Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

She thought for a second or two before settling on the right word.

  “Betrayal.”

  A few days later, John Ray and some members of his law practice went to Oak Beach at five A.M. to retrace Shannan’s steps in the marsh under what he believed were ideal conditions: the same time of day and the same time of year when Shannan made the trip. He’d been told by the medical examiner that the marsh was in roughly the same condition now that it would have been two years earlier—most important, the water level was the same. To try to keep the conditions as close to the real thing as possible, they walked through the parts of the marsh that the police hadn’t mowed, just to see how hard it would have been for Shannan to run through there. Ray even brought a woman about Shannan’s size to simulate what she must have experienced, what she could and couldn’t see.

  It wasn’t hard at all to walk in the marsh. The soles of Ray’s shoes barely got wet. It was easy to see, too. Ray and the woman with him found that their sight lines extended past the reeds. From the thick of the marsh, they could see houses, the highway, everything. It was difficult to believe that Shannan was lost at all, and even harder to believe that she might have drowned or died of exposure. Ray remembered the ME saying that all of Shannan’s bones had been bleached by the sun in such a way that her body seemed to have been lying down for a long time. When Ray asked if that meant Shannan could have been placed in that spot after she was dead, Sims-Childs would neither concede nor deny the point.

  How else might Shannan have died? Sudden heart failure from drugs? They couldn’t know, because the remains were tested for only one drug. Strangulation? They couldn’t know, but the absence of two hyoid bones sure was suspicious. Granted, Mari was Ray’s client, and he had a vested interest as her lawyer, and he had gone to the marsh already suspecting that Shannan had been killed and dumped there, her things flung in the marsh at a different time. But after his morning stroll, Ray was more convinced than ever that the police theory was wrong. The police explanation of hysteria not only didn’t make sense; it was practically Victorian in its view of prostitutes, as if Shannan had died of sorrow, or fright, or sadness, or heartache. Against all common sense and with willful ignorance of Shannan’s own words that night, the police seemed to be saying that Shannan Gilbert had died because her soul had been rent asunder by a life in the streets.

  It was left to Mari to champion her daughter. Months after Lorraine and Missy spurned her, some of the most devoted followers of the case would also drop out of Mari’s Facebook group, even the steadfast Michele Kutner. “I hung by her,” she said, “but I’m not going to stay there and be abused.” None of the conflict seemed to rattle Mari, although conflict had always resembled her natural state. She spent the summer ushering in new Facebook friends who had heard about the case through repeats of the 48 Hours episode. She was casting about for a way to get Shannan’s case on John Walsh’s TV show, America’s Most Wanted. During a midsummer visit with John Ray on Long Island, Mari went out of her way to be kind about Lorraine, if a little patronizing. “Lorraine is sweet. She’s a little slower at talking, because she wants to make sure it’s right.” And she didn’t resist the chance to judge Missy, suggesting she hadn’t done enough to help Maureen while she was alive. “I hurt for her the most,” Mari said. “Because I hope it’s not haunting her, the choices she made.”

  Mari was more comfortable forgiving herself, even if it meant not questioning what part, if any, she might have played in her daughter’s tragedy. “I can’t be plastic,” she said, adding that she wished Shannan had been a little more like that. “I think if Shannan inherited anything from me, it was being able to do what she chose to do and not care what people thought. I wish she were more street-smart.” Mari was trying hard to be philosophical, in her own way. “Sooner or later, things will catch up to a person. You do the best you can when you’re in that situation. And everything is meant to be. You cannot disrupt the order of life. You just can’t, because it’s gonna happen anyway. So you do the best you can. You roll with the punches. You get knocked down, you dust yourself off, you keep going.”

  By then even Sherre had lost patience with Mari. They didn’t speak over most of the summer. “I think my mom’s a hater,” she said one afternoon in a park near her home in Ellenville. “She’s lost a lot of her friends. She’s closing herself off from people. We’ve always had our ups and downs, but it’s gotten much worse since Shannan’s been gone.” Sherre spent much of her time carefully vetting all the coverage of the case, protesting whenever anyone used the word prostitute to describe her sister. This wasn’t the life she wanted, she wrote in a message to friends. The world can’t see if she would’ve changed, what her life may have become . . . Before you judge her or judge us, make sure your life is perfect because none of our lives are! Privately, Sherre didn’t spare herself any criticism. “I just feel bad because I never really tried to stop her. I never talked about it with her.”

  Despite staying active online, Sherre felt isolated. Not talking to Mari meant having fewer people with whom to mourn Shannan. Even before she vanished, Shannan had such an ephemeral place in her family’s world—living at home on and off, making such foreign choices—that Sherre couldn’t stop wondering, almost in an endless loop, what might have made her sister’s life so different from her own. “I just feel like Shannan always wanted to be loved,” she said, fighting back tears. “And she never felt like that. And I think her doing what she did, it was something that she didn’t really care about. You know how you’re supposed to cherish your body? Maybe if she felt loved. But I don’t think she did.”

  What seems to hurt Sherre and Mari the most—the complaint they share with Missy and Lorraine and Kim and Lynn—is the way the police’s theory of the case blamed Shannan at the exclusion of everyone else. Joe Brewer was still a free man. So was Michael Pak, who, as her driver, posted her calls, which to some made him a de facto pimp. Why was Shannan the only one to answer for what happened that night? Murder or no murder, Shannan and all of the others were failed by the criminal-justice system not once but three times. The police had failed to help them when they were at risk. They’d failed again when they didn’t take the disappearances seriously, severely hobbling the chances of making an arrest. And they’d failed a third time by not going after the johns and drivers. Sherre and Mari know that no matter what happened in Oak Beach, Shannan’s profession had sealed her fate. Even before she disappeared, she ceased to matter.

  Alex Diaz said he hadn’t been able to get and stay with a girl since he lost Shannan. “It’s always in the back of my head. I want to know what happened to her. It’s kind of hard to move on, not knowing.” He got a straight job, earning three hundred dollars a week as a dispatcher for a valet company. Michael Pak, still living in Queens, said he’d gotten a job, too, though he wouldn’t say where.

  Alex’s life was further complicated by the way he was perceived by people aware of Shannan’s case. “The media tried to make it seem like I’m a pimp,” he said, “because they found out I didn’t have a job. And the family used to trash me and say I was using her.”

  Mari and her family were happy to let Alex twist in the wind. He was matter-of-fact when he defended himself, much the same way Blaze was when talking about Melissa Barthelemy. “If I was using her, you guys are just as guilty,” he said. “They knew what she was doing. And the mother would take the money, the sister would take the money. And they would judge me? You want to put me in that category, then we’re all bad people. We’re taking the money, and we know where it’s coming from.”

  In the summer, Peter Hackett’s neighbors at Oak Beach noticed that his car had a brand-new set of Florida plates. The doctor spent much of the year on Sanibel Island in the Florida Keys. Back in December, Hackett had told me that had been the plan for some time. “I’ve been hurt so many times in my life that I’ve had to use the money to help my children with their habits—like eating,” he’d said sardonically. “You’ve caught me in the last couple
of years of making sure my kids all grow up in the same place, have the same memories. Now I need to move somewhere warm so I won’t slip on the ice.”

  When he came back, Hackett put his house up for sale, listing the four-bedroom, two-bathroom cottage for $399,000. “Our plan is to see if we can sell the house,” he told me in October. “Or we’ll just stay right here. We’re just taking a shot in the dark. I’ve been disabled, and now because of this miserable story that the Gilberts and everybody else have made up, I’m essentially unemployable. I’ve already missed getting a job because somebody went on the Internet and saw my name.”

  From his cottage in Oak Beach, with the autumn sun low in the sky, Hackett was more talkative than he ever had been, eager to discuss the damage the case had done to him. “My family’s been threatened, people have called me to threaten me. I have no apologies to make. I’ve told no lies.” He insisted yet again that he’d never seen Shannan, never treated her. “My daughter and wife were home. That would be pretty difficult, to treat somebody.” He reiterated that no neighbors called him that morning. “Just check my telephone. Anyone like the police can just check my phone and see that. I would have known more about it on Monday when I met the boyfriend and the driver.”

  What about the neighbors who apparently heard him say that he saw her?

  “I told neighbors like Gus and Barbara, ‘If this was you and your wife, and someone was hurt, who’s the first person you’d call?’ They said, ‘Oh, you.’ They said, ‘Oh, we didn’t want to bother you.’ I did say to people, ‘I wished somebody had called me.’ Having started the trauma program in this county, I would have been able to get her to the right trauma center. And I did say that to people, because I was annoyed that somebody was missing, sitting outside people’s houses, and they bothered to call the police, but normally, if somebody were hurt, for twentysomething years I’ve gotten up many, many nights to take care of them when they were sick and injured. I felt poorly that they didn’t think to call me to help Shannan out.”

  That didn’t jibe with Gus Coletti’s denial that he’d talked with Hackett at all. But Hackett continued to profess bafflement at how anyone would think he was capable of anything like this. “They seem to imply I chased after this girl or something? I can’t catch up to myself walking backwards. What I’ve found with the press is if you don’t talk to them, they make it up.”

  He’d denied making the calls to Mari at first, he said, because “I’d forgotten I’d called her” until he’d checked his phone records. Recently, he had looked at the notes from his meeting with Alex Diaz and Michael Pak—notes that, he mentioned, were the main reason the police wanted to talk to him about this case—and remembered that they’d been concerned because Sherre told them Shannan’s cell-phone account was turned off. Hackett said he thought that the police might be able to track Shannan better if her phone were active. That, he said, was why he had called Mari. “My downfall only started because I didn’t want my community to be seen as uncaring—rich people who didn’t give a damn,” he said. “I tried to do what I could for the family, and then I guess the family did what they could for me, which was to make up a lot of hooey.” He talked about his physical limitations—the false leg, the back pain, the pacemaker and implanted defibrillator—and he wondered aloud why, if he was such a suspicious character, the police never so much as wrote him up or booked him.

  He’d tried not to pay attention to the blog attacks, but that proved impossible. “This Internet mechanism of prosecuting people. Where do these people come from?” The malpractice cases that Truthspider dug up, he said, were practically pro forma. “I’m not going to deny I’ve been sued for malpractice, but I’m an ER doctor in New York. ER doctors in New York are sued once or twice a year.” The question of a rehab raised by one court document, he didn’t answer directly. “This is just mean,” he said. “If I were intoxicated or whatever it was they said it was, why didn’t I lose my license?”

  For the first time publicly, he talked about the Scalise family. “They’re using this as an opportunity to make me look as bad as possible,” he said. He couldn’t understand why. He claimed to have been on the Scalises’ side during their battles with the association, though he allowed that “if I were to go over there and tell them that, they’d never believe me.”

  That said, Hackett wondered if the bad blood would ebb. His term as a board member was ending. Taking one of the free spots on the board was Joe Scalise’s sister. “Maybe things will change,” he said. Meanwhile, he and Barbara, now empty-nesters, were contemplating starting over in Florida. “I’m trying to get a job with the VA program to work with the doctors there. I’m writing a book about people coming home from war who have lost their legs. My dad was a writer. He said never tell anyone what you’re working on.” Putting all the rumors and accusations behind him, he said, would be the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.

  What did he think had happened to Shannan? Hackett said he believed the police. Years as a trauma specialist, he said, confirmed it. “People on coke,” he said, “if they hit their head, they’re going to get intracranial bleeding and get confused and run in some random direction.” The marsh was right there on Anchor Way. She saw the lights from the highway. She ran. She fell. End of story.

  “I mean, just think about it,” the doctor said. “If I was involved in this thing—if any of this had any substance—would the police be so stupid to miss somebody as obvious as me?”

  That same day in October, Joe Jr. was doubling down on his suspicions. “The guy’s no good,” he said triumphantly. “Around the Oak Beach community, he’s been thought of as this hero personality. Now they can’t wait for him to get the hell out of here.”

  Did he still believe Hackett killed Shannan Gilbert?

  “I know he killed Shannan Gilbert,” Joe said.

  He kept going, offering more rumors, all unsubstantiated: Shannan’s hyoid bone had been crushed because the doctor thrust his knee into her neck . . . The police never investigated the morning Shannan vanished; they were waved off by a neighbor, and now Gus and everyone else was lying to cover up for the doctor . . . Hackett was seen making someone erase the security video . . . Neighbors suspected Hackett of mistreating his local patients . . . “Don’t you think it’s strange that all these supposedly God-fearing people were invested in saying she ran off to the beach, she ran to the water?” Joe said.

  It was just like Richard Dormer had said. The thing’ll never die down.

  The barrier islands are supposed to be the rest of Long Island’s first and last defense against ocean storms. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy turned that axiom on its head. The trajectory of the storm brought the whirlwind in from the west, hitting the South Shore inland towns before the barrier islands. Ocean Parkway had buckled and crumbled into pieces, but in something of a miracle, all the crosses on the north side of the highway were still standing after the storm passed. The bramble had protected them, just as it had protected ten sets of human remains. Oak Beach fared better than many inland towns, such as Massapequa or Seaford. Dunes were flattened. Houses all along the Fairway and the Bayou and Larboard Court were flooded and lost power. But the people of Oak Beach were always ready to lose power and deal with a little water. Besides, they had been through a hurricane of their own a year earlier.

  Two weeks after Sandy, on November 15, Shannan’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Peter Hackett. With distinct echoes of the scenario that Joe Jr. said he’d heard from Bruce Anderson, the complaint alleges that Hackett gave Shannan drugs that morning, implying a doctor-patient relationship, and then let her leave his home, demonstrating negligence. Mari and John Ray held another press conference, accusing Hackett of controlling the security video and tormenting Mari with his phone calls. “The words he chose, his tone of voice—it made me feel like he was more concerned about himself instead of truly wanting to know where Shannan was,” Mari said. “And it was already proven that he was a liar once by denyi
ng he called me for over a year.” As a new smoking gun, Ray finally unveiled Mari’s phone records, which showed that the doctor had made a five-minute phone call to Mari on May 3, 2010, two days after Shannan disappeared and three days before the calls he’d previously admitted to. “Hackett told 48 Hours the first conversation was May 6,” Ray said. “And he claimed he and his wife searched their records and this was all they came up with. Hackett is deliberately lying.”

  Like the civil suit against O. J. Simpson filed by the family of Ron Goldman, Mari’s lawsuit was designed as a wedge to force Hackett and others to be deposed in court. “Our intent is to uncover what happened in detail,” Ray said. “That has not been done by the authorities to date. So we’re just going forward with every legal means that we can find to accomplish that.”

  What the complaint didn’t have behind it was anything other than Mari’s phone records. Ray explained later that he had no affidavits from neighbors, neither Joe Jr. nor Bruce Anderson. When reporters at the press conference brought up the fact that the police didn’t think Shannan had been murdered at all, Ray brought the questioning to a close. “There’s no direct evidence as to who killed this lady,” he said. “But circumstantial evidence can be very strong. And the circumstantial evidence right now is very strong to support what we’re doing here. And I don’t care what the police believe. The facts are the facts.”

  Sometime after Melissa’s funeral, Lynn Barthelemy got a call from the coroner’s office in Suffolk County, saying they had found more remains along the side of the highway with her daughter’s DNA. She wasn’t told exactly where these remains were found, and it never was made clear to her what had happened: whether the body had been dismembered or an animal had gotten to Melissa’s remains before they were discovered. She wasn’t told what it meant in terms of the case theory, whether finding part of her daughter elsewhere meant one more link between the four bodies in burlap and the other six found along the beach.