Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  What it meant, first and foremost, was the need for another cremation, another interment. Lynn and Jeff arranged to pick up the remains in New York. They found a funeral home that wanted to charge them $3,400, but Bill McGready, a detective who had worked Melissa’s missing-persons case when it was still an NYPD matter, had a friend who ran a funeral parlor and got them a cheaper rate.

  When Lynn came to Bill’s office, she saw that he’d draped an American flag over the container. Bill had on his white dress uniform gloves when he handed the container to Lynn. When she took it from him, he started crying.

  Melissa’s friend Kritzia Lugo and her son, Jemire, had started the year in their third-floor apartment in a walk-up in Newark. In January, Kritzia was set to start classes at a community college to earn a certified medical aide degree when she was told at the last minute that she wouldn’t be able to enroll: They needed her birth certificate, and she didn’t have a copy. She took it hard. She couldn’t stop crying. Then she took a whole bunch of Tylenol and some sleeping pills. The day she was supposed to start school, Kritzia was admitted into a psychiatric unit at Clara Maass Medical Center in Newark. After eight days, they let her make calls again.

  On the phone, she sounded tired but resolute. She’d been on this detour before. “I’m thinking I’m going to go down to city hall and find some judge and get a court order or something to find my birth certificate,” she said. “They’re trying to put me in some program. My first day would be tomorrow. But I’m going to go to school. Because that’s what I want to do.”

  A Facebook status from Dave Schaller on February 10, 2012:

  Today is my friend Ambers birthday she was taken by the cowardly piece of shit “serial killer” on long island from me casa! He will pay for what he did. It just hurts to have to live this everyday that I could have stopped u or remembered him if I wasn’t so high. I’m sorry!

  The last time I saw Bear in Tompkins Square Park, he said he was planning to move to Las Vegas with a friend, “a junkie that turned his life around.” Bear said he thought he could get straight in Vegas. “I’m not going to get any better if I don’t get the fuck out of this neighborhood. I am not well. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I have stage-one cirrhosis. My liver is shutting down. Some other guy could end up raising my kid. And that’s my worst fucking nightmare—that people tell my son that his dad was a junkie who’s dead because he chose drugs and alcohol over you. I can’t deal with it.”

  A week later, on the phone, Bear sounded different, less manic. He said he’d asked his parents for help, and they’d found him a bed at a detox on Long Island. The Vegas plan was off the table for now. Bear had been welcomed back into his family for as long as he stayed sober.

  In a rest home in Wilmington, Al Overstreet said a miracle had happened. “I come in here and I get all kinds of stuff. I caught pneumonia, I almost died from that. I got cancer, tumors, six of them. Five in my lungs, one in my chest. But you know what? The five in my lungs disappeared. No treatment. I think it was Amber, praying. She told me one time, she said, ‘Dad, you’re not gonna die from cancer.’ She went to church. I mean, even with the lifestyle she lived, she was really religious.”

  Al wanted to come live with Kim on Long Island. Kim refused. “I can’t take care of him physically,” she said. “His skin is literally so paper-thin that it’s like a wet paper towel.” Once, he did live with her and Mike, and he fell backward into a coffee table. They found him sitting in a pile of glass shards. “It takes someone being with him all day, because sometimes he just falls.”

  Sitting on his bed, Al asked for news about Kim. He knew she was still doing calls, and he knew that she had been avoiding him because of it. “Kim’s afraid to call me,” he said, “because it’s been about seven months, eight months. If you get the chance and see her, tell her to give me a call. Tell her I ain’t gonna fuss at her. She don’t know how many nights I couldn’t sleep, wondering.”

  But then he brightened. Kim, he said, was always the stronger of the two girls. “Kim’s a worker,” Al said. “Not talking about the escort service, but any job she’s ever had, they loved her to death. Because she’s got a good personality.”

  Amber, he worried about more. “Amber was raped when she was young,” he said. “It messed her mind up. And then when her mother died, she was mama’s baby, so she just . . . broke down. She was hooked on heroin. Otherwise, she was a real nice person.”

  When the FBI filed to seize Akeem Cruz’s laptop, they found it at the South Portland home of Ashley Carroll, the girl Vybe had been seeing behind Megan’s back. When Ashley relinquished the laptop, Vybe’s friends assumed she’d turned against him. “That turned into a shit show,” Ashley said. “I had to do it, but in his pea brain, he didn’t understand I had to do it. He doesn’t understand what a search warrant means?”

  Vybe started making menacing calls to Ashley from prison. “He’d be saying, ‘Why don’t you like me?’ And he’d ask about my son.” The last time he called, she said, “he told me he was going to kill me and violate me. He said he was going to break my jaw and break my ribs. Because it doesn’t leave marks when you break ribs.”

  Weeks before Vybe’s scheduled release date in early 2012, prosecutors found a way to keep him in jail. That April, Akeem Cruz pleaded guilty to violating the Mann Act, transporting Megan several times across state lines, and eventually received a sentence of three years. In jail, Vybe still wasn’t saying a word about what he might have seen the night Megan vanished. While the police have never officially connected him to her disappearance, that didn’t stop some members of Megan’s family from laying the blame at his feet.

  A few months later, when Lorraine finally scraped together the money for an eight-hundred-dollar headstone for Megan, Greg complained that it wasn’t good enough. “She deserves one with a vase and with angels,” he said.

  Sometime earlier, Greg had a chance meeting with an important person in his sister’s life—someone whom, until then, he’d only heard about. Officer Doug Weed of the Scarborough police said they met when Greg had a “law-enforcement contact,” though he won’t be any more specific. Until then, Weed had only heard of Megan’s older brother, Greg. When he noticed Greg’s last name, he made the connection. “Megan Waterman?” he said.

  Greg’s eyes widened. “You’re Officer Weed? I know all about you!”

  The news about Megan’s disappearance, and later, her murder, had surprised Weed as much as anyone. He’d never known anything about Megan and prostitution, and he thought he’d known her pretty well. Once he had time to consider it, he thought he should have seen it coming. He knew that she was in the wrong crowd. It made him think about what chance there really is to help a person with such narrow options. Maybe, he figured, if you got to a point in your life where someone comes up to you and says, “I’ve got money, I love you, you’re beautiful,” you’re just a sitting duck.

  A few months after meeting Greg, Weed got a letter in the mail. Inside was a school photo of a kindergartener—a girl with brown eyes and a heart-shaped face that, to Weed, was unmistakably familiar.

  Hi Officer Weed,

  Its me Lili. Here is a picture of me from school. I hope I get to see you again someday. My mommy lives in Heaven now she is an angel. Nana says she is proud of me and she doesn’t lie so I guess she is. I am five years old and I go to J.F. Kennedy School. I am in kindergarten and I am real smart. Nana says you are real nice and you knew my mommy, she was nice too. I hope you like my picture. Nana says I am beautiful just like my mommy.

  Love, hugs and kisses,

  Liliana R. Waterman

  Doug Weed usually doesn’t cry. But that letter put him over the top. “I literally had to stop when I read it,” he said. “I told my wife, if we get the chance, we’d adopt her. I’m not kidding. My wife said, ‘That’s fine, absolutely.’ Because she knows.”

  Maureen’s family was Catholic, but no one ever went to church. “With Catholics, it doesn’t matter,” Missy
said as the car, driven by her husband, Chris, approached the cemetery. “As long as you believe there’s a God and the mother Mary, you go to heaven. You believe in Jesus, all that stuff.”

  Life was continuing even while Missy wasn’t paying attention. Missy was pregnant again—a boy, due in September. On the ultrasound, it looked like he was already flexing his muscles. The pose in the printout reminded Missy of her brother. She thought of naming him Liam—like Will’s name, William, only shortened—but she’d told Chris he could name the baby, so his name would be Dominic.

  It was windy and cold with a light drizzle as Missy got out of the car at St. Mary’s in New London. Maureen and Will were buried next to each other, near a statue of the saint herself. Missy was proud of the location. “Especially in the summertime. If you notice, my brother has all this grass everywhere, and my sister has this perfect grass, too. And everywhere else, it’s all messed up.”

  Will was between two trees. At the other end of the cemetery were Maureen’s grandmother and great-grandmother and her uncle Reggie. Missy’s father was there, too—the father she and Will barely knew, separated from his son by just two other plots. “It’s very, very hard to come here,” she said. But Missy, usually so prone to tears, seemed more relaxed at the cemetery than anywhere else. Maybe it was because she got to commune with her past without any self-consciousness, without any guilt that she was neglecting her present-day life. She was mindful as she walked to their headstones. She was, in her way, maternal.

  “I was kind of happy when the funeral parlor told me there was a law in Connecticut that states that you cannot cremate a homicide victim,” she said. “I didn’t want her cremated. I felt like she went through so much that I didn’t want her . . . ” She trailed off. “You know what I’m saying? I looked at my mom and was like, ‘See, you shouldn’t cremate her.’ And she didn’t get cremated, she was buried. And she’s in a casket next to my brother. My brother wasn’t cremated, either, he’s in a casket.”

  There were some plants on the graves. Missy’s mother had brought them. “She comes here more than I do,” Missy said. “It’s harder for me, I don’t know. It’s because I’m the middle child. I lost my older and my younger.”

  On July 14, 2012, the fifth anniversary of Maureen’s disappearance, Sara Karnes reached out to Missy on Facebook:

  SARA KARNES I wish I had stayed. I really thought I’d be seeing her again on Wednesday

  MELISSA CANN Sara there was no way you could have known that Maureen would be in danger and it would be the last time anyone of us would hear from her was this weekend 5 years ago. Your in my thoughts cause I know this is hard for you as well as my family.

  SARA KARNES Yeah but even if I didn’t know that I shoulda still stayed. What kind of friend leaves their friend all alone in a big ass city?

  MELISSA CANN Please remember it is nobodies fault besides the person who took her life. No one could have predicted that this would have happen. I mean, I can say what kind of sister lets their sister go to a big ass city?

  Stunts 4 Justice didn’t raise close to the five thousand dollars Missy had hoped. But it was good to be with Lorraine that day, and they met a famous crusader for the families of missing persons: Janice Smolinski, whose son, Billy, disappeared in Connecticut in 2004, and who has been working for the creation of Billy’s Law, which seeks to expand online public information on missing people and unidentified remains. Over the summer, Missy’s activism intensified. She started looking into how to go about getting the Gilgo Beach killer on the FBI’s most-wanted list: Others on the list were unidentified, with only the case details listed. Why not this killer and this case?

  Missy kept gathering every piece of data, flagging some sketches of the unidentified bodies she found in a national database and giving them to the press. “The Suffolk police dropped the ball and never released it to the public,” she said. Through the Connecticut victims’ advocate attorney, she tried to arrange a meeting with Norwich police to go over what steps they took in Maureen’s missing-persons case, and maybe even get a look at the case file. “This should be interesting,” she said. Once she delivered the baby, Missy wanted to put together another stunt show and finally meet her goal. Somewhere down the line, she was thinking of moving to Stamford, to be closer to Long Island if and when there was an arrest in the case.

  Missy monitored the growing national discussion about online ads for escorts. “Knowingly making money off of girls’ bodies—that sounds like a pimp or promoting prostitution to me,” she said. “Of course, the girls who do this are also wrong, but if it was not for this online hiding of it, I don’t think half of them would be out there doing this.”

  The exchange of sex for money has been a part of life in nearly every human civilization, at times playing an accepted, even respected role. Thousands of years before Christ, the profession was connected to religious practices in the temples of Sumeria, and the rights of prostitutes and their children were spelled out in the code of Hammurabi. Brothels were legal in ancient China and ancient Greece, tolerated by the Israelites, taxed by the early Roman Empire, and openly indulged by royalty during the Renaissance. In practically every era, prostitutes have thrived, and in some, they were recognized and exalted.

  In America, commercial sex was more or less tolerated as a sort of low-grade offense in Colonial times, easy for the authorities to ignore. That continued through the Civil War and only changed about a century ago, when progressive groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union worked to protect young girls from being forced into prostitution. When the Mann Act of 1915 made a federal crime of transporting “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose,” prostitutes in America entered a shadow world, even if their services were as in demand as ever.

  While Europe experimented with legalization and regulation after WWII, the practice here was more stigmatized than perhaps it had ever been. It was also dangerous. John J. Potterat, one of the nation’s leading epidemiologists, noted in 2004 that the leading cause of death for prostitutes was homicide. He also found that most prostitute murders—64 percent—were committed by johns, with the high body count of killers like Gary Ridgway, Robert Pickton, and Robert Lee Yates skewing that statistic away from onetime killers and toward the serially inclined.

  The Internet had promised to bring about the most significant change to the sex trade in years, maybe centuries. Never before had the marketing of prostitution become so convenient and unobtrusive—so easy. No one had to go to a bad part of town to look for what they wanted. Everything could take place behind closed doors, where no one was watching. Craigslist was the great disrupter in any number of industries, transforming the way people shopped for anything, and commercial sex was no exception. The great selling point of Craigslist, and the Web in general, was its anonymity. A person can do practically anything online without even their closest loved ones knowing, from commenting on Yelp or Gawker to selling stolen goods or viewing porn videos. This is as true for the escorts as it was for the johns, who have turned sites like TheEroticReview.com into a sort of Yelp for steady customers of commercial sex.

  In 2009, Craigslist earned a reported $45 million a year from Adult Services ads, or about a third of the company’s total profits (the site had started charging $5 per posting just a year earlier). Some believed that Craigslist and its competitors were doing well by doing good: In 2006, a research team from Princeton and Columbia said that this new type of prostitute had a “careerist orientation.” Three years later, a study and survey by Baylor University economist Scott Cunningham confirmed that the Web was drawing entirely different sorts of people into prostitution—better educated, even thinner. And in 2011, University of Arkansas researcher Jennifer Hafer said people embraced online prostitution “for many of the same reasons that people enter the conventional job market—money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction.” Thanks to the Internet, it was said, prostitution could become a me
ans of economic empowerment for an entire swath of society. The women and men who walked the street could come in from the cold, becoming free agents, liberated from the system of pimps and escort services that had exploited them for so long.

  Few people considered how the Web’s anonymity stood to make escort work more dangerous than ever. Sure enough, online escorts started to report incidents of violence. Nearly half of the New York City indoor sex workers surveyed by a group called the Urban Justice Center in 2006 said they had been forced by a client to do something they did not want to do, and almost as many said they had been threatened or beaten. When the Craigslist killer, Philip Haynes Markoff, made headlines in 2009, the public got its first sense of the danger. The bodies on Gilgo Beach only reinforced the point: a killer using the convenience of the Internet to carefully select his victims, and taking advantage of the anonymity of the same technology to elude capture.

  By 2009, law enforcement had already targeted Craigslist. The sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, sued the company, calling the site “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.” He was joined in the lawsuit by forty state attorneys general, one of whom, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, called online sex ads the new Times Square—an unsavory back alley everyone winked at, but no one did anything about. The pressure forced Craigslist to shut down its Adult Services category on September 3, 2010—as it happens, the day after Amber Lynn Costello went missing. Escorts never stopped advertising on Craigslist; they just posted on the sly in other categories. And when the scrutiny and criticism shifted over to the new market leader, Backpage, it was widely understood that if Backpage shut down its Adult Entertainment page, a dozen more sites like it stood ready to pick up the traffic.