Shannon Gilbert, a 24-year-old woman living in Jersey City with a boyfriend/pimp in what neighbors described as tumultuous relationship, was last seen in a gated Long Island community managed by the Oak Beach Island Association at around 5 AM on the morning of May 1, 2010.
She was wearing a brown leather jacket, blue jeans, a black low-cut blouse and strappy sandals. Tattooed on her left wrist was a bunch of cherries, and on her back, a scorpion.
A driver, initially thought to be the Hispanic boyfriend/pimp, but later learned to be an Asian male named Michael Pak, drove Shannon, who sold sex on Craigslist, to meet a client, Joseph Brewer, in the Oak Beach vicinity. Shannan then went with Brewer to his house in the predominantly white, upper-middle-class Oak Beach enclave, where residential property taxes run from $15,000 to $20,000 a year.
Several hours later, a terrified Gilbert came pounding on the door of elderly neighbor Gustav Colletti, at No. 17, The Fairway, screaming for help. When Colletti opened the door, she almost fell into the house. When he asked what was wrong, the hysterical young woman screamed "I need help! I need help! They're after me!
But as Colletti went to call 911, Gilbert ran back out the door.
Moments later, Pak drove past Colletti's house in a dark-colored SUV. When Colletti told Pak that he had called 911, Park said he shouldn't have done that. Pak said he was looking for Gilbert; that they had been partying and that Gilbert had gotten upset.
Colletti reportedly saw Gilbert hiding under his boat, where Pak approached her. She ran off, with Pak following her.
Colletti last saw her running into the weeds on Oak Beach.
In the days or weeks after her disappearance, several people, including Pak, the boyfriend and members of her immediate family from upstate Ellenville, New York, searched for Gilbert in the Oak Beach community. One of her sisters found her earring near Joseph Brewer's house.
One of the many strange turns in the case was that Gilbert made a 20-minute call to a 911 operator from Brewer's house on the morning of her disappearance, but was apparently unable to give the operator the address of the house.
Shannan apparently told the operator that she feared for her life and was trying to escape from a john.
Gilbert's mother, Mari Gilbert, told the New York Post that her daughter was screaming the john's name on the 911 tape, saying that he was trying to kill her, and asking for help.
Help didn't arrive in time.
Eventually, the Jersey City Police Department declared Gilbert a missing person. The missing persons flyer they issued described her as "bi-polar" and known to use cocaine, marijuana and prescription drugs. She was facing a 2009 charge of "promoting prostitution" when she disappeared.
Gilbert's mother, according to a
Fox News account, got a call, some days after after her daughter's wild flight from Joseph Brewer's house, from a man who identified himself as Dr. Charles P. Hackett, another Oak Beach resident. Mari Gilbert said Hackett told her that he had contact with her daughter around the time of her disappearance; that he ran a halfway house; that Shannan wanted to be off the streets; and that he had tried to help her.
Hackett, a former police surgeon and former head of Suffolk County Emergency Medical Services, initially denied ever having contacted Gilbert's mother.
According to a police report, investigators for the Suffolk County Police Department both disputed the Gilbert family's assertion that they had reported the phone call from Hackett almost a year ago, and acknowledged that they had interviewed Hackett in connection with Gilbert's disappearance.
Hackett has since admitted that he did contact Gilbert's family, as Mari Gilbert reported.
Gilbert's Craigslist client, 46-year-old former financial adviser Joseph Brewer, who lived at No. 8, The Fairway, admitted that Gilbert had spent several hours with him there on the morning of her disappearance. In the aftermath, although not necessarily on that morning, Brewer was questioned by police, and his house and car, a light-colored SUV, were searched.
According to Brewer, Gilbert "became agitated" and "ran out" of his house after he had "coaxed her to leave". It is speculated they may have had a dispute over money.
Brewer has taken a lie detector test, with inconclusive results.
The driver, Michael Pak, corroborated Brewer's version of what happened the night of Gilbert's disappearance. According to Pak, Brewer called him, after Gilbert had been in his house for about three hours, saying that Gilbert was refusing to leave.
When he entered the house, Pak said, he found Gilbert, fully-clothed, on the phone with the 911 operator. When he tried to get the "delirious" Gilbert to leave, he said, she accused him and the john of trying to kill her and ran out of the house.
According to police reports, there was
a second man "partying" with Gilbert at Brewer's house that night -- presumably not Pak. According to the New York Post,
the other man was a 48-year-old "drifter" with a penchant for strippers who has since, according to his mother, left the state.
Both Pak and the "drifter" are believed to be in Georgia.
Joseph Brewer's family owns several rental properties across Suffolk County. Although he was living at the Oak Beach house the night of Shannon Gilbert's disappearance, he has since moved back into his mother's house in West Islip, where his young daughters and their mother also live.
The Oak Beach house has been put up for sale.
Some of Brewer's Oak Beach neighbors suspect he was involved in Gilbert's disappearance. One recounted having seen Brewer and another man loading something into a U-Haul van pulled up next to Brewer's Oak Beach house -- with all the lights off.
The month after her disappearance, Gilbert's boyfriend/pimp moved out of the Jersey City apartment they had shared.
According to Gilbert's mother, police, after responding to Gus Colletti's 911 call on the morning of Shannan's disappearance, ignored the family's efforts to find Shannan for months, until, in December, 2010, on
Gilgo Beach, just 3 miles from Oak Beach, cadaver dogs deployed in a training exercise -- based on the Gilbert search -- discovered a serial killer's body dump.
The bodies of four young adult females, in varying stages of decomposition, had been systematically dumped, about 500 feet apart, along Ocean Parkway, east of Jones Beach State Park.
As the victims were identified, it was learned that they, like Gilbert, had all been sex workers in their 20s who advertised on Craigslist, and, like Gilbert, were all exceptionally petite.
All of the victims appeared to have been killed in a similar manner: asphyxiation (probably strangulation), at another location, and their bodies driven to the dump site.
All 4 bodies were wrapped in burlap bags.
Police surmised that the killer drove up, opened the opposite car door and dumped each body into the brush.
Ocean Parkway is a 4-lane highway connecting Jones Beach State Park with several state-and town-run beaches to the east along a barrier island -- a narrow strip of land between the Great South Bay and the Atlantic. In summer, the area attracts a surfing crowd.
The body dump is located on a remote, windy stretch of oceanfront about 9 miles east of Jones Beach. There are no streetlights, and very few homes, there.
The families of the 4 victims had reported them missing. The oldest report had been made 3 1/2 years earlier, the most recent in September, 2010.
Two of the young women had been killed after Shannan Gilbert's disappearance at Oak Beach.
The four young women whose bodies were found at Gilgo Beach were identified as:
- Maureen Brainerd Barnes, a 25-year-old from Norwich, Connecticut, last seen in Manhattan on July 9, 2007;
- Melissa Barthelmy, a 24-year-old from Buffalo, last seen in the Bronx on July 12, 2009, when she got a call from Massapequa, L.I., about 20 miles from Gilgo Beach;
- Megan Waterman, a 22 year-old from Scarborough, Maine, last seen at a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppage, L.I., about 20 miles from Gilgo Beach, on June 16, 2010; and
- Amber Lynn Costello, a 27-year-old from North Babylon, L.I., last seen in North Babylon in September, 2010.
Police said the bodies had been systematically dumped at the site over a period of at least 2 years. The first body, found just steps from the parkway and 40 miles southeast of the Bronx, was that of Melissa Barthlemy. The 3 other bodies were discovered in the days that followed.
After Melissa Barthelmy disappeared on July 7, 2009, the man believed to be her killer, who sounded like "an older white guy", made 6 successive phone calls to Melissa's teenaged sister, using Melissa's cell phone.
The lewd, sadistic caller asked the teenager if she knew that her sister was a "whore", described his sexual activities with Melissa, and, in the last call, told her that he had killed Melissa.
Police tracked the cellphone signal from Massapequa, Long Island, where the first call was made, to midtown Manhattan, where it died.
The killer may may also have made a series of phone calls to Melissa's boyfriend/pimp in the Bronx during this same time period, taunting the boyfriend with lewd details of his and Melissa's sex life that the killer would have to have learned from Melissa.
Megan Waterman disappeared after leaving a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppage, alone, on June 16, 2010. Her boyfriend/pimp, a 21-year-old Brooklyn man named Akeem Cruz, now serving 20 months in Maine for drug trafficking, picked her up in her hometown of Scarborough, Maine and drove her to New York City, then to the Holiday Inn Express in Hauppage, where she disappeared.
Why Megan, who never went on outcalls, and never worked without Cruz nearby, went out alone that night without her cell phone and without telling anyone where she was going, is a mystery.
The killer also induced Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, the last-killed of the Gilgo Beach 4, to leave their cell phones behind when he picked them up -- which could be seen as an evolutionary move. The killer's sadistic phone calls to Melissa Barthelemy's sister had nearly given him away.
Amber Costello's roommate, at home when the killer made 3 successive phone calls to her and offered her $1,500 for the night, said the killer had sufficiently disarmed the usually cautious Costello that she left her phone behind when she went down the block to meet him for her last outcall.
She was next seen as a cadaver on Gilgo Beach.
In a macabre interview, Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin, contacted by the New York Post at the prison where he is serving a life sentence for murdering 17 prostitutes over a four-year period, criticized the "new guy's" methods. Most serial killers, he said, dump their bodies at widely-spaced locations, as he did.
Since December, 2010, the continuing search for bodies along Ocean Parkway has uncovered 6 more sets of human remains. So far, only the Gilgo Beach 4, and one later find, have been identified. None of the 6 later finds, which are much older kills, can be attributed to Rifkin, nor can police say whether they are related to the Gilgo Beach 4.
The later finds include the dismembered body parts of two young females, one of them now identified as sex worker Jessica Taylor,
whose severed torso was found dumped some years ago in rural Manorville, Long Island.
If you have any leads or information, call the Suffolk County Police at 1-800-220-TIPS, text SCPDmesstocrimes274637 or visit
www.tipsubmit.com.
