Lost Girls (32 page)

Missy and Lorraine had been at Oak Beach for two days already, camping out in the rain, trying to get press attention. Missy had put her family’s forty-six-inch Sharp LCD TV up for sale to pay for the trip. But that day, hours after the police announced they’d found Shannan, the fog and misty rain had cleared just in time.

It was bright but cold and windy when the reporters and camera crews started rolling into the parking lot. Kritzia joined the others, a good distance away from the media. Michele Kutner, the girls’ biggest Facebook fan, was with them, telling everyone that there was no way Shannan just drowned. She and two others had spent a few days determining the exact site of each victim, then marking each location with spray paint on the side of Ocean Parkway so that they could erect four crosses before the vigil. Each family made their own except Kim. Melissa Wright in Wilmington made a beautiful white cross for Amber and had it shipped there for the occasion.

As they all waited for Mari, they were crying, embracing, and marveling at the coincidence. The reporters, watching from a distance, weren’t quite as amazed. They’d been coming to Oak Beach for a long time, and cynicism was taking over. “I can’t believe they’re doing all this for a whore,” said one member of a TV crew.

Kim turned up, too, as promised. She brought a friend, a woman who was helping her stay sober. But she had dark circles under her eyes, and the tears never stopped flowing. When Missy saw Kim, they hugged, but then Missy looked at her like she was a dead woman walking.

Gus Coletti came by. Michele Kutner broke away from comforting the families and gave him a hug. “Where’s Hackett?” she said.

“He’s in my living room,” Gus said.

Kutner took that to mean that Hackett was hiding from reporters. But a little while later, Hackett came out, too. Kutner went over to him. “Thank God they found her. Aren’t you happy?” she said.

“Yeah,” Hackett said, smiling a little. “You guys thought I did it.”

Michele saw his hands shaking.

Finally, Mari arrived, wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses, her blond hair flowing. She locked into an embrace with Missy and Lorraine as the camera crews closed in on them.

Kim refused to get up with the other three. “I’m not doing that shit,” she said. “I fuckin’ hate these people. I’m here for my sister.”

Soon there wasn’t room for her, anyway. The other three were frozen in their hug for minutes on end as the reporters crushed in, snapping away. A minute or two later, they gathered behind a collection of microphones, Mari in the center, Missy to her left in a plaid flannel jacket, Lorraine to her right in a blue parka. Mari’s arms were around the others, clutching them for support. There was more media today than ever before—more than the June balloon release, more than any of Mari’s guerrilla attacks on Oak Beach.

Mari spoke. “First of all, I’d like to say this is a sad but yet happy moment. Today marks the one-year anniversary that the bodies were found, and I want to be here to support the families and to be with them. And as much as today may be Shannan, it’s not just Shannan. It’s all of us. Every one of us and our families and friends and everyone that was affected by this.” She trailed off. “It’s too hard,” she finally added. “I can’t even talk. I don’t even have words to say how I’m feeling right now.” Then she looked to either side, at Missy and Lorraine. “But I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” said Missy. They all hugged.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Lorraine. “Like we told you, Mari, don’t ever be sorry.”

“And just like you’re here to support our girls,” said Missy, “we’re here to support Shannan. And we’ve been here since the day that we found out that Shannan was a part of our girls. And we won’t ever leave. Please believe that.”

The three embraced again.

The reporters were surrounding them, video cameras in the back, photographers down low in front. When the embrace lasted longer than a few seconds, the reporters took that to mean it was time for questions. The first question was the one everyone wanted to ask: “Do you believe it was an accident?”

“No, no,” Mari said, running a hand through her hair. “I will not believe that, for the simple fact that Shannan was a strong woman.”

The next questions baited Mari into unloading on the police, and she was more than happy to oblige. She wondered why the police seemed so certain it wasn’t murder when they hadn’t even conducted an autopsy. And she blasted the entire investigation as too little too late. She ripped into the 911 call again—the time it took the police to come after her call. “I believe that when she was initially reported missing that they didn’t care. They treated her like her ‘job’ and not as a person and as a human being. And I think if they started to search early and continued it longer than they did the first time, we would have found her sooner, and this case would be so much further ahead than it is.”

Another question, posed tentatively by a reporter in the back: “Is there any thought that this guy is . . . uh . . . is still . . . doing it? I mean—”

Lorraine spoke up. “I almost a hundred percent guarantee that this man is sitting in his home right now, watching what is going on on the TV, getting the biggest thrill of his life, seeing what he has done to these families.”

There was one last question. “Mari, if the autopsy proves the police’s theory”—if it indicated that she’d fallen and drowned, as opposed to sustaining any obvious wounds—“do you feel like Shannan had a purpose to solve this case?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Mari said. “She brought loved ones home.”

“She brought us together,” said Missy. “Because
this
is our family, you know? Our bond.”

A few police cars led an SUV filled with family members to visit the sites along Ocean Parkway where the bodies were found. Counting Kritzia, at least one person who knew and loved each of the girls had come to visit the crosses. Mari came, too. On the way there, it was lost on none of them that they were tracing the killer’s route and making the same stops.

These were their only few minutes alone, without the media on top of them. In the car, Mari was subdued, fuming about everything that she’d been put through, and now this. She whispered that there was no way Shannan had died by accident.

Missy asked Kim, “Where’ve you been?”

Kim’s answer chilled her: “I’m trying to catch our girls’ killer.” Missy didn’t know what to say after that.

Kritzia went to work on her. “I know you think this is never going to happen to you,” she told Kim, “because you think you know what you’re doing, but guess what, your sister thought like that, too.” Kim just looked at her.

At each stop, they crouched down in the bramble, laid flowers, and tied a bright red heart-shaped balloon. Missy was the only one who didn’t cry. She’d been there for two days, and mourned her sister for four and a half years, and was all cried out. Not so for Kritzia; when she saw Melissa’s cross, she threw herself to the ground. “Get up,” Lorraine said. “What are you doing? Get up.”

When Kritzia finally stood up and looked around, something clicked. This stretch of Ocean Parkway was like a little netherworld. Nobody lived there, and there were no stores. It was the perfect place to dump a body: no signs, no streetlights. That was why he felt so confident that he could throw the bodies right there, she thought, right in the street.

Call Joe Jr. biased, call him vindictive, but he had been right all along about the marsh. As Flukeyou, he spent the next several days crowing about it online.
They found Shannan’s personal items right behind the doc’s house,
he wrote.

The Hackett theories abounded on Websleuths. Some commenters said he was completely innocent. Others said he was a calculated killer who called Mari after the murder in order to lull her into a false sense of security and give his partners more time to hide the body. Others split the difference, saying Hackett was just a patsy who tried to respond to a hysterical, incoherent girl, and when Shannan panicked and ran into the brush behind the house, he was left with her belongings and forced to stash them in the marsh. Still others said he gave her a sedative that interacted badly with the drugs she’d taken earlier, leaving Hackett with a corpse on his hands.

Now Joe Jr. was waiting for the police to connect the dots to Hackett, saying it was only a matter of time before the police had him in cuffs.
They only get one shot at this punk in court,
he posted,
so they’re taking their time to build a case.
He built new theories all the time online, as Flukeyou.
Shannan was placed there after she died . . . They can put a man on the moon, but take eighteen months to find a girl in a field? . . . Barbara H was not home the morning that SG disappeared . . .

The day after the vigil, Mari was in anguish.
Not knowing hurts but knowing really hurts!!
she posted in Shannan’s Facebook group. As Missy, Lorraine, and others tried to support her, Mari worried about what the autopsy might reveal. She started doing damage control preemptively.
If there are any chemicals in Shannan’s body, and if they are NOT “street” drugs, then who gave what to her?
She called the cops “liars or stupid,” concluding,
I KNOW Shannan WAS Murdered!!!!
And she made a pledge:
Shannan will have Justice AND so will Maureen—Megan—Melissa—Amber!! If NOT by $ than by they way the SCPD CHANGE how they treat escorts!!!!

Two days later, she was even madder.
F Dormer!!!!!!!!!!
she wrote.
Let me go running, and see how fast my jeans fall off my body!! Give me a F*in Break!!!

On Facebook, Mari posted an illustration of Jesus holding a photograph of Shannan. Others in her group posted photos of Shannan as an angel, and angels holding Shannan, and Shannan ascending to heaven. Johanna Gonzalez got a new tattoo of an eye, modeled after one of Shannan’s wide anime eyes. Another friend suggested that Mari could be the next John Walsh. Still another called her “Mama Mari.”

A week after the body was found, Mari convened another press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. Dormer, days from retirement, shrugged when he was told about it. “The thing’ll never die down,” he said.

Mari asked all her friends to wear blue in honor of Shannan. When she emerged from her car, she was head to toe in bluish-purple velour. Another car pulled up with her, and out stepped Mari’s new lawyer, a Long Island plaintiff’s attorney named John Ray. A notorious dandy, Ray was wearing a derby hat and a plaid vest with a matching suit and a long plaid overcoat. As a final flourish, he was carrying a gnarled corkscrew-shaped shillelagh. Following Ray’s sartorial lead, his younger associate was wearing a well-tailored brown suit with his own matching derby.

Ray’s remarks were stagey, almost Sharpton-esque, designed for maximum impact. He likened the Suffolk homicide squad to something out of Mayberry, and Dormer’s investigation to a
Pink Panther
movie. He said the police had dropped the ball with Shannan from the very start. He tore into the 911 call. He said that it didn’t matter if the autopsy said she’d drowned—who had drowned her?

As he talked, his associate circulated copies of a letter Ray had sent the police on behalf of Mari Gilbert and the other victims’ families. The letter called upon the police to hand the case, which Ray considered hopelessly botched, to the FBI. It closed by saying that if the FBI didn’t take over the case, Mari would sue.

Then Mari spoke. Her sentences were clear and short, perfect newspaper quotes. “Ask yourself what you would do if this was your daughter,” she said. She was more composed than she’d been the day they’d found Shannan. Now she was resolved, a crusader. She took just one question: Did she believe Shannan was a victim of the serial killer? “Yes,” she said, her head jerking forward.

The news crews were breaking down their equipment and packing when Gus Coletti pulled up in his car. He was ready to shoot the breeze with reporters, as usual. Before he could get out, Joe Jr. approached the driver’s side of the car and started screaming into Gus’s face. “You’re the mayor of Oak Beach! There were two 911 calls that night!
Why didn’t you save the security tape!
”

It was quite a sight: young, handsome Joe, completely unhinged, shrieking at a stooped old man, sitting in a car. Mari’s lawyer was upstaged. The news crews rushed over. Joe kept shouting. Gus gave as good as he got: “The only thing wrong with Oak Beach is
you
!”

Gus couldn’t drive off—there were too many people around it—but he made a show of pulling out his cell phone and calling the police. “I don’t have to put up with that,” he grumbled.

Joe was still yelling as the reporters followed him. “What are you gonna do now, Mayor? Are you gonna do your poor-little-old-man act? You’re the mayor of Oak Beach!
What about that tape! Why are you covering up for the doctor!
”

Missy Cann watched the press conference on the Web from her home in Connecticut. She had trouble understanding what she was watching. All she’d known ahead of time was that Mari was going to announce she had a new lawyer. “He hasn’t talked to any of us,” she said.

Mari had acted unilaterally. None of the other families had been told a thing about her new legal strategy. No one had shown them the letter to the police that John Ray supposedly had written on their behalf. The request to get the FBI involved particularly threw Missy. “The FBI already is assisting. If Suffolk County wasn’t doing their job, the FBI would have already stepped in.” Missy thought criticizing the police was a misguided strategy—that the police knew more about the case than they were letting on, and for all anyone knew, they might not be bungling it at all. The best guess Missy could make was that the tactic was just a lot of posturing. “It’s a little premature. I’d have waited until the autopsy came back before I said this.”

Once John Ray’s office passed Missy a copy of the letter, she became furious. “ ‘On behalf of the sex worker murder victims’?” she said a few weeks later, quoting the letter. “So Shannan is
Shannan,
and the other girls are
sex workers
? I never talk to that man for a day, and he’s working on behalf of my sister?” She couldn’t believe what Mari had done, how she had decided to stick a thumb in the eye of the people investigating the case. The police, Missy said, arrived ten or twenty minutes after Barbara Brennan called, not counting Shannan’s call as the start of the response time. “They did way better than the police did for us or the other girls. She should be a little grateful.” If you thought about it, she said, Shannan had more resources than any of the other girls. She’d been treated better, too. “They didn’t bring anything of
Maureen’s
belongings to my mom or
me
to look at.”