Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  Solina persuaded Coletti to initiate eviction proceedings against the elder Joe Scalise and his son. For the first time that anyone could remember, a special meeting was called of the entire voting population of Oak Beach. The Scalises stood accused—by Coletti and Solina—of trimming some trees on association property and putting a snow fence on the beach. The seventy-two homeowners were asked to participate in a simple up-down vote: Should the Scalise family stay, or should they go? To some, it seemed ridiculous. “I said to Frank, ‘You know this is never gonna happen,’ ” remembers one neighbor, Bruce Anderson. “He said, ‘Oh, no, Gus told me he’s gonna get rid of them, and he’s got a list of other people he’ll evict next.’ And I said to myself, ‘Aw, geez, maybe I’ll be on the list!’ ”

  When the vote didn’t go the way Solina liked—twenty-one to nineteen against evicting the Scalises—Gus counted three absentee ballots and declared victory anyway. The Scalises hired a lawyer, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees later, the courts stopped the eviction on the grounds that the bylaws stated that members had to be present to vote. The judge issued an order for the association to treat the Scalises as members in good standing. A year later, the association, still controlled by Coletti, sued the Scalises again for cutting down trees. That suit was also dismissed. Since then, the Scalise family harbored a grudge against those who ran the association and their friends. They despised Gus Coletti, Frank Solina, and everyone on the board, including Dr. Peter Hackett.

  Nearly everyone agreed that the feud had polluted the culture of Oak Beach. The ugliness of the outside world had made it past the gate, so it seemed almost like an afterthought, or a foregone conclusion, when Joe Brewer arrived on the Fairway, taking up residence in his mother’s aging two-story Cape three doors down from the Colettis. Brewer was no scrappy South Shore survivor. He was an inland “lawn guyland” guy, unctuous and cloying and classless. The Brewer family owned a lot of real estate in central Long Island—apartments, a strip mall, some homes—and Joe, neighbors said, was the family’s Fredo. In his mid-forties, paunchy, and unemployed, Brewer once worked on Wall Street but hadn’t seemed to work at all in years. His mother’s place at Oak Beach became Brewer’s to do with as he pleased. The inside was a wreck—piles of junk everywhere, not an inch of floor exposed, nothing ever thrown away, and a pervasive smell of cat. Brewer had a young daughter but wasn’t married, and neither the girl nor her mother ever came to Oak Beach. On his way in and out of the house, he always waved to neighbors, smiling broadly and often chuckling at some private joke.

  Brewer was not active in the association, but he was no misanthrope. He was the kind of guy who would recognize a neighbor at the supermarket in Babylon and come up and shake hands, animated and hyper, his long monologues punctuated with laughter. Like Hackett, he considered himself a macher, though Brewer could be cruder. To a few people, men he may have wanted to impress, he would confide that the house in Oak Beach was a party pit for him and his friends, “a place where you can do whatever you wanted to do.” These weren’t Animal House bacchanals; they were small affairs with a handful of guys and a woman hired for the occasion. Not that he ever needed to pay for sex, he’d say. As he cheerfully reassured one neighbor, laughing all the way, “I’ve had rock-star success with women.”

  Alex Diaz had kissed Shannan good night on Friday evening at about ten, after their movie in Jersey City. He spent the next day thinking she would be home soon. She never returned, and by Sunday, Alex was concerned enough to try calling. He didn’t even get a ring; her phone was shut off.

  He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew her driver’s name, Michael Pak, but didn’t have a number for him—or anyone in Shannan’s family, for that matter. Finally, he rifled through Shannan’s drawers and found a torn piece of paper with some numbers.

  He first called Michael, who seemed surprised. “She’s not home with you?”

  Alex was furious; he was her driver, how could he lose her? Michael told Alex what had happened: how she didn’t want to come to the car, how she was irrational, how she said he and the client were trying to kill her, how she ran. Michael said he just couldn’t find her.

  Alex couldn’t understand. Nothing Michael was saying sounded like Shannan. Even when she was high, she didn’t act like that. Together, they Googled and found six nearby hospitals and four police stations. Using three-way calling, they dialed them all, supplying her name, her description, her alias. No one had seen her.

  Alex asked Michael to connect him with the john. Michael called. A man answered. “What happened to her?” Michael asked.

  Joe Brewer laughed. “Oh, man! That’s your job. You should know where she’s at.”

  Alex spoke up. “I’m the boyfriend. What happened?”

  Brewer was defensive. “I tried to hold her. I tried to tell her to calm down. But she took off.”

  “Why didn’t you try to bring her to the car?”

  “She wouldn’t,” Brewer said. “And then she just took off, really scared.”

  It didn’t sound right to Alex. Michael said she’d been there for three hours already. What would set her off after all that time?

  That night, at about eleven-thirty, Alex drove to Oak Beach, the first of three trips he would make in the next week. He was so nervous, he brought a gun, a little .25 he’d had for years. As he passed under one bridge, he felt a weird vibe: Getting thrown out of a car along this road could kill somebody.

  Brewer came out to meet him at the gate. He looked like he’d been home all day—pants unbuttoned, dirty white T-shirt, stubble. Brewer tried to level with him. “Look, man, she came to my house. We were having a conversation. All of a sudden, I felt uncomfortable with the conversation.”

  They talked for what felt like a half hour. Brewer kept wanting Alex to follow him through the gate—“Come to my house and search it,” he said—but Alex didn’t want to. He was worried about what might be waiting for him on the other side.

  “You know, I’m gonna call the police,” Alex said.

  “Okay,” Brewer said. “I got nothing to hide.”

  “I’m going to go to the police station,” Alex said. “Do you know where it is? Can you take me there?”

  “All right,” Brewer said. “Follow me.”

  Together, Alex and Brewer tried to file a report. Alex remembers the Suffolk County police officers having a hard time concealing their laughter. “She ran away? She’ll probably come back to your house. Check your house—maybe she’s there now.” When Alex said he was from Jersey City, they told him to file a report there.

  When Alex got home, he could barely sleep. The next day, he drove back, a photo of Shannan in hand, ready to knock on doors. He made it to the Oak Beach gate at about noon; a neighbor stopped him and asked him to wait. A moment later, a truck pulled up the drive and came to a stop. Out stepped a portly middle-aged man with a pasty complexion. Alex noticed his limp and his prosthetic leg. He lumbered over with surprising speed. The man had an easy smile and bright eyes. He reached out his hand and introduced himself as Dr. Peter Hackett.

  The doctor listened intently to Alex, even writing down some of what he said in a little notebook. He told Alex he knew nothing about what had happened to Shannan. But he said, “We’re gonna help you out with the case. I used to work with the police. We’re gonna call them. We’ll have this whole place searched.” Sure enough, later that day, helicopters were sighted above Oak Beach. They found nothing—hardly a surprise to Alex, since she had been gone for two days.

  That night Alex filed a missing-persons report for Shannan in Jersey City, listing all her distinguishing marks: a tattoo of cherries on her left wrist, a scorpion tattooed on her back. He also told them Shannan was bipolar and was known to use cocaine, pot, and prescription drugs. A few days later—either the fifth or the sixth, he can’t remember—Alex came back to Oak Beach a third time, this time with Michael. Shannan’s sisters and Mari were supposed to meet them but backed out at the last minute, concerned
that residents might call the police.

  Alex and Michael walked through the neighborhood and saw Hackett, this time at the doctor’s cottage on Larboard Court. Hackett took notes again, asking about Shannan’s medical history, what drugs she took. Alex gave him Shannan’s picture to put on a flyer. Hackett offered to give Alex and Michael a ride around the neighborhood, down roads Michael hadn’t known about the night he was there. “I’m gonna keep an eye on it around here,” Hackett said. “Don’t worry.”

  Before they parted ways, Hackett told them a story. Long ago, he said, he was stranded on a boat in the water in the dark, all alone, thinking he’d die there. But then he saw a boat from far away. He shot a flare gun. The flare hit the boat, but all was well; he was rescued. Later, he said, he became a doctor who specialized in emergency medicine. His specialty was saving lives.

  No question about it, Dr. Hackett liked to talk.

  Mari Gilbert had trouble remembering the details. It had happened so long ago, before she understood that Shannan might be gone. The content of the phone call, as she remembered it, was very strange.

  Mari heard the man say that his name was Dr. Peter Hackett, and that he lived in Oak Beach, Long Island, and that he ran a home for wayward girls. She remembered him saying that he had seen Shannan the night before—that she was incoherent, so he took her into his home rehab to help her, and the next day, a driver came and picked her up. He wanted to know if Mari had seen her since.

  It was a quick call, no longer than a few minutes. In time, Mari would be questioned on every aspect of the call—when it took place, what was said, who really might have been the person calling. Alex and Michael would quibble about the timing, whether Hackett called Mari before they met him, as Mari said, or right after, the way they think it must have happened.

  Hackett would deny calling Mari at all, at least at first. But Shannan’s sister Sherre was there for the call, right next to her mother. She would confirm what Mari heard. And in time, there would be others—including neighbors at Oak Beach—who would come to believe that Dr. Peter Hackett knew far more about what had happened to Shannan than he ever let on.

  There was no public outcry, no crush of camera crews. No one called Newsday or Channel 12, Long Island’s cable news channel, to say that a woman had gone around the neighborhood banging on doors and screaming bloody murder before disappearing into the night. The police didn’t come back to search Oak Beach after that first morning, either. There had been no official missing-persons report, so there was no case, just a sheepish john and an angry boyfriend.

  A few days after Michael and Alex’s visit, Shannan’s sisters made it to Oak Beach to knock on doors and pass out flyers. Mari went with them but waited outside the gate, afraid they’d be accused of trespassing. The neighbors who spoke with them had little to offer. It seemed to Sherre that most would have preferred if they hadn’t come at all.

  Gus Coletti said he didn’t think about the girl again at all until the middle of August, when a Suffolk County police officer knocked on his door—the same officer who had responded to the 911 calls from neighbors on the morning of May 1. The officer told Gus that on the morning when Shannan vanished, he had searched the whole neighborhood and hadn’t found her. He said he’d put his hand on the hood of every SUV in the neighborhood to see if it was warm. He never saw the black SUV with the Asian driver. The officer was back, he told Gus, because a missing-persons report had been filed for Shannan in New Jersey. All this time later, there was a case. The officer wanted to know more from Gus about that morning: what Shannan was wearing, what she said, where she went.

  “You know, it’s been months,” Gus said. “Somebody here dropped the ball.”

  “Well, that would be New Jersey,” came the reply. This was the official line from the police: Only when the report was finally forwarded to Suffolk County did the police connect a 911 call from an upset girl in the early hours of May 1, 2010, with the reports from that same morning of a woman pounding on the doors of Oak Beach. It took that long because even after twenty-three minutes on the phone, Shannan hadn’t been specific enough about her location to get help, and she hadn’t been on the line long enough with the Suffolk County police for the operator to perform a trace. About three minutes into the call, Shannan said she thought she might be “near Jones Beach” and got transferred to the New York State police, because Jones Beach is their jurisdiction. No patrol car was dispatched. A police spokesperson later said the dispatcher couldn’t figure out where Shannan was: “We spoke with her, the call was lost, and she never called back.”

  With no body, Shannan had become a run-of-the-mill missing-persons case, and the taint of prostitution didn’t add any momentum to a nearly nonexistent investigation. A jacket found on the ground near where Shannan was last seen was misplaced by the authorities. According to Gus, the police didn’t even show any interest in Oak Beach’s security video. Several cameras record who comes through the front gate at all hours; those cameras should have provided a full view of Shannan running up the Fairway and in and out of Gus’s house, maybe even which direction she ran after dashing past Michael Pak’s car. The video is stored on a hard drive for a month. According to Gus, the police first asked about the security video eight months after Shannan disappeared. “I told them who would have it, who was in charge of it,” he said, a neighbor named Charlie Serota, a member of the association. By the time the police came back, Gus said, the tape had already been erased.

  The neighbors who acknowledged seeing Shannan—Gus, Joe Brewer, and Barbara Brennan—appeared to have let the matter drop. Maybe they assumed they’d done their part and the police would take it from there. Maybe they thought she made it home one way or another, that she was not their problem. Maybe, when they learned that she was an escort, they cared a little less. Or maybe of all the bad luck Shannan Gilbert had that night, the worst was coming to a community that, for the better part of a century, had wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

  The Suffolk County Police Department is the twelfth-largest police department in the country, with some twenty-five hundred officers serving and protecting the people of eastern Long Island. Aiding those officers is a unit of twenty-two dogs. The canine unit is composed of purebred male German shepherds imported from Eastern Europe. It takes two full-time police officers to train the dogs. Each dog develops a specialty, like a major in college: drugs, explosives, cadavers. The dogs are trained on the real thing, and when they find what they’ve been trained to find, they bark, bite, and scratch to get the attention of their handlers.

  The one thing that an open missing-persons case with a lack of leads may be good for, as far as the police are concerned, is a training exercise for the canine unit. Officer John Mallia was a thirty-one-year veteran of the Suffolk police, a fifty-nine-year-old former private investigator who, since 2005, had called his German shepherd his partner. Blue was seven years old, and Mallia had trained him since he was a puppy. While the accepted wisdom is that most police matters are resolved within forty-eight hours, Mallia looked at Shannan’s disappearance a different way. He assumed the girl was dead. Logic suggested it would be only a matter of time before someone found her. And Blue needed on-the-job training.

  Over the summer, Mallia and Blue searched all of Oak Beach. Parts of the neighborhood had already grown too thick with bramble and poison ivy for a dog and his handler to walk. As summer turned to fall and the obstacles shrank, he and Blue fanned out along the southern edge of Ocean Parkway. When they found nothing, they moved across the highway to the north. Blue got scratched up, and Mallia broke out in a wicked rash.

  Then, at about 2:45 P.M. on Saturday, December 11, 2010, along the parkway near Gilgo Beach, Blue’s tail started wagging. He buried his snout and dug with his forepaws, and Mallia craned to have a look at what the dog had discovered.

  That was when he noticed the burlap. And the skeleton.

  BOOK TWO

  I.

  BODIES

 
They found three more just like it, two days after the first—four sets of bones in all. Each was a full skeleton, kept whole and shrouded in burlap. Each had been placed with an odd specificity, staggered at roughly one-tenth-of-a-mile intervals along the edge of Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. Right away, both the array of the bodies and the care given them seemed deliberate, precise, and methodical.

  Convinced that at least one of them was Shannan, the police searched Joe Brewer’s house and seized his car. Almost as soon as the find came over the police scanner, the parking lot where the Oak Beach Inn used to be became a staging area for the media, filled with trucks from all the local New York TV and radio news stations—WCBS, WABC, FOX 5, WNBC, News 12 Long Island. The cable-news networks followed later, then Dateline and 48 Hours. Surrounded by reporters, the man outed by the police as Shannan’s john was defiant: “I’m innocent in this case,” Brewer said, “so I have truth on my side.”

  Brewer claimed to have taken a polygraph, and while the police didn’t describe the results or confirm right away that he had submitted to the test, they also didn’t declare Brewer a suspect or person of interest. The police talked to Michael Pak, too, picking him up and driving him out to headquarters on Long Island and interrogating him for the better part of a day. Like Brewer, he would say that he passed his polygraph. Unlike Brewer’s, his name didn’t leak out to the papers. The police wouldn’t charge him with anything, nor would they declare him a suspect.

  The people of Oak Beach felt under siege. That much wasn’t unusual. But this time, the threat came from inside the gate. Where they once waved on the road, now they eyed one another as potential co-conspirators in a serial-murder case. Now it wasn’t just a question of what had become of Shannan that night but of why no one in Oak Beach had cared enough to help her. Most neighbors stayed inside their homes. The one exception was Gus Coletti, who tried to distance his community from the remains found down the highway. “What guy would murder four people and dump them right outside the door here?” he said. “That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.” Nothing he said made a difference. Even the most routine questions about Shannan’s last night seemed to hint at some broader conspiracy. When reporters learned there was no security video for that night, they wondered why the police hadn’t cared enough to recover the footage right away—and why, after a girl went screaming down the road and two neighbors dialed 911, anyone in the Oak Island Beach Association would allow the memory on that hard drive to be wiped clean.