by Alison Bass
Frustrated with the police’s seeming indifference to Carmen’s fate, Elle embarked on her own search for her. She knocked on doors, went to shelters and hospitals around the city, and talked to people who knew Carmen. That’s when she learned that her former fiancée had been on the stroll — to earn money to feed her drug habit. Elle even put up flyers asking people to contact her if they had seen Carmen before September 25, 2002, the day she disappeared.
“I tracked her to her last movements, right when she got into a vehicle,” Elle recalls. “That’s when my trail went cold.”
IT’S THE WEEK BEFORE Thanksgiving, and we’re sitting at Elle’s dining room table, which is dressed up with a green and red Christmas tablecloth and matching napkins. Elle is wearing a snug-fitting gray-flannel shirt and jeans. She’s carefully made up with lipstick and eye makeup that accentuates her gray-green eyes. She sips beer from a tall Coors can and seems lost in her memories. In the weeks after Carmen went missing, she says, “I was so angry and filled with rage, I blocked out a lot.”
In September 2003, a year after her disappearance, Carmen Rudy’s skeletal remains were found buried in the woods behind a private boys’ school in Marlboro, Massachusetts, about twenty miles northeast of Worcester. Five days later, the remains of another young woman, Betzaida Montalvo, also twenty-nine, were found a hundred yards from Carmen Rudy’s grave. A reporter for the Metro News, which covers Marlboro and surrounding towns, interviewed John Kelly, a forensic specialist, who speculated that a serial killer might be at work. As Kelly noted, both Rudy and Montalvo fit a specific profile: they were young, single Hispanic mothers who had taken to selling sex on the streets of Worcester to feed drug habits. Despite the press coverage, however, police were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of a serial killer. In 2004, the bodies of two more young women from Worcester were discovered, one of which had been taken across the border and dumped in a trash can in York, Maine. That brought the FBI into the case, and local law enforcement finally said the S-word.
“You have to understand, if the police come out and utter these words, ‘serial killer,’ here comes the press, and when the press comes in, there is pressure to solve the case,” says Kelly, a forensic social worker and the president of System to Apprehend Lethal Killers, or STALK, a nonprofit New Jersey–based organization that profiles suspected serial killers. “A lot of law enforcement agencies aren’t interested in having that kind of pressure put on them.”
Kelly and others say that many police agencies in the United States simply don’t put a lot of resources into solving the murders of sex workers. “The way a lot of local law enforcement [officials] look at it, [the women] are living a high-risk lifestyle. They’re out there doing drugs and selling themselves, so [violence] is all part of that game,” Kelly says. “There’s a double standard here. If four hookers are found dead down the street, they are not going to get the same attention as a lily-white housewife who has disappeared in suburbia. If that happens, [the police] are going to have helicopters up and dogs beating the bushes.”
Sex workers have long been viewed as disposable not only by law enforcement but also by society as a whole, which often turns its back on prostitutes, particularly streetwalkers. Such official indifference may explain why prostitutes are more likely to be killed than any other set of women ever studied, according to a 2006 report published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. The researchers found that sex workers were killed primarily by clients. Equally chilling, these researchers found that serial killers accounted for up to 35 percent of all prostitute homicides.1
A 2004 study, which tracked homicides from 1981 to 1990 and was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that, on average, 124 sex workers were murdered each year in the United States.2 This study concluded that the homicide rate for prostitutes in the United States is fifty-one times higher than that for the next most dangerous occupation — working in a liquor store.3
Conservative groups argue that prostitution itself is what causes this level of violence, but research shows that the profession is not inherently violent. A number of studies show that indoor sex workers are much less likely than streetwalkers to be targets of violence. Indeed, a 2007 British study of 135 indoor prostitutes found that 78 percent of them never experienced violence.4 When a Canadian researcher surveyed thirty-nine indoor sex workers who had never worked the street, she found that the majority of women (63 percent) had not experienced any violence while working in the sex industry.5 Similarly, in a study of 772 sex workers in New Zealand, conducted after prostitution was decriminalized in that country in 2003, the risk of violence was not perceived to be an issue among indoor sex workers, “as most had never experienced violence.”6
Most serial killers do not target women in general; they focus on street prostitutes. Gary Ridgway, for example, was the notorious Green River killer, who admitted to killing forty-eight women (most of them streetwalkers) in Washington State and may have killed dozens more. In his statement of guilt in 2003, he said, “I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
The sad irony is that some Seattle-area prostitutes, as well as their boyfriends and pimps, knew for years that Ridgway was the Green River killer, says Annie Sprinkle, a former prostitute and porn star who went on to earn a Ph.D. and become an internationally recognized artist and writer in San Francisco. “But they were either afraid to come forward for fear of being arrested themselves, or when they did come forward, the police didn’t believe them over the ‘upstanding family man,’ Gary Ridgway,” Sprinkle writes. “It seems as though police weren’t working very hard to find the Green River killer.”7
In her moving essay for the collection Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, Sprinkle touches on one of the most persuasive arguments for decriminalizing prostitution: if sex workers knew they would not be arrested for calling the police, many more would come forward and work with police in targeting violent predators, who often end up killing sex workers and women who are not in the sex trade. According to an in-depth examination of prostitute homicides by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, men who assault prostitutes often have a record of assaulting other women as well. Violence against sex workers, the researchers concluded, is part of a continuum of violence against women in general.8
Indeed, researchers have found that countries with the most restrictive laws against prostitution (such as the United States and many countries in Southeast Asia) have the greatest violence against sex workers and other women, while countries with the least restrictive legal systems (such as the Netherlands and Germany) have the least violence.9
In the Netherlands, where sex work was decriminalized in the 1970s and has been legal since 2000, many workers in the sex industry feel that they can report crimes against them to the police. The result: an unusually low incidence of violence against sex workers, and red-light districts in Amsterdam and other cities that are safe places to walk around at all hours of the night. In a 2004 study of women working in legal brothels, clubs, and window units in the Netherlands, conducted by the Dutch Ministry of Justice, most of the women surveyed reported that they “often or always feel safe.”10
Yet because prostitution is illegal in the United States, sex workers can’t go to the police, even when they’ve been robbed, raped, or otherwise physically threatened. Kimora, the striking African American transsexual whom I met at HIPS in Washington, D.C., said she was robbed by a client who lured her into a downtown alley and then pulled a gun on her. “I had already made about $200 and he took all my money,” she says. “What am I going to tell the police? They’d just arrest me.”
Another time, Kimora says, she was brutally raped by a john near the Trinidad area of Washington, D.C., and decided to press charges. But when she wen
t to the Fifth District police station to file a complaint, “The police officer said, ‘Being you’re dressed this way, you pretty much lured him,’ ” she says. “He wouldn’t take the report.”
Many streetwalkers like Kimora are actually more afraid of the police than they are of johns. She says she heard about one Washington, D.C., cop who patrolled the streets and pretended to arrest streetwalkers. “Instead he’d take the girls to an alley and rape them himself,” she says. “The laws don’t protect people like me.”
In a phone interview, Melvin Scott, commander of the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., said he hadn’t heard of any police officers who prey on sex workers in that manner. “If that’s something we found, we’d arrest the cop,” Scott insists. During his thirty-three-year tenure with the department, Scott says he recalls a few instances when police officers were accused of soliciting sex from prostitutes in exchange for dropping charges. But he couldn’t recall any cases in which specific criminal charges were lodged against the officers.
Columbia University sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein found a similar pattern of police misconduct when she interviewed San Francisco streetwalkers in the 1990s. A number of streetwalkers shared stories about police officers who wanted blow jobs in exchange for dropped citations or who revealed their identity as cops after sexual services had been rendered. Some streetwalkers said the police even stole money from them.11
Another Columbia University sociologist, Sudhir Venkatesh, studied 160 streetwalkers on the South Side of Chicago between 2005 and 2007. Of all the tricks turned by the prostitutes he surveyed, roughly 3 percent were freebies given to police officers. As Venkatesh concluded, a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.12
In some states, the men in blue are the biggest customers of commercial sex. In Ohio, for instance, law enforcement topped the charts of the listed occupations when it came to buying sex (indoors and outdoors), according to a 2012 report on domestic sex trafficking by Ohio’s Human Trafficking Commission. Police even beat out politicians for that distinction, and it didn’t matter whether or not the women were selling sex voluntarily. According to the Ohio report, law enforcement officials were the number one customers even when the women they frequented were found to have been trafficked into the trade.13
Then there are the cops who abuse their authority in more insidious ways. Jennifer Reed is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, doing research for her dissertation on adolescent sex workers in Sin City. When she was a divorced single mother raising two children on her own in eastern Ohio, she danced in a strip club just over the border in Weirton, West Virginia, to make ends meet. She soon started doing sex work as well.
“Guys would pay a lot of money for fetishes, like splashing food on girls or mud wrestling. I’ve done a lot of two-girl shows [two women having sex], bachelor parties, birthday parties,” she says matter-of-factly over lunch one day at the Desiree Alliance conference in Las Vegas. Reed, forty-three, is a tall, plainspoken woman with long brown hair and a no-nonsense manner. She is unapologetic about her past; strip dancing and doing outcalls allowed her to finish college and earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in sociology.
What Reed and the other working girls feared most was law enforcement. “The police would come in and solicit women for sex in order to bust them,” she recalled. “They ran my [license] plate and knew where I lived.”
There was one police officer on the Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, force who kept pressuring Reed to have sex with him. When she refused, he showed up in the neighborhood where she lived and harassed her children while they played outside. “He threatened to have them arrested,” she says. One day, she got calls from the middle school her son attended and the elementary school her daughter attended; the police were at both schools, searching her thirteen-year-old son and her eleven-year-old daughter for drugs.
“I went to my son’s school first and talked to the principal, who was female,” Reed says. “She knew my son wasn’t a problem, he was a good kid, and she understood what was going on.” Then Reed went to her daughter’s elementary school. When she walked into the principal’s office, the same cop who had pressured her for sex was there, “grinning from ear to ear.” He held up a bag of what he claimed was marijuana and said he had found it in her daughter’s school locker. “It turned out to be a bag of spices, and it had been planted,” Reed said. “My daughter is an honors student, but the principal said my daughter would either get suspended or be sent to an alternative school.”
Reed put her eleven-year-old daughter in the alternative school and sought a lawyer’s advice. “He sent a cease-and-desist letter to the city, saying this is harassment,” Reed said. But the attorney also advised her to get out of town. “So I pulled my kids out of school and homeschooled them until we could move,” she said.
Most police officers are not like that, but the minority who harass sex workers and other vulnerable citizens tend to be habitual offenders. “They harass a lot of people; my only hope was that he messed with someone who has more power than I did. And that happened to this cop. He messed with someone who knew someone at city hall, and he got taken down,” she said.
When the officer harassed Reed’s children, however, her attorney said that because she was a sex worker, she had no power. “Sex workers are treated like they are not human,” she says.
Norma Jean Almodovar, a former traffic cop with the Los Angeles Police Department, pretty much summed it up at the 2010 Desiree Alliance conference. “We have bad laws, and bad laws lead to bad cops,” she said in her keynote speech. Almodovar left the department in 1982 after injuring her back in a traffic accident. She went on disability and decided to become a call girl. As she explained in her 1993 memoir, Cop to Call Girl, she felt that it was time to get paid for the sex she had been giving away all those years to her fellow officers. In 1982, she was arrested in a sting operation and served three years in prison for pandering (or recruiting someone into prostitution). In 1986, she made an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor of California on a platform that called for the decriminalization of prostitution. As Almodovar told the crowd at the conference, “There are good cops out there and they don’t want to have to arrest prostitutes. They want to arrest people who are murdering people or raping people. But what happens when you have laws which allow police to pick and choose who they will arrest and who gets to go free? How do they make their choices? By those who cooperate with them.”
The Long Island Murders
Little wonder that in this toxic atmosphere of harassment and mistrust few American sex workers come forward when they see or experience an act of violence. That reality may have hampered the investigation into the murders of the five escorts whose bodies were discovered buried on Long Island in 2010 and 2011.
The Long Island murders received national attention. But even though several escorts had gone missing after arranging assignations with clients on Long Island as far back as 2007, police did not begin poking into the case until May of 2010. That’s when a twenty-six-year-old escort named Shannon Gilbert disappeared after calling police from a house in Oak Beach, a village on the southern peninsula of Long Island near Fire Island. Gilbert was described by family and friends as a smart, engaging woman with olive skin and chestnut-brown hair streaked with blonde highlights. For much of her childhood, Gilbert had cycled in and out of the foster care system, one of four daughters of a struggling single mother in upstate New York, according to the 2013 book, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, by New York magazine writer Robert Kolker. As soon as Shannon graduated from high school, she headed to New York City. She dreamed of becoming a famous actress. Until then, she had worked as an escort, first with a service called World-Class Party Girls and then on her own, placing ads on Craigslist.14
In the early-morning hours of May 1, 2010, Michael Pak, Shannon
’s regular driver to and from appointments, took her to a gated compound in Oak Beach and parked outside Joe Brewer’s home. Brewer was a former Wall Street financier whose family has extensive real estate holdings on Long Island. Just before 5 a.m., Brewer tapped on the window of Pak’s black Ford Explorer and told Pak that Shannon wouldn’t leave his house. When Pak went inside with Brewer, Shannon said, “You guys are trying to kill me.” Seemingly high on drugs, she crawled behind a couch. Then she started talking to someone on the phone, and Pak, fearing it was the police, ran out of Brewer’s house. According to transcripts, Shannon stayed on the call with the police even as she ran out of Brewer’s house and started frantically knocking on the doors of nearby dwellings, calling for help. Pak told police he followed her in the car, shouting her name. But he says he lost her and finally gave up and drove back to Manhattan.15
Several other people in the gated compound said they also saw Shannon running from house to house, pounding on doors and shouting for help. But when two residents told her they were going to call the police, she started running again. Even though Shannon stayed on the call with the police for twenty minutes, Kolker says the state police were unable or unwilling to trace her location. “Even though she said, ‘They are trying to kill me,’ they weren’t able to locate her or they didn’t put the effort into locating her,” Kolker said in a phone interview. “The 911 response was from neighbors’ calls.” The local police arrived eighteen minutes after the first 911 call from a neighbor. They found no sign of Shannon.
Her disappearance, and her family’s efforts to locate her, stirred up a hornet’s nest of publicity. When the families of the other escorts who had gone missing also began talking to the press, the furor only intensified. The Suffolk County police began searching the area around Oak Beach, and in December 2010, they unearthed the skeletal remains of four women along Ocean Parkway (all four were wrapped in burlap bags), just three miles from Oak Beach. Using DNA, the police identified the four women as escorts who had disappeared after arranging assignations via Craigslist with clients on Long Island. At that point, the Suffolk County police acknowledged they might be dealing with a serial killer, and during the months that followed, they unearthed more remains buried along Ocean Drive, a highway that runs along the southern peninsula of Long Island and links Oak Beach with other beaches, including Jones Beach, a popular destination for many New Yorkers. Shannon Gilbert’s body was not among those found.
