Lost Girls Part 13

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 transvest.i.te 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 t.i.tle. The author, a West Islip native, confesses to a life of burglary, drugs, a.s.sault, 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 s.e.x with prost.i.tutes (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 compa.s.sion 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 n.o.body. 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 n.o.body. 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 G.o.d, 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. .h.i.t in the sky, but this is a straaange f.u.c.kin'-this is a strange event. It is."

Joe decides he's said enough. "G.o.d, 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 a.s.sume 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 Na.s.sau 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 a.s.signed 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 c.o.ke-especially since the hair had spent eighteen months deteriorating in a salt.w.a.ter 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 a.s.sumption 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, s.e.m.e.n-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 . . . "

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 prost.i.tutes, 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 prost.i.tute 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 d.a.m.n," 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 doc.u.ment, 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 a.s.sociation, 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 c.o.ke," 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d-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 Sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Ma.s.sapequa 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 denying 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 circ.u.mstantial evidence can be very strong. And the circ.u.mstantial 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.

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 cla.s.ses 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 Maa.s.s 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 s.h.i.t "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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed she'd turned against him. "That turned into a s.h.i.t 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 prost.i.tution, 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 G.o.d and the mother Mary, you go to heaven. You believe in Jesus, all that stuff."