Something in Joseph Brewer's house made Shannan
Gilbert think she was going to die. Maybe it was the fleeting image of some horrific
thing she was not used to seeing in the home of a john, though for a 24-year-old sex worker who
apparently turned tricks in the darkest corners of the New York metropolitan
area, it stretches the imagination to guess what such a thing could even be.
Maybe it was a violent suggestion whispered in her ear. Or maybe someone in
Brewer's house told Gilbert a story about a hired escort who steps out into the
night in Long Island and is never seen alive again.
For the growing number of us who have come to obsess over it,
and the community of online
sleuths
devoted to solving it, the mystery surrounding the perpetrator known
only as the Long Island Serial Killer is closer in atmosphere to the chthonic landscape of David Lynch's
Lost Highway than a conventional
whodunit. It's a tale replete with rumors of orgies, torture, and sadistic, sex-addicted cops. Gilbert's abrupt
disappearance from the
private coastal community of Oak Beach, New York, on the night of May 1, 2010,
released a black cloud of murder and conspiracy that seems to still hover over the sleepy suburb; when her skeletonized remains were eventually found, some 19 months later, in a pool of brackish water, it seemed to confirm what by then was obvious to anyone paying attention: Something was wrong on Long Island.
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Suffolk County Police and recruits search an area of beach near where police found human remains on April 5, 2011 in Babylon, New York. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The search for Gilbert led to the mass discovery of bodies just off Gilgo Beach,
an undeveloped coastal park in Suffolk County, New York, and evolved into an
investigation that has now lasted over half a decade, uncovering the corpses of
eight
young women. It has also
produced the body of a trans woman found with teeth missing from
her skull, a female toddler wearing hoop earrings, and unconfirmed suspicions
about
as many as seven other female victims who have never
been verified by police as being part of the same killer's spree.
All of the adult victims
who have been identified were sex workers. The majority of the
remains were found on Ocean Parkway, a dim and desolate stretch of road that
runs from the far edges of Jones Beach and into maritime oblivion.
Two torsos
were found 40 miles away in Manorville, tossed into the woods like unwanted hunks of meat.
The Long Island Serial Killer emerged as early as 1996, although no
one knew it then. Richard Dormer, the former Suffolk County
police commissioner,
says a couple found two severed female legs
wrapped in plastic
that year while taking a
stroll through Davis Park, a beach spot
on Fire
Island. When the bodies were discovered
in the bramble along Ocean Parkway in 2010, a
cop involved in the 1996 investigation called
police to recommend
running a DNA
test, which matched the legs
to a victim of the Long Island Serial Killer.
The most recent possible victim was a 31-year-old woman
of Yugoslavian origin named Natasha Jugo with a history of paranoia. In 2013, Jugo drove her Toyota Prius some 40 minutes from Queens out to Ocean
Parkway at four in the morning for unknown reasons, and, much like Shannan
Gilbert, disappeared into nothing, leaving her wallet and clothing behind. That June, three months after she vanished, a group of beachgoers spotted
Jugo's body floating motionless in the sea.
In December, local tabloids announced that the FBI had rejoined the search for the
Long Island Serial Killer. Days later, an anonymous source
alleged in
the press
that tarnished former Suffolk County Police Chief James
Burke made deliberate efforts to block the
FBI from participating in the investigation, fueling longstanding rumors of a
police cover-up.
Meanwhile, Burke
was
indicted by the feds on December
9 for
violating the civil rights of a man accused of stealing his property and
conspiring to obstruct a federal investigation into the incident. Should the
FBI succeed in nabbing the Long Island Serial Killer—or as some theorists would
have it,
killers—it will tie
together the threads of what has arguably become the most confounding murder mystery
in contemporary America.
![]()
Unmarked grave of Maureen Brainard-Barnes at St Mary's Cemetery in New London, Connecticut. Photo by Laura McClintock
No one would have ever known about the Long Island Serial Killer if not
for Shannan Gilbert, who ran through
a gated
community
in Oak Beach that May morning not far
from the unseen resting places of various other sets of female remains.
She called 9-1-1 and told the operator, "They are trying to kill me." A record of her phone call exists, but
Suffolk County District Attorney Tom Spota's office
has chosen not to
release it to the public. Spota's office declined to comment to VICE,
instead deferring questions about the investigation to the police. Those who
have listened to the tape diverge when describing Gilbert's tone. Detective
Vincent Stephan of the Suffolk County Police Department penned an op-ed to
Newsday in an effort to blunt criticism
by Gilbert's family, claiming that
her voice was calm. Dormer,
however, told VICE that Gilbert was "in distress" on the tape when he heard it
and "scared out of her mind."
The "they" in Gilbert's call, like almost everything
else
about her death, remains an enigma. No
one knows who she believed was trying to kill her, and a fair share of people doubt
that anyone ever was. Michael Pak, Gilbert's driver, had brought her to the private
seaside community of 72 houses under the auspices of entertaining just one man:
Joseph Brewer. Brewer's life in Oak Beach, by the accounts of those who knew
him, was that of
an idle middle-aged bachelor with an
appetite for paid sex. No one publicly considered him to be dangerous. He summoned
Pak at around
5 AM to escort Gilbert back to Jersey
City, where she lived, but
for some still-mysterious reason Gilbert called the police and fled,
ringing doorbells in the creeping dawn, begging someone—anyone—for help.
("I put my faith in the police," Brewer said over the phone when asked
about Gilbert for this story, before hanging up. According to Dormer, the former
police commissioner,
suspicions about Brewer were dismissed
early on in the
investigation.)
Dormer summarizes the morning Gilbert disappeared this way: After she ran from Brewer's house, she rang
the doorbell of an elderly man named Gus Coletti, now deceased, who also called
the police. Pak circled his black Ford Explorer toward her, and when he did, Gilbert
scrambled in the direction of candle-shaped electric lights positioned
along a windowsill. Those lights, according to neighbors, were part of a nearly
decade-old vigil held by a woman named Barbara Brennan, a widow who lost her
husband during the September 11 terrorist attacks. Brennan didn't answer Shannan's knocking, and instead made
two phone calls:
one to police at 5:22 AM,
and another to a neighbor she trusted, Tom Canning.
Canning, a tall, retired landscaper with a veiny, rubicund complexion
and a shock of white hair, claims to have arrived at Brennan's house with his
dog, a Weimaraner.
"There was nobody there for me to rescue," Canning recalls, staring
down at the deck of his home in Oak Beach before letting his eyes drift out to
direction of the Atlantic Ocean's soft rocking tide. "I wish I had the chance
to help her."
![]()
Gilgo Beach, Long Island, New York. The bodies of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Lynn Costello were discovered from December 11–13, 2010. Photo by Laura McClintock
Canning points away from the water and to the left of his house where
a thick carpet of reeds as tall as an adult
man stretch
out into the horizon.
"She ran into the marsh," he says, referring to the place where
Gilbert's body was found.
Other accounts diverge from Canning's. His then-20-year-old
son Justin
told the New York Post in 2010: "We saw her
footprints in the sand. She was in a panic. We thought she was on drugs."
The elder Canning denies ever having
seen footprints in the sand. His son Justin
declined an
invitation to be interviewed for this story.
Joe Scalise is a septuagenarian state park employee with eyes that
match the blue of the ocean surrounding Oak Beach, where he and his family have
lived for over four decades. He recalls an interaction he had in Canning's
driveway shortly after Hurricane Sandy,
close to a year
after police finally found the body of Gilbert. The alleged encounter surrounded
another Oak Beach resident
named Peter Hackett, a former surgeon
for
the Suffolk County Police Department and a friend of Canning's.
"Canning told me after Sandy that Dr. Hackett sedated Shannan Gilbert,"
Scalise
says. But Canning denies that Hackett had any
contact with Shannan Gilbert after she rang Brennan's doorbell. "He's crazy,"
Canning says of Scalise.
Regardless of who's telling the truth, Hackett is an important
name in this saga. Among a circle of online conspiracy buffs, he is a bigger
and more divisive celebrity than Donald Trump: Depending on whom you ask, Hackett
is either a sick, deranged killer, or a
Girardian scapegoat, a
socially awkward man with a prosthetic limb
and propensity for self-exaggeration that made him the easiest possible answer
to a community's fears.
It took months for the police to connect Gilbert's emergency call to reports
of a panic-stricken woman knocking on doors in Oak Beach. The reason for this
delay relates to a procedural failure: When the 9-1-1 operator asked Gilbert
where she was, the answer she gave, according to Dormer, was something to the
effect of "around Jones Beach." Jones Beach, a popular weekend destination for
New Yorkers who most likely know little else about Long Island not gleaned from gossip
columns about the Hamptons and
the songbook of Billy Joel, was the
most frequently mentioned destination Gilbert would have seen on
road signs as Pak's SUV approached Brewer's home. It's also a state park, which
meant that her call that morning was transferred to state, rather than local,
authorities.
To Gilbert, Ocean Parkway must have looked like a stark and forbidding
horizon of blackness, moonlight, and waves. When she died, it's fair to assume
that she had no tangible idea where she was.
![]()
Mari Gilbert, left, looks on as her lawyer John Ray speaks to the media at a news conference in Babylon, NY, Tuesday, December 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
According to Shannan Gilbert's mother, Hackett called
her
two days after her daughter's disappearance and uttered
seven words:
I run a
home for wayward girls.
Hackett denied ever calling Gilbert's mother until phone records determined that he did in fact call her—twice. Hackett
sent
two letters to 48 Hours Mystery, a documentary program
on CBS that covered
the Long
Island Serial Killer saga
back in 2011, acknowledging that he made the
calls
but denying that he ever met Shannan, took her in, or administered drugs to her.
The Gilbert family doesn't agree with his side of the story, to put it mildly.
"Dr. Hackett told Mari Gilbert that he ran a home for wayward girls,
and that Shannan was in his care," says John Ray, an attorney for the Gilbert
family. "Why would anyone do something like that?"
The Gilbert family filed a wrongful
death suit against Hackett in November 2012, claiming
that he took Shannan into his home that morning and administered drugs to her,
facilitating
her
death. Ray, an affable man with a tight,
gray ponytail, tells his version of the complex story of the Long Island Serial
Killer with the command of a great conductor tackling Mahler. He slows down to
build tension, allowing room for the listener's curiosity to trickle through
the many obscure coincidences along the way.
"I have a tremendous respect for homicide detectives," he insists from
his warm, book-lined office in Port Jefferson. "But after putting over
750
hours of work into this case, I can see that the police have been deliberate in
covering it up."
Ray has deposed most of the key players in the Shannan
Gilbert story, including Hackett and his family. He
claims that many things that should have been standard protocol in a homicide
investigation went undone, and that "many things
that shouldn't have been done were." Hackett's home,
boat, and car, Ray says, were incompletely
searched, and police have never
volunteered
whether or not the
soil underneath
the spot where Gilbert's
body was found ever got tested for particles of flesh
(to
determine whether or not she had decomposed there, or was dumped
).
The Suffolk County Police Department, when reached for comment, would
not confirm or deny any of Ray's allegations.
Michael Baden, an independent medical investigator retained
by Ray on behalf of the
Gilbert family, told me Gilbert's hyoid
bone, a small, curved part of the throat, was found
deformed. He claims that could have been caused by strangulation, but without
access to Gilbert's soft tissue, which according to Baden's findings
was
boiled away soon after the initial autopsy, he was unable to make a definitive
determination of her cause of death. While frustrating, Baden notes that the
boiling away of soft tissue
post-autopsy is a fairly commonplace identifying procedure,
and—though he feels it was unnecessary here—not indicative of an effort to obscure evidence on the part of authorities.
But Baden suspects that Gilbert was
murdered for additional reasons beyond the
deformity of her
hyoid bone. He says Gilbert's
body was found belly-up, unusual for
a drowning victim, and
that her belongings
were strewn around her, suggesting her corpse was carried to the spot where it
was found.
Ray highlights that Hackett's phone call to Mari Gilbert matches a
known tendency of the Long Island Serial Killer to taunt the family members of
his victims. Amanda Barthelemy, the younger sister of Melissa Barthelemy—who
disappeared in 2009 and was discovered during the search for Gilbert as a
skeleton wrapped in burlap along the bramble of Ocean Parkway in December 2010—was
tormented by the killer in a
series of violent and sexually explicit phone calls made from
locations in and around Midtown Manhattan. Ray also notes that the second call,
made by Hackett five days after Gilbert's initial disappearance, bounced off of
a cell tower in New Jersey, a place Ray says Hackett denied traveling to that
week.
When deposed, Hackett allegedly volunteered that
he owned
a DEA license marked with an X, a designation that would
have
enabled him to prescribe certain opiates.
Hackett
also allegedly admitted to Ray that he
regularly consumed a cocktail of
self-prescribed opiates
and other drugs. Stories of opiate
addiction are common in Oak Beach, and Scalise
and his family
claim that Hackett was using his access to a prescription pad to subsist
as a quasi–drug dealer after
allegedly being fired by the county.
Still, despite Ray's massive file of interviews, and the litany of amateur sleuths convinced
of his guilt, questions remain about Hackett's involvement: If police
did make an effort to cover-up the
identity of the Long Island Serial Killer, as many believe, why would they
protect such a man?
Hackett certainly wouldn't have been saved from arrest by the authorities: According to Ray, he said under oath that he was fired
by Suffolk County for misusing a work cell phone and claiming to be at work
when he wasn't actually there. After the tragedy of Flight 800, when a plane
burst into a fireball, scattering
the remains of 230 passengers across Suffolk County in 1996, Hackett
embarrassed the department by embellishing his role in the investigation to local
papers. He was, to quote one officer of the Suffolk County Police Department
who prefers to remain anonymous, "a squirrel"—a man who would be easy enough to
arrest without causing embarrassment.
Finally, Hackett's wife, son, and daughter were living at his house in
Oak Beach at the time of Gilbert's disappearance, and would likely have to
somehow be complicit in his supposedly murderous double life.
That
would present a tortuous front for a family to maintain for so many years.
Hackett's public persona has evolved over the five-plus
years since Gilbert first vanished from Oak Beach.
48 Hours Mystery spoke to Hackett outside of
his home, where he denied remembering the phone call to Gilbert's mother.
Journalist Robert Kolker, whose 2013
book
Lost Girls centers on the often sad circumstances through which the victims of
the Long Island Serial Killer fell into a life of sex work, was invited into
Hackett's Oak Beach home
in December of 2011,
several months after the interview with 48 Hours, and
the doctor denied his involvement in Gilbert's disappearance at
length.
But somewhere along the way, Hackett stopped talking. Crime Watch
Daily, a syndicated investigative newsmagazine series, followed Hackett to his
car in December after he completed one of Ray's depositions: In the clip, Hackett
appears to
fake a heart attack after being asked whether or not he was responsible for the deaths of
the women found on Ocean Parkway. Shortly after clutching his chest and falling
to the ground, the doctor hops into his car,
closes the door, and
makes the
sign of the cross in
the falling dusk.
Hackett, like others touched by Gilbert's disappearance that night,
including Barbara Brennan and
Joseph Brewer, moved away from Oak Beach,
perhaps in an effort to put distance between his name and a story
that never seems to fade away. I reached out to his lawyer, but the calls
weren't returned. Hackett supposedly lives in Fort Myers, Florida, now, and a trip to a
different Long Island address in a town called Point Lookout, belonging
to Hackett's wife Barbara, turned up a younger woman at the door
last
month.
When asked if either Peter Hackett or his wife could be
reached for comment on this story, the woman glared sharply.
"They don't want to talk to you," she said, and slammed the door.
![]()
Gilgo Beach, Long Island. Photo by Laura McClintock
Richard Dormer just wants to clarify one important detail.
"The FBI came back," he
says, nodding his pale forehead over a cardboard cup of black coffee. "They
aren't coming for the first time—they came
back."
There is an old-fashioned charm to the former Suffolk County police commissioner,
spiced by his Irish accent, a remnant from when he immigrated to America back in 1958. Dormer maintains the same theories he held about the
investigation that he did at the time he led it: Gilbert got high, freaked out,
ran into the marsh, and drowned. The bodies that have been found through the
years were the work of one killer. The fact that Gilbert was a sex worker, and died
next to the burial ground of so many others like her, is simply a coincidence.
"She was a skeleton," Dormer claims of
the toxicology report he says found no traces of drugs in Gilbert's system.
"There was nothing much there to test."
The former cop is cagey about the way his successor handled the
case, but is determined to reassure me—and the public—that he did
everything he could to solve
it.
"I'm not going to talk about Burke," Dormer says. "But I do have
serious concerns that this investigation suddenly went dormant."
Former Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke, who rose through the
ranks around the same time Hackett was a fixture there, is running low on
defenders. His trial is set to begin this March for an incident in which he
allegedly burst into an interrogation room and beat a suspect raw for stealing
a duffel bag from his car. Inside the duffel bag, the thief
claimed to find a
stash of
sex toys, cigars, and hardcore porn. Burke allegedly threatened the thief by saying
that he would
give him a hot shot, a slang term for murdering a man by injecting him with a fatal dose
of tainted heroin. Burke also once carried on an ongoing romantic relationship with
a convicted sex worker and drug dealer by the name of Lowrita Rickenbacker who
committed her offenses in the precinct where he was a supervisor.
Burke's
violent backstory fuels concerns that he deliberately slowed down the
investigation of the Long Island Serial Killer after taking it over from Dormer.
The man entered law enforcement as a witness in one of the most infamous murder
cases in Long Island history: the John Pius trial of 1979. During the
proceedings,
a 14-year-old Burke
testified against
his own friends, who had sadistically bullied and murdered a 13-year-old boy by
stuffing rocks down his throat. Many observers have questioned the degree to
which the younger Burke might have been complicit in the horrific crime, given
that he failed to intervene
when it was happening. The young prosecutor who handled the Pius case was
Spota,
who
now serves as Suffolk County district attorney and facilitated Burke's
emergence as the most
powerful cop in the county. Local papers describe Spota's relationship to
Burke as
a nurturing one, the prosecutor helping him
become chief in 2012.
(The FBI declined to comment as to whether an investigation
into Burke's abuses of authority was in any way connected to the investigation
of the Long Island Serial Killer. Spota's office declined to comment on the district attorney's relationship to Burke.
Burke, speaking
through his attorney,
Joseph Conway,
declined to comment on the Long Island Serial Killer investigation or the
charges he is facing.)
Timothy Sini, the recently appointed commissioner of the
Suffolk County Police Department, now heads up the investigation of the Long
Island Serial Killer. He's the third person to assume authority over the probe
since the bodies were discovered in 2010. In a phone interview, he told me
that, in addition to the feds, two homicide detectives are working full time on
the case, and as many as a dozen other detectives are also in the loop.
"Any shortcomings of this investigation from the past will be looked
into going forward," Sini said, in reference to Burke. "I'm not going to sugarcoat
this situation."
He expressed optimism that the case was still solvable.
"We still get tips every day," he said. "Unfortunately, most of them
seem to involve women who suspect their husband to be the killer."
Sini's final words about women suspecting their husbands might be an
oblique reference to a woman in her 40s who told me about an 80-page
report she
says she provided to the FBI,
implicating her husband in a grand conspiracy of serial murder that also
allegedly implicated James Burke. She claims to have tied them
together through a website called
Utopia Guide, where men rate and discuss sex workers together at length. The woman
believes the men threw sex parties together under the name
Carney Construction Crew, and that some of the women who were
hired were later disposed of in the bramble along Ocean Parkway. This
unsubstantiated theory speaks to the wormhole of ideas bandied about every day
both online and in local bars throughout Long Island.
There are those who believe that a prominent Suffolk County
businessman, who may have committed suicide on the anniversary of the bodies
being found, did the deeds. There are others who insist the murders to be the
work of a satanic cult, or of a man who made snuff films. There are those who talk
about
Eyes Wide Shut-style sex parties on big,
expensive boats, where influential men in Suffolk politics had an incentive to
cover-up their dalliances.
Some connect the bodies on Ocean Parkway to the
unsolved murder of four women in Atlantic City in
2006.
There is the unverifiable
rumor of an African-American sex worker who allegedly escaped from Oak Beach in
the dead of night sometime
before 2010, and ran semi-naked along the parkway, screaming, "They're trying to
kill me" in the same manner that Shannan Gilbert did on the morning she
vanished.
All of it is frightening, but none of it points to anything definitive,
or clear.
Eventually, it all comes back to the start: Shannan
Gilbert picked up the phone to call 9-1-1 from Joe Brewer's house in Oak Beach,
Long Island. For reasons that no one can seem to explain, she knew that she was
about to die.
Michael Edison Hayden grew up on Long Island. His work has been
featured in the
New York Times, Foreign
Policy, the Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter.
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