Lost Girls Part 12

"And G.o.d forbid," she said. "But it'd be better than living my life like this every day. I'd rather be dead than have to live the rest of my life every single day like this."

"She's gotta be there someplace," Dormer said. "Or parts of her, at this point."

It was Monday, December 12, six days into the search, and the commissioner had agreed to see me in his wood-paneled office in Yaphank to discuss the case. As he talked, teams of cops thirty miles away were searching the marsh for Shannan. They knew the window of opportunity was closing, that they had to find her before the tide came in and water bubbled up into the marsh again. Dormer strained to explain why she hadn't turned up yet. "You know, she's been out there for over a year and a half, two summers, heading into the second winter," he said. "It's a wild area, swampy. People don't go in there. You need a machete to get through this stuff."

His chief of detectives, Dominick Varrone, was on his way-Varrone was the details man, while Dormer was the big-picture guy-but while we were waiting, Dormer took the opportunity to tell me why he thought Shannan's death was accidental. "Where she went in, it's like a little path. I was down there, you could make it through there. So she went in, and now you're in that area, disoriented." The things of Shannan's that they'd found weren't far from the little path. That made Dormer think she'd headed in there and hadn't come out. "But it's very difficult to find anything in there. A lot of animals in there, muskrats and that kinda thing. A lot of wildlife in there that would obviously feast on the flesh."

Dormer sounded so certain. But the next second, he shrugged and said it was just a theory. "If you've been in this business for a while, you start to get a sense," he said. "You can pick out what's real and what's not. They don't teach this in college. It comes through life experience from dealing with this stuff, dealing with people, and dealing with investigations. And looking at it logically, keeping an open mind-always keeping an open mind. I say that all the time, 'Never close your mind on something, never throw something out.' I always keep it there. Keep it on the table. You may have to go back to it. You know, investigations evolve as you move forward."

Why did they go back to the marsh after all this time? Dormer credited John Mallia, the cop who found the first four Gilgo bodies. Mallia, Dormer said, "had already searched the area there, but there was a lot of water and we really couldn't get a good search. In fact, he had told the guys, 'I think we should go back.' " With Varrone still not here, Dormer decided to clear up a lot of gossip about the case, starting with the rumors about a second person at Brewer's house. He said they had no indication that anyone besides Shannan and Brewer were inside. He mentioned the twenty-three-minute 911 call, noting that Shannan got switched away from Suffolk County when she couldn't say exactly where she was. Once the police got the 911 calls from Coletti and Barbara Brennan, he said, they arrived "within eighteen minutes." And he scoffed at the rumor that the killer had special knowledge that only a cop would have. Anyone who watched SVU or Criminal Minds, he said, would know anything this killer knew about using disposable cell phones and avoiding detection.

Dormer detailed how he came to believe all the others had the same killer. "Maybe the killer evolved," he said. "Maybe he didn't go through the trouble of dismembering them now. The experts tell us that that happens. They evolve over time. So you put all these things together, and it looks like one person." He saw more circ.u.mstantial evidence in the fact that five sets of remains still hadn't been identified. "If a young woman from college went missing from the shopping mall, their parents would report them missing. And they would put them in the database. The fact that the others are not in there is an indication to me that they were estranged from their families, n.o.body missed them, and therefore they didn't go into the database. Which would indicate that they're probably s.e.x workers."

Dormer, in other words, had no special knowledge about these victims. He was playing the averages-working from a set of accepted a.s.sumptions made by many people in law enforcement about who typically goes missing and who gets murdered by serial killers. University of Illinois criminologist Steve Egger, author of a popular 2002 study called The Killers Among Us, has a.s.serted that nearly 78 percent of female victims of serial murderers are prost.i.tutes. That finding does not seem to have been replicated in any other research, but it's become received wisdom. Dormer no doubt a.s.sumed that in general, prost.i.tutes who are murdered by serial killers aren't known to be missing until their bodies are discovered, and sometimes not even then; often the killer has to identify his victims and guide the police to the remains. In the case of Was.h.i.+ngton's Green River killer, Indiana University criminology professor Kenna Quinet has found that eleven of the forty-eight victims-or 23 percent-were so-called missing missing: victims with no active missing-person case. Faced with a string of bodies along a beach, Dormer decided to work with the a.s.sumption that they, too, were missing missing.

None of that explained the toddler. "It's particularly puzzling," Dormer said. "Because even if the mother was in the s.e.x business, somebody would know that she had a toddler. But people that I've talked to in the business tell me these girls move around a lot. They're in New York two weeks, they go to Atlantic City, Vegas, Florida, Buffalo. So they're moving around all the time, a lot of them. And so they go missing, and n.o.body notices."

What really convinced Dormer that the victims were prost.i.tutes targeted by the same killer was the low probability that two killers would dump in the same spot. Then again, it could be an unusually good spot. The more he thought about it, the more Dormer couldn't see any possibility other than one killer. "Do they have a society of serial killers that meet once a month, and they sit in the diner in the back room, and they say, 'Where are you dumping the bodies this month?' And they say, 'Oh, well, Ocean Parkway, down near Gilgo Beach'? I don't think we have that. They don't usually work in pairs, either. They're individuals-psychopathic, the whole bit."

He was all but certain that Shannan was not one of the killer's victims. "The MO is different," he said. "The driver drives her out there. Brewer's very open that he contacted her through Craigslist. He makes no bones about that, it's what he does." The others, he said, "were strictly one-on-one contact. There was no john involved, no driver involved, that we know of. All these gals were contacted by the killer."

That was when Varrone walked in, a grim, guarded figure with receding hair and a bushy mustache. Varrone talked about the marsh. "It's a ma.s.sive search," he said, "and it's a search that we really couldn't do earlier, because of the amount of water in here." Had there really been enough water for her to drown? "Well, she was exhausted, she was up all night," he said. "You talk about cocaine psychosis-she could have just succ.u.mbed to exhaustion, and she could have drowned in six inches of water."

Then Varrone surprised me by saying that at first, he hadn't believed Shannan was hysterical enough to run into the marsh. "Despite the fact that she was acting irrational, she was rational enough to be running apparently to houses that were well lit," he said. "Some people have cocaine psychosis, and they jump into a lake or something. But we didn't think she was irrational enough to go into here. But apparently, she did."

He talked about the killer of the others. "First of all, he probably makes them an offer they can't refuse. Like we speculated he'll pay the whole night-a significant amount. And with certain demands, he doesn't want to be interrupted." Varrone thought it was strange that Amber had left her cell phone behind. "It's probably the demand that he has made on some of the victims." And then Varrone came close to blaming the victims. "And this guy-this killer-is making them an offer that they find very hard to resist. And greed gets the best of them. In fact, most of them are in the business that they're in because it's an easy way to make money, and because they're greedy."

Not the most compa.s.sionate or PR-friendly thing for him to say about the victims of the department's most famous unsolved mystery. But Varrone, like Dormer, was a lame duck. It's customary for all the chiefs to leave with their commissioner, and he didn't seem at peace with that. There was an edge to Varrone's comments-irritation at, if nothing else, the pressure brought by the families. As he talked, it was clear that he didn't have a high opinion of them, either. "In a high-profile case, it becomes difficult," Varrone said, "because everybody is pounding on their doors for information. They're not sophisticated enough. After a while, you could almost see-I don't want to pick on one family-but some of the family members start doing their hair and dressing up. They rise to the spotlight. And they criticize us."

With Mari in particular, he'd been reminded of another famous case he worked on long ago, the 1992 kidnapping of nine-year-old Katie Beers in Bay Sh.o.r.e, Long Island. The girl's mother, Marilyn Beers, "was a taxicab driver," Varrone said, smiling at the memory. "And then she got her hair all done up."

Dormer chuckled.

It was time to go. Varrone left first; he was heading to the marsh. On his way out, I asked about Hackett. "He's somebody we've taken a look at, and we continue to," he said.

When Varrone was gone, Dormer answered, too. "He's a kook," he said. "Have you met him?"

I said yes.

"Does he look like he could commit murder?" Dormer asked rhetorically. "No, he doesn't." But then he caught himself. "Unless he did."

His smile was unreadable. Or rather, it could be read any number of ways.

The bones-an almost fully intact skeleton-were found on the far side of the marsh, about a quarter mile from Shannan's belongings. The police didn't wait for a medical report. The metal plate in the jaw gave them all they needed. Mari got the call early in the morning. And at eleven-thirty A.M. on December 13-almost a year to the day after the discovery of the first four bodies-the police announced that they'd found what they believed were Shannan's remains.

They found her on the far side of the marsh, about as far from where they found her belongings as she could be. The remains were close to the southern edge of Ocean Parkway, surprisingly, which brought her a little closer to the other victims. Even though Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber were dumped on the northern side, it was possible that Shannan had been dumped off the side of the road like the others-at least as possible as her clawing her way through a quarter mile of marsh before dying.

The inconsistencies didn't faze Dormer. When he spoke to the press, he doubled down on the theory that Shannan wasn't a murder victim-that she'd died after collapsing in the marsh. "It appeared she was heading toward the parkway, toward the lighting on the causeway," he said. Why were her belongings found so far away from her? "That's explainable," Dormer said, "because she's, you know, hysterical. And she's discarding her possessions as she moves along . . . Her jeans could have come off from running in that environment. And that is a possibility."

Dormer was out on his own. Within hours, a former chief medical examiner from New York named Michael Baden, who once worked in Suffolk County, was telling reporters how absurd it was to think that a woman who weighed not much more than a hundred pounds could thrash her way through a marsh that the police were afraid to walk into. "The circ.u.mstances are very impressive that the mother is right and she was murdered," Baden said.

Soon after that, the DA, Thomas Spota, tossed a bucket of water on Dormer's other theory: that the rest of the victims all were killed by one person. While Spota allowed that everyone involved in the case believed the first four bodies were the work of one killer, he said the others had displayed gruesome tendencies that were all over the map. He also suggested that Dormer had been off the reservation with his theory all along. "I don't think it's healthy for us to be talking about a single-killer theory," Spota said. "[Dormer] has never mentioned it to the prosecutor and, to my knowledge, none of the homicide investigators who are a.s.signed to the Gilgo investigation."

Some of his motivation was political. Spota was a foe of Dormer's boss, Steve Levy. Spota hated the way that Levy and Dormer had gutted the police budget, and his investigation into possible campaign-spending improprieties had helped convince Levy not to run for another term. Still, any time a district attorney and police commissioner openly clash over a high-profile unsolved case, an investigation can seem compromised. It was almost as if, by floating two conflicting theories, they were giving a gift to any future defense lawyer handling the Gilgo case at trial. Which might have explained why the incoming interim commissioner, Edward Webber, would announce that the department no longer was pus.h.i.+ng any theory of the Gilbert case or any of the Gilgo Beach cases. "The theories are open," he'd say. "There's no fixed theories at the moment."

Mari's family and friends couldn't stop picking apart what Dormer had said about Shannan's death. Would a crazy person call 911? That's not a psychotic break, they said, that's genuine terror. How could she be crazy enough to pull off her jeans in the marsh, yet rational enough to keep 911 on the phone for twenty-three minutes? They started teasing out other explanations, conspiracies to explain everything. It seemed to them too coincidental that the police would suddenly look there and find Shannan months after not searching there at all. Some said the body must have been placed there recently. How else could the FBI Black Hawk helicopter not have spotted her on its flights earlier in the year?

And they all marveled at the most poignant coincidence: that Shannan's body was found on the same day that the rest of the families were convening at Oak Beach for the first-anniversary vigil.

Missy and Lorraine had been at Oak Beach for two days already, camping out in the rain, trying to get press attention. Missy had put her family's forty-six-inch Sharp LCD TV up for sale to pay for the trip. But that day, hours after the police announced they'd found Shannan, the fog and misty rain had cleared just in time.

It was bright but cold and windy when the reporters and camera crews started rolling into the parking lot. Kritzia joined the others, a good distance away from the media. Michele Kutner, the girls' biggest Facebook fan, was with them, telling everyone that there was no way Shannan just drowned. She and two others had spent a few days determining the exact site of each victim, then marking each location with spray paint on the side of Ocean Parkway so that they could erect four crosses before the vigil. Each family made their own except Kim. Melissa Wright in Wilmington made a beautiful white cross for Amber and had it s.h.i.+pped there for the occasion.

As they all waited for Mari, they were crying, embracing, and marveling at the coincidence. The reporters, watching from a distance, weren't quite as amazed. They'd been coming to Oak Beach for a long time, and cynicism was taking over. "I can't believe they're doing all this for a wh.o.r.e," said one member of a TV crew.

Kim turned up, too, as promised. She brought a friend, a woman who was helping her stay sober. But she had dark circles under her eyes, and the tears never stopped flowing. When Missy saw Kim, they hugged, but then Missy looked at her like she was a dead woman walking.

Gus Coletti came by. Michele Kutner broke away from comforting the families and gave him a hug. "Where's Hackett?" she said.

"He's in my living room," Gus said.

Kutner took that to mean that Hackett was hiding from reporters. But a little while later, Hackett came out, too. Kutner went over to him. "Thank G.o.d they found her. Aren't you happy?" she said.

"Yeah," Hackett said, smiling a little. "You guys thought I did it."

Michele saw his hands shaking.

Finally, Mari arrived, wearing a black leather jacket and sungla.s.ses, her blond hair flowing. She locked into an embrace with Missy and Lorraine as the camera crews closed in on them.

Kim refused to get up with the other three. "I'm not doing that s.h.i.+t," she said. "I f.u.c.kin' hate these people. I'm here for my sister."

Soon there wasn't room for her, anyway. The other three were frozen in their hug for minutes on end as the reporters crushed in, snapping away. A minute or two later, they gathered behind a collection of microphones, Mari in the center, Missy to her left in a plaid flannel jacket, Lorraine to her right in a blue parka. Mari's arms were around the others, clutching them for support. There was more media today than ever before-more than the June balloon release, more than any of Mari's guerrilla attacks on Oak Beach.

Mari spoke. "First of all, I'd like to say this is a sad but yet happy moment. Today marks the one-year anniversary that the bodies were found, and I want to be here to support the families and to be with them. And as much as today may be Shannan, it's not just Shannan. It's all of us. Every one of us and our families and friends and everyone that was affected by this." She trailed off. "It's too hard," she finally added. "I can't even talk. I don't even have words to say how I'm feeling right now." Then she looked to either side, at Missy and Lorraine. "But I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," said Missy. They all hugged.

"Don't be sorry," said Lorraine. "Like we told you, Mari, don't ever be sorry."

"And just like you're here to support our girls," said Missy, "we're here to support Shannan. And we've been here since the day that we found out that Shannan was a part of our girls. And we won't ever leave. Please believe that."

The three embraced again.

The reporters were surrounding them, video cameras in the back, photographers down low in front. When the embrace lasted longer than a few seconds, the reporters took that to mean it was time for questions. The first question was the one everyone wanted to ask: "Do you believe it was an accident?"

"No, no," Mari said, running a hand through her hair. "I will not believe that, for the simple fact that Shannan was a strong woman."

The next questions baited Mari into unloading on the police, and she was more than happy to oblige. She wondered why the police seemed so certain it wasn't murder when they hadn't even conducted an autopsy. And she blasted the entire investigation as too little too late. She ripped into the 911 call again-the time it took the police to come after her call. "I believe that when she was initially reported missing that they didn't care. They treated her like her 'job' and not as a person and as a human being. And I think if they started to search early and continued it longer than they did the first time, we would have found her sooner, and this case would be so much further ahead than it is."

Another question, posed tentatively by a reporter in the back: "Is there any thought that this guy is . . . uh . . . is still . . . doing it? I mean-"

Lorraine spoke up. "I almost a hundred percent guarantee that this man is sitting in his home right now, watching what is going on on the TV, getting the biggest thrill of his life, seeing what he has done to these families."

There was one last question. "Mari, if the autopsy proves the police's theory"-if it indicated that she'd fallen and drowned, as opposed to sustaining any obvious wounds-"do you feel like Shannan had a purpose to solve this case?"

"Oh, yes, absolutely," Mari said. "She brought loved ones home."

"She brought us together," said Missy. "Because this is our family, you know? Our bond."

A few police cars led an SUV filled with family members to visit the sites along Ocean Parkway where the bodies were found. Counting Kritzia, at least one person who knew and loved each of the girls had come to visit the crosses. Mari came, too. On the way there, it was lost on none of them that they were tracing the killer's route and making the same stops.

These were their only few minutes alone, without the media on top of them. In the car, Mari was subdued, fuming about everything that she'd been put through, and now this. She whispered that there was no way Shannan had died by accident.

Missy asked Kim, "Where've you been?"

Kim's answer chilled her: "I'm trying to catch our girls' killer." Missy didn't know what to say after that.

Kritzia went to work on her. "I know you think this is never going to happen to you," she told Kim, "because you think you know what you're doing, but guess what, your sister thought like that, too." Kim just looked at her.

At each stop, they crouched down in the bramble, laid flowers, and tied a bright red heart-shaped balloon. Missy was the only one who didn't cry. She'd been there for two days, and mourned her sister for four and a half years, and was all cried out. Not so for Kritzia; when she saw Melissa's cross, she threw herself to the ground. "Get up," Lorraine said. "What are you doing? Get up."

When Kritzia finally stood up and looked around, something clicked. This stretch of Ocean Parkway was like a little netherworld. n.o.body lived there, and there were no stores. It was the perfect place to dump a body: no signs, no streetlights. That was why he felt so confident that he could throw the bodies right there, she thought, right in the street.

Call Joe Jr. biased, call him vindictive, but he had been right all along about the marsh. As Flukeyou, he spent the next several days crowing about it online. They found Shannan's personal items right behind the doc's house, he wrote.

The Hackett theories abounded on Websleuths. Some commenters said he was completely innocent. Others said he was a calculated killer who called Mari after the murder in order to lull her into a false sense of security and give his partners more time to hide the body. Others split the difference, saying Hackett was just a patsy who tried to respond to a hysterical, incoherent girl, and when Shannan panicked and ran into the brush behind the house, he was left with her belongings and forced to stash them in the marsh. Still others said he gave her a sedative that interacted badly with the drugs she'd taken earlier, leaving Hackett with a corpse on his hands.

Now Joe Jr. was waiting for the police to connect the dots to Hackett, saying it was only a matter of time before the police had him in cuffs. They only get one shot at this punk in court, he posted, so they're taking their time to build a case. He built new theories all the time online, as Flukeyou. Shannan was placed there after she died . . . They can put a man on the moon, but take eighteen months to find a girl in a field? . . . Barbara H was not home the morning that SG disappeared . . .

The day after the vigil, Mari was in anguish. Not knowing hurts but knowing really hurts!! she posted in Shannan's Facebook group. As Missy, Lorraine, and others tried to support her, Mari worried about what the autopsy might reveal. She started doing damage control preemptively. If there are any chemicals in Shannan's body, and if they are NOT "street" drugs, then who gave what to her? She called the cops "liars or stupid," concluding, I KNOW Shannan WAS Murdered!!!! And she made a pledge: Shannan will have Justice AND so will Maureen-Megan-Melissa-Amber!! If NOT by $ than by they way the SCPD CHANGE how they treat escorts!!!!

Two days later, she was even madder. F Dormer!!!!!!!!!! she wrote. Let me go running, and see how fast my jeans fall off my body!! Give me a F*in Break!!!

On Facebook, Mari posted an ill.u.s.tration of Jesus holding a photograph of Shannan. Others in her group posted photos of Shannan as an angel, and angels holding Shannan, and Shannan ascending to heaven. Johanna Gonzalez got a new tattoo of an eye, modeled after one of Shannan's wide anime eyes. Another friend suggested that Mari could be the next John Walsh. Still another called her "Mama Mari."

A week after the body was found, Mari convened another press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. Dormer, days from retirement, shrugged when he was told about it. "The thing'll never die down," he said.

Mari asked all her friends to wear blue in honor of Shannan. When she emerged from her car, she was head to toe in bluish-purple velour. Another car pulled up with her, and out stepped Mari's new lawyer, a Long Island plaintiff's attorney named John Ray. A notorious dandy, Ray was wearing a derby hat and a plaid vest with a matching suit and a long plaid overcoat. As a final flourish, he was carrying a gnarled corkscrew-shaped s.h.i.+llelagh. Following Ray's sartorial lead, his younger a.s.sociate was wearing a well-tailored brown suit with his own matching derby.

Ray's remarks were stagey, almost Sharpton-esque, designed for maximum impact. He likened the Suffolk homicide squad to something out of Mayberry, and Dormer's investigation to a Pink Panther movie. He said the police had dropped the ball with Shannan from the very start. He tore into the 911 call. He said that it didn't matter if the autopsy said she'd drowned-who had drowned her?

As he talked, his a.s.sociate circulated copies of a letter Ray had sent the police on behalf of Mari Gilbert and the other victims' families. The letter called upon the police to hand the case, which Ray considered hopelessly botched, to the FBI. It closed by saying that if the FBI didn't take over the case, Mari would sue.

Then Mari spoke. Her sentences were clear and short, perfect newspaper quotes. "Ask yourself what you would do if this was your daughter," she said. She was more composed than she'd been the day they'd found Shannan. Now she was resolved, a crusader. She took just one question: Did she believe Shannan was a victim of the serial killer? "Yes," she said, her head jerking forward.

The news crews were breaking down their equipment and packing when Gus Coletti pulled up in his car. He was ready to shoot the breeze with reporters, as usual. Before he could get out, Joe Jr. approached the driver's side of the car and started screaming into Gus's face. "You're the mayor of Oak Beach! There were two 911 calls that night! Why didn't you save the security tape!"

It was quite a sight: young, handsome Joe, completely unhinged, shrieking at a stooped old man, sitting in a car. Mari's lawyer was upstaged. The news crews rushed over. Joe kept shouting. Gus gave as good as he got: "The only thing wrong with Oak Beach is you!"

Gus couldn't drive off-there were too many people around it-but he made a show of pulling out his cell phone and calling the police. "I don't have to put up with that," he grumbled.

Joe was still yelling as the reporters followed him. "What are you gonna do now, Mayor? Are you gonna do your poor-little-old-man act? You're the mayor of Oak Beach! What about that tape! Why are you covering up for the doctor!"

Missy Cann watched the press conference on the Web from her home in Connecticut. She had trouble understanding what she was watching. All she'd known ahead of time was that Mari was going to announce she had a new lawyer. "He hasn't talked to any of us," she said.

Mari had acted unilaterally. None of the other families had been told a thing about her new legal strategy. No one had shown them the letter to the police that John Ray supposedly had written on their behalf. The request to get the FBI involved particularly threw Missy. "The FBI already is a.s.sisting. If Suffolk County wasn't doing their job, the FBI would have already stepped in." Missy thought criticizing the police was a misguided strategy-that the police knew more about the case than they were letting on, and for all anyone knew, they might not be bungling it at all. The best guess Missy could make was that the tactic was just a lot of posturing. "It's a little premature. I'd have waited until the autopsy came back before I said this."

Once John Ray's office pa.s.sed Missy a copy of the letter, she became furious. " 'On behalf of the s.e.x worker murder victims'?" she said a few weeks later, quoting the letter. "So Shannan is Shannan, and the other girls are s.e.x workers? I never talk to that man for a day, and he's working on behalf of my sister?" She couldn't believe what Mari had done, how she had decided to stick a thumb in the eye of the people investigating the case. The police, Missy said, arrived ten or twenty minutes after Barbara Brennan called, not counting Shannan's call as the start of the response time. "They did way better than the police did for us or the other girls. She should be a little grateful." If you thought about it, she said, Shannan had more resources than any of the other girls. She'd been treated better, too. "They didn't bring anything of Maureen's belongings to my mom or me to look at."

Missy had been holding her tongue for a while about Mari: her volatility, her vanity, her need to fight everyone who threatened to pull attention away from her. Now she was unburdening herself. She made a crack about Mari's "groupies" on Facebook, winding Mari up, feeding her ego, egging her on. She called them all "yes-men" and suggested that any dissent ended with being punished-banishment from the group. "We have to walk around eggsh.e.l.ls around her, too," Missy said, "which is kind of bulls.h.i.+t. Me and Lorraine have been avoiding her. She changes her theories more than anyone. I just try to be as supportive as I can be and go on my way. 'Cause Mari's the type of person who, if you disagree with her, she starts blasting you to everyone."

She was fed up. "Six days after Shannan is found, she gets this lawyer and goes on TV? I was talking to Lorraine, and she said, 'Sorry, but she does not act like a grieving mother.' When my mom found out, my mom talked to n.o.body. I felt the same way. I guess everyone's different, but I know I would have waited for my daughter's autopsy before saying anything. And then she switches and said she thinks Shannan is part of the serial-killer case? I think she just wants attention for Shannan. That's so sad. I'd rather just know it was an accident."

Her voice had flattened as she spoke. She was so immersed in every detail of the case that stoicism had set in. For Missy, all the questions that obsessed other people about Shannan's disappearance were not quite so mysterious. Of course Shannan died accidentally, she said. Of course she wasn't connected to the others. "I definitely don't think Shannan got murdered by the same serial killer," she said. After repeating some of Dormer's arguments-none of the other girls had drivers; they didn't have anyone with them-she added one more: the time line of the murders. Shannan went missing after Maureen and Melissa but before Megan and Amber. If the killer got Shannan, too, Missy said, "she would have got placed in the same place, in burlap bags." The theory that the killer changed up his pattern for Shannan-pressured by her attention-getting dash through Oak Beach-didn't hold water with her.

The thickness of the brush, she suggested, could be why Shannan took off her jeans-"because they were weighing her down," she said. "You'd be surprised what a person would do to survive." Besides, she added, "I don't think anyone could put her body where it was."

Missy didn't necessarily agree there was a police screwup in Shannan's case. The 911 call had jurisdictional problems; things like that just happen. "I'm sorry, but I think this is ridiculous. They couldn't search that area because it was engulfed with water at that time. They couldn't bring dogs in. I think they did the best that they could, given the situation. They treated Shannan as their own separate case, which was good. And then they worked on the serial-killer case. But when they found these girls, they didn't just forget about Shannan. They just kept looking."

If Shannan's death had been an accident or a crazy coincidence, Missy thought the serial killer was a john who was a regular to all four of the girls. "I think that he knew them, gave them trust," she said. "Amber was very experienced in that field, and she obviously knew this person very well. She let her guard down."

What upset Missy more than anything was the disagreement between Dormer and Spota. "It makes you wonder how close they are to catching this guy if they don't know if it's one or more killers." The only certainty, she said, was that the first four girls to be found were connected. Until someone could prove to Missy that Shannan was connected, too, she said, she'd believe the police and not Mari.

As a new year began, the disagreement created a schism-Mari and her Facebook followers in one camp, Missy and Lorraine in another. Missy started planning Stunts 4 Justice, a stunt-bike show, in collaboration with the old motorcycle club of her late brother, Will, to raise money for the Crimestoppers reward for the case. She scrambled to get local DJs to attend. She wanted to raise five thousand dollars. As soon as it was announced, Mari made it known that she was hurt that only the four girls' names were being mentioned in the publicity, not Shannan's.

Missy didn't know how to respond. "I really feel like crying," she said. "My sister got murdered. I'm just trying to do one positive thing, and I hear it's wrong. How is it wrong? Just because Shannan was found, I can't jump up and say the killer did this, too. It's not like I can change things because someone's acting like a child and kicking and screaming. It's too much drama."

On Facebook, Lorraine showed off a photo of her latest tattoo: four interlocking hearts, each a different color, each with an initial inside-M, M, M, and A. There was no S. When Mari said she was angry about this, too, Lorraine responded dryly that when Shannan's death was proved a murder, she would add the S.

On January 14, Mari and Sherre returned to Oak Beach for another press conference. No one from any of the other families attended. "It's been a very hard eighteen months," Mari said. "Half the battle is over. We still have another battle ahead of us. Our worst battle, our strongest battle. But we're not gonna give up, we're gonna have faith and gonna pursue this, no matter how long it takes and no matter what it takes. To find out the truth about what happened to Shannan and to bring the killer to justice and everyone who is involved."

Mari pulled out a piece of paper. "I'd like to read this on behalf of our family and I." She looked down. " 'We are not close to accepting the loss of our daughter and our sister Shannan. We don't know if we will ever fully be well inside. How hollow we feel, lonely, sad, confused, and bitter. There will never be closure because there will be an emptiness inside. And the thought of Shannan never coming home for birthdays, holidays or births or just because, is more pain than anyone can imagine unless you've lost a child yourself.' "

A tall white cross-over twice the height of the crosses for the other four girls-had been placed in the spot in the marsh where Shannan was found. Sherre put some red flowers around the base. Mari added yellow ones. In front of the grave, they both broke down as the photographers snapped away. Mari didn't get up for the longest time. In front of a lit candle protected from the wind by gla.s.s, Mari sobbed loudly. A few days later, she posted to Facebook a photo of herself kneeling there, wailing. The caption read: THE DAY MY LIFE CHANGED FOREVER.

THE JOHN.

When Joe Brewer answers the phone, one of the first things he does is ask for money. "I mean, you can write your story," he says, "but n.o.body can write it like I can, because I lived it. And it's even more sensational than anybody's saying. That's why I've kept my mouth shut for this long."

I tell him I don't pay for interviews. Joe keeps talking anyway, for close to a half hour, his voice overrun with laughter. In fact, the more Joe talks, the more his laugh is all that I hear, coloring everything he says, a roiling, rolling, life's-a-party laugh that he means to sound coy and knowing and smooth but more often seems bafflingly out of tune with the subject he is trying hard not to discuss.

"I think it would be important for you to meet me and get a feel for the kind of guy I am," he says. "Like, I'm a huge, huge, extreme liberal. You know, I couldn't hurt, I couldn't kill, a f.u.c.kin' small mammal. The whole of who I am is so disproportionate to people's perspective of me, it's hysterical to me. So why don't you meet me and see who I am as a person."

That would be great, I say.

He talks right past me. "Yeah, what kind of human being I am and how much compa.s.sion I have for the entire human race. And any living individual." Then he second-guesses himself playfully. "I guess I would kill a mouse if I had a mouse in my house. So I can't say I wouldn't kill any mammal." He laughs. "But it's insane that I was shown as a serial killer!" He laughs again. "I don't mean to disappoint you. It's funny."

He is still living at his mother's house in West Islip. The Oak Beach place was on the market for $439,000, then reduced to $399,999, then pulled off and relisted for $375,000. Joe says he is staying in West Islip for now. "At first I thought I had to relocate. But people who knew me and knew me in this town, it's like, the one thing people who grew up in this town, the first thing people said, is of all the people, I'd be the last person on anybody's list who would ever be suspect of anything!"