Lost Girls
Authors: Robert Kolker
For Kirsten
CONTENTS
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.”
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.
Hi! I’m Maureen! I’m calling from Atlantic Security! We have an offer right now—this is not a sales call—we’re offering a free month for a demo, a free in-home estimate . . .
Maureen Brainard-Barnes was winsome and girlish, with porcelain skin, dark tousled hair, and green eyes that shifted to blue and gray and back—depending, it seemed, on her mood. Sara Karnes was blond and plump, with a dimpled chin and intense green eyes of her own. As employees at the same telemarketing company, they clicked right away—jabbering with each other over the cubicle walls, getting yelled at by their boss about how they were supposed to be making calls, and snapping back: “We
are
making calls! The computer makes calls for us. When we hear a pickup, we shut up!”
Groton, Connecticut, is an industrial port town of forty-five thousand on the Thames River and the northern reaches of the Long Island Sound, once known for manufacturing submarines and now better known for the nearby Indian casinos. Atlantic Security’s office of ten cubicles was housed away from the water, in a storefront in the middle of a shopping strip on what the locals called Hamburger Hill—a spur of Route 95 with Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s. Sara had been working there for a few weeks when Maureen arrived, right before Christmas in 2006. After Maureen’s first few days making cold calls, chirping from a prepared script about protecting your family and safeguarding your property, Sara decided that she was different from the others. Maureen might not have been happy there, but at least she wasn’t actively hostile. She didn’t act like she was risking her soul on the outcome of her calls. She smiled.
Sara soon learned that she and Maureen had a lot in common. They were the same age, twenty-four, and had gone to the same high school in Groton, Robert E. Fitch. They didn’t remember each other. Sara had gone there only briefly, transferred there after being expelled from a Catholic school for playing a minor prank. Maureen, only a little less wild, left when she was sixteen to have a baby and never went back. She had two children now, each with a different father. The job had come in the nick of time: Unable to afford a place of her own, Maureen had crashed at the home of her little sister for a few months, then moved into a place in Norwich paid for by her son’s father. Maureen told Sara she didn’t like being so dependent on her ex. She complained about her roommate, who Maureen assumed had been asked to keep an eye on her. In this respect, too, Sara saw something of herself in Maureen. Both women were a little irresponsible and unselfconscious and more than a little annoyed by those who would hold them down.
As precarious as Maureen’s situation seemed, it was far better than Sara’s. Sara and her boyfriend were staying in a hotel room paid for with the two hundred dollars a week Sara made at Atlantic Security. When they couldn’t afford food, they made the rounds at soup kitchens and food banks. Still, Sara had one thing that Maureen didn’t: a car. Sara drove a ’93 aqua pearl Chrysler LeBaron GTC, a gift from her mother. Carved into the driver’s-side door was the word
whore,
a message to Sara from one of her boyfriend’s bitter exes. Maureen thought that was funny. So did Sara. Soon after they met, Maureen, not wanting to bum rides from her ex any more than she had to, asked Sara for a ride home after work in the whore-mobile. Sara said yes. From then on, Maureen had transportation every night.
Both women had been told that Atlantic Security offered seasonal work only; full-timers, of course, would have been entitled to health benefits. Sara was let go shortly after New Year’s. A month or so later, Maureen was let go. Maureen and Sara kept in touch. Sara started working at McDonald’s, but the money she made didn’t cover her room. Sara’s boyfriend moved in with an aunt, and Sara moved in with her McDonald’s boss and his girlfriend. She was an inch away from homelessness. That was when Maureen stepped in with an offer.
“I need a driver,” she said. “This guy wants a massage.”
“You’re a masseuse?” Sara asked.
Maureen smiled. “Yeah.”
Take the Long Hill Road exit off of 95 in Connecticut and curl south toward downtown Groton and you’ll find, not far from Atlantic Security, each of the places, still standing, that briefly employed Maureen Brainard-Barnes. There’s the Blimpie not far from the T. J. Maxx and the AutoZone and the Stop & Shop. And Cory’s gas station, where she worked behind a Chester’s chicken counter, making the JoJo’s—what the locals call potato wedges. And the Groton Shopping Plaza, with the Groton Cinema 6 where she picked up discarded snacks from the carpet in exchange for free admission and a bag of popcorn.
Before the mid-nineties, when Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun came to this part of Connecticut, Groton was a two-company town. There was the navy submarine base—where, depending on the geopolitical situation of the moment, Tomahawk missiles would roll in and out after dark, for nights on end—and there was Pfizer. Scientists filled the wealthier suburbs like Mystic, home of the upper middle class, or “stuck-up rich people,” as Maureen’s family put it. They avoided Mystic much of the time, just as they avoided the town on the other side, New London, where the gangs lived. Groton was in the middle—and in Groton, if you weren’t navy, you didn’t have anything.
Maureen grew up in a three-bedroom apartment in a federally subsidized housing development called Poquonnock Village. Each day her mother, Marie Ducharme, would walk two miles to clean rooms at a motel on the side of another highway off of 95; she would have driven, but the car almost never started. Maureen knew her father, but Bob Senecal, who stayed with them only from time to time, was just like Maureen—mellow though a little immature, not one to take life too seriously, quick with the Beavis and Butthead imitations. Bob worked in lumber, mostly, and a little as a mechanic. He was the one the kids would turn to if they had a question about Middle Earth. Marie, meanwhile, was short-tempered—understandably so, considering the whole family’s fate rested on her shoulders. Bob treasured solitude, and he liked to go on long walks that gave him the chance to think. It was on one of those walks that he died a few years later, in 2003, on Maureen’s twenty-first birthday. He was walking on a train trestle late at night, tripped, and drowned in the shallow water where he had fallen.
Maureen’s mother stopped cleaning motel rooms when she became one of the first employees of Mohegan Sun. A new job as a slot attendant helped her afford the down payment on a car, a tan Ford Taurus, which allowed her to drive to a second job cleaning offices. From that point on, she was almost never home. Maureen and her younger sister and brother, Missy and Will, would take care of one another. Each week their mother bought a new stack of frozen meals, Ellio’s pizza, and chicken cutlets that the children would heat up for dinner. They were left on their own to explore the woods behind the apartment complex, to pick berries and walk on railroad tracks when they weren’t supposed to, to run from the police when they were spotted. Some evenings, Maureen would sneak Missy and Will into American Billiards to shoot pool and drink, or they would play with an old football in the big field right next to the apartment building. In warmer weather, they would climb on top of the sheds filled with lawn-maintenance equipment and just sit there staring up at the sky.
While her sister and brother spent a lot of time playing sports, Maureen looked inward. She would remember her dreams and scribble them down in a marble-covered notebook, and she used her MySpace page to let others know of moments when she sensed things happening before they happened: the death of her grandmother, a friend scorching herself with a cigarette lighter. She felt somehow anointed, in touch with things that others couldn’t see. Her writing helped her arrive at some central questions:
Is heaven a physical place or just a state of mind?
Tell me what you think
. She turned to certain books for answers. The book of Revelations fascinated her for a while. Later on,
The Da Vinci Code
became a sacred text for her, along with anything about the Illuminati. From there, she moved on to anything about the supernatural. Maureen believed that the answers to most of life’s mysteries were attainable to anyone who sought them out. She told Missy and Will about what she read and learned, lecturing and making connections right before their eyes. Sometimes they believed, too.
Although school was easy for Maureen, she would rather read all day than be there. That changed when she started getting attention from boys. Maureen had never been a makeup-and-accessories girl, but she developed curves and breasts early. She didn’t need makeup to be noticed, and by the time she started at Fitch High School, she was reveling in the attention. Where she once was pensive and introverted, now she was impetuous and needy. If she walked into a room, friends said, she made sure the boys knew it, and she ignored the girls. Jealous girls targeted her, and when they started fights, she withdrew again. She stopped going to school for a while, long enough for her mother to make an issue of it, and the two of them fought. Maureen left school for good when she was sixteen, as soon as she learned she was pregnant.
She had been with her boyfriend, Jason Brainard-Barnes, for just six months, but they were in love. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. A justice of the peace performed a brief ceremony at a courthouse in 1999, after Maureen delivered their daughter, Caitlin. They moved into Jason’s grandparents’ place in Pawtucket, and then they went south for two years when Jason enlisted in the army. Shortly after they returned, the marriage fell apart, but there were no fights and no lawyers. Without drawing up papers, they decided that Caitlin would live most of the time at her father’s place in Mystic, where the schools were better.
Maureen moved in with her sister, Missy, and her children in a low-income housing development in Groton called Branford Manor—once considered a grand experiment in suburban public housing, but by then another anonymous project in a struggling town. The three of them were reunited—Maureen, Missy, and Will, grown up, each with children of their own. As their mother receded from their daily lives, Missy hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas; she was younger than Maureen but had always been more grounded, more practical. At least once a week, Missy cooked large dinners to lure Will and his kids over. Will had been a Fitch High School football star and now was working as a mechanic at Midas. He became the family’s protector and paterfamilias. If Maureen ever complained to him about a boyfriend, she knew the conversation would end with her brother attacking whoever had caused her to worry.
Maureen was the one everyone loved—the dreamer, the artist, the romantic. One morning she brought two stray kittens in from the rain. When Missy noticed they had fleas and told Maureen to kick them out, her sister went on about about how heartless she was, went shopping for the right shampoo, and came back and bathed them, even though they scratched her to pieces before it was done. The real world still stumped her sometimes. Her most promising job, as a card dealer at Foxwoods, ended in under a year when she started calling in sick too often. Delivering pizza or running the register at the ShopRite failed to capture her imagination. More and more, she left her daughter with Missy while she went out. Sometimes Missy would lose patience, and the little sister would lecture the big one, and Will, the peacemaker, would try to calm Missy down. These confrontations made Maureen feel guilty, and she’d spend whatever she earned to make amends—presents for Caitlin, a lobster bake, or pizzas for Missy and her kids.
Still, when Missy thinks of their time together now, all she can remember is a family idyll: Maureen reading Shel Silverstein aloud to Caitlin and, later on, Missy’s children; Maureen playing dress-up with Missy’s daughter and the cat; the whole crew heading out together to get grinders and sit in the park; Maureen filling her stacks of marble composition books with poetry and rap lyrics. The apartments were almost like townhouses, each with a yard out back. All weekend long in good weather, the grills would be going, the neighbors would come out, and the children ate and played. Maureen would bring Caitlin there, too, when she could; Maureen never seemed more at ease than when she was barefoot and in a sundress, running free in the backyard, smiling broadly.
It took a while for the situation to become strained. By 2003, Maureen was twenty-one with a four-year-old daughter, no steady job, and no place of her own to live. Another person might have resigned herself to the limitations that bound her life—no diploma, no job good enough to support her daughter—and never even tried. But Maureen wouldn’t make the same choices that Missy did. For Maureen, the possibilities lay ahead, the breaks this way and that of a life she had barely begun. She remained flexible and curious. Who knew what luck would find her? Maybe she’d be a rapper, maybe a model. The plan always changed. If nothing else, Maureen always had a plan.
The following year, Maureen stopped by her friend Jay DuBrule’s place, almost giddy with excitement. She’d brought Caitlin, then five, and directed her into another room to play with Jay’s daughter, who was a year older. “Oh, look!” Maureen said before the kids ran into the other room. “I had the photo shoot!”