Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  That same night, Maureen had called her sister Missy, at home in Groton with her husband, Chris Cann, and their three children. On the phone, Maureen kept things light. She didn’t say anything about getting robbed or being in trouble, or how she had to be in court the next day, or that she needed cash or she’d be out on the street. She said she was calling from Penn Station. “Can Chris come pick me up?” she asked calmly.

  “Maureen, it’s eleven-thirty,” Missy said. “Chris has to work in the morning.”

  “I’ll call Will.”

  A moment later, Missy’s phone rang again. Will had to work, too. Maureen said she had enough money to take the train and would take the next one.

  On Tuesday, Missy called Maureen, but she wasn’t answering. Maybe she was sleeping, she thought, or maybe her phone was out of minutes.

  Will called Missy on Wednesday. He hadn’t heard from Maureen, either. Her phone was going straight to voicemail.

  On Thursday, Missy and Will called the Norwich police. As soon as they learned what Maureen was doing in Manhattan, the officers stopped taking them seriously. She was an escort in financial trouble; maybe she’d dropped off the grid until she made enough money to set things right. Missy knew that couldn’t be true. Maureen would never be willingly out of touch with Caitlin and Aidan for that long.

  Missy learned from Sara Karnes where they had been staying. Will and Chris got on their motorcycles for Manhattan. The clerks at the Super 8 blithely claimed to have no memory of the dark-haired woman who had just spent days on end in room 406. The hotel records showed Maureen checking out not on Monday but on Tuesday, the day she was supposed to be back in court. They learned later that she had not kept the appointment to look at the sublet. She didn’t get back in touch with Al, either.

  Missy rushed to her sister’s apartment in Norwich. The entire place had been cleared out. All her sister’s things were in a dump truck out front or gone—all of her composition books and all the books she loved to read aloud to her children. Her clothes were gone, too. A friend of Maureen’s had taken them all, telling Missy that Maureen had said she could. A short time later, the police told Missy that Maureen’s food-stamp EBT card had been used in Norwich. Missy and Will started searching all over Norwich until they discovered that the same friend was using it.

  Missy logged in to her sister’s e-mail—Maureen had shared her password—searching for clues but also for anything left of the sister she knew. She moved on to the Web, looking for photos of Maureen on adult websites, stories of unidentified bodies, or even women with amnesia. Weeks turned into months, and Missy never stopped calling the police in Groton and New York, pushing for word on any progress. When an internal-affairs detective took pity on her, Missy learned that one of the last people known to have responded to Maureen’s Craigslist ad had been a New York police officer, a Staten Island resident ultimately cleared of any involvement in her disappearance. Then came more silence, more waiting, until Missy learned that the police had picked up a ping from her sister’s cell phone—someone trying to access her voice mail, perhaps. The signal registered at a water tower on Fire Island. Police with cadaver dogs and helicopters searched the area but didn’t find anything. At the time, Missy was confused; as far as she knew, Maureen never did outcalls on Long Island.

  Missy didn’t know what to do with her frustration. Once, when she thought of Maureen, it had been about what book she was reading, or who would do the shopping for the kids’ birthday parties. Now it was about Craigslist, and incalls and outcalls. She began neglecting her kids, her husband, her job. She forced herself to think of any scenario in which Maureen might be alive. She ran into Maureen’s friend Jay DuBrule and started talking about how Maureen might have gotten drugged up and abducted by a sex slaver and forced to work for a human-trafficking ring. Jay found himself hoping right along with her. Better, at least, to think she was alive.

  While Missy became obsessed, her brother cast about, adrift, enraged, and morose. And then, he, too, was gone. On August 14, 2009, Will—the baby of the family, a muscular, square-jawed, hard-partying football star from Fitch High School, whose anguish over the loss of Maureen was so intense that he had his sister’s name tattooed on his chest—was on his Harley before sunrise near Exit 78 on Route 95, a tricky merge that has since been marked by a traffic sign. Will had been at a party that night with other members of his motorcycle club. A few of his friends were with him on the road. He was out in front, as usual. There was a truck in front of him; the police said its lights were either off or dim. Will seemed to notice the truck only when he was a few feet from the back of its trailer. He slammed his brakes, but it was too late. The bike broke in half, and Will died on impact.

  When Missy was seventeen, she’d almost died in a car crash. Maureen, nineteen and already a mother, had sat with her at the hospital, coaxing her back into consciousness. Maureen, Missy, and Will had always taken care of one another. Now there was just Missy, left with nothing but an inkling that it was never supposed to work out this way.

  As horrible as Will’s death was, even that presented Missy with a strange sense of possibility—a new scenario. She couldn’t help playing it out like a movie trailer in her mind: Maureen running away and reinventing her life somewhere; Maureen walking through the door, embracing her, ready to grieve for their brother as a family, ready to come home.

  When Maureen didn’t show up at the funeral, that put an end to it. Missy knew she was gone for good.

  Amanda received eight calls in all. Whoever it was always phoned in the evenings, speaking briefly and calmly, taunting Amanda in a low voice. “Is this Melissa’s little sister? I hear you’re a half-breed.”

  Amanda’s father was black. The caller knew what Amanda looked like.

  Her mind flooded. Had this man captured Melissa? Was he holding her prisoner? Was she dead already? Or was this some sort of joke? Amanda seemed to be the only one he would talk to. The time Lynn answered, he hung up.

  Steve Cohen, the Barthelemy family’s lawyer, told the police about the calls. Only then did they seem to take Melissa’s disappearance seriously. Starting with the third call, police traced the signal to cell towers in Times Square and Madison Square Garden. Detectives showed Melissa’s picture around at strip clubs. They wondered if the caller worked in midtown and commuted from Long Island. The calls were too short to narrow down the location.

  After the third call, Amanda, just fifteen years old, was being asked to function as bait. If he called, she was supposed to draw him out, keep the conversation going. She and her mother spent the next several weeks waiting for another call. Every time the phone would ring, she’d wonder, Is this him, is there another clue? Once, the caller seemed to toy with Amanda, asking if she knew what Melissa did for a living. Another time he said, “Are you gonna be a whore like your sister?” Little by little, he dropped more hints. He said he knew where she lived, and he suggested he might come after her. Amanda thought he knew exactly what he was doing; that he was enjoying it, controlling every second, revealing himself with steady precision.

  The last call came on August 26, 2009: “I’m watching your sister’s body rot.”

  Amanda was driven almost hysterical by the calls, not just because Melissa might be dead but because she had been keeping her sister’s secret. She had been the only one in the family who traveled to New York and spent time with Melissa, the only one with anything close to an authentic glimpse of what her life was like. Lynn had heard about how they went for mani-pedis and visited the Statue of Liberty. Now Amanda told her the rest: how she would hear Melissa on the phone making dates, and see her on the computer posting photos of herself. She told her mother that Melissa had a car service ferry her back and forth while Amanda waited in the house for her to call and say she was okay.

  Lynn had always considered her older daughter a force of nature, independent and self-reliant. Now all she could do was wonder what more she and Jeff could have done to persuade her to come home. />
  Amanda had a hard time in school, missing classes and staying home, depressed. A full year passed with no word. Lynn and Jeff threw themselves into their work. Lynn had retired from making meals at Manhattan Manor to help out at the latest incarnation of Jeff’s diner. Jeff had pulled up stakes at his inner-city location in Lovejoy, where Melissa had worked some shifts after beauty school classes, and found a new spot in Cheektowaga, a suburb to the east of Buffalo. The new diner, called JJ’s Texas Hots, was on a four-lane commercial strip lined with dollar stores and Goodwill and Chick-N-Pizza and the Polish Villa and 7-Eleven. Across the street was Resurrection Church, dominating the intersection with an electronic bell that played on the hour. JJ’s new building used to be a Dunkin’ Donuts, and it showed: the floor-to-ceiling windows around the perimeter, the Formica tables. The doors had handwritten signs on whiteboard in different-colored markers, reading SORRY WE CANNOT TAKE CREDIT CARDS OR DEBIT CARDS and RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY. Nobody paid attention to either of them. After a while, Lynn and Jeff knew most of the patrons and what they were going to order. The term Texas Hots referred to the sauce as much as the dog—a mild meat sauce with a nice bite; hot enough but not super-hot. It was a family recipe. The connection to Texas was tenuous at best. Jeff’s father, a Buffalo native, had opened the original JJ’s thirty years earlier.

  If the loss of Melissa hung over their emotional lives, JJ’s had become the center of their financial anxieties. On bad days, it resembled a house of cards. It had cost Jeff and Lynn about twelve thousand dollars to open the location. It would have cost more, but he brought in some equipment from the old place in Lovejoy. They borrowed the money from relatives of Jeff’s, and they felt horrible about the timing. A few months after they opened, the market crashed and the relatives lost their life savings. Not once did they ask for any money back. And when they came in to eat, they got angry if Jeff gave them free food. Both Jeff and Lynn spent nearly every waking hour there, each working seventy-two hours a week or more. Lynn’s little sister, Dawn, came by to work a shift after her full-time job as a bank teller. Lynn’s father, Elmer, washed dishes after pulling a full shift as a maintenance worker at Canterbury Woods, a well-heeled assisted living community that opened after Manhattan Manor. Lynn’s mother, Linda, had helped get the place ready, scrubbing the floors and walls and painting.

  The older generation was overextended. Linda had taken advantage of the loose standards for credit and signed a home-equity loan to buy a new in-ground swimming pool. When she died of heart failure just weeks after Melissa disappeared, the debt was on her estate. Elmer got a lawyer to tell the pool company that if he declared bankruptcy, everything he had would go toward the mortgage. They gave up trying to collect. He never declared bankruptcy, and he kept the pool.

  Melissa’s grandmother had lived just long enough to learn the truth about what her granddaughter had been doing in New York. Elmer, Lynn, and Dawn were convinced that the loss broke her heart. Elmer put on a brave face for a few months but soon sank into a deep depression. When he wasn’t helping out behind the counter, he’d be sitting in the restaurant, telling strangers about his wife and his granddaughter, telling old stories about them both, treading lightly on the reasons for Melissa’s disappearance. Elmer had failed a stress test but refused to do anything about it. If his time was up, he said, he was ready to join his wife. Lynn worried about him. So did Dawn, who from time to time tried to snap her dad out of his funk. “I know how you feel,” she’d say. “I don’t have it as deep as you, but you really have to snap out of it. You have to see the light. There is light . . . No child can do anything wrong.”

  Then came the day in December when Lynn, craning her neck up from the cash register at JJ’s Texas Hots, saw the reports on television: four bodies on a Long Island beach, all presumed to be prostitutes. She burst into tears. It took until the end of January for her to learn that Melissa was the one John Mallia and Blue had discovered on December 11—the first of the four to be found.

  Lorraine Waterman was never really rid of any of her history. She carried it with her in the form of guilt or anger: She was the real victim; the children, Megan and Greg, were stolen from her. No one understood her. She wore her story on her body now, for all to see. The initials of her boyfriend, Bill, were tattooed on her right shoulder. On her left arm, after the DNA match came back, she got a tattoo that read MEGAN RIP.

  Lorraine’s hard drinking was far behind her. Sober ten years, she was working on getting a medical-assistant degree from Kaplan University, around the corner from her home in South Portland. The program was supposed to last two years, but she was taking an extra class each semester so she could finish early. At night, she worked at the Domino’s managed by her boyfriend. Like Buffalo, Portland had lost most of its blue-collar jobs, but it had become a booming health-care town, with hospitals expanding all over and state laws facilitating the funding of assisted-living facilities. Even so, Lorraine thought that getting a medical-assistant job would be difficult, with so many younger people competing. It took two or three interviews to even be in the running for a job, and Lorraine wasn’t exactly spry. Her mother, Muriel, and big sister Liz called her a hypochondriac—“Every time somebody has an ailment, Lorraine has it, too,” Liz said—but Lorraine maintained that she suffered from bad kidneys, diabetes, and arthritis of the spine.

  Lorraine’s two-story detached house on a quiet wooded street smelled of cigarettes, with deep red curtains blocking the light in the living room. There was a fifty-five-gallon aquarium, two torn-up beige Barcaloungers, a large TV, and an inscription on the wall from the children’s book Guess How Much I Love You: I love you right up to the moon and back. She shared the house with Bill, one of Bill’s daughters, and Bill’s three-year-old grandson, David, just a little younger than Megan’s daughter, Lili. On any given day, Lili’s toys would be strewn about the floor, and David often played with them. But Lili did not live here. She lived with Lorraine’s mother, Muriel, just as Megan had for most of her childhood.

  In the official version of Megan’s life story—the one generally accepted by everyone in the family other than Lorraine—Megan and her brother were rescued as babies from a neglectful and sometimes abusive situation. For decades, Lorraine held on to her dissenting view: that Muriel took Megan and Greg away from her. Once the worst had befallen Megan—once she had become a murder victim—Lorraine was ready to lay that at Muriel’s feet, too. She blamed Muriel’s overprotectiveness for everything. “My mom defended Megan, protected Megan, lied about Megan,” she said. “She got kicked out of school. She beat up the teachers. And my mom always protected her. Megan knew that, ‘Hey, Nana and Grandpa are going to come bail me out.’ If they had not covered for her, I think Megan would’ve smartened up.”

  When Megan disappeared, her estranged family wasn’t in much of a condition to rally a search. Still, they tried. They held a vigil nineteen days after she was last seen—on June 25, 2010—in the bandstand area of Congress Square in Portland. Volunteers gathered at the Scarborough Walmart parking lot on Gallery Boulevard the next morning to hang Missing posters. Others, including Megan’s brother, Greg, and her friend Nicci Haycock, had done the same in Hauppauge, Long Island, a few weeks later in July. Local newspaper and TV news shows took notice. By August, when CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell put Lorraine on for a few minutes to talk about Craigslist, the short version of Megan’s story wasn’t exactly flattering. “I’ve got to ask you, Lorraine, did you try to stop your daughter from getting involved in this escort business?” Lorraine answered as honestly as she could: “Yes. Me and my whole family have. We have told Megan how dangerous it is for her to be doing that. And she did it anyways. She didn’t listen.”

  Muriel and others were horrified. Some of Megan’s friends were astonished to see Lorraine acting as the family spokesperson. “I was working with Lorraine and didn’t even know she was Megan’s mom until Lorraine was on TV,” said Rachel Brown. “That’s how involved Megan’s mother was.”
/>
  Lorraine saw only after the fact how terrible it looked to say such a thing in public. From then on, she and others in the family made sure to cast Megan as a victim. In September, Lorraine told one reporter that Akeem Cruz, now in jail, had been “her boyfriend-slash-pimp,” who “told her how she could make easy, quick money, and he got her hooked on Craigslist. Her attitude, her personality—all of it changed when she met him.” This wasn’t exactly true—she’d been an escort before Vybe came along—but all the momentum was shifting against him. The family would call Akeem Cruz what anti-sex-trafficking activists call a Romeo pimp. He’d romanced Megan only to control her, they said; then he brought her to Hauppauge and abandoned her. Maybe he even had something to do with what happened.

  That fall, the family planned another benefit to raise money for a reward: a spaghetti supper and silent auction with door prizes, a raffle, and a DJ. It was during the planning that Lorraine discovered that Muriel was taking steps to share custody of Lili not with Lorraine but with Lorraine’s oldest sister, Liz Meserve. Lorraine lashed out at Liz; Liz unfriended Lorraine on Facebook; and the fund-raiser fell apart. If the feud had started with a struggle for control over Megan’s memory, then Lili had become another front in the same war.

  By December, when Lorraine got the call from Suffolk County that four skeletons had been found on Ocean Parkway, no two members of the family seemed to be on speaking terms. When Lorraine went on Nancy Grace, the others watched from home, amazed yet again by the performance. She wasn’t a mother in real life, but there she was, playing one on TV.

  The police came to Portland to tell Lorraine about the DNA match on January 20, the day after what would have been Megan’s twenty-third birthday. Again, the family ceased hostilities, this time just long enough to plan the funeral. Five-year-old Lili, her hair in cornrows, wore a maroon velvet dress with a bow in the back and black Nikes with pink swooshes. The minister got a few laughs when he said, “You couldn’t tell Megan anything was a bad idea. We all remember the way she liked to jazz people up. Megan was strong-willed. Her friends loved to follow her in her adventures and escapades.”