Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  In 2011, Suffolk County drained a thickly overgrown and mosquito-infested marsh behind the compound on Oak Beach, and police started searching the marsh. In December, they finally found Gilbert’s body. First, they stumbled upon her purse, then her cell phone, shoes, and a torn pair of jeans. On December 18, on the far side of the marsh, not far from where the bodies of the other women had been found, they discovered her skeletal remains. Even then, Suffolk County Commissioner Richard Dormer insisted that Shannon had drowned or died of natural causes.16

  His claim prompted other forensic experts, such as former New York Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Baden, to state that Gilbert clearly had been killed, just like the other escorts before her. Baden told reporters that it was absurd to think that a woman who weighed not much more than a hundred pounds could thrash her way through a marsh that the police were afraid to walk into. “The circumstances are very impressive that the mother is right and she was murdered,” Baden said.17

  Kolker, who interviewed many police officers and forensic experts for his book, agrees. “Why would Shannon call 911 in the first place, which is something an escort would never do,” he says. “Why would she knock on strangers’ doors and run away from her driver? Why would she stay on the phone with the police for twenty minutes? All of this indicates she was in fear of her life.”

  The case, however, remains unsolved to this day. Rumors within the sex work community offer one speculative explanation: that an ex-cop is one of the possible suspects. (In his book, Kolker mentions a former Suffolk County cop who lived in Oak Beach and was a friend and neighbor of Dr. Peter Hackett, an Oak Beach resident whom police questioned because he had lied about calling Shannon’s mother shortly after she disappeared.) A number of amateur Internet sleuths and several residents of the Oak Beach compound where Gilbert was last seen offer another theory: that she and four other escorts were killed by Hackett as part of a conspiracy involving Brewer and perhaps other residents of the compound as well. After several months of denying that he had called Shannon’s mother a few days after she disappeared and offered to help search for her daughter, Hackett reversed himself. In an interview with the TV show 48 Hours Mystery in July 2011, he acknowledged that he had called Shannon’s mother a few days after her daughter disappeared. (Gilbert’s mother has the cell-phone records to prove that Hackett called her.) According to this theory, which Kolker lays out in some detail in his book, Hackett, whose house backs up to the marsh, could have killed Gilbert and the other escorts and kept their bodies in his shed. But then, tipped off to the police search by his ex-cop neighbor, he could have moved their bodies to shallow graves along Ocean Parkway. These amateur sleuths also argued that Hackett, who was a member of the Oak Beach neighborhood association, could have been the person who erased the security video taken by the automatic camera that is always mounted on the entrance to the gated compound.18

  Hackett has since moved to Florida, and the Suffolk County police have yet to name any suspects in the case. Kolker and others believe that the unsolved mystery has a lot to do with the fact that the victims were sex workers and therefore disposable.

  “If this was the daughter of a judge or Son of Sam killing middle-class women, it would be a different story,” Kolker says. “One of the big takeaways is that if you’re a sex worker and you’re in trouble and you call 911 and say someone is trying to kill you, they won’t give a shit. And if you do disappear, they’ll say you’re not one of the victims. And even when your body is found, they’ll say you died of fright. We’re dealing with very retrograde views of women and prostitution here.”

  Such retrograde views no doubt hampered the investigation. In 2011, after the first four bodies were found and the news media swarmed the case, Commissioner Dormer rushed to reassure reporters. No sex worker who had volunteered information on the case, he said, had been charged with a crime.19 But he refused to give sex workers blanket amnesty in exchange for their cooperation. That refusal and the entrenched bias against prostitutes may help explain why the case remains unsolved. The Long Island serial killer is still out there, no doubt laughing at law enforcement’s ineptitude.

  The Main Street Woodsman

  Even though the serial killings in Massachusetts didn’t grab the same attention that the Long Island killings did, the police inquiry into who murdered Carmen Rudy and the other Worcester streetwalkers yielded better results. In 2007, four years after Carmen’s body had been discovered in the woods near Marlboro, the skeletal remains of a fifth sex worker from Worcester were found on land abutting a central Massachusetts state park. Shortly afterward, forensic specialists from the New Jersey–based STALK released a profile of the possible killer. (Besides John Kelly, the forensics team included a former chief of criminal investigations for the Seattle sheriff’s office, a psychologist, an addictions specialist, and a psychiatric nurse.) The profilers said the serial killer was probably a construction worker or truck driver between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-one years who drove a pickup truck or SUV and liked to hunt and fish. They dubbed him “the Main Street Woodsman” because all his victims had strolled Worcester’s Main Street and because the killer was clearly comfortable in the woods (most of his victims were buried there).

  A few months later, police homed in on a man who had recently been arrested and jailed for allegedly raping and trying to strangle a woman, who was not a sex worker, in a West Boylston motel. The man, Alex Scesny, a thirty-eight-year-old construction worker who drove a white pickup truck, had a criminal record of assaulting women. His parents (and he himself at one point) lived very close to where Rudy’s body was found. The real break came when DNA found on the rape victim matched DNA recovered in 1996 from the body of a thirty-nine-year-old woman who had been strangled to death in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, twenty-four miles north of West Boylston. That victim, Theresa Stone, was known to have been a sex worker.20

  In September 2008, Scesny was convicted of assault and battery against the woman he had attacked in the West Boylston motel. The same day, police charged him with Stone’s murder. Four years later, after an extended legal battle, Scesny was convicted in the 1996 rape and murder of Theresa Stone and sentenced to life without parole.21 While police were unable to tie him to the other murders, John Kelly, president of STALK, told local reporters that Scesny was a “significant person of interest” in the deaths of Carmen Rudy and the four other young women who had walked the streets of Worcester.22

  This is of little comfort to Elle St. Claire and Jackie Rudy. While Scesny may remain behind bars for the rest of his life, the sad reality is that Carmen Rudy’s friends and family will never know for sure who took the life of their flawed but beautiful “wild child.”

  Busted in Sin City

  NEVADA’S TWO-FACED APPROACH TO SEX WORK

  The Great Recession hit Anna and her husband hard. They had recently purchased a house in South Florida, and when the automotive company she worked for went bankrupt, Anna lost her job. Her husband was in graduate school and couldn’t help out much. “I still had $50,000 in student loans to pay off and a mortgage,” she says. “The economy was so bad, I couldn’t even get a job at Wendy’s.”

  Anna had seen the HBO series on the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada and was intrigued by the idea of getting paid to do something she already enjoyed. “One night, I said to my husband, ‘If they’re having that much fun and making that money, maybe it’s something I should look into,’ ” she recalls. She and her husband had been together since college, and they often enjoyed recreational sex with other couples. “Being swingers, sex was never something that we attached to love,” Anna says. “So I figured I might as well get paid for doing it.”

  Her husband was supportive of the idea. “He actually finds it exciting,” she says. “It turns him on a bit.” So Anna, who was then twenty-seven, did some research online and discovered that Sheri’s Ranch, one of Nevada’s largest and most upscale brothels, garnered the best reviews from women in the trade. She sen
t the brothel a brief bio and pictures of herself; Sheri’s Ranch management liked what they saw and hired her in 2009.

  “The first time I came here, I felt like I was on vacation. I didn’t have to cook for two weeks, and I could lay out by the pool,” Anna says.

  I met Anna the day I drove out to Sheri’s Ranch, which sits in the dusty desert town of Pahrump, an hour west of Las Vegas. She had been asked by the madam to give me the grand tour.

  Anna (her brothel name) is pretty, with radiantly clear skin, a sweet smile, and long, witch-black hair. She is dressed in a short, low-cut cocktail dress that hugs her butt and shows off her figure. Yet her legs are not particularly toned and she is not big-breasted. What catches your attention are her eyes, dark green and strikingly luminous. She exhibits a sweet perkiness reminiscent of the girl next door.

  Indeed, Anna is the girl next door. She grew up in a middle-class home in a suburb of Philadelphia. Although her father is an engineer and her mother a beautician, she comes from a large family and her parents weren’t able to contribute much to her college education. So she took out substantial loans to pay the tuition at a private liberal arts college in New York, from which she graduated with double majors in communication studies and psychology.

  For the past four years, she has been working at Sheri’s Ranch, two weeks on and one week off. In the beginning, she commuted between Florida and Las Vegas; she was picked up at the airport in Las Vegas and transported to Pahrump via the brothel’s free limousine service for customers and workers. After a few months, her husband came to live with her in Las Vegas and transferred to the University of Nevada. They rented out their house in Florida.

  Her family, she says, has no idea what she does for a living. “The misconceptions [about sex work] are so numerous, they wouldn’t understand,” she says. “The public thinks we’re all uneducated drug addicts, and that’s not true.”

  At Sheri’s Ranch, each woman works a five-day-a-week shift. For the first two days, the women are on call for twenty-four hours, and then, for the duration of their shift, they are on call for twelve hours, Anna says. She sees an average of two or three customers a day, although there are also days when she sees no one.

  “I’m going to be on the lower end of what most girls make because I’m pretty picky,” Anna says. “I might have one or two big parties versus lots of little ones. My parties generally last a couple of hours to all night. It’s more of a girlfriend experience than slam bang, thank you, ma’am.” Even so, Anna clears between $2,500 and $5,000 a week in take-home pay. She has already paid off the bulk of her student loans.

  “I wish I’d known about [Sheri’s Ranch] sooner, I could have made more money,” Anna says, as she shows me a room that she calls the “formal dining room,” where “a gentleman can take us out to dinner and clothing is optional.” In the center of the room is a small, oval table draped with an elegant tablecloth and set for two; a still-life hangs on the wall behind the table, and two brass light fixtures on the mantelpiece complete the Victorian parlor effect.

  Anna smiles sweetly. “If he wants a blow job under the table, there is a kneeling pillow and a splatter platter,” she says and then adds, “although now that everyone has to wear condoms, there’s no splatter.”

  Mandatory condoms are one of the non-negotiable rules at Sheri’s Ranch and indeed at all of Nevada’s legal brothels. The women who work in the state’s brothels also must get tested for sexually transmitted diseases every month; they can’t get a license to work without clean test results. Since that law went into effect during the AIDS scare in the 1980s, no brothel worker has tested positive for HIV.1 (Nevada state law has required condoms in the brothels since 1988.2)

  “What draws customers here is that they know they’re not going to bring something home with them,” says Chuck Lee, a Las Vegas businessman who has co-owned Sheri’s Ranch since 2001. In fact, the major drawing card for Nevada’s brothels is the safe environment they offer — for both clients and sex workers. While Sheri’s Ranch is more opulent than the Chicken Ranch (the brothel next door whose name was made famous by the movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), its focus on safety is shared by the state’s other brothels. Nevada is the one state in the United States that has officially legalized prostitution, but only within the confines of heavily regulated brothels restricted to sparsely populated counties well outside resort areas such as Las Vegas and Reno.

  Contrary to what many visitors believe, all other forms of prostitution remain illegal in Nevada, even on Las Vegas’s gaudy Strip, where scantily clad women pose for pictures with tourists and Mexican immigrants hand out cards advertising “hotassescorts” and free admission to the city’s many strip clubs. Sex is everywhere in Sin City, and it is a big part of the resort’s draw for traveling businessmen and tourists. According to the sex workers I interviewed, the casinos usually look the other way when elegantly dressed escorts pick up men at the casino bars and nightclubs. The yellow pages in every hotel room contain pages and pages of escort service ads for “Barely legal flawless thin and busty blonde” or “Beautiful soccer mom to your room, busty, slim, discreet.”

  Despite the carefully cultivated atmosphere that anything goes in Las Vegas, the city spends a lot of money enforcing its laws against prostitution. Like other local police departments, the Las Vegas Police Department receives funding from the U.S. government’s antitrafficking task force. In 2012 and 2013, for instance, the department was awarded a million dollars from the Department of Justice for “antitrafficking,” according to a University of Nevada researcher. But police use the yellow pages and online ads not to go after traffickers but to entrap the many sex workers who are working in Las Vegas by choice, sex workers and researchers say. The vast majority of sex workers arrested in Sin City are not trafficking victims, although once in custody, some claim they are victims to avoid prosecution.

  Under the new antitrafficking laws, “police have to ask [the sex workers they arrest], ‘Are you a trafficking victim?’ ” says Jennifer Reed, who is involved in a multisite study of Las Vegas sex workers as part of her Ph.D. dissertation in psychology for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “And so some say they’re trafficked so they won’t get put in jail. And, of course, that inflates the [trafficking] statistics.” Las Vegas police are so vigilant about prostitution that they recently stopped two young African American sisters (who were in Sin City on vacation) when the women tried to hail a cab to take them home from a nightclub one night. “They thought we were prostitutes,” said one of the sisters, both professionals, who were eating at the same Bavarian restaurant as I was that evening. Such harassment is hardly an isolated incident in Las Vegas, many say. “The police target minorities,” Reed says.

  They also target anyone who is out late at night wearing provocative clothing. Cris Sardina, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother and former sex worker from Arizona who was in Las Vegas in July 2013 for the fifth annual Desiree Alliance conference, was arrested with a friend for jaywalking while walking back to their hotel late one evening. Her friend, an African American woman from Washington, D.C., who was attending the same conference (and is not a sex worker), refused to pay for the jaywalking ticket and kept asking why she was being ticketed. So police handcuffed her and took her to the local jail, where she had to spend the night. (She was released the next morning with no charges.) Sardina, who needed to be at the conference the next morning (as one of the co-organizers), decided to pay the fine so she wouldn’t get hauled off to jail too.

  “The Vegas cops knew we were in town and they treated us like dogs,” Sardina said. “The cop practically begged me to come after him so he could use his violence on me, but I couldn’t afford to go to jail.”

  Reed says that what sex workers in Las Vegas complain about most is harassment from police officers demanding sex from them. “They say, ‘If you service me, I won’t bust you,’ ” Reed says. “But then you have to continue servicing that officer to stay out of jail.” The Las Ve
gas police declined repeated requests for interviews.

  To many researchers and advocates, the bifurcation of Nevada’s prostitution laws is hypocritical and discriminatory. Most of the legal brothels are owned by businessmen with close ties to the state’s political infrastructure, according to Barbara Brents, the sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Chuck Lee, the co-owner of Sheri’s Ranch and a former homicide detective from Chicago, for example, was the chief investigator for the district attorney in Clark County (which envelops Las Vegas and its exurbs). Lee owned several successful car dealerships before he bought into Sheri’s Ranch. The brothels are quite profitable for their owners, most of whom are male. (Of the eighteen brothels currently in operation, only two have female owners, Reed says.) The owners receive 50 percent of the sex workers’ earnings.

  The women who work at the brothels are required to pay room and board and various licensing fees, and at many of the brothels, including Sheri’s Ranch and the Chicken Ranch, they must work shifts that usually run two to three weeks long.