Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

290 Pages·2013·1.58 MB·English

by  Robert Kolker

DEDICATION
For Kirsten
CONTENTS
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Book One
I.
Maureen
Melissa
Shannan
Megan
Amber
II.
Marie
Chloe
Angelina
Lexi
Carolina
Interlude: Oak Beach, 2010
Book Two
I.
Bodies
Families
Conspiracies
Alliances
II.
The Doctor
The Marsh
The John
The Remains
Maps
Chronology
List of Characters
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Lost Girls is a work of nonfiction about five women connected to the same
criminal investigation—the case of a suspected serial killer or killers operating
in Long Island from 1996 until the present day. The narrative is based on
hundreds of hours of interviews with the victims’ friends, family members,
acquaintances, neighbors, and members of law enforcement. No scenes were
invented. All events and dialogue not witnessed firsthand are based on personal
accounts and published reports. For reasons of privacy, the names of some
children have been changed, as have the names of four adults: “Blake,” “June,”
“Teresa,” and “Jordan.”
PROLOGUE
To most travelers, the barrier islands of Long Island are just a featureless stretch
between Jones Beach and Fire Island—a narrow strip of marsh and dune,
bramble and beach, where the grassy waters of South Oyster Bay meet the waves
of the Atlantic Ocean. The main artery of the barrier islands, Ocean Parkway, is
long and straight and often empty at night—a drag racer’s dream. A driver can
see little more than the beach heather or bayberry tangled thick and high on the
shoulders of the highway. Fifteen miles of darkness surrounds passing vehicles
like a tunnel, and the headlights of other cars are visible for miles down the
straightaway. You can tell when you’re alone.
Late on a warm night in May 2010, just after one A.M., Michael Pak weaved
his black Ford Explorer around the traffic circle surrounding the elegant brick
spire marking Jones Beach and shot out the other side on Ocean Parkway. From
Manhattan, he was heading east on the straightaway, passing right by the best-
kept secret of the barrier islands, Gilgo Beach: a surfing mecca in the sixties,
until erosion ruined the waves. Just before he reached the Fire Island turnoff, his
GPS guided him off Ocean Parkway and down an unlit, unmarked side access
road. The sign on the turnoff read OAK BEACH. In the backseat sat a young
woman with chestnut hair streaked blond. Her name was Shannan Gilbert.
They moved slowly now in the dark. The narrow road was overgrown with
Virginia creeper and shining sumac and poison ivy. Outside, the air was spongy
and salty, and the hum of the car was drowned in the whir of insects. Through
some pine trees on the left, they both could see the rushing glow of cars speeding
by on the highway. Through the brush on the right were the lights of a house—
the only indication that anyone lived at the end of the road.
After half a mile, Michael pulled up to a white gatehouse decorated with a
wooden model of a lighthouse and, a few yards beyond the gate, a blue wooden
sign that read OAK ISLAND BEACH ASSOCIATION EST. 1896 in the kind of gold
cursive lettering you might find on the side of a sloop. Where the gatehouse once
had an attendant was now a metal box with a keypad. Michael didn’t know the
code. Neither did Shannan. Michael dialed a number on his phone and, a
moment later, another SUV—this one white—approached the gate from the
other side.
The driver’s door opened. Out stepped a middle-aged man with a potbelly and
a wavy mess of dark hair. The man waved, jogged a few feet up to the
gatehouse, and punched in four digits, smiling over at them.
The gate swung up. The Explorer rolled through, and Michael waited for the
man to get back in his car before following him down a path he hadn’t seen,
back toward the house with the light.
Gus Coletti is shaving. He is eighty-six years old, a grandparent, long retired. He
and his wife, Laura, are up early in their small wood-frame house in Oak Beach
to head upstate to a car show. He hears pounding on his front door. He opens up
and sees a girl with chestnut hair. In her hand is a cell phone.
The girl is shrieking. The only word Gus can make out is “help.” Those who
have heard the 911 recording say it sounds as if Gus never let her inside, though
he will later insist that he did. In any case, all it takes to send her running away is
Gus saying he’s going to call the police.
The girl trips down the porch stairs. Gus heads outside, staying on the porch,
watching as the girl beats on a few more doors, then finds a hiding place behind
the small boat just outside his house. Both he and the girl see the lights of a truck
coming down the Fairway toward them. When the car stops, he can see it more
clearly—a black Ford Explorer with a young Asian driver.
The SUV slows to a stop. Gus comes down from the porch to talk with him.
As soon as the girl sees that the driver is distracted, she bolts out past the
headlights, across the road, and into the darkness.
Gus’s driveway is just a few dozen yards from the Oak Beach gatehouse. The
way out of the gated community is just yards away, plain to see, but the girl
doesn’t head in that direction. Instead, she runs down another road, Anchor Way,
to knock on another door—that of Wanda Housman—but again, there is no
answer. She keeps on running, a hundred more yards, to a street called the
Bayou. Barbara Brennan hears the knocking, and she even sees the girl, notices
her frantically fiddling with her cell phone. She calls out, but the girl doesn’t
respond, and Brennan doesn’t open the door. Instead, like Gus before her, she
calls 911. The girl runs.
When the police finally arrive—about forty-five minutes after Gus Coletti’s
and Barbara Brennan’s 911 calls—the officer talks to the neighbors but doesn’t
get much of anywhere. It isn’t the least bit clear what has happened here or what
is to be done. Both the car and the girl are gone.
Seven months later, over three rainy days in December, police uncovered the
bodies of four women in the bramble on the side of Ocean Parkway on Gilgo
Beach, three miles from where Shannan Gilbert disappeared. Detectives thought
at least one of them had to be Shannan. They were wrong. There was Maureen
Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier in
2007, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan
Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month
after Shannan in 2010—and, a few months later that same year, Amber Lynn
Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon, Long Island. Like Shannan,
they all were petite and in their twenties. Like Shannan, they all came from out
of town to work as escorts. Like Shannan, they all advertised on Craigslist and
its competitor, Backpage.
It had seemed enough, at first, for some to say the victims were all just
Craigslist hookers, practically interchangeable—lost souls who were dead, in a
fashion, long before they actually disappeared. There is a story our culture tells
about people like them, a conventional way of thinking about how young girls
fall into a life of prostitution. But that story, in the Internet age, is quickly
becoming outmoded. Shannan, Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber took part
in a modern age of prostitution in which clients are lured with the simple tap of a
computer keyboard rather than the exhausting, demeaning ritual of walking the
streets. The method is easier, seductively so, almost like an ATM—post an ad,
and the phone rings seconds later—but also deceptive about its dangers. They
each made the decision to have sex for money for intensely personal reasons:
acceptance, adventure, success, love, power. They kept working, often, for
reasons even they didn’t comprehend. And they traveled in worlds that many of
their loved ones could not imagine.
When they disappeared, only their families were left to ask what became of
them. Few others seemed to care, not even the police. That all changed once the
bodies were found on Gilgo Beach. Then, a few miles from where Shannan had
last been seen alive, the police flailed, the body count increased, the public took
notice, and the neighbors began pointing fingers. There, in a remote community
out of sight of the beaches and marinas scattered along the South Shore barrier
islands, the women’s stories finally came together, now all part of the same
mystery.