Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  I asked Kim if she had a drug problem, too, like her sister.

  “I’ve had my own, I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s not exactly affiliated, you know, but eight out of ten calls nowadays are affiliated with drugs. Because drugs and this go together hand in hand. I was telling Lorraine that it’s not uncommon for a girl to meet someone who sells crack or coke and team up with him and go on a call because both of you are gonna make money. I’ve had guys go, ‘Look, if you can’t bring coke, don’t even come.’ ”

  I opened the floor to others. Was anyone else at the table surprised by details like these?

  “I hate to be so vivid about it,” Kim boasted.

  The others saw it almost as a trick question. To say they were surprised made them seem naive. To say they weren’t made them seem complicit.

  “Basically, my sister explained it almost exactly like that,” Missy said.

  “You know, it’s so interesting,” said Jeff Martina, sitting next to Lynn and Amanda. “Melissa wasn’t into drugs.”

  “Yeah, Maureen wasn’t into drugs, either,” Missy said.

  “But I know there are girls that she’s talking about,” Jeff said.

  Kim seemed a little baffled. “I mean, I lived it.”

  “I mean, she drank to the point where she blacked out,” Lynn said.

  “The drinking is better than the coke because it’s legal,” Kim said. “Methadone? There’s no difference. They call it hillbilly heroin.”

  Jeff tried to change the subject. “This is a dangerous profession,” he said.

  “I think they all knew him,” Missy said, gently changing the subject back to the killer.

  “I don’t know whether they knew him or not,” said Jeff.

  “I think so,” said Lynn.

  Missy winced. “My sister would have never gone with someone—”

  “My sister and I talked about that,” Kim said. “The precautions you take. Like, the worst thing that ever happened to me was the guy’s wife came home.”

  To one degree or another, all of the women had taken on the role of amateur homicide investigator. “It’s like a little detective crew,” Kim said. So little was known about the nights the other girls disappeared that the women tended to focus on the night Shannan went missing, replaying the details of what happened again and again, searching for clues to who the killer might be. No one engaged in that exercise more than Mari.

  Everything about the day she’d just spent at Oak Beach made her feel like the people there were trying to wish her daughter away. “It’s not even about the prostitution,” Mari said. “It’s about how all their clients were wealthy. Look where she was. They don’t want the attention. There’s doctors there, lawyers there, cops there. They don’t want to be associated with that kind of behavior. That’s why they don’t care. Money can take care of anything.”

  For the first time, Mari talked publicly about her suspicions of the driver, Michael Pak. “During the twenty-three-minute 911 tape, she’s screaming, pounding on doors. We were given an excerpt of it: ‘Help me help me he’s gonna kill me help me help me.’ It was the driver she’s getting away from. My daughter says his name. And in the background is this person, ‘What are you talking about, I’m trying to help you, you’re lying,’ and the tape went dead.”

  Shannan’s coat was found on the road, she said, but then the police misplaced it. “Come on, a big huge coat? How could they have lost it?” The errors didn’t rile her as much as the apathy—and what she thought was a whitewashing. Mari didn’t believe that John Mallia and his dog had been searching for the bodies when they came across them. She thought the police were just trying to look good, that the recent discoveries were more of a coincidence than a piece of crack police work. “The cop stopped along the side of the road to let the dog do his business,” Mari said with a wave of her hand. “The dog accidentally found the remains.”

  She remained fixated on Hackett. She told the others about her attempt to talk to him a day earlier, during her visit to Oak Beach. (“Is that whose door you were banging on?” Lynn asked, and Mari laughed, answering, “Was that on TV?”) After no one answered the bell, Mari said she peered through a window, noticing what she thought was burlap. “I was about ready to flip out,” she said. “One of the news crews filmed it. I think they’re going to keep that. They’re going to give it to my lawyer.”

  No one could be sure that Mari really saw what she thought she’d seen. If anything, Mari was more than a little out on a limb: After Mari and the Hacketts’ go-round in the press a few weeks earlier, the police had said repeatedly that Hackett, like Brewer and Pak, was not a suspect. Still, the others fell silent as Mari explained what she believed had happened to her daughter, unfurling a theory that, for the time being, implicated Joe Brewer, Michael Pak, and Peter Hackett and linked her daughter’s disappearance to the other murders. She said she thought that Brewer frequently brought girls to Oak Beach for parties, and that Hackett knew. She said she thought that Pak drove girls to other parties there. She blamed Hackett for what had happened to the security video; she said she’d learned that as a board member of the Oak Island Beach Association, he was listed as playing a security role. “They have no record of her screaming and yelling and running, they have no videotape of the truck that was chasing her! And Hackett has medical experience.”

  If Brewer, Hackett, and Pak were involved, I asked, why would they leave the bodies so close to home? That’s the point, she replied. “Who would ever think?”

  Missy nodded. “Maybe because they thought if they travel, they knew they’d get caught,” she said. “And they knew that area.”

  Mari nodded along with her. “Yeah, she was probably forced to get stoned, drunk, high, whatever.”

  “Not forced,” said Kim. “She probably did it. Because I’ve done it on calls, too.”

  That annoyed Mari. Who was Kim, of all people, to say what her daughter might or might not have done? Shannan was in line to become the next victim, Mari said. But Shannan, she insisted, wasn’t like the other girls. She would not go quietly. “I think they underestimated her,” Mari said. “She knew, ‘This is not what I want to do.’ And without her running and screaming, none of these other bodies would have been found.”

  The appeal of the theory was obvious. Any mother would want to think her daughter stood up for herself. Of course, it was all conjecture, and it also happened to be demeaning of the other girls, whom Mari was implying didn’t try to fight back. Kim, for one, didn’t think it happened that way. Drawing from her own experience as an escort, her theory was slightly less flattering to Shannan. She said that she thought Shannan got high with Brewer that night, even though he later denied it. “He got this girl probably so blown out of her mind, because that’s how they are. They’ve got the drugs and they’ve got the money, and you’re there for the hour. Then, for whatever reason, he did something to spook this girl. That girl was scared for her life. Something made her think that somebody’s going to kill her.”

  “She was hiding behind his couch, right?” Missy asked.

  “She wouldn’t leave,” Kim said. “She’s scared. So Brewer calls the driver and says, ‘Shannan won’t leave.’ ”

  One detail still confused Kim. “Why didn’t she run to the driver?” she asked. “The driver’s my safety. I don’t give a damn how fucked up I was, my ass is going to the driver, because that’s my way out, whether it’s the police coming or somebody trying to kill me.”

  Mari offered an explanation. “Because when she was done with Brewer, she went back to the car to go home, and the driver’s like, ‘Where’s my money?’ And she said, ‘I don’t have any money.’ So he brought her back to Brewer’s, and Brewer said, ‘What are you talking about? I paid her.’ She said she’s tired of the driver taking all her money. ‘I’ve given you money every time, I want this money now.’ And that’s when they started arguing, and she hid in Brewer’s house.” Maybe Shannan ran off to safety, Mari believed, or maybe that was
when the killer got her.

  The others wanted to know why Mari thought Shannan wouldn’t share her fee with the driver. “I was the last one Shannan talked to that night, six hours before she was missing,” Mari said. “We had planned for her to come home for my birthday and for Mother’s Day.” Mari thought Shannan didn’t want to give the driver his cut that night so she could have enough money to buy her mother a present. “She said, ‘I have to work tonight, Mommy.’ ”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. The guilt permeating that theory was so overpowering that no one wanted to acknowledge it. Finally, Kim said, “Okay. So you don’t know that conversation went on between her and that driver at that point? You’re just guessing?”

  “I’m assuming,” Mari said tensely, “that when she went back to the driver and the driver said, ‘Give me the money,’ she said, ‘No, I need the money for my mom’s birthday.’ ” She paused and locked eyes with Kim. “Because she told me, ‘I’m doing a job so I’ll have some money to buy you something for your birthday.’ ”

  Mari was incensed now. But to all the other women at the table, Kim was presenting an alternative image of all the girls—a less innocent one than some would care to picture. Unlike any of the others, Kim saw in all these murders an alternate ending to her own life, one she’d long imagined and yet somehow escaped. “I was thinking, God, did I run across this person?” she told me later. “And maybe I wasn’t his type?”

  Kim almost said something else to Mari but then stopped herself. “I’m telling you, I feel for you more than I feel for myself or any other lady here,” she said. “Because Shannan is still missing, you know? At least I know where my sister is. And if I don’t know nothing else, I have that closure.”

  Jeff Martina seemed to want to break the tension and bring everyone back together. “I just think all these girls, all our daughters, our sisters, whoever they are, I think they all met the same nut.”

  “To me, Joe Brewer is guilty even if he didn’t kill her,” Kim said. “Because he got Shannan in there. He got high with her. There was drugs. It was obvious.” But later, she pressed her view again. “The connection between these four women is cocaine,” she said when we were alone. “That wasn’t my sister’s drug of choice, but she had access to it. And if it was gonna make her money, she would do it. Shannan had a history of coke. Even though people won’t admit it in public, just do your research and you’ll see. So I think the killer likes to get high.”

  At dinner, after some drinks, Lynn and Jeff passed around family photos of Melissa as a teenager, looking a little like Amanda and exactly like her mother. Lynn showed the group the silver cross she wore around her neck with Melissa’s ashes installed inside.

  They dropped their guard a little. “It’s tough enough to see my daughter go through this,” Lynn said, “and a month later my mother dies and I’ve got to keep my whole family together. I’ve got to be strong for her, for my dad. Everything is dumped on me.”

  “I lost my mom, and my dad is dying,” said Kim.

  “It’s made me a stronger person,” said Lynn. She laughed. “I’m strong as hell, but I break down all the time.”

  “I do, too,” Lorraine said.

  They talked about the case again, its logistics and forensics. There was a robust discussion about whether the salt air from the ocean corrodes human flesh more quickly or acts as a preservative.

  “So Shannan had a metal jaw?” Kim said.

  “I can’t say,” said Mari coolly before Kim asked her why the police weren’t searching the bramble with metal detectors. “It’s titanium. That can’t be detected by a metal detector.”

  Missy and Kim glanced across the table at Amanda’s caramel skin. They both wondered if one common bond among the girls was that they dated black men. “Everybody’s assuming he’s white,” Kim said. “Maybe that was the connection—they would see black guys. The profile says white, but you never know.”

  The women talked about the vigil they were planning. They hoped to march down Ocean Parkway, near where the bodies were found, but the police were pushing back. “They don’t want us walking down that road,” said Missy, who was serving as the group’s liaison to the Suffolk County police. Missy wanted the people of Oak Beach to be as upset as she was—or, failing that, at least to understand. “I may never get closure. But that’s still a place where she was. And I just feel like that community has to see the families. All they care about is the values of their houses and how their community looks. Because they’re just stuck-up rich people that don’t care.”

  “Look at Natalee Holloway,” Kim said—the white blond Alabama girl whose disappearance in Aruba five years earlier had become a cable-news staple. “People should have been elbow to elbow out there, walking for this girl, Shannan Gilbert. Why not? What makes her disappearance any different?”

  Missy had taken it upon herself to police anyone seeking to exploit the case. One target was Longislandserialkiller.com, a site that reprinted every news story about the case and invited anonymous comments. “They were selling freaking T-shirts!” she said. She told the others that she had asked the police to shut down a posting of a rap video called “Ocean Parkway” that used photos of the dead girls without permission (sample lyric: The white girl had to get it because she could snitch on me / They killed you because you were a menace to society). Searching the Web, Missy had discovered the message board on Longislanderotic.com where anonymous johns had threatened to take revenge on Amber months before the media found it.

  In the middle of dinner, two NYPD detectives who worked on Melissa’s disappearance dropped by the restaurant to say hello to Lynn and Jeff. Jeff said the two detectives had been assigned to the NYPD’s terrorist task force, but after being turned on to the case by Lynn and Jeff’s lawyer, they went out of their way to help. “They went above and beyond. They were bangin’ on strip club doors.” As soon as they showed up, Mari scurried away for a cigarette. “I hate cops. I’m outta here.”

  When she came back, Mari was distant again. “What I’m going through is different,” she said. “Shannan is still missing. She’s not a body.”

  Kim reached out, trying to take the sting out of their conflict earlier. “We’re all here together because of Shannan,” she told Mari. “I don’t care if they ever find her. As long as I live, she will always be dear to me.”

  After dinner, we returned to the hotel lobby to say goodbye. The women seemed to have wilted. The hugs started. “We’ll be friends till the end,” Lorraine said. “Even after they find him. We’ll all be friends till we all go upstairs.”

  Lorraine handed the others identical trinkets she’d picked up at a shop in Maine. They were little pink hearts with angel wings. “It’s because the girls are all in our hearts,” Lorraine said, “and they’re all in heaven.” The other women loved them. They were a new family, for now.

  Mari liked the trinket, too. “I always worked for, like, normal-class people, like fourteen dollars an hour,” she said. “But Shannan just liked really expensive things. I don’t know who she picked it up from.” She remembered the night Shannan disappeared and their last phone call. “I said, ‘Look, Shannan, you coming is my gift. You don’t have to bring me a present, just come home.’ ” After hanging up, she said she texted Shannan: Be safe.

  Right away, she said, her daughter answered: I always am.

  Everyone showed up at the June 11 vigil except Kim, who wasn’t answering her phone or returning calls or e-mails. The others were concerned that she’d gone back to work.

  The media was there, paying attention to the girls, and that counted for something. The TV outlets were stumbling over one another now. A News 12 camera crew was joined by crews from Dateline, 48 Hours, and a British crew preparing a documentary for A&E. Lorraine rolled in a little late with Greg and Nicci. In front of the cameras, Lorraine was transformed, so different from the woman who sat so quietly a month ago with the others. “I have to keep her name out there until this person is caught,
” she said. “She can’t speak for herself.”

  Lynn and Jeff brought Lynn’s sister, Dawn, and her father, Elmer. They all were wearing T-shirts in honor of Melissa. “We’re celebrating the lives of the girls,” Lynn said at a short press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot, “and just want everybody to know that you know these girls, they were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins. You know, it doesn’t matter what they did for their profession that they were victims.”

  Missy didn’t speak directly to reporters—she was too self-conscious for that—but off-camera, she arranged a balloon release in honor of the dead and missing. She also got the police to arrange for the families to spend five minutes along the highway where the bodies had been found. The shoulder was narrow and the roadway dangerous. Everyone came away with ticks. When they spent a little longer there than they’d planned, the police urged them to finish. Mari cursed them out: “Fuck you, you fucking cops!”

  Missy was appalled. So was Lynn. In time, Mari would do other things that puzzled them. When Missy planned another visit to Oak Beach for early August, to do some recon work of her own about Shannan’s disappearance, Mari caught wind of it and got angry at Missy for not including her. “Shannan’s my daughter,” Mari said. “Not her daughter.”

  Missy didn’t understand what had set Mari off. This was the first time that Mari’s combativeness had come in her direction, though it wouldn’t be the last. Missy decided to be diplomatic. She canceled her trip. “Mari is a peculiar person,” Missy said.

  That night they all jammed into a few rooms of a local hotel, playing with Missy’s kids and bonding some more before heading off to bed. The next day, Lorraine returned home to Portland, Lynn to Buffalo, Missy to Groton. They resumed their Facebook relationships. Now and then, a few would be brought into the city again for on-camera interviews with networks and cable channels that had picked up on the story. In August, Lynn hosted a get-together for a few days, and she and Lorraine and Missy all got a chance to bond without reporters and camera crews. Mari was not invited. Kim didn’t come, either. No one had heard a word from her since May. As she had before, she’d dropped out of sight.