May 1, 2010: Shannan Gilbert, a call girl, arrives at the Long Island home of Joseph Brewer for a date arranged through Craigslist. Gilbert had reportedly struggled with mental illness and before leaving Brewer’s home, she placed a 23 minute call to 911 in which she claimed someone — they — were trying to kill her. Two men’s voices could be heard in the background. Gilbert could not tell the 911 operator where she was and as a result the call was misrouted to the State Police. No officers were immediately dispatched.
When questioned later, Brewer would say Gilbert inexplicably went berserk for no reason when he asked her to leave. Brewer claimed he went outside, where Gilbert’s driver was waiting, and enlisted the driver’s help in getting her back to the car, but Gilbert raced from the house and began banging on neighbors’ doors asking for help. One neighbor, Gus Colletti, recalled Shannan Gilbert repeatedly asking for help. When the driver arrived to attempt to calm Gilbert, she took off again, and Colletti called police, but by the time the authorities arrived, Gilbert had vanished.
The search for Shannan Gilbert would yield unintended results… bodies, or perhaps more accurately, body parts, which would leave authorities no choice but to admit, a serial killer was at work on Long Island… a sinister savage with no regard for human life. If this were a fictional story, this would be the moment when I tell you to turn off the lights, light some candles, sit down by the window while a thunderstorm rages outside, and listen.
However, this story is not fiction, it’s about real people, and that kind of dramatic audio theater would no doubt be considered disrespectful by some. It’s also about a real killer, so before you put on a pair of headphones, I would advise you lock the door, because still, this very day, as you listen to this, he is out there walking free, breathing the same air as you and I.
Tales of True Crime, episode 9: The Long Island Serial Killer
The first apparent break in the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert came two days after she went missing. Oak Beach resident Dr. C. Peter Hackett called Shannan Gilbert’s mother and claimed Shannan was at a halfway house he operated out of his home, but upon investigation, Shannan was not at Dr Hackett’s halfway house. Shannan’s mother and law enforcement would naturally believe this man, Dr Hackett, had something to do with her disappearance. When questioned, he first denied making the call, then later admitted it, claiming he was just trying to be supportive. It was a strange, disruptive red herring in the early days of the investigation.
All summer they searched for Shannan along the barrier islands, accompanied by the sound of waves and wind along the sandy scrub marshes. Her family went door to door, passed out fliers, with no luck. The summer sun gave way to autumn and shadows grew longer as tourists returned to their homes.
December 10th, 2010: Suffolk Police Officer John Mallia was training a police dog for cadaver searches on a pristine barrier island between Gilgo and Cedar Beach, just three miles from the home of Joseph Brewer. The dog discovered the skeletal remains of a woman in the roadside brush, just off Ocean Parkway. News choppers from the major New York City TV stations circled overhead. The assumption in the community was immediate–they found her. They found Shannan Gilbert. But everyone was in for a surprise… as the search continued for any remains or evidence that might have gone unnoticed, three more bodies were found. All four bodies had been wrapped in burlap and discarded in the thick overgrowth. And the fact that shocked everyone… None of them were Shannan Gilbert.
The Gilgo 4
The first body discovered by the cadaver dog would turn out to be that of Melissa Barthelemy, a New York prostitute who was last seen alive on July 12th, 2009 outside her apartment in the Bronx. She reportedly had a Craigslist date arranged with a john on Long Island, a date the authorities are fairly certain she kept because later that night when her phone was used to access her voicemail, it pinged off a tower on Long Island.
About a week after she disappeared, Melissa’s teenage sister Amanda got a call from Melissa’s phone, but it was not her sister calling. On the other end was a man, soft-spoken with a controlled manner of speech and disgusting, abhorrent things to say. Details about the way Melissa had been killed, sexual talk, all with the apparent intent of insulting and terrifying her family. In one call, the killer admitted killing Melissa, and in another he hinted that he knew where Amanda lived, and he might come for her next. In total, he would call 8 times from Melissa’s phone before the calls stopped coming.
With a police tap on Melissa’s phone, the calls were traced to locations in Manhattan… Times Square, the Port Authority, and the Empire State Building. The caller hung up before the calls could be traced, and appeared to know how long he could safely stay on the phone and still evade capture. In a 2011 interview with 48 Hours, the attorney for Melissa’s family, Steve Cohen, said he believes the man who made the phone calls was in his late-20s to late-30s and is a white male. The police have said they believe the man who made the calls is the man who killed Melissa.
If the man on the phone was actually the Long Island Serial Killer, then he must be counted among the psychopaths who enjoy a narcissistic sense of superiority and harbor a reckless need to taunt victims and the law with phone calls, like The Zodiac, The Golden State Killer, and BTK.
The other three victims were identified as Maureen Brainard Barnes, Amber Costello, and Megan Waterman. With Barthelemy, these four women would become known as the Gilgo Four, and of the four, Maureen Brainard-Barnes was the first to disappear, on July 9th, 2007.
A single mother, Maureen was about to be evicted from her home in Connecticut, and she traveled to Manhattan to set up encounters with johns she met on Craigslist so she could make the rent. She vanished into the night.
Megan Waterman disappeared June 6, 2010 and was last seen leaving a Long Island hotel. She left behind a four year old daughter.
It was September 2nd, 2010 when Amber Costello disappeared. She came from a troubled background of dysfunction and addiction and her roommate would later tell 48 Hours when she disappeared, nobody in her family even bothered to report her missing. According to the roommate’s account, Amber’s final encounter was with a man who called her 3 or 4 times on the day she disappeared and offered her $1500 if she would spend the night. The payment would be considerably more than her regular rate. She went on the date and inexplicably left her phone and purse behind. She was never seen alive again.
When the Gilgo Four were discovered in December 2010 it left little doubt in anyone’s mind that a serial killer was operating on Long Island, and yet, Shannan Gilbert had still not been found.
More Victims Discovered
Three months later, in March 2011, police discovered six more victims in the area.
- Jessica Taylor, an escort who vanished in 2003. She was dismembered.
- The head, right foot and hands of an unidentified female who would come to be known as Jane Doe #6.
- A baby girl, found not far from Jane Doe #6. A toddler, around two years old. She was initially believed to be the child of Jane Doe #6.
- An Asian man dressed in women’s clothes.
- an unidentified female skull
- and a bag of bones from another female victim.
All found in the brush along the shore of the Jones Beach barrier island.
Now, true crime sleuth… if you’ve consumed a voluminous quantity of true crime stories, as so many of us have, you probably recognize there are some conclusions that can be drawn…
One, we can be almost certain that whomever is responsible for the murders on Long Island is exceedingly comfortable in the area. You could even say he is likely a resident, because organized serial killers almost always prey in an area they are familiar with. There are always exceptions of course, but in many, many instances, serial killers stalk their home regions.
Two, the killer views sex workers as low-risk victims due to their occupation. Serial killers view sex workers as sub-human. Killers like Gary Ridgway and Samuel Little targeted sex workers for a number of reasons. They believed law enforcement would not investigate as thoroughly because sex workers often lack close family ties, are frequently addicts, and are prone to disappear on their own for periods of time. They believed the disappeara nce of a sex worker would be more difficult to investigate, and considered a low-priority. And in this case, the Long Island Serial Killer was right, because as far as we knew when these bodies were being discovered in 2010 and 11, he had been killing for at least 7 or 8 years, undiscovered. We would find out later this killer was considerably busier than that, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
At this point in the story we have ten bodies discovered on Jones Beach Island, yet none of them are Shannan Gilbert, the missing woman who spawned the search in the first place. And then, on December 7, 2011 there was a development… police discovered blue jeans and a pair of shoes in the marsh. Days later, a year and a half after she disappeared, Shannan Gilbert’s body was discovered, little more than skeletal remains, not far from Oak Beach, where she was last seen, and just down the road from where the bodies of the other ten victims were discovered.
Nobody would fault you for assuming the discovery of Shannan Gilbert’s body, a stone’s throw from the remains of 10 victims of the Long Island Serial Killer, made her victim number 11, but surprisingly, there is some doubt as to whether she was actually a victim of homicide. That’s right. There are those who believe Shannan Gilbert was just an escort with a family history of mental illness, and it might just be an uncanny coincidence that she met her end in the same neighborhood where 10 other sex workers’ bodies were dumped.
There are a lot of theories. When you look at maps of the locations where the bodies were found, you’re prompted to ask other questions and draw intriguing conclusions to the identity of the Long Island Serial Killer. And in the absence of official statements from the authorities or the apprehension of a suspect, the court of public opinion has generated their own likely perpetrators.
In the years since 2011, revelatory evidence has been uncovered. We now know the Long Island Serial Killer has been preying on women much longer than the seven years between 2003, when Jessica Taylor disappeared, and 2010 when Shannan Gilbert went screaming into the early morning breeze on Oak Beach.
Who could have done these terrible things? How long has he been doing it? What can we learn from the placement of the remains and the timing of the killings? Why would a police chief, in charge of the investigation, decline assistance from the FBI?
If you enjoy this podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple podcasts because we’ll explore all of those questions and more in the next episode of of Tales of True Crime, part two in a multipart series on the Long Island Serial Killer.
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[music] Devastation and Revenge, Stay The Course and Sovereign Quarter by Kevin MacLeod Incompetech.com. Creative Commons License via FilmMusic.io
[feature photo] Melanie Wupperman courtesy Pexels.com
[Sources]
CBS 48 Hours, July 20, 2013
Fox News, December 15, 2016
Rolling Stone, Dec 15 2016
Slate, July 9 2013
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker
News Day, June 11th, 2011
New York Post, April 10th, 2011
Psychology Today, April 7th, 2014
