Authors: Robert Kolker
Amanda had a hard time in school, missing classes and staying home, depressed. A full year passed with no word. Lynn and Jeff threw themselves into their work. Lynn had retired from making meals at Manhattan Manor to help out at the latest incarnation of Jeff’s diner. Jeff had pulled up stakes at his inner-city location in Lovejoy, where Melissa had worked some shifts after beauty school classes, and found a new spot in Cheektowaga, a suburb to the east of Buffalo. The new diner, called JJ’s Texas Hots, was on a four-lane commercial strip lined with dollar stores and Goodwill and Chick-N-Pizza and the Polish Villa and 7-Eleven. Across the street was Resurrection Church, dominating the intersection with an electronic bell that played on the hour. JJ’s new building used to be a Dunkin’ Donuts, and it showed: the floor-to-ceiling windows around the perimeter, the Formica tables. The doors had handwritten signs on whiteboard in different-colored markers, reading
SORRY WE CANNOT TAKE CREDIT CARDS OR DEBIT CARDS
and
RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.
Nobody paid attention to either of them. After a while, Lynn and Jeff knew most of the patrons and what they were going to order. The term
Texas Hots
referred to the sauce as much as the dog—a mild meat sauce with a nice bite; hot enough but not super-hot. It was a family recipe. The connection to Texas was tenuous at best. Jeff’s father, a Buffalo native, had opened the original JJ’s thirty years earlier.
If the loss of Melissa hung over their emotional lives, JJ’s had become the center of their financial anxieties. On bad days, it resembled a house of cards. It had cost Jeff and Lynn about twelve thousand dollars to open the location. It would have cost more, but he brought in some equipment from the old place in Lovejoy. They borrowed the money from relatives of Jeff’s, and they felt horrible about the timing. A few months after they opened, the market crashed and the relatives lost their life savings. Not once did they ask for any money back. And when they came in to eat, they got angry if Jeff gave them free food. Both Jeff and Lynn spent nearly every waking hour there, each working seventy-two hours a week or more. Lynn’s little sister, Dawn, came by to work a shift after her full-time job as a bank teller. Lynn’s father, Elmer, washed dishes after pulling a full shift as a maintenance worker at Canterbury Woods, a well-heeled assisted living community that opened after Manhattan Manor. Lynn’s mother, Linda, had helped get the place ready, scrubbing the floors and walls and painting.
The older generation was overextended. Linda had taken advantage of the loose standards for credit and signed a home-equity loan to buy a new in-ground swimming pool. When she died of heart failure just weeks after Melissa disappeared, the debt was on her estate. Elmer got a lawyer to tell the pool company that if he declared bankruptcy, everything he had would go toward the mortgage. They gave up trying to collect. He never declared bankruptcy, and he kept the pool.
Melissa’s grandmother had lived just long enough to learn the truth about what her granddaughter had been doing in New York. Elmer, Lynn, and Dawn were convinced that the loss broke her heart. Elmer put on a brave face for a few months but soon sank into a deep depression. When he wasn’t helping out behind the counter, he’d be sitting in the restaurant, telling strangers about his wife and his granddaughter, telling old stories about them both, treading lightly on the reasons for Melissa’s disappearance. Elmer had failed a stress test but refused to do anything about it. If his time was up, he said, he was ready to join his wife. Lynn worried about him. So did Dawn, who from time to time tried to snap her dad out of his funk. “I know how you feel,” she’d say. “I don’t have it as deep as you, but you really have to snap out of it. You have to see the light. There
is
light . . . No child can do anything wrong.”
Then came the day in December when Lynn, craning her neck up from the cash register at JJ’s Texas Hots, saw the reports on television: four bodies on a Long Island beach, all presumed to be prostitutes. She burst into tears. It took until the end of January for her to learn that Melissa was the one John Mallia and Blue had discovered on December 11—the first of the four to be found.
Lorraine Waterman was never really rid of any of her history. She carried it with her in the form of guilt or anger: She was the real victim; the children, Megan and Greg, were stolen from her. No one understood her. She wore her story on her body now, for all to see. The initials of her boyfriend, Bill, were tattooed on her right shoulder. On her left arm, after the DNA match came back, she got a tattoo that read
MEGAN RIP
.
Lorraine’s hard drinking was far behind her. Sober ten years, she was working on getting a medical-assistant degree from Kaplan University, around the corner from her home in South Portland. The program was supposed to last two years, but she was taking an extra class each semester so she could finish early. At night, she worked at the Domino’s managed by her boyfriend. Like Buffalo, Portland had lost most of its blue-collar jobs, but it had become a booming health-care town, with hospitals expanding all over and state laws facilitating the funding of assisted-living facilities. Even so, Lorraine thought that getting a medical-assistant job would be difficult, with so many younger people competing. It took two or three interviews to even be in the running for a job, and Lorraine wasn’t exactly spry. Her mother, Muriel, and big sister Liz called her a hypochondriac—“Every time somebody has an ailment, Lorraine has it, too,” Liz said—but Lorraine maintained that she suffered from bad kidneys, diabetes, and arthritis of the spine.
Lorraine’s two-story detached house on a quiet wooded street smelled of cigarettes, with deep red curtains blocking the light in the living room. There was a fifty-five-gallon aquarium, two torn-up beige Barcaloungers, a large TV, and an inscription on the wall from the children’s book
Guess How Much I Love You
:
I love you right up to the moon and back
. She shared the house with Bill, one of Bill’s daughters, and Bill’s three-year-old grandson, David, just a little younger than Megan’s daughter, Lili. On any given day, Lili’s toys would be strewn about the floor, and David often played with them. But Lili did not live here. She lived with Lorraine’s mother, Muriel, just as Megan had for most of her childhood.
In the official version of Megan’s life story—the one generally accepted by everyone in the family other than Lorraine—Megan and her brother were rescued as babies from a neglectful and sometimes abusive situation. For decades, Lorraine held on to her dissenting view: that Muriel took Megan and Greg away from her. Once the worst had befallen Megan—once she had become a murder victim—Lorraine was ready to lay that at Muriel’s feet, too. She blamed Muriel’s overprotectiveness for everything. “My mom defended Megan, protected Megan, lied about Megan,” she said. “She got kicked out of school. She beat up the teachers. And my mom always protected her. Megan knew that, ‘Hey, Nana and Grandpa are going to come bail me out.’ If they had not covered for her, I think Megan would’ve smartened up.”
When Megan disappeared, her estranged family wasn’t in much of a condition to rally a search. Still, they tried. They held a vigil nineteen days after she was last seen—on June 25, 2010—in the bandstand area of Congress Square in Portland. Volunteers gathered at the Scarborough Walmart parking lot on Gallery Boulevard the next morning to hang Missing posters. Others, including Megan’s brother, Greg, and her friend Nicci Haycock, had done the same in Hauppauge, Long Island, a few weeks later in July. Local newspaper and TV news shows took notice. By August, when CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell put Lorraine on for a few minutes to talk about Craigslist, the short version of Megan’s story wasn’t exactly flattering. “I’ve got to ask you, Lorraine, did you try to stop your daughter from getting involved in this escort business?” Lorraine answered as honestly as she could: “Yes. Me and my whole family have. We have told Megan how dangerous it is for her to be doing that. And she did it anyways. She didn’t listen.”
Muriel and others were horrified. Some of Megan’s friends were astonished to see Lorraine acting as the family spokesperson. “I was working with Lorraine and didn’t even know she was Megan’s mom until Lorraine was on TV,” said Rachel Brown. “That’s how involved Megan’s mother was.”
Lorraine saw only after the fact how terrible it looked to say such a thing in public. From then on, she and others in the family made sure to cast Megan as a victim. In September, Lorraine told one reporter that Akeem Cruz, now in jail, had been “her boyfriend-slash-pimp,” who “told her how she could make easy, quick money, and he got her hooked on Craigslist. Her attitude, her personality—all of it changed when she met him.” This wasn’t exactly true—she’d been an escort before Vybe came along—but all the momentum was shifting against him. The family would call Akeem Cruz what anti-sex-trafficking activists call a Romeo pimp. He’d romanced Megan only to control her, they said; then he brought her to Hauppauge and abandoned her. Maybe he even had something to do with what happened.
That fall, the family planned another benefit to raise money for a reward: a spaghetti supper and silent auction with door prizes, a raffle, and a DJ. It was during the planning that Lorraine discovered that Muriel was taking steps to share custody of Lili not with Lorraine but with Lorraine’s oldest sister, Liz Meserve. Lorraine lashed out at Liz; Liz unfriended Lorraine on Facebook; and the fund-raiser fell apart. If the feud had started with a struggle for control over Megan’s memory, then Lili had become another front in the same war.
By December, when Lorraine got the call from Suffolk County that four skeletons had been found on Ocean Parkway, no two members of the family seemed to be on speaking terms. When Lorraine went on
Nancy Grace,
the others watched from home, amazed yet again by the performance. She wasn’t a mother in real life, but there she was, playing one on TV.
The police came to Portland to tell Lorraine about the DNA match on January 20, the day after what would have been Megan’s twenty-third birthday. Again, the family ceased hostilities, this time just long enough to plan the funeral. Five-year-old Lili, her hair in cornrows, wore a maroon velvet dress with a bow in the back and black Nikes with pink swooshes. The minister got a few laughs when he said, “You couldn’t tell Megan anything was a bad idea. We all remember the way she liked to jazz people up. Megan was strong-willed. Her friends loved to follow her in her adventures and escapades.”
A half sister, Amanda Gove, went to the pulpit and started to speak but broke down in sobs. Greg came up to finish her speech, but he, too, was overwhelmed. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. Megan had the best heart of just about anybody I’ve ever met in my life. There isn’t a thing that girl wouldn’t do for anybody.”
Since Amber disappeared in September, Kim had been a hard woman to find. She changed her cell number constantly, avoided voice mail and e-mail, rarely texted, and visited her Facebook account once every three or four months. All her children went for months without knowing where she was or if she was all right. Whenever Kim resurfaced, it was usually with a wink and a smile. “
Ahm
not off the grid,” she’d say in her North Carolina drawl. “
Ahm
just hard to track.”
Kim had a way of starting practically every sentence with “
Ahm
not gonna
lie
.” She wouldn’t, to a point. She had a way of muddying the waters when it came to subjects that, seen clearly, revealed her more calculating side—like who tried the hardest to get Amber into rehab (that would be Dave Schaller), and why she might not have filed a police report about her sister’s disappearance (she didn’t want to get into trouble herself ), and what she did with Amber’s ashes once the remains came back to her (she wouldn’t say). None of this meant that Kim didn’t love Amber dearly or that she didn’t feel the loss. What many of Kim’s detractors—and there are many among Amber’s old friends—choose to ignore are Kim’s own demons, her own addictions. The only one who might have understood Kim’s troubles was her sister. And now, with Amber gone, there was nothing left for Kim to do but run—from the law, from the guilt, from herself.
The news about the bodies on Gilgo Beach found Kim in North Carolina as she visited her father at a Wilmington nursing home. A friend called her cell phone: “Girl, you need to put on the news.” She couldn’t avoid the truth anymore. After months of dodging Dave Schaller’s calls, she had known it was only a matter of time before an ID came back positive. She called the Suffolk County police and arranged to send a swab of her own DNA. She came back to Long Island in January, in time for the funeral in Lindenhurst. The service had been arranged largely by Dave, who had received money from a local pastor to cover the burial.
Kim took Amber’s ashes and the cash from the pastor and promised to bury them in Wilmington and have another service, but that never happened. Kim was in the wind again, answering no texts. Dave, who had gone through a round of rehab himself after Amber vanished and was living sober, suspected her of absconding with the money. So did Amber’s old childhood friend Melissa Wright, who contacted the funeral home and learned that Kim had picked up the ashes. Since then, she said, Kim had called saying her car had broken down. Kim asked Melissa to wire her some money to bring Amber’s remains to Wilmington. Melissa sent some cash. Years later, she was still waiting for Kim to come to Wilmington with her old friend’s ashes.
The second Missy saw the news about Gilgo Beach, she knew that Maureen had to be one of them. That cell signal from Maureen’s phone registering on Fire Island in 2008 finally made sense.
While waiting for a DNA match, Missy became desperate for something to do. Prowling the Web, she read a news story about Megan and found her mother, Lorraine, on Facebook. Weeks before either Maureen or Megan were confirmed as victims, Missy and Lorraine were talking on the phone every day—Missy, the younger of the two yet three years ahead in dealing with the loss. Missy wanted to tell Lorraine that the pain would go away. “But it doesn’t,” she said. “It gets harder as time goes by. And you’ve just got to know that it’s coming and be strong.”