Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  On August 19, a sunny summer Sunday, Mari and a small entourage staged another offensive at Oak Beach. No family members were with her this time, just her old friend Johanna Gonzalez; the British film crew working on the A&E documentary; and some new friends from Long Island she’d made through Facebook who had become devoted to Shannan’s case: a Glen Cove resident named Michele Kutner and a Massapequa native named Mike Dougherty, who, on Facebook, darkly calls himself Jim Jones. The publicity had also brought two local psychics into Mari’s life—Cristina Pena and Joe Agostinello—and they came to Oak Beach, too. Jim Jones later recalled that when they got to the spot on Anchor Way where Shannan was last seen, Joe the psychic, who is Hispanic and Native American, took out a crystal pendulum, let its chain hang from between his index finger and thumb, and watched its movements carefully as the late-day sun moved through it. “Something happened here,” Joe said, his voice rich and deep. “I’m picking up a whole lot of vibrations right here.”

  They were standing next to the marsh.

  They continued down Anchor Way to where it intersects with a road called the Bayou. This was supposedly where Shannan’s jacket was found. Joe shook his head. “I felt more back the other way,” he said.

  They decided to walk up toward Hackett’s house, a Cape-style cottage, raised high with a carport at the ground level. Mari wanted to knock on Hackett’s door and confront him. Before she had the chance, the doctor appeared down the road, lumbering toward them from a neighbor’s house.

  Mari stood as the man she’d been thinking and talking about for over a year walked toward her, his hand outstretched. A portion of the encounter was caught on video. Hackett was wearing a deep blue polo shirt tucked in, accentuating his big belly. His white shorts showed off his prosthetic leg.

  Hackett was surprised to learn the woman whose hand he was shaking was Shannan Gilbert’s mother. As soon as Mari introduced herself, he grimaced, looking this way and that as she and others in her group fired questions at him.

  “What I don’t understand is, what happened?” Mari said. “Did you see anything? What did you hear?”

  “I never saw her,” Hackett said evenly. “I never met her.”

  Mari’s friend Johanna spoke up. “You must have heard something, because everybody here has heard something, one way or another. What’s the rumor you heard?”

  Hackett squinted at her. “Rumor?”

  “Everyone’s heard a rumor here,” said Johanna.

  “What’s been on the news,” Hackett said, shrugging. “That’s it.”

  “Yeah,” Mari said, “but this is my question. You called me. And for over a year you denied it.”

  “I didn’t deny it,” Hackett said.

  “When there was proof you did call me, you admitted it,” said Mari.

  Michele Kutner spoke next. “But you never saw her that night? You never heard?”

  “Didn’t hear, didn’t do anything,” Hackett said. “Whoever Alex asked me to call, I called. All of this stuff about a rehab or something? I don’t have any rehab. I don’t do rehabs.”

  “Then why would you say that to me?” Mari asked.

  “I didn’t,” Hackett said, some irritation coming through.

  “But my point is this,” said Mari. “How can we not know in another year it will be proven that you did say that to me?”

  That startled Hackett. “I didn’t say anything!” he answered. He glanced at the camera crew. “If you want to talk, I’d be happy to chat with you, but not with whatever this is.”

  What happened next, as Jim Jones remembers it, amazed them all. Someone in the group wished they’d brought some water, and the doctor’s wife, Barbara, invited them all inside. Mari and Jim took her up on the offer as Hackett stayed outside with the others. As they walked in, Mari’s body shook, and she clasped Jim’s hand for support. They saw Hackett’s daughter’s paintings, and detective novels on the tall bookshelves in the living room.

  The doctor’s wife did her best to show some sympathy for Mari. She said she couldn’t imagine what she was going through. Then she talked about the pressure her husband had been under—the media assault, the constant questioning. She recounted her husband’s life of selfless service: Countless times, she told them, he wouldn’t make it home for dinner because he was out helping someone who needed assistance in one way or another.

  Asked about the security video, Barbara said it ran on a two-week loop and got taped over automatically. That was all.

  On her way out of the house, Mari finally lost control and started sobbing. In the months to come, she’d get angrier, returning for Shannan’s birthday in October. She was backed into a corner. Nothing anyone said would alter her conviction that the conspiracy was real.

  ALLIANCES

  “That girl standing there?” Kritzia said. “She’s working. And the guy in front of her is her pimp.”

  We were standing on Seventh Avenue at about one-thirty A.M., across the street from Lace, the strip club. She and her friend Melissa used to spend hours on end on this corner. Kritzia was tiny, plump, and sultry, with bright red lips and wild hair. But she was dressed conservatively, like a mom at a PTA meeting. Since hearing about Melissa’s death, she’d sworn off working as an escort, and so far, she’s kept the promise to herself. On a clear night in October, she agreed to show me around where she and Melissa used to work, to get a view of the women who have taken their place.

  “Does she look familiar?” I asked about the girl in front of us.

  “Yeah. She knows me and I know her.”

  “Why not talk to her?”

  “Because the girl’s pimp is there, and I don’t want her to get in trouble.”

  When Kritzia pointed to the pimp, I saw him for the first time, even though he was under ten feet away—skinny, white, and dressed plainly, eyeing us both suspiciously over a thin trace of a mustache.

  We walked away a bit, then circled back around to Lace. “I’m trying to bring you closer but so we don’t look so obvious,” Kritzia said.

  A new man, dressed in a suit, came walking down the block. The woman approached. “She’s trying to talk to him,” Kritzia said. “But he’s probably not going to leave with her.” She was assessing every aspect of the encounter with a professional eye. “I don’t know, but it looks like he’s staying at a nice hotel, and you can just tell she’s a ho. But he might take her because she’s pretty and she’s white—you know, just because she’s white and it looks more regular. But it’s hard convincing men. You don’t just walk up to a guy and he says, ‘Yes, let’s go.’ ’Cause remember, you’re talking hundreds of dollars.”

  As she finished speaking, we saw the man walk away.

  “Yeah,” Kritzia said, laughing. “I could always tell which guys would go with me and which guys wouldn’t. Some girls talk to every man. I wouldn’t, ’cause some guys would be a waste of time.”

  Everywhere she looked, there were memories. The McDonald’s on Broadway, where they gathered in cold weather; the Batcave on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Seventh, where they hung out in the summer. The cross streets on this side of Seventh Avenue were dark this time of night, and Kritzia was muttering almost to herself, “Drug dealers. Coke. Pot. Pimp wannabes. Stone-cold fake-ass rappers.”

  Between the Batcave and Seventh Avenue, we saw a collection of people outside a deli on the north side of the street, and she stiffened. Then, just as though he were another bullet point on her list of what she’d left behind, Kritzia said, “That’s my son’s father right there. The one next to the one with the red jacket. We don’t talk anymore.”

  Mel was in the center of the crowd, right in our path. We walked by, but not fast enough. As if to announce herself, Kritzia called out, “Excuse me!” and Mel whipped around and feinted a punch at her. She staggered back and was still reeling when, a half second later, he hit her for real this time. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing from anyone watching, but no one around him seemed to notice. Maybe they were to
o afraid and were looking the other way. Or maybe confrontations like that happened all the time.

  I was startled, but I tried to stay close as Mel leaned toward her again, growling something only Kritzia could hear. She wouldn’t let him touch her; she was weaving out, running for cover into the deli. Mel followed. The Asian guy behind the counter recognized Kritzia and said, “Oh, hello!” The shouting continued. After a few seconds, Kritzia darted out and rushed past me, down the block. I followed her.

  She was trying to laugh it off. She lifted her iPhone and waved it at me; the screen was shattered. Then she locked eyes with mine. I saw a small bruise on her cheek and tears streaming down her face. She grunted. “You know, that’s just the way of him talking to me, and getting to touch me, and feeling me up.”

  She wiped her nose and fixed her hair. We kept walking west, to Eighth and Ninth avenues, where she said the girls were cheaper, and where Kritzia had gotten her sad start. “You saw the way he was now? That’s why nobody would ever fuck with me or Mel. ’Cause they’re fucking scared of him. There’s nothing to be scared of! Like, I got hit by him just now, and did you see me crying? Every other nigga would have been, like, running. ’Cause they’re just, like, pussies.”

  Kritzia was smiling. I wanted to see what it was like? Mission accomplished. She raised her hands in the air and let out a long, hearty laugh.

  “This is the fucking life, yo!”

  Kritzia had been out of circulation for a while. Back in 2009, shortly before Melissa disappeared, Kritzia had gotten pregnant with Mel’s baby, a boy she would name Jemire, and moved to New Jersey. Her life had changed for a time. The pregnancy had compelled Kritzia to connect with her parents for the first time in years. A sort of armistice was declared: Kritzia didn’t have to talk about where she’d been or what she’d done. Mel lived with her for a while. “Mel was paying all the rent, all the bills, taking care of everything. My parents weren’t giving him nothing. They took our living room and made it my little brother’s room.”

  Kritzia applied to school, and Mel found a straight job, in carpentry. “I thought everything was going to change.” But when Jemire was born, Mel wasn’t around. Then came a rent dispute with a landlord, which Mel sat out, and a move into a homeless shelter with Jemire. “Then one day I realized, this nigga just wants to be in the streets—he don’t want to be a father. He don’t want to work, he don’t want to do what he’s supposed to do. He just wants to be free. There are people that are like that.”

  Alone with Jemire, Kritzia broke down. She saw a psychiatrist for depression, and without her knowledge, the psychiatrist filled out an application on her behalf for SSI, the Social Security program that supports mentally or physically disabled people. It wasn’t the money that Kritzia objected to; it was the possibility that being on SSI would flag her as an unfit mother. Sure enough, along came Children’s Services. “They came after me and took me to court, to take my son.” She appeared before a judge and made her case. She told him everything about her life. She got to keep Jemire. And when she needed money, she returned to Times Square to work.

  One night in July 2011—a few weeks after the family vigil at Oak Beach in June—Kritzia ran into Blaze, standing outside of Lace.

  “Is that Mariiii-ah? Hi, Mariiii-ah! How you doin’?”

  They exchanged a few pleasantries. Kritzia showed him a photo of her baby. Then she asked, “Where’s Melissa?”

  “That bitch is dead,” Blaze said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, a trick killed her,” Blaze said. “She was one of those girls they found in Long Island. All they found was her bones.”

  Kritzia had been so consumed by her own life in New Jersey that she didn’t even know about the bodies on Ocean Parkway. She didn’t believe it until she Googled Melissa’s name. Then she saw the news and the video and the pictures, including one she’d seen before, of Melissa with red hair pulled back in a ponytail. That picture transported Kritzia to a night long ago, when they were riding into work from the Bronx. She even remembered what she was wearing that night, a tight white tank top with little spaghetti straps.

  Kritzia started crying and couldn’t stop. Then she started breaking things, and the people downstairs knocked on her door. When she saw how scared her son was, Kritzia finally calmed down. She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  She really had thought Blaze was lying.

  The next day Kritzia jumped onto Facebook and joined all the memorial groups. She got on the phone with Lynn in Buffalo—they’d never spoken; not even Amanda knew Kritzia existed—and learned how Melissa’s whole family had blamed Blaze for the life she’d been leading. Melissa’s family had so many questions about her disappearance that Kritzia served at least as a kind of confirmation. “They were like a lovey-dovey couple,” Kritzia said. “That’s how Blaze treats his girls: hugs, kisses. I mean, pimps, they still beat you when you go to work, but then they act like they love you. That’s why it makes you want to stay.”

  Kritzia didn’t stop with Lynn. She was shattered by the idea of a serial killer going after girls just like her, and she needed to talk to someone about her lost friend and the fear of being preyed on herself. She friended Missy, Lorraine, and Sherre. Unlike Kim, Kritzia was an escort who spoke out with deep regret about the life she’d chosen. “I want it to be exposed, what goes on in Manhattan, what goes on in Times Square,” she said. “There are so many other girls that are out there working right now. And they don’t know. I want girls to get scared and stop working—which I know is not gonna happen, but some girls get scared. I got scared.”

  As she showed me around Times Square, Kritzia barely stopped talking long enough to catch her breath. She talked about what she and Melissa used to do, and why they did it, and why so many other people were still doing it—by some estimates as many as five thousand underage girls and boys in New York City are working as prostitutes at any given time. She talked about being seventeen and homeless in Times Square, too angry to go home to her mother, rejected by cousins already packed into her grandmother’s place. A bed at a city-run nonprofit social-service agency seemed out of the question. The city has about 250 beds available in all of New York for some four thousand homeless young people without families. When she met her first pimp, a guy everyone called Baba, Kritzia needed more than cash; she needed a reason to go on. “It’s not just about the money. There are so many other things. You don’t have family, you don’t have friends, you don’t have nobody. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, you don’t have a place to live. When I was underage, nobody wanted to help me—because I was underage! Nobody wanted to give me a job, no one wanted to give me an apartment.”

  Kritzia said that escort work gave her something to do, someone to be, though selling her body meant living in a shadow world that everyone ignored. “And then you’ve got pimps who follow you and beat you up. And then you go in front of the judge, and they don’t care, they throw you in jail.” She believed that Melissa’s online career was her way of escaping that cycle. “People think, Oh, the money, the money, but do you know how hard it is to get a guy to date you? I’m not just standing on the corner, waiting. You have to go to them, walk to them, talk to them, convince them. Then you have to agree on a price, convince them, and a whole lot of fucking bullshit.”

  She was crying now. “I was thinking about her all day today. That’s why she didn’t walk the streets—because it was so much work. It was too much walking. Like, you have to walk all over Manhattan, like, all night on these heels, and you don’t know who you’re gonna meet, you don’t know if you’re gonna make money. You just walk all night in the cold, in the heat. And that’s what Melissa didn’t like and why she started advertising on the Internet.”

  Online, Kritzia became an honorary family member, representing Melissa’s memory in the memorial Facebook pages, posting constantly. She was mostly steering clear of contact with Mel, and she had no use for Blaze anymore.

  But someone who kn
ew Blaze, near the Batcave on Forty-seventh Street, was able to relay a message to him, and a few weeks after my visit there, Blaze and I spoke on the phone. Straight away, he denied being a pimp. He said he was a musician and a rap producer. Kritzia had predicted this: “Blaze wanted to be everything, but he really was nothing.” Blaze, in turn, had some unfriendly things to say about Kritzia: “She probably gets a check from the state for being slow.”

  But he stayed on the phone. He seemed eager to get a message to Melissa’s family in Buffalo. He surprised me by saying that he used to call and talk with Lynn all the time when he and Melissa were together. Though he seemed to want to meet in person and agreed to have lunch at a Caribbean place in Washington Heights, not too far from where he lived, he never showed up.

  “I’ve got a lot of stress,” he said later, on the phone. He had three kids, and for the first time in his life, he said, he was being hit up for child support. He agreed to stay in touch with me. A few months later, after a flurry of texts, he was on the phone again. In a more tender moment, Blaze told me what he loved most about Melissa: “The way that she would go hard for me. The love that she had for me. The way she was there for me, no matter what people said. Like, when we used to argue or break up, she would call me back on the phone and rush back to the house or whatever and try to fix it.”

  He even said his mother liked her. “My moms loved her. My moms, you know? She would come over and help the best way she can, always. Always.”

  He revealed a little more about himself. He said his kids were nine, twelve, and thirteen. He’d gotten out of jail recently, after serving a brief stretch for credit-card fraud. “That was bullshit,” he said. In one of our last conversations, I brought up the attack on Melissa in the street, the one Kritzia said he ordered. That was when Blaze exploded. “I took care of her the whole time she was out here! Any time somebody is with somebody in a relationship, you can’t tell me that people don’t have fusses and fights and arguments. So if I’m guilty of fussing and fighting with my girlfriend, yeah, I’m guilty for that. But hurting her and harming her? No, no. Not at all. I’ve been through some stuff because of her, stuff a lot of homies could’ve got killed for, and I still took her back, you know what I mean?”