Authors: Robert Kolker
Once again, an echo chamber: First Mari says Hackett called her, then the police tell neighbors about her claim, and then neighbors come away believing it.
As Bruce kept talking, he suggested that the police had more of an interest in Hackett than Dormer had ever let on. “The cops caught wind of this,” he said, “and brought him in for questioning, and after a few hours he said, ‘Well, I just said that.’ ”
Why would he just say it?
“He makes up a lot of stories,” Bruce replied. “All kinds of crazy stuff, he makes up. So people say, ‘Oh, that’s just Peter, he wants to be a big shot.’ ”
And how did Bruce know that the police were looking into Hackett?
“Because they came door-to-door, saying, ‘How well do you know this guy Peter Hackett?’ ” Bruce said. “And I said to them, ‘You know, I wave to the guy, he waves back. I really don’t socialize with the guy.’ I heard through the grapevine he’s a wacko. There’s enough wackos in Oak Beach. I don’t know if it’s the salt air or the water. One of the locals told me it was the water.”
Bruce had revealed something about the doctor and the police’s suspicions. But he hadn’t confirmed hearing anything directly from Hackett about seeing Shannan. When I circled back to Joe Jr., he said he wasn’t surprised that Bruce had denied hearing anything firsthand. Like everyone else in Oak Beach, he said, Bruce didn’t want publicity. He was careful. His wife had panicked when the police came to talk to him. He didn’t want to be known as the neighbor responsible for fingering Hackett.
All that really mattered, Joe said, was that Bruce had told Mari everything. Joe had arranged the phone call himself, sometime after my visit. Thanks to Joe and Bruce, Mari felt she had confirmation that the doctor had said what he said, even if the police didn’t seem to care. If nothing else, Mari was relieved. Before speaking with Bruce, she said, she had begun to wonder if she had dreamed up the whole thing.
Gus Coletti spent much of his time sitting on the porch of his two-story house on the Fairway, down the road and around the corner from the Scalise family, watching for strange cars coming through the Oak Beach gate. He and his wife, Laura, have lived in Oak Beach for thirty years. They bought their bungalow for twenty-two thousand dollars, and they used it as a summer home while Gus spent eight years building it up. He hired an engineering company to put in a foundation. Then he rewired the house and had the plumbing done. He replaced the windows and doors, added a room, redid the bathroom, and insulated the whole thing. By the time he added siding and replaced the roof, he’d spent more renovating the place than he would have if he’d knocked it down and built a new one.
The longer he stayed, the richer he and Laura got, at least on paper. A few years ago, they were offered $850,000 for their house. Gus wasn’t ready to sell. It might have been the wrong decision. Now he didn’t think he could get $500,000 for it. He got slammed twice: first by the economy, then by Shannan Gilbert and the bodies on Gilgo Beach. Two houses that were already sold, the buyers had backed out. Now they were both in court. One of the sellers refused to return the deposit: Where in the contract did it say that dead bodies nullified the deal?
In his golden years, Gus had indulged his two great loves: restoring old cars and caring for pigeons. On the wall of his little living room, amid photos of his five grandchildren, was a plaque in his honor, bestowed by the Nassau Suffolk Pigeon Fanciers Club:
For your untiring efforts throughout the years
. (Gus is the president of the club.) Now that Oak Beach has become a possible crime scene, Gus remains the only neighbor who saw anything and is willing to talk. He’s old. His story changes, the details shift: exactly when Shannan came to his door, whether he called 911 while she was there or after, whether he went to the front gate as soon as she ran away or waited a bit. What didn’t change, in every telling, was that Gus behaved nobly. He talked to Shannan. He tried to help her. He even let her into his house—something Mari didn’t believe was true, based on the excerpts of the 911 call that the police shared with her. Gus pointed to where she stood: a swath of carpet in front of a woodburning fireplace. There hadn’t been much room for her to go beyond that. Gus said that when Shannan was there, Laura had been sleeping on the lower level, to recover from a knee replacement.
Gus headed over to his porch, reliving that morning yet again. He remembered her hair, the blond streaks, and her clothes, a white halter top covered by a sweater or jacket. He didn’t remember a cell phone, though she apparently had it later when she knocked on Barbara Brennan’s door. As Gus recalled, Shannan did nothing but scream, and then she ran away.
Gus said he believed Shannan was under the influence. “I had four kids. I’m sure one or two of them could probably tell you more about drugs than I could. But that girl was pretty well drugged up. She couldn’t hardly stand. She almost fell over twice while I was talking to her. And she wasn’t making any sense. Even though she was in the house and I was talking to her, she still was screaming, ‘Help me, help me!’ ”
He said he picked up the phone in full view of her and even started talking to the dispatcher as she watched: “This girl here is screaming for help . . . ” He said he finished the call and turned to her and said, “Sit down in that chair over there. Relax. I called the police, they’re on the way here.” As soon as he said that, out the door she went.
He pointed to the porch stairs. Gus said he saw Shannan stagger halfway down and fall the rest of the way. She got up and started running around to the right, back to the Fairway toward Joe Brewer’s house, against the weeds on the far side of the street. Gus watched as she pounded on a neighbor’s door, one she’d skipped on the way to Gus’s because he’d had his light on. Then she ran back out to the road and stopped, looking down the road toward Brewer’s house.
“It was obvious she was looking at something,” Gus said, “and she started to run again and she fell a couple of times and she ran around here.”
Gus was pointing to his front yard, where he’d parked a small boat. A car had been next to the boat that morning. Gus said Shannan got in between the car and the boat. “She knelt down there, like she was hiding.”
Gus saw a car coming down the road, a black Ford Explorer, rolling a few feet and stopping, then rolling a few more feet. This was Michael Pak. “I stopped him right here,” Gus said.
“You stopped him?” I asked. It seemed like a big step to take, to walk down the porch to the road and flag down a strange car.
Gus nodded. “I said, ‘Where are you going?’ And he said to me, ‘I came from Brewer’s house. We were having a party and the girl got upset, and she’s running around here. I’m trying to find her.’ ”
What did Gus say to Michael Pak?
Gus assumed his best John Wayne posture. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve called the police, and they’re on their way, so you stay right here.’ ”
And Pak’s reaction?
“He said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have called the police. She’s going to be in big trouble.’ I said, ‘So are you, if you leave. I already got your plate number, and I can identify you.’ ”
That was when Shannan got up and ran off again. Gus returned to his house and told his wife to stay by the phone in case the police called back. Then he went back out, walking over to the gate, where he stood waiting, he said, for over a half hour.
“I stood by the gate till the police came,” Gus said. He said he never saw Shannan or Michael Pak again. “Nobody left here with a body in their car, because I would’ve seen it.”
Nobody left here with a body in their car.
That was exactly what the Scalises said did happen. They also said Gus was supplying a front, a cover story—“He would’ve at least seen Michael Pak drive out,” Joe Jr. said. “Where did Michael Pak go that morning?”—and that all of Gus’s accounts in the media were part of a community effort to stay silent about what really happened to Shannan.
What did Gus think of Peter Hackett? “He’s one of the best neighbors you can have,” Gus said as soon as the doctor’s name was mentioned. “He’s always ready to help everybody. He’s always, if he hears you’re sick, he’s over here in minutes. He’s helped more people on this beach than anybody else around has. He’s a doctor. And he’s a great guy. He’s got the one weakness. He tells stories.”
“He overelaborates,” Laura said.
“Yeah,” said Gus. “You tell him a little story, and he stands up making it a big one. But do I think he had anything to do with her disappearing? No.”
Did he ever hear the doctor say that he helped Shannan out?
“No,” he said. “I never heard that. As a matter of fact, we never even had any discussions about it, and I see him regularly.”
This was strange, too. Shannan’s disappearance was easily the biggest thing ever to happen at Oak Beach. If he and Hackett were so close—and if Hackett was such a big storyteller—how could they never have discussed it?
I asked Gus what he thought happened to Shannan.
“She died in the water,” he said.
How?
“She was scared. She was drugged up pretty good. I think she slipped and fell. Have you looked at any of the jetties? They’re as slick as glass when they’re damp in the morning. If she ran out on one of them, she’s gone.”
Into the fall, the Scalises kept beating the drum about a conspiracy. They had company now. The first TV reports about Hackett had made the doctor a regular subject of scrutiny on Websleuths, a well-established Internet chat group devoted to dozens of open murder cases around the country. The armchair detectives pored over TV news reports, searching for snippets of the doctor warding off reporters, analyzing his repeated use of “No comment.”
I’ve been watching that interview of the Dr. and observing his body language,
one commenter wrote.
He is blocking the doorway like he is afraid the reporter will try and go inside. He also averts his eyes down and to the left a few times while he is speaking. Isn’t it a sign of deception when someone averts their eyes down and to the left? . . . Something about him seems, well, off!
A commenter calling himself Truthspider seemed determined to pin every murder on Hackett—not just Shannan and the four in burlap but the unidentified ones, as well as the ones in Manorville. The handle Truthspider belonged to a Long Islander named Brendan Murphy, a skilled researcher who dug up some court documents about Hackett suggesting that he’d been sued twice. The first case stemmed from January 17, 1989, when, according to the documents, Hackett, working as a volunteer member of the Point Lookout–Lido Fire Department, responded to a call in Inwood, New York, where an infant was suffering a febrile seizure. The suit, filed eight years later, accused Hackett of negligence, saying he failed to administer intravenous fluids, treat the seizure, document the treatment he rendered, supervise the emergency personnel, communicate with the hospital, or hydrate the infant. Hackett defended himself by saying he was protected by the Good Samaritan law; the suit was later abandoned. But before it was over, the plaintiff’s attorney filed a Notice of Discovery and Inspection seeking information about “medical care providers furnishing care and treatment to [Hackett] for substance abuse for the period one year prior to the incidents at issue and two years subsequent to said occurrence.” The Oak Beach doctor in rehab? Truthspider couldn’t help but take notice of that.
The second lawsuit was a malpractice suit involving another infant, though details of what happened and Hackett’s involvement weren’t available in any public documents. The lawsuit was originally filed in 1996 against three other doctors, Long Beach Hospital, and a lab called National Emergency Services, Inc. Three years later, in 1999, the hospital filed a third-party claim against Hackett in what appeared to be an attempt to shift some or all of the responsibility to him. The original case was settled shortly afterward, in July 2000. Hackett was not required to pay any fines, nor was any judgment made against him. Three years after that, the case against Hackett by Long Beach Medical Center was also dismissed.
The meaning of the court documents is a matter of interpretation. It isn’t unusual for ER doctors to be sued for, in the heat of the moment, not being able to help. Even the first lawsuit’s request for a rehab record was ambiguous: Either the plaintiff was on a fishing expedition, trying to dig up dirt on Hackett, and no such rehab records even existed; or, as Murphy decided, Hackett was a drug-addled predator masquerading as the neighborhood Boy Scout. As Truthspider, Murphy posted online about how the first lawsuit demonstrated that Hackett was an addict—an unstable, unethical doctor with access to prescription drugs that he could have used on Shannan that night. Others on Websleuths promptly accused Murphy of tunnel vision, bending all facts to fit his opinion. They saw no evidence of wrongdoing in the negligence cases, and in fact saw plenty to suggest that the lawsuits had no foundation at all.
But for Truthspider, the Hackett question was simply a case of Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation being the most likely. For Murphy, any number of simple explanations implicated Hackett. That early April report in the
Post
about a second man, a “drifter,” at Brewer’s house—could that have been Hackett? Or maybe Hackett didn’t come there at all, but Shannan and Brewer went to him on their quick errand out of the house. Maybe Brewer brought Shannan there to get painkillers or other pills. And maybe Hackett, upon seeing Shannan, asked Brewer to lend him the girl for a few hours.
This was all conjecture, of course, and widely disputed. But to hear Truthspider tell it, wouldn’t that have been enough to make Shannan not just frightened but terrified, afraid for her life? Wouldn’t it have been a short leap for her to be convinced that her driver, Pak, was in on the deal? Wouldn’t that suspicion—her own driver selling her out to another guy—have been scary enough to convince Shannan to call 911? To send her running into the dark? As Truthspider, Murphy wrote as early as May 2011 that the man with all the answers would have to be Brewer, and Brewer had to be covering for Hackett.
Everybody inside knows, they just can’t say.
[
Brewer
]
was able to piece it together . . . He was
[
saying
]
to the media “the truth will come out.” He just can’t say what the truth is. The police told
[
Brewer
]
he has to wait until they have the proof they need.