When the door opens, I see his half-smile. Maybe this is a doctor’s self-regard or a wince of pain from his prosthesis. Or maybe he’s frustrated by yet another knock. He wasn’t expecting me; I came back to Oak Beach because of the rebooted search for bodies, and I hoped to hear from Hackett himself about the rumors.
He seems annoyed from the start, irritated, ready to say no. He shakes his head and says he’s turned down many requests for comment. He says there’s no sense trying to disprove things that are so obviously not true: “What would be the point?” he says, as if it’s the most ridiculous question in the world.
Then, suddenly, he glances left and right. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “Come on in.”
It’s not at all clear, at least to me, what changed his mind. Some people simply aren’t comfortable not talking, and Hackett seems to be one of those. The unfortunate by-product of this impulse is that he can come off as a dissembler, even when he might not be. He overanswers questions to the point where it seems like he’s hiding something, because he’s gone out on a limb, talking about things he doesn’t know anything about. Some might say that’s because he’s a blowhard—or, as Laura Coletti charitably puts it, an overelaborator. Others, like the Scalises and Mari, would say it’s because he is hiding something.
Hackett offers a tour. He heads straight back, and as he enters the next room, he snaps, “Here’s my clinic.” Then, quickly, he says he’s joking; he’s referring to the rumor that he treated Shannan here. It’s a storage room, neat but lived in—he calls it “a workroom”—filled with years of boxes and tools and belongings amassed by a large family. Hackett limps swiftly through a doorway to a back room that contains a bed and an easel and paintings made by Hackett’s daughter Mary Ellen, who is visiting for the holidays. Around a corner is a folded futon couch with a pillow and comforter on it. That’s for his son, he says. His two daughters, both in their twenties, are living on their own now, though he’ll later say that one daughter, along with his wife, was there the morning when Shannan disappeared.
He heads out of the room and up a short staircase to the main room of the house, a double-height living room that sits right in the entryway, capturing the southern light from large slanted windows. The room has a galley kitchen in the far corner, opening up to a table with barstools. The table is indeed large enough and at a good height to double as an examination table, as the doctor once said. We sit on the stools. The far wall of the room is floor-to-ceiling with books, including a copy of Writers Market. Hackett says offhandedly that his father was a writer.
As he talks, Hackett insists that the whole controversy about him does not usually occupy a second of his time or attention. He says that, contrary to the gossip, no neighbors called him the night Shannan went running down the street, pounding on doors. In fact, he says that days later he told Gus Coletti and Barbara Brennan that they should have called him; that he might have been able to help the girl. It strikes me when he puts it this way that this quite possibly could be what Bruce Anderson really overheard: Hackett saying he would have treated Shannan if he’d seen her, not that he had treated her, the way Joe Jr. believed. I wonder if Hackett had said the same sort of thing to Mari on the phone—not that he had helped Shannan but that he wished he had helped her.
Even that wouldn’t explain Hackett denying ever having spoken to Mari, then later admitting as much. That could have been his haplessness, or it could have been a deception. Yet as Hackett answers more questions, he continues to be fuzzy on information that he should have figured out stock responses to a long time ago. He says the first time he heard anything about Shannan was several days after she disappeared, when Alex Diaz and Michael Pak came to the neighborhood with flyers. He suggests that he felt a little sorry for them. “They were nice guys, but they didn’t know how to go about getting information from people.” He says he told them to go to the local police where Shannan lived and to report her missing, and then he gave them his card and told them he’d be happy to help out if they needed anything. He remembers thinking that “from a police standpoint, this was not a child that has gone missing.” In other words, she was a grown-up, and the police might be inclined to think she’d gone off somewhere on her own and would come back when she felt like it. It never occurred to him that anything else would come of it. “This is a twentysomething woman who has disappeared before,” he says. “Or at least that’s what I understood.”
He remembers all of this. But he doesn’t remember the call he made to Mari. At first he says he didn’t speak with Mari on the phone, when he clearly admitted that in his letters to 48 Hours. A moment later, he acknowledges that there is a phone record confirming that he and Mari had spoken.
“I don’t know. It’s a possibility someone called. I don’t want to appear to be disputing what she said. I get thirty-five calls a day. I don’t know if maybe she called me to talk. But I never saw the girl. I never talked to the girl. I don’t have any recollection of talking to the mother.”
Out of nowhere, he recalls something else. “Hold it,” he says. “It’s possible she called me and I called her back wondering who she was. It was a three-minute phone call.”
In a way, you could argue that this is refreshing honesty—guilelessness. But in the middle of a murder investigation, with his name all over the news and police searching the bramble on a beach three miles away, it is also a little foolish. And yet it’s impossible for me to tell if it is because he’s genuinely hiding something or because he is naive about just how eager some people are to pin Shannan’s disappearance on him. I can’t help but think of Richard Jewell, who discovered the pipe bomb at the Atlanta Olympics only to be fingered for a long time as the bomber. Is Hackett the Richard Jewell of the Long Island serial-killer case? Or is he Joel Rifkin?
Hackett continues to insist that the whole line of inquiry is ridiculous. “I’m a family practitioner: an emergency physician, a former director of emergency medicine for Suffolk County, New York, and then emergency department director at Central Suffolk Hospital. Can you imagine my putting my reputation on the line, saying I ran a clinic?”
For a moment, it’s possible to sense Hackett’s plight and even sympathize. He’s a talker. Maybe he said something Mari misinterpreted, something about how he works in emergency medicine and knows about rehabs. Everyone knows that Hackett has enemies in the neighborhood; maybe those enemies are only too happy to believe he’s up to no good and that there’s a cover-up. Is it possible that this is a perfect storm of gossip and the doctor had nothing to do with it at all?
He throws up his hands. How does one prove that one is, in fact, not a murderer? “I’ve been over this so many times, it doesn’t get clearer with repetition,” Hackett says. The best he can hope for is to be forgotten. “All you’re doing is trying to tread lightly and lightly and more and more lightly until you recede into the background and eventually no one can see you anymore.”
I ask about the security video. Hackett sighs. “The police wanted the security video. The police took the security video. Being on the board, I saw when the police told the board they wanted it. So yes, we gave it to them.”
Did he have a look at it beforehand?
“Of course, early on we said we should be looking at the security video. But that would be tampering with evidence.”
I stay an hour. He answers every question. The doctor and I shake hands. We agree to stay in touch.
And twenty-four hours later, the police find Shannan’s belongings in the marsh behind his house.
THE MARSH
The largest marsh in Oak Beach—forty-nine acres, about the same size as the inhabitable portion of the community—borders Anchor Way, where Shannan was last seen, and Larboard Court, where the Hacketts live. With every storm, the marsh fills up like a bathtub with rainwater, then drains through pipes beneath the roads of Oak Beach, down toward the old Oak Beach Inn parking lot and eventually into the Fire Island Inlet. At least that’s what is supposed to happen.
In reality, the pipes get crushed by storms or clogged with sediment, and the marsh fills even higher, until the ground starts to look like muck and the cordgrass and reeds and poison ivy grow so thick that no resident would ever try to hack through it.
The mosquitoes come next. They like nothing better than a freshwater marsh. The mosquitoes multiply, and so do the ticks, and the people of Oak Beach cry out for help from the town of Babylon. Every few decades, the town acquiesces and sends a team from Vector Control to dredge the marsh, building and repairing drainage ditches. You can see the trenches in aerial view: a long one down the middle and short splints off to the sides, like a spine with little ribs. As Joe Scalise, Jr., pointed out, one of those ribs runs right behind Hackett’s cottage—a trench that anyone running through the marsh at night wouldn’t see.
The marsh and the people of Oak Beach have coexisted this way for over a century. In the early nineties, the town of Babylon ceded control of the marsh to the state of New York in a land swap; in return, the town got control of a portion of the Oak Beach parking lot, which it intended to transform into a public park. Just before that happened, in 1989, the town dug out the mosquito ditches one last time. A main drainpipe to the inlet was replaced with a new pipe that lacked a flapper valve—meaning that in the decades since, salt water has drifted up into the freshwater marsh. Salt meadow cordgrass followed. So did salt grass and common reed, along with the seaside lavender, black grass, marsh elder, groundsel bush, and more poison ivy.
The marsh became a Frankenstein of plant life, universally avoided by the people of Oak Beach. Everything grew there, and no one ever seemed to go in. Until, on a cold morning in December, eighteen months after Joe Brewer’s last party on the Fairway, the police, John Mallia and his dog, Blue, among them, discovered—nearly fully intact, just steps from the shoulder of Ocean Parkway—the remains of Shannan Gilbert.
They found her purse first, with her identification inside. Then they went back and found a phone, some shoes, and a torn pair of jeans. They could get in now because of the repairs, which had drained the marsh for the first time in decades. Inspector Stuart Cameron of the Suffolk County police said that the pipe “drastically increased our visibility in there and assisted us in being able to find things.”
The police chose that day, December 6, to search the marsh because the tide seemed low. They used a large amphibious vehicle for the densest areas and cut new trails with a brush hog, a rotary mower with blades on hinges so they bounced up and over rocks and stumps. Ten officers went in on foot behind the vehicles, using brush cutters—high-powered WeedWackers—to clear paths. A dozen more came in with dogs. Rounding out the search party were six emergency services personnel and three members of the crime-scene unit. A few of the officers used metal detectors in the muck. Some of them reported working in waist-deep water and getting stuck.
“She’s in there someplace,” Dormer said at a press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. It was late afternoon and misty and rainy and cold as the commissioner spoke, vowing to keep looking “into the foreseeable future . . . Hopefully, we will find the remains.”
With Shannan’s belongings as his first solid clue but still no body, the commissioner wasted no time fitting it into his theory. He said that Shannan was high that night, and paranoid, and she ran into the marsh, seeing the lights of the cars from Ocean Parkway beyond it. But in her condition, he said, Shannan had no concept that those cars were as far as a quarter mile away, and since she didn’t know the area, she had no idea that she was about to fling herself into a dense, murky marsh that even the neighbors avoided. So, Dormer concluded, Shannan tripped—most likely in a drainage ditch—and drowned.
If this was true, it would be amazing, almost poetic irony. First Shannan’s disappearance leads to the discovery of ten other sets of remains, and then the hunt for the serial killer makes Shannan’s case so prominent that police have to come back to Oak Beach and search for her. Without the serial-killer case, they might have called off the search for Shannan. But without her, they might never have known there was a serial killer.
The girls all found one another.
Even if they did find Shannan’s body in that ditch, there were many questions—chief among them, who killed the other girls? The people of Oak Beach would still have a lot to answer for. What happened in Joe Brewer’s house that made her feel so threatened? When she and Brewer left the house briefly, were they buying drugs? If so, from whom? Once she came back, what happened that made her want to run away not just from Brewer but from her own driver? And did some neighbors—if not Hackett, then anyone—see her before she disappeared in the marsh?
Most of the people of Oak Beach had spent the better part of a year denying that she was there, behaving as if something horrible hadn’t happened in their secluded beach community. Now there was proof that something had.
The police showed the belongings to Mari, who confirmed that the pocketbook and phone were Shannan’s. Then she hunkered down at home, avoiding reporters, consumed with grief. Her family and friends were puzzling over the convenient timing of this search and the discovery, so close to Dormer’s retirement. Some were wondering about Hackett. Mostly, they didn’t want to believe that Shannan just wandered off and got lost and tripped and died. They wanted her death to mean something, and they wanted a culprit.
A day passed, and the police found nothing. Another day passed, and Shannan was still missing. When the weekend came, some of them harbored hope that Shannan wasn’t there; that she wasn’t even dead. “I’d rather her be alive somewhere,” said Shannan’s sister Sarra.
All the families were angry and bound together by that anger. Soon they were all declaring love and loyalty for one another. The most prolific was Kritzia Lugo, who, never having met any of the women in person, told the story in a long string of Facebook comments on how each one of them had saved her. Many of them replied to Kritzia, and soon they were all feeling it.
KRITZIA LUGO It’s weird but I learned from you guys one night I was so sad it was late I called Melissa Cann and she was there for me!
MELISSA CANN I will always be there for you . . . And I know it is likewise with you also. :)
KRITZIA LUGO That time I cut my wrist and was in the hospital for like a week Melissa Brock Wright was there for me it was late but I got to tell her all I was feeling
KRITZIA LUGO Dawn Barthelemy talks to me once in a while and gives me advice
KRITZIA LUGO Mari Gilbert showed me that there are mother’s out there who do love their children
MELISSA BROCK WRIGHT None of us will ever have to fight any battle alone! We are all a unit, and if one of us is having a hard time then we all are. If someone messes with one of us then they’re messing with all of us!
KRITZIA LUGO Kim Overstreet showed me the power of sisterhood when she is willing to sacrifice her life to get her sis justice
MELISSA CANN Yes I agree
KRITZIA LUGO Sherre Gilbert showed me children are a blessing—don’t be so uptight—love them and learn how to have fun with them and enjoy them
Mari hung Christmas decorations around her place in Ellenville: garland around the fence, lights hung from the porch, and giant plastic candy canes on the lawn. In the middle was a pink sign: ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU. “Christmas is about dreams, dreaming, wishes coming true,” Mari told a Newsday reporter. The sign included a map of the Gilgo Beach area and a list of names: Jessica Taylor, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello. “They’re my extended family now,” Mari said.
Mari’s youngest daughter, Stevie, was there, too, helping to decorate the home. She told the reporter that the family would put up a stocking for Shannan, and that she believed Shannan was still alive. Even if Shannan’s remains were found, Stevie said, “there’s never going to be closure unless I have her home. I’m just praying that Shannan comes home.”
Taking advantage of the press attention, Mari noted a few inconsistencies in the sear
ch. She said she wasn’t able to confirm that the shoes belonged to Shannan, who’d been seen in strappy sandals earlier that night, and the police had found what looked like ballet slippers. She said she believed that Shannan’s things were planted in the marsh—by whom, she wouldn’t say. She couldn’t be sure of anything until Shannan was found, and even then, she vowed to fight. “I think Dormer just wants to find the remains, say she drowned, and close the case before he retires. That’s what I feel, but I’m not gonna let that happen.”
The question hung over every Facebook thread for days: Could Shannan really have run into a marsh and died?
“I mean, that would just be my fuckin’ luck,” Kim said.
On the phone that week from her place on Long Island, Kim said she could see Shannan being coked up and paranoid enough to run away from Michael Pak; Kim had been in situations a little like that. “And she’s bipolar,” she said. “Whatever meds she’s taking for that, there are just some things you can’t mix together. I know that through experience, with myself and my sister. My sister would have drug-induced seizures. Some people have drug-induced schizophrenia. I’ve seen that shit.”
Which brought Kim to the purpose of her call. She’d been thinking of calling the detectives and turning them on to a menacing trick she’d had not long before Amber disappeared. “It weighs on me heavy,” she said. “My instincts are usually not too wrong.” The john was all the way out on the East End of Long Island. He gave her five hundred for the hour and wanted full service. Dave Schaller was with her, so she said no to the date. But the next day he called and offered another four hundred, “and he says he’s going to score some rock.”
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