Missy didn’t know how to respond. “I really feel like crying,” she said. “My sister got murdered. I’m just trying to do one positive thing, and I hear it’s wrong. How is it wrong? Just because Shannan was found, I can’t jump up and say the killer did this, too. It’s not like I can change things because someone’s acting like a child and kicking and screaming. It’s too much drama.”
On Facebook, Lorraine showed off a photo of her latest tattoo: four interlocking hearts, each a different color, each with an initial inside—M, M, M, and A. There was no S. When Mari said she was angry about this, too, Lorraine responded dryly that when Shannan’s death was proved a murder, she would add the S.
On January 14, Mari and Sherre returned to Oak Beach for another press conference. No one from any of the other families attended. “It’s been a very hard eighteen months,” Mari said. “Half the battle is over. We still have another battle ahead of us. Our worst battle, our strongest battle. But we’re not gonna give up, we’re gonna have faith and gonna pursue this, no matter how long it takes and no matter what it takes. To find out the truth about what happened to Shannan and to bring the killer to justice and everyone who is involved.”
Mari pulled out a piece of paper. “I’d like to read this on behalf of our family and I.” She looked down. “ ‘We are not close to accepting the loss of our daughter and our sister Shannan. We don’t know if we will ever fully be well inside. How hollow we feel, lonely, sad, confused, and bitter. There will never be closure because there will be an emptiness inside. And the thought of Shannan never coming home for birthdays, holidays or births or just because, is more pain than anyone can imagine unless you’ve lost a child yourself.’ ”
A tall white cross—over twice the height of the crosses for the other four girls—had been placed in the spot in the marsh where Shannan was found. Sherre put some red flowers around the base. Mari added yellow ones. In front of the grave, they both broke down as the photographers snapped away. Mari didn’t get up for the longest time. In front of a lit candle protected from the wind by glass, Mari sobbed loudly. A few days later, she posted to Facebook a photo of herself kneeling there, wailing. The caption read: THE DAY MY LIFE CHANGED FOREVER.
THE JOHN
When Joe Brewer answers the phone, one of the first things he does is ask for money. “I mean, you can write your story,” he says, “but nobody can write it like I can, because I lived it. And it’s even more sensational than anybody’s saying. That’s why I’ve kept my mouth shut for this long.”
I tell him I don’t pay for interviews. Joe keeps talking anyway, for close to a half hour, his voice overrun with laughter. In fact, the more Joe talks, the more his laugh is all that I hear, coloring everything he says, a roiling, rolling, life’s-a-party laugh that he means to sound coy and knowing and smooth but more often seems bafflingly out of tune with the subject he is trying hard not to discuss.
“I think it would be important for you to meet me and get a feel for the kind of guy I am,” he says. “Like, I’m a huge, huge, extreme liberal. You know, I couldn’t hurt, I couldn’t kill, a fuckin’ small mammal. The whole of who I am is so disproportionate to people’s perspective of me, it’s hysterical to me. So why don’t you meet me and see who I am as a person.”
That would be great, I say.
He talks right past me. “Yeah, what kind of human being I am and how much compassion I have for the entire human race. And any living individual.” Then he second-guesses himself playfully. “I guess I would kill a mouse if I had a mouse in my house. So I can’t say I wouldn’t kill any mammal.” He laughs. “But it’s insane that I was shown as a serial killer!” He laughs again. “I don’t mean to disappoint you. It’s funny.”
He is still living at his mother’s house in West Islip. The Oak Beach place was on the market for $439,000, then reduced to $399,999, then pulled off and relisted for $375,000. Joe says he is staying in West Islip for now. “At first I thought I had to relocate. But people who knew me and knew me in this town, it’s like, the one thing people who grew up in this town, the first thing people said, is of all the people, I’d be the last person on anybody’s list who would ever be suspect of anything!”
Another laugh.
“Not that I was suspected! The police, I was never a suspect. I’m sure there was a brief time in the beginning where I was a person of interest, of course. But as soon as I ran to them and made it clear to them I had nothing to do with any of this.”
As soon as he says that, he corrects himself. He says he does know something special about the case. “Dude, there’s something you don’t know, something really big. I do have some big chits on that, but I’ve got to hold them back. You want to know the truth, I mean, honestly, everybody would say the same things I was saying, even if they were guilty. But there’s a lot out there I know, I don’t want to say this because a lot of them are my friends, but at the end of this, the police are going to have a lot of pie on their face.”
When I ask why Shannan called the police that night, he laughs his biggest laugh so far.
“I’m sorry to laugh,” he says. “That was, like, the easiest—you know, it’s so funny—sometimes the most obvious answer is the most easiest one to figure out. And, like, that is the question I get more than any, and that is the most easy to figure out.” He pauses. “No, I’m sorry, I’m gonna take that back. The easiest one is I must have scared her, I must have threatened her, you know, obviously, that’s number one choice. But that is far from—I was ready to help her. And you know what, dude? If they ever release that 911 call, I know my voice is in the background. And I know I’m the only voice of reason, and I know the police know that. I would never harm a soul. If you actually read through, you can put it together why she ran crazy into the night. You know, the answer’s there. Yeah, I know everybody wants a bad guy, they want a villain, and they want me to be the villain. It’s not that sensational, buddy, it’s not what happened.”
The first thing I think of is Joe’s transvestite story—that he wouldn’t pay her because he thought she was a man. That was hardly the most obvious explanation, though it was pretty sensational. It was also ludicrous. So I decide not to bring it up. Then there is the question of the drifter reported as being at Joe’s house that night. Though the police would continue to say that Brewer was alone with Shannan, a few months after my talk with Joe, the drifter would finally surface, self-publishing a memoir under the pen name “W.” Confessions of the Oak Beach Drifter does not deliver on the promise of its title. The author, a West Islip native, confesses to a life of burglary, drugs, assault, rape, and one shooting. What he doesn’t offer is any insight into Shannan’s death, just a few swipes at Joe for liking rough sex with prostitutes (something the author doesn’t seem exactly against) and for, he believes, telling the Post about him as a way to divert suspicion from himself. As a houseguest of Joe’s not long before that night with Shannan, the drifter, in the book’s sole accusation, recalls “one particular night I was awakened by a woman screaming, ‘No! Please stop! Please, don’t do that!’ and that was followed by a loud thud. And then there was silence.” But he also says that his memoir is partly fictionalized, and he offers no date for the incident in question, and he allows that his drug and alcohol problem “was at an all-time high” during his stay on the Fairway and that he “had quite a few blackout nights.” All in all, the drifter’s account is a wash for Joe.
I tell Joe that it sounds like he’s saying Shannan had a bad reaction to a drug that night.
For the first time, Joe is less playful. “No, I’m not saying that.”
Then I’m not following you, I say. What is the obvious explanation?
“No, I’m not saying that at all,” he repeats. “I did not say that at all.”
I apologize.
Joe chuckles. All is forgiven. He seems to be thinking over whether to say something.
“I mean, it would be shocking to you,” he says. He laughs again. “Well. I’m sorry
, I don’t mean to laugh. First of all, Shannan was a nice girl. I spoke with Shannan. I met Shannan. I knew who Shannan was as a person. And she was a sweet—And you know, she had a rough life, I’m sure. I think there are some people who choose that profession. Some people are kind of forced into it because they have a family or lost their job. And some people are kind of thrown into it, and I’ve got a feeling that Shannan was one of those who was thrown into it.”
He is not-so-subtly turning the focus away from himself and toward Shannan’s family.
“And I’ve got a lot of compassion for that. She took care of a lot of people, you know? She supported her mother. She supported her family. They knew what she did. You know? That’s why she needed the rent money for her mom. You know? I feel bad for that situation. There was a very poor, sick girl, and people want to point at me for blame, and that’s not how it was.”
Joe won’t answer the question of why Shannan called 911, at least not directly. The real story, he says, is that he was trying to help her that night. “I was the only one trying to help her till the very last moment,” he says. “Until even after when I knew she was gone, I was reaching out. And I was nobody. I was just some guy, she was in my house that night, I don’t know what to call it, I wasn’t a person of interest, I had no connection to her, I was nobody. It’s a strange thing. But, uh, why she left my house? That is the million-dollar question. To be in a rage and fearful of her life?”
He’s back to teasing it out, playing up the drama. “Well, that answer will come. I have that answer.”
A pause.
“Well, to be honest, I don’t have it a hundred percent.”
Another laugh.
“But basically, based on what I heard, I have more pieces to the puzzle than anybody. And I think my theory is pretty good.”
I don’t want to misrepresent you, I say.
At this, he laughs very hard. “What’s gonna happen? Another pile of sand is gonna go on my face? That’s gonna make me do something at this point? I know who I am. I don’t need anybody, I don’t need to plead to anybody who I am. I answer to one person. I’m not really Catholic, I’m more agnostic, but I believe in God, I believe in morals, I believe in yin-yang and karma. I’m a huge—Well, maybe this happened for a reason. I’m in tune with myself. I don’t need the money, let me tell you. Any money I make, I’d donate some to some kind of charity for some girls who are stuck on the streets. And I’d put it away in a college fund for my daughter. Money isn’t my motive. I wouldn’t want a five-hundred-thousand-dollar contract movie deal, because that would probably break my family apart even more. But my story will come out.”
He starts to beg off. “Ask about me. I’m a pretty well-known guy in town. I’ve been lifting people when they’re down my entire life. So, I mean, it’s just, it’s such an odd time. It is so—What is this a test? What, you know? Maybe it was given to me because I could handle it, ’cause I wouldn’t crack. And these girls needed to be found, and maybe some higher power up there—not that I believe in that stuff, necessarily—but maybe Shannan had a purpose, and I had a purpose, and she was on a path to destruction, and I, you know, I could handle this kind of thing. I don’t know. I don’t know what made these two asteroids hit in the sky, but this is a straaange fuckin’—this is a strange event. It is.”
Joe decides he’s said enough. “God, talk about a trillion-to-one shot. But I went through a lot, dude. I mean, my life is—I won’t say destroyed, because I won’t let them beat me. It actually made me a better person. How’s that? There’s a quote for you. So if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably let it happen again, because it’s probably made my life better.”
A pause.
“Except for the fact that any girl had to suffer,” he says. “But anyway.”
THE REMAINS
They found two more bodies after New Year’s. On February 17, 2012, a man and his dog discovered a new collection of skeletal remains in the pine barrens of Manorville, a short distance from where two of the Gilgo Beach victims’ body parts had been found years earlier. On March 21, a jogger stumbled on yet another set of remains, also in Manorville. Each set of remains had been left in two distinct areas, both remote and densely wooded, the perfect spots to dispose of a body. The police urged the public not to assume these discoveries were connected to the Gilgo murders.
These discoveries didn’t seem to register with the media, either. New stories upstaged the serial-killer case. In Manhattan, the police had raided a posh Upper East Side brothel, and the madam, Anna Gristina, made the front page of the Post after threatening to reveal the names of some of her more famous and powerful johns. In Nassau County, three high-ranking police officials were indicted on bribery charges, sending the Websleuths world into a long discussion about whether the police in Suffolk were any better. Those following the serial-killer case saw conspiracies everywhere: Could the cops in Suffolk have been bribed by powerful interests in Oak Beach to call Shannan’s murder an accidental drowning? Even the brush fires that plagued Manorville all spring seemed suspicious, a perfect way to obscure the investigation even more.
By spring, Suffolk County’s new homicide squad chief, Detective Lieutenant Jack Fitzpatrick, suggested another change in strategy, saying that “The case is going to be looked at again, from perhaps a different perspective.” At the same time, he went out of his way to knock Dormer’s single-killer theory, saying he believed “it’s very unlikely that it’s one person.” Over in the DA’s office, Spota was pleased. “We are in sync again,” he said. “Not one detective familiar with the facts of this case believes one person is responsible for these homicides.”
Mari, in a turnaround, went back to Oak Beach to voice confidence in Fitzpatrick. Michele Kutner, the families’ local booster, explained that Mari was trying to be a little less down on the police and more positive in general. Possibly, Mari realized she’d overplayed her hand with her threatening letter to the police, and that she still needed them to share the results of the medical examiner’s report.
Lynn tried not to get her hopes up. “I just hope it’s not too late,” she said, “because it’s been a long time.”
On May 1, 2012, two years to the day after her daughter went missing, Mari, her lawyer, John Ray, and Shannan’s three sisters drove to police headquarters in Suffolk County for a private meeting with the Suffolk County chief medical examiner, Yvonne Milewski, to learn the findings of the medical report.
The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Milewski and new detectives assigned to the case were mostly quiet as Hajar Sims-Childs, who had performed the hands-on work, did most of the talking. Sims-Childs, according to Ray, was the medical examiner who had told Dormer in December that it was possible Shannan had died of exposure. At this meeting, she told the Gilberts that after over four months of analyzing Shannan’s remains, they knew little more than they did before they started; in a sense, they knew less.
The cause of death remained a huge question mark. Sims-Childs said Shannan’s skeleton had been discovered almost entirely intact. All that was missing, besides a few finger and toe bones, were two of the three hyoid bones—the small, fragile bones in the upper part of the neck. A broken hyoid bone is a hallmark of strangulation cases. That the bones were missing suggested that Shannan, like the first four victims, was strangled. But Sims-Childs said that without knowing whether those bones were broken or just never made it out of the marsh, it was impossible to tell for sure. The medical examiner tried to explain that away by saying it was common for small bones to disappear; the hyoid tended to come loose quickly, and it was small enough for, say, a rodent to take away. On the other hand, there are 206 bones in the body. How likely would it be that the only bone selected by an animal happened to be the one bone that could link Shannan’s cause of death to the other murders?
The drug question also remained only partially answered. Sims-Childs said they had some challenges analyzing Shannan’s remains. They needed bone marrow but couldn’t
find any in a femur bone, and for reasons she didn’t explain, they didn’t crack open any other bones to search for marrow. Instead, they used a smattering of tissue from the brain and a small clump of hair, which they tested for signs of cocaine use. The tests were negative. While that didn’t eliminate the possibility that Shannan had done coke—especially since the hair had spent eighteen months deteriorating in a saltwater marsh—it did make it less likely that she had. Even if nothing she’d taken that night had seeped into her bones, the theory that she was high that night, and a drug addict in general, was less plausible if Shannan didn’t have traces of some cocaine in her system.
What stunned Mari and her lawyer was that the medical examiner didn’t appear to test for any other drug, not even pot. Bone marrow might have yielded more information about any number of drugs: pot, meth, psychotropics, everything but alcohol, which evaporates. Based on what Sims-Childs was saying, she hadn’t searched for marrow beyond that one femur bone. In light of the assumption that Shannan was hysterical and irrational that night, wouldn’t they want to test for any psychotropic or psychedelic drug they could think of in order to confirm their theory? Sims-Childs did not have an explanation.
Then there was the matter of Shannan’s clothes, which the police had yet to test for anything—blood, DNA, semen—that might indicate who was with her that morning. Ray and Mari had to wonder what the police had been doing for five months.
After the meeting, Mari spoke to reporters. “I’m more frustrated and angry than ever,” she said. “I was hoping for something more substantial and solid. But all I got was . . . ”
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