Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  He shifted the focus away from himself, back to Melissa’s family. This time he was less tender. “She sent Lynn the money to pay her bills, for her diner and all that. Did you know that? Did you? So come on. Like, everybody’s putting me out to be the bad guy or whatever. But your daughter was the one who was in the streets doing stuff, not me. Not me.”

  Sometimes—“Well, okay, a lot of the time”—Sara Karnes thought about what would have happened if she’d stayed in the Super 8 with Maureen on Monday morning. Would Maureen still be alive? She knew the answer. “I wouldn’t have let her go. We would’ve just ended up chilling in the room till Wednesday.”

  Sara didn’t stop working after Maureen disappeared. She went back to New York, to the Super 8, a few times with Matt, and she and Matt hooked up. Sara tried doing calls in Connecticut, but she learned quickly how much better the johns treated her in New York—most of them, anyway. There, she felt treated like a princess. Back home, she’d say she was treated like “a fuckin’ street-corner bitch, only more expensive.”

  She posted as Lacey on Craigslist for eastern Connecticut. One guy she met at the Two Trees Inn at Foxwoods was completely naked when she walked into the room. “Hi, I’m Lacey,” she said. The guy said, “I don’t give a fuck. The money’s on the counter, put it in your pocket, and suck my dick.” She surveyed the scene and walked out. He was naked, she was dressed; let him try to chase her.

  She kept on working steadily until 2009—two years after Maureen’s disappearance—when she got picked up for the first time by the police. She had a cop friend, a Norwich detective who had worked on Maureen’s disappearance early on, who hadn’t been very helpful to Missy but gave Sara good counsel. Every time Sara would call him to check in about Maureen’s case, he’d offer tips on where or when not to work. Unfortunately, he was telling her only about what he knew, in Norwich. When Sara arrived for an outcall at the Radisson in New London, she got caught. Normally, the bond would have been $2,500, which would have meant paying $250 to get out. But the cop who arrested her saw that she didn’t have a pimp and wasn’t part of some bigger drug or sex ring, so he took pity on her and released her on a promise to appear in court at a later date.

  Life might have gone on fine for Sara if she hadn’t been busted again for drug dealing. It was March 17, 2010. Sara claimed she was set up by the wife of a cousin who turned out to be a confidential informant. She was charged with dealing and prostitution and failure to appear in court and was sent to jail. She got out on June 11, her twenty-eighth birthday. She went into a drug program, failed it, and went back to doing calls, despite being pregnant. When she missed a court date, she earned a “failure to appear” bench warrant. When she got arrested for rolling a blunt behind the Groton Stop & Shop, that put her away for real.

  The second time in jail seemed to snap Sara out of it. She decided she just couldn’t do the work anymore. When she found out about Maureen, she added that to her list of reasons. “There’s nothing that can convince me,” she said. “I’m broke as shit right now, and if this was two or three years ago, you’re damn right I’d be doing it right now. Because I don’t want to be broke. But I’d rather be broke and with my daughter than what happened to Maureen.”

  On the day in October when we met for lunch in Stamford, where she was living in a nonprofit shelter for families, Sara was late. She had thought her daughter, a fourteen-month-old named Bella, was sick and had taken her to the hospital, but it was just a cold. Then she saw her probation officer; she had to see him monthly for another eight months, until June, when her probation for the felony was scheduled to end: “my faaabulous felony,” as she put it. She had to mention it to every potential employer. As a result, Sara hadn’t been able to get a legitimate job.

  Over lunch, Sara talked about the irony of getting a free four-hundred-dollar replacement phone—the latest Droid—after getting robbed, but not being able to find a job to get out of a shelter. Then she looked down at Bella, who was playing with the phone. Sara said her daughter was the best reason she’d stopped escorting.

  The night before, Missy had sent Sara a Web link to a German documentary that seemed to show video of a skeleton being discovered along Ocean Parkway. Missy was certain the skeleton was Maureen’s, because the shoulders were so broad. Sara flipped out when she saw the video. She showed it to two other women at the shelter. Then she went on Facebook with her new Droid and published a screed about it. If I would, I’d go Dexter-style on him, she wrote. As we talked, Sara said she’d rather be Stieg Larsson’s avenging Goth girl, Lisbeth Salander. Whenever she felt this way, Sara posted on Maureen’s Facebook page:

  I’m soooo sorry Maureen that i didn’t stay. I’m so sorry that there’s a fuckin’ wacko out there that thinks he can play god when he’s really the devil . . . I keep praying that all of this will end, that this motherfucker will pay dearly for what he did to you all. I personally don’t think that our justice system has a severe enough punishment for this creep.

  Sara had known Maureen for only six months before she disappeared. Something about the emotion she brought to the loss seemed misplaced, overwrought, as if the drama helped elevate her life a little. But those feelings were real to her. Whenever she was feeling low, Sara tried not to think about how Maureen died but, rather, about how she lived. She would will herself to recall her favorite memory: that Sunday night in July, their hair done up, their makeup perfect, all eyes on them in Times Square. Sara said she believed that Maureen was put in her life to teach her to be more independent—“ ’Cause my mom sure didn’t.” Sometimes she thought that was as good as life would ever get for her.

  “I made that Lacey picture my Facebook picture,” she said. “ ’Cause it’s pretty. It’s my favorite picture of myself.”

  On each of Greg Waterman’s arms are two enormous tattoos spelling out one phrase: CAUGHT UP IN / THE STRUGGLE. Megan’s brother had been working construction for the same guy for seven years until the 2008 market crash forced his boss to sell half of his properties. Since then, Greg has had trouble finding work. His search was complicated by the fact that he’d lost his driver’s license and had a theft arrest on his record. “That really screws things up for me,” he said over dinner at the Olive Garden at the Maine Mall. “It was five years ago, it was a while ago. I just can’t deal with not having a job.”

  Greg had four kids. Nicci Haycock was the mother of the youngest. “She’s got two kids with another person. I look at them as my own kids, I raised those kids like my own for three and a half years.” He and Nicci were together a long time, but at dinner, they said they were on a break for the time being. “It’s not permanent,” Greg said. “It’s just the time is not right.” He suggested that their separation had something to do with his sister’s disappearance. “My anger got a lot worse,” he said as Nicci stared down at her food.

  Like the rest of Megan’s family, Greg spent the better part of a year bristling at Lorraine, especially after her trips to New York to publicize the case. When Greg found out about the little heart-and-angel trinket she had bought the other mothers and sisters in New York, he castigated her for buying gifts for four strangers when she hadn’t bought her own grandchildren a thing in years. The vigil in June compounded the problem. He and Nicci went down with Lorraine, but “she was more concerned with impressing the other family members there.” He almost exploded at her when she encouraged him to drive faster. “I said, ‘I’m not rushing for you, and I’m not rushing for them. I didn’t come down there to show my face, I came down there to see where they found my sister.’ I was so sick of her, you know? She’s so worried about getting down there to get her face on the news.”

  Greg did explode when he got home and saw Lorraine’s post on Facebook that the women at that vigil were her “new family.” Even months later, he was practically shouting about it at the table, speaking as if Lorraine were right there in the restaurant with us. “You’re out here again trying to get a pity party for you? I’ve been back
in Maine for a month and a half, and you haven’t called once to see how my daughter is! Everyone in your biological family knows how you are and your true colors and all these other people don’t.” For Lorraine to call Megan her daughter, he said, was a joke. “You never had her. You were never a mother to her. Your mother raised her.”

  Lorraine, meanwhile, was feeling as wronged as Greg, locked out of Lili’s life by her mother, Muriel, and Lorraine’s oldest sister, Liz. “When Megan was alive, all of Liliana’s birthdays were at my house,” she told me a few weeks later. “When Liliana turned four, Megan wasn’t here, and we still had her party at my house. Since Liz got guardianship, she had planned Liliana’s fifth birthday party and never invited me. So I missed my granddaughter’s fifth birthday party because of my sister. Her school pictures, everybody in the family has a picture of her but me. That’s a tough situation.”

  What was more upsetting to Lorraine was that, at least according to her, Liz had next to nothing to do with Megan when she was alive. “Liz could not stand Megan!” She said that Liz asked Megan to sign over custody of Lili while Megan was alive, thinking maybe she just wouldn’t want the headache of having a child. (Megan declined.) “And the minute Megan went missing, Liz and everybody in my family acted like they’d been involved in Megan’s whole life.”

  Now it was Lorraine who had seemed to fall away again. Muriel and Liz were accusing her of being completely inaccessible, never returning calls, never making time for Lili, and yet still complaining about being the black sheep. Once, when Lili had fractured her ankle, Muriel and Greg each tried to call Lorraine, and when she didn’t answer, they left messages. She didn’t call back. Then Lorraine noticed the news on one of Liz’s Facebook posts, and she posted: It’s a shame I have to hear about my granddaughter breaking her ankle on Facebook. “She might be angry,” Liz said, “but she really doesn’t feel anything is her fault.”

  “You know what breaks my heart?” Muriel said. “Lorraine turning her back on this baby. Any time Lorraine even calls to see how she is, it’s because I posted something nasty about her on Facebook.”

  All these years later, Muriel still didn’t believe that Lorraine could be a good parent. Ella, Lorraine and Liz’s sister, agreed. “I tried to defend Lorraine when it comes to Lili,” she said, “but it’s not my mother saying no. It’s Lorraine just not doing it on her own.”

  Greg sided with his aunt and grandmother. He hadn’t always seen eye to eye with Liz—he’d like to share custody of Lili; Liz and Muriel are concerned that he isn’t stable enough—but Lorraine incensed him. “She acts like she wants to get to know her granddaughter, but behind closed doors, she could give two shits about it,” Greg said. “She can’t be bothered. She does more for her boyfriend’s kid now than she does for her kids or grandkids.”

  A lawyer would cost Lorraine about two thousand dollars to fight for custody. That was money she didn’t have, and she couldn’t pull it together working at Domino’s. Once she earned her medical-assistant degree, maybe she would have a chance. For now, all she could do was bide her time. “When Liliana gets older,” she said, “she will learn the truth, just like Greg and Megan did when they got old enough. Liliana is going to know the same thing and realize or know that it had nothing to do with me.”

  One late-summer day, Dave Schaller was walking near his new home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when he heard the honk of a car horn. Dave looked over and his mind flooded. He remembered the car right away, an Ultima, and the guy behind the wheel, one of Amber’s old johns. As he recalled, this john lived somewhere in Nassau County. Dave didn’t know what he was doing in Brooklyn, or why he wanted to talk, but decided he didn’t want to know. Dave dashed down the stairs of the G train to avoid him.

  Dave knew he’d been running a risk by appearing on 48 Hours in July. The police had warned Dave not to be too out in front about his ties to Amber or the case. “The cops were like, ‘Listen, it could’ve been somebody you threw out of the house. You don’t know if you once kicked this guy’s ass.’ ” Now, Dave thought they had a point. “If the killer was so adamant about picking her up near my house, he’s probably somebody I saw,” he said. “So I worry about it sometimes. What if I’m a loose end?”

  All fall, as Dave continued hitting the methadone and looking for work, he dreamed of Amber, of how he had failed to save her. “Every single fucking time she had somebody come or she went somewhere, I was with her,” he said. “Every time except the time she left and she got killed.” By day, he felt stigmatized. “Everybody thinks I was a goddamn pimp. Because why would I have two whores in my house if I wasn’t fucking pimping them?” His only respite was twelve-step meetings. He despised them, but they kept him together. “I’m not going to lose my sobriety,” he said. “I hate sitting there, but it is what it is.”

  One thing he’d managed to get over was his attachment to Kim, though now and then, he’d allow himself to vent. “I’m glad she’s out of my life, that much I can say,” he said. “Let me tell you, man. That girl, it’s sad to say, but she’s going to wind up dead. She’s going to wind up dead.”

  I suggested that Kim might be going through a version of what he was going through, that she felt guilty, too.

  “I hope she does,” Dave said. “I really do hope she feels guilty. Because the way she treated her sister was fucked up.”

  Kim’s Backpage photo showed her tan and trim and toned. Shot from behind, she was topless and bending forward, away from the camera, offering a full view of her lean bottom in a tight set of black panties, riding up. In person, though, she looked tired, worn out. The skin on her face hung a little loose. As she talked over lunch on a September afternoon in Manhattan, Kim demonstrated a lot of addict behavior—she was hyper-verbal, very friendly, constantly gauging my reactions, never overtly asking for anything. Still, all through the long lunch, she was in a great mood. She ordered a glass of red wine, and as she talked, she did her best to describe her current life as free of conflict.

  Until that day, Kim had all but dropped out of the alliance of family members and friends. The more unavailable she had made herself, the more people blamed her for what had happened to Amber. In Florida, Louise Falvo—a friend of Amber’s who helped take care of little Gabriel before he moved back with his mother—believed that Amber would have had a better chance at surviving if she’d never joined Kim in New York. “Kim is the biggest BS-er there is. How do you not know your freaking sister is missing?” she said. “Amber is very easily influenced, and Kim had a way of mesmerizing Amber. And Kim knew it and took advantage of it. And that’s how Amber ended up the way she ended up.”

  Back in Wilmington, Amber’s old friends Melissa Wright and Carl King had gone on about how Kim never saw her kids there, including her oldest, Marissa. “Me, personally, I can’t go through a Christmas, let alone a birthday, without seeing my kids,” said Carl. “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. Once I saw that Kim did that, I lost a lot of respect for her.” Every few weeks, Melissa Wright posted on Kim’s wall on Facebook, asking what she did with Amber’s ashes or where she will put the headstone. She never got a reply. “We all just want to be able to say goodbye to her,” Melissa said. “Because we were told she was going to bring her home and put her with her mom. I love Kim to death, but she needs to get her priorities straight and be honest.”

  Lorraine and Missy left Kim messages, too. Kim kept her distance from everyone, popping up briefly on Facebook, then disappearing again. All the drama around her might have explained why, a few days before Labor Day, Kim returned one of my messages, saying she wanted to tell her sister’s story.

  We met in midtown, near Penn Station. She said she had come in from Long Island, where she was living close to her old boyfriend Michael Donato’s parents, John and Amy, who still had custody of the three children. I asked if John and Amy were all right with her being near the kids, considering everything that had happened. Kim nodded. “They know I come around,” she said. “They do not like me do
ing anything like the escorting now, and if they think drugs are involved, they step in immediately. ‘Let’s go get tested.’ And if something does pop up, they’re like, ‘Let’s see what we can do to fix this problem immediately,’ because they don’t want the girls to be exposed to that shit, and I understand. They love those girls like I love them. And I love them, too—I love John and Amy.”

  I asked if she’d been escorting lately. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I did this up until I went to North Carolina.” That would be the previous fall, before she learned that Amber’s body had been found. “I always fell back on it as fast money. Even when she was living with Dave and I needed money, I did a couple calls, too. I always fell back on it because it was such a good moneymaker for me.”

  She reminisced about her life with Amber—how they’d bonded as children. “We weren’t that wild compared to some of the kids,” said Kim, who, a moment later, mentioned getting stabbed one time and seeing a group of black girls try to jump her sister. “It’s not that we were raw,” she said. “We just knew how to survive at an early age.” In less charitable moments, Kim said she always felt put upon by Amber. “Amber, she never turned her back on me. But she was selling me out a lot. If I talked shit about Amber, I talked it to her face. I never talked shit behind her back, and I never let anyone else talk shit behind her back. And she was never like that. If somebody talked shit about me behind my back, she would never say anything. Which pissed me off, because I always stood up for her.”