Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  Gus headed over to his porch, reliving that morning yet again. He remembered her hair, the blond streaks, and her clothes, a white halter top covered by a sweater or jacket. He didn’t remember a cell phone, though she apparently had it later when she knocked on Barbara Brennan’s door. As Gus recalled, Shannan did nothing but scream, and then she ran away.

  Gus said he believed Shannan was under the influence. “I had four kids. I’m sure one or two of them could probably tell you more about drugs than I could. But that girl was pretty well drugged up. She couldn’t hardly stand. She almost fell over twice while I was talking to her. And she wasn’t making any sense. Even though she was in the house and I was talking to her, she still was screaming, ‘Help me, help me!’ ”

  He said he picked up the phone in full view of her and even started talking to the dispatcher as she watched: “This girl here is screaming for help . . . ” He said he finished the call and turned to her and said, “Sit down in that chair over there. Relax. I called the police, they’re on the way here.” As soon as he said that, out the door she went.

  He pointed to the porch stairs. Gus said he saw Shannan stagger halfway down and fall the rest of the way. She got up and started running around to the right, back to the Fairway toward Joe Brewer’s house, against the weeds on the far side of the street. Gus watched as she pounded on a neighbor’s door, one she’d skipped on the way to Gus’s because he’d had his light on. Then she ran back out to the road and stopped, looking down the road toward Brewer’s house.

  “It was obvious she was looking at something,” Gus said, “and she started to run again and she fell a couple of times and she ran around here.”

  Gus was pointing to his front yard, where he’d parked a small boat. A car had been next to the boat that morning. Gus said Shannan got in between the car and the boat. “She knelt down there, like she was hiding.”

  Gus saw a car coming down the road, a black Ford Explorer, rolling a few feet and stopping, then rolling a few more feet. This was Michael Pak. “I stopped him right here,” Gus said.

  “You stopped him?” I asked. It seemed like a big step to take, to walk down the porch to the road and flag down a strange car.

  Gus nodded. “I said, ‘Where are you going?’ And he said to me, ‘I came from Brewer’s house. We were having a party and the girl got upset, and she’s running around here. I’m trying to find her.’ ”

  What did Gus say to Michael Pak?

  Gus assumed his best John Wayne posture. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve called the police, and they’re on their way, so you stay right here.’ ”

  And Pak’s reaction?

  “He said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have called the police. She’s going to be in big trouble.’ I said, ‘So are you, if you leave. I already got your plate number, and I can identify you.’ ”

  That was when Shannan got up and ran off again. Gus returned to his house and told his wife to stay by the phone in case the police called back. Then he went back out, walking over to the gate, where he stood waiting, he said, for over a half hour.

  “I stood by the gate till the police came,” Gus said. He said he never saw Shannan or Michael Pak again. “Nobody left here with a body in their car, because I would’ve seen it.”

  Nobody left here with a body in their car. That was exactly what the Scalises said did happen. They also said Gus was supplying a front, a cover story—“He would’ve at least seen Michael Pak drive out,” Joe Jr. said. “Where did Michael Pak go that morning?”—and that all of Gus’s accounts in the media were part of a community effort to stay silent about what really happened to Shannan.

  What did Gus think of Peter Hackett? “He’s one of the best neighbors you can have,” Gus said as soon as the doctor’s name was mentioned. “He’s always ready to help everybody. He’s always, if he hears you’re sick, he’s over here in minutes. He’s helped more people on this beach than anybody else around has. He’s a doctor. And he’s a great guy. He’s got the one weakness. He tells stories.”

  “He overelaborates,” Laura said.

  “Yeah,” said Gus. “You tell him a little story, and he stands up making it a big one. But do I think he had anything to do with her disappearing? No.”

  Did he ever hear the doctor say that he helped Shannan out?

  “No,” he said. “I never heard that. As a matter of fact, we never even had any discussions about it, and I see him regularly.”

  This was strange, too. Shannan’s disappearance was easily the biggest thing ever to happen at Oak Beach. If he and Hackett were so close—and if Hackett was such a big storyteller—how could they never have discussed it?

  I asked Gus what he thought happened to Shannan.

  “She died in the water,” he said.

  How?

  “She was scared. She was drugged up pretty good. I think she slipped and fell. Have you looked at any of the jetties? They’re as slick as glass when they’re damp in the morning. If she ran out on one of them, she’s gone.”

  Into the fall, the Scalises kept beating the drum about a conspiracy. They had company now. The first TV reports about Hackett had made the doctor a regular subject of scrutiny on Websleuths, a well-established Internet chat group devoted to dozens of open murder cases around the country. The armchair detectives pored over TV news reports, searching for snippets of the doctor warding off reporters, analyzing his repeated use of “No comment.” I’ve been watching that interview of the Dr. and observing his body language, one commenter wrote. He is blocking the doorway like he is afraid the reporter will try and go inside. He also averts his eyes down and to the left a few times while he is speaking. Isn’t it a sign of deception when someone averts their eyes down and to the left? . . . Something about him seems, well, off!

  A commenter calling himself Truthspider seemed determined to pin every murder on Hackett—not just Shannan and the four in burlap but the unidentified ones, as well as the ones in Manorville. The handle Truthspider belonged to a Long Islander named Brendan Murphy, a skilled researcher who dug up some court documents about Hackett suggesting that he’d been sued twice. The first case stemmed from January 17, 1989, when, according to the documents, Hackett, working as a volunteer member of the Point Lookout–Lido Fire Department, responded to a call in Inwood, New York, where an infant was suffering a febrile seizure. The suit, filed eight years later, accused Hackett of negligence, saying he failed to administer intravenous fluids, treat the seizure, document the treatment he rendered, supervise the emergency personnel, communicate with the hospital, or hydrate the infant. Hackett defended himself by saying he was protected by the Good Samaritan law; the suit was later abandoned. But before it was over, the plaintiff’s attorney filed a Notice of Discovery and Inspection seeking information about “medical care providers furnishing care and treatment to [Hackett] for substance abuse for the period one year prior to the incidents at issue and two years subsequent to said occurrence.” The Oak Beach doctor in rehab? Truthspider couldn’t help but take notice of that.

  The second lawsuit was a malpractice suit involving another infant, though details of what happened and Hackett’s involvement weren’t available in any public documents. The lawsuit was originally filed in 1996 against three other doctors, Long Beach Hospital, and a lab called National Emergency Services, Inc. Three years later, in 1999, the hospital filed a third-party claim against Hackett in what appeared to be an attempt to shift some or all of the responsibility to him. The original case was settled shortly afterward, in July 2000. Hackett was not required to pay any fines, nor was any judgment made against him. Three years after that, the case against Hackett by Long Beach Medical Center was also dismissed.

  The meaning of the court documents is a matter of interpretation. It isn’t unusual for ER doctors to be sued for, in the heat of the moment, not being able to help. Even the first lawsuit’s request for a rehab record was ambiguous: Either the plaintiff was on a fishing expedition, trying to dig up dirt on Hackett, and no such reh
ab records even existed; or, as Murphy decided, Hackett was a drug-addled predator masquerading as the neighborhood Boy Scout. As Truthspider, Murphy posted online about how the first lawsuit demonstrated that Hackett was an addict—an unstable, unethical doctor with access to prescription drugs that he could have used on Shannan that night. Others on Websleuths promptly accused Murphy of tunnel vision, bending all facts to fit his opinion. They saw no evidence of wrongdoing in the negligence cases, and in fact saw plenty to suggest that the lawsuits had no foundation at all.

  But for Truthspider, the Hackett question was simply a case of Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation being the most likely. For Murphy, any number of simple explanations implicated Hackett. That early April report in the Post about a second man, a “drifter,” at Brewer’s house—could that have been Hackett? Or maybe Hackett didn’t come there at all, but Shannan and Brewer went to him on their quick errand out of the house. Maybe Brewer brought Shannan there to get painkillers or other pills. And maybe Hackett, upon seeing Shannan, asked Brewer to lend him the girl for a few hours.

  This was all conjecture, of course, and widely disputed. But to hear Truthspider tell it, wouldn’t that have been enough to make Shannan not just frightened but terrified, afraid for her life? Wouldn’t it have been a short leap for her to be convinced that her driver, Pak, was in on the deal? Wouldn’t that suspicion—her own driver selling her out to another guy—have been scary enough to convince Shannan to call 911? To send her running into the dark? As Truthspider, Murphy wrote as early as May 2011 that the man with all the answers would have to be Brewer, and Brewer had to be covering for Hackett. Everybody inside knows, they just can’t say. [Brewer] was able to piece it together . . . He was [saying] to the media “the truth will come out.” He just can’t say what the truth is. The police told [Brewer] he has to wait until they have the proof they need.

  For his next trick, Murphy pieced together Hackett’s entire work biography and tried to match it up to other bodies, deciding that many of the early nameless victims were conceivably on the doctor’s commute. As Suffolk’s emergency medicine chief after the Flight 800 disaster, Murphy said, Hackett would have driven down Halsey Manor Road in Manorville to get back and forth from the recovery operation at the East Moriches Coast Guard station and a secondary recovery location at Calverton Executive Airpark. When Hackett moved on to Suffolk Central Hospital in Riverhead, his commute down the Long Island Expressway from Oak Beach would have brought him past the same area near Halsey Manor Road, possibly at an ER’s very odd hours. A few years later, in 2000, a torso would be found in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens, a state-protected wooded region just off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville. Portions of Jessica Taylor’s body were found in the same area in 2003. Both of these discoveries, of course, were later linked by DNA to body parts found along Ocean Parkway. For Murphy, that sealed the deal. How many people on Long Island are familiar with the back roads of Manorville and Ocean Parkway? For all you non-believers out there, Truthspider wrote, it’s time to take your head out of the sand and start believing.

  Truthspider saw clues everywhere. An old Babylon Beacon story about Hackett speaking out against a proposal for developing the old Oak Beach Inn site led Truthspider to conclude that Hackett exhibited “territorial behavior” and that, he hastened to add, Hackett made those comments at roughly the same time as the toddler and a Jane Doe’s head, hands, and right foot are believed to have been dumped by the killer. When something didn’t quite fit the theory, like the dismembered legs found all the way in Davis Park, he made it fit: I am certain they floated to Davis Park from elsewhere due to severe coastal flooding from the Nor’easter in January 1996, he wrote, noting that the marks on the legs were consistent with the work of a surgeon.

  Another prolific commenter named Peter Brendt wrote, So . . . Truthspider . . . you tell me, how someone with one leg prosthesis and breathing problems can alone carry a body from his vehicle down to where the [four bodies in burlap] were found?

  Truthspider responded coolly: He worked for years as an EMT with a prosthetic leg, as part of that job you have to be able to pick up victims, put them on stretchers, or boards and carry the board or stretcher possibly up and down stairs. I think he can handle a sedated 110-pound girl. From my personal experience with the Gilgo dump sites, the full skeletons were 3-5 feet into the bush, whereas the dismembered parts seemed to be buried further into the brush a decent distance from the road.

  Brendan Murphy is about thirty years old and won’t divulge where he lives, except to say that he spends part of the time in a barrier-island community that is not Oak Beach. When I met him for dinner in Manhattan, he struck me as calm and reasonable but every bit as fervent in his belief that Hackett was the killer as he was on Websleuths. He said he thought Hackett might have gone into his chosen career with fantasies of being an angel of mercy, but from there it was a short leap to becoming an angel of death. He pointed to other medical people who have become mass murderers, like Richard Angelo, the registered nurse implicated in at least eight deaths during the 1980s; and Michael Swango, the doctor suspected of poisoning some sixty patients and colleagues over twenty years. Murphy’s favorite comparison was John Edward Robinson, an accomplished con man and killer from the eighties, who got away with it as long as he did only because people considered him too old, too nice, too soft-spoken, and not physically capable, all while he maintained a sparkling public image as a do-gooder, a good neighbor, and a family man.

  As the summer went on, Murphy developed an intricate theory of how Hackett grew up to become a serial killer. He’d read a war novel written by Peter’s father, Charles Joseph Hackett—The Last Happy Hour, a semiautobiographical romp in the mode of Catch-22 or M*A*S*H, published by Doubleday in 1976—and discovered a passage in which the main character goes on about how impossible it is to “convert” prostitutes by arguing with them, then travels the country with his young son after the war, spending nights in motels with “dancers.” It’s really a very unfortunate description of a boy’s early life if people are suspecting him in the Long Island serial-killer case, Murphy wrote. He decided that Peter’s mother’s death in childbirth and his father’s presumably strange predilections created a monster. He pointed to the car accident that took Hackett’s leg, and the carnage of the TWA Flight 800 crash. He cited a theory called “Trauma Control Model,” put forward by Eric Hickey, a researcher of serial killers, which argues that an early childhood catastrophe can set up a child for deviant behavior in adulthood. Murphy decided that something in Hackett’s childhood—the feelings of abandonment caused by not having a mother, perhaps—got dredged up in these adult traumas, and Hackett descended into deviant behavior.

  Murphy also thought that Shannan’s disappearance was a turning point for Hackett, a sign that he was getting sloppy. He did something out of the ordinary on May 1st by going after [Shannan], he wrote, and it’s also why she got away from him for almost an hour. Like Joe Jr., Murphy believed the bodies of the other four were stashed locally until shortly before they were discovered. Since his dump site—the shed beside the marsh—was undiscovered for 10+ years, he felt he didn’t need to dismember and leave torsos far from his house, he wrote. Then, in a panic, he dumped them. He was extremely organized, but got lazy, then slipped with [Shannan] and now he is going down.

  Murphy told me that he believed Hackett started tentatively, picking up people along his work commute and leaving parts of them in parks. He noted that all the bodies along Ocean Parkway and Manorville were found on state parkland. “In the middle of the night, parks are not patrolled,” he said. “I can tell someone I have a reason to be in a park. I can con them.”

  The same way, he said, that Hackett might have conned Joe Brewer into bringing him a victim.

  On July 11, Hackett blinked. CBS aired a one-hour report of 48 Hours Mystery devoted to the bodies at Gilgo Beach and the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert. The show featured a section on Hackett in which the doctor, a
fter numerous interview requests, reversed himself, admitting to making two calls to Shannan’s family on May 6, a few days after she disappeared.

  Hackett refused to be interviewed on-camera. In two written responses to CBS, he said merely that he called Mari at Alex Diaz’s request, to offer to help with the search. On the face of it, this timing would make more sense than Mari’s claim that he’d called just after Shannan went missing. Hackett said the longest call lasted under four minutes. While he said he couldn’t quite recall what was said, his memory was apparently strong enough for him to continue to deny ever telling Mari that he ran a rehab or home for wayward girls, and to deny that he ever saw Shannan. He said the same thing to Newsday just before the broadcast: “I had nothing to do with anything occurring the night Shannan went missing. I never saw her that night; she never came to my house, I never offered her assistance.”

  His coming forward only made him a larger target. The Websleuths world parsed the wording of Hackett’s letters, making much of how he’d refused to take a polygraph, citing health issues. If I picked this suspect out of a hat, I agree it would be coincidence, but we didn’t, Truthspider crowed. He is one of three men directly tied to the May 1 incident, but is the only one of them who refuses to take a poly, changed his alibi multiple times, lied to everyone for a prolonged period of time, can be connected to the areas of the dump sites, and whose parameters fit that of the serial killer: classic post-crime behavior, age, intellect, capacity, knowledge of law-enforcement tactics, etc. The police continued to maintain that Hackett was not a suspect. But for Mari, blood was in the water. The doctor had lied; how could you believe anything he said after he’d spent a year saying the phone call never happened?