Authors: Robert Kolker
For his next trick, Murphy pieced together Hackett’s entire work biography and tried to match it up to other bodies, deciding that many of the early nameless victims were conceivably on the doctor’s commute. As Suffolk’s emergency medicine chief after the Flight 800 disaster, Murphy said, Hackett would have driven down Halsey Manor Road in Manorville to get back and forth from the recovery operation at the East Moriches Coast Guard station and a secondary recovery location at Calverton Executive Airpark. When Hackett moved on to Suffolk Central Hospital in Riverhead, his commute down the Long Island Expressway from Oak Beach would have brought him past the same area near Halsey Manor Road, possibly at an ER’s very odd hours. A few years later, in 2000, a torso would be found in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens, a state-protected wooded region just off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville. Portions of Jessica Taylor’s body were found in the same area in 2003. Both of these discoveries, of course, were later linked by DNA to body parts found along Ocean Parkway. For Murphy, that sealed the deal. How many people on Long Island are familiar with the back roads of Manorville
and
Ocean Parkway?
For all you non-believers out there,
Truthspider wrote,
it’s time to take your head out of the sand and start believing.
Truthspider saw clues everywhere. An old
Babylon Beacon
story about Hackett speaking out against a proposal for developing the old Oak Beach Inn site led Truthspider to conclude that Hackett exhibited “territorial behavior” and that, he hastened to add, Hackett made those comments at roughly the same time as the toddler and a Jane Doe’s head, hands, and right foot are believed to have been dumped by the killer. When something didn’t quite fit the theory, like the dismembered legs found all the way in Davis Park, he made it fit
: I am certain they floated to Davis Park from elsewhere due to severe coastal flooding from the Nor’easter in January 1996,
he wrote, noting that the marks on the legs were consistent with the work of a surgeon.
Another prolific commenter named Peter Brendt wrote,
So . . . Truthspider . . . you tell me, how someone with one leg prosthesis and breathing problems can alone carry a body from his vehicle down to where the
[
four bodies in burlap
]
were found?
Truthspider responded coolly:
He worked for years as an EMT with a prosthetic leg, as part of that job you have to be able to pick up victims, put them on stretchers, or boards and carry the board or stretcher possibly up and down stairs. I think he can handle a sedated 110-pound girl. From my personal experience with the Gilgo dump sites, the full skeletons were 3-5 feet into the bush, whereas the dismembered parts seemed to be buried further into the brush a decent distance from the road.
Brendan Murphy is about thirty years old and won’t divulge where he lives, except to say that he spends part of the time in a barrier-island community that is not Oak Beach. When I met him for dinner in Manhattan, he struck me as calm and reasonable but every bit as fervent in his belief that Hackett was the killer as he was on Websleuths. He said he thought Hackett might have gone into his chosen career with fantasies of being an angel of mercy, but from there it was a short leap to becoming an angel of death. He pointed to other medical people who have become mass murderers, like Richard Angelo, the registered nurse implicated in at least eight deaths during the 1980s; and Michael Swango, the doctor suspected of poisoning some sixty patients and colleagues over twenty years. Murphy’s favorite comparison was John Edward Robinson, an accomplished con man and killer from the eighties, who got away with it as long as he did only because people considered him too old, too nice, too soft-spoken, and not physically capable, all while he maintained a sparkling public image as a do-gooder, a good neighbor, and a family man.
As the summer went on, Murphy developed an intricate theory of how Hackett grew up to become a serial killer. He’d read a war novel written by Peter’s father, Charles Joseph Hackett—
The Last Happy Hour,
a semiautobiographical romp in the mode of
Catch-22
or
M*A*S*H,
published by Doubleday in 1976—and discovered a passage in which the main character goes on about how impossible it is to “convert” prostitutes by arguing with them, then travels the country with his young son after the war, spending nights in motels with “dancers.”
It’s really a very unfortunate description of a boy’s early life if people are suspecting him in the Long Island serial-killer case,
Murphy wrote. He decided that Peter’s mother’s death in childbirth and his father’s presumably strange predilections created a monster. He pointed to the car accident that took Hackett’s leg, and the carnage of the TWA Flight 800 crash. He cited a theory called “Trauma Control Model,” put forward by Eric Hickey, a researcher of serial killers, which argues that an early childhood catastrophe can set up a child for deviant behavior in adulthood. Murphy decided that something in Hackett’s childhood—the feelings of abandonment caused by not having a mother, perhaps—got dredged up in these adult traumas, and Hackett descended into deviant behavior.
Murphy also thought that Shannan’s disappearance was a turning point for Hackett, a sign that he was getting sloppy.
He did something out of the ordinary on May 1st by going after
[
Shannan
]
,
he wrote,
and it’s also why she got away from him for almost an hour.
Like Joe Jr., Murphy believed the bodies of the other four were stashed locally until shortly before they were discovered.
Since his dump site—the shed beside the marsh—was undiscovered for 10+ years, he felt he didn’t need to dismember and leave torsos far from his house,
he wrote. Then, in a panic, he dumped them.
He was extremely organized, but got lazy, then slipped with
[
Shannan
]
and now he is going down.
Murphy told me that he believed Hackett started tentatively, picking up people along his work commute and leaving parts of them in parks. He noted that all the bodies along Ocean Parkway and Manorville were found on state parkland. “In the middle of the night, parks are not patrolled,” he said. “I can tell someone I have a reason to be in a park. I can con them.”
The same way, he said, that Hackett might have conned Joe Brewer into bringing him a victim.
On July 11, Hackett blinked. CBS aired a one-hour report of
48 Hours Mystery
devoted to the bodies at Gilgo Beach and the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert. The show featured a section on Hackett in which the doctor, after numerous interview requests, reversed himself, admitting to making two calls to Shannan’s family on May 6, a few days after she disappeared.
Hackett refused to be interviewed on-camera. In two written responses to CBS, he said merely that he called Mari at Alex Diaz’s request, to offer to help with the search. On the face of it, this timing would make more sense than Mari’s claim that he’d called just after Shannan went missing. Hackett said the longest call lasted under four minutes. While he said he couldn’t quite recall what was said, his memory was apparently strong enough for him to continue to deny ever telling Mari that he ran a rehab or home for wayward girls, and to deny that he ever saw Shannan. He said the same thing to
Newsday
just before the broadcast: “I had nothing to do with anything occurring the night Shannan went missing. I never saw her that night; she never came to my house, I never offered her assistance.”
His coming forward only made him a larger target. The Websleuths world parsed the wording of Hackett’s letters, making much of how he’d refused to take a polygraph, citing health issues.
If I picked this suspect out of a hat, I agree it would be coincidence, but we didn’t,
Truthspider crowed.
He is one of three men directly tied to the May 1 incident, but is the only one of them who refuses to take a poly, changed his alibi multiple times, lied to everyone for a prolonged period of time, can be connected to the areas of the dump sites, and whose parameters fit that of the serial killer: classic post-crime behavior, age, intellect, capacity, knowledge of law-enforcement tactics, etc.
The police continued to maintain that Hackett was not a suspect. But for Mari, blood was in the water. The doctor had lied; how could you believe anything he said after he’d spent a year saying the phone call never happened?
On August 19, a sunny summer Sunday, Mari and a small entourage staged another offensive at Oak Beach. No family members were with her this time, just her old friend Johanna Gonzalez; the British film crew working on the A&E documentary; and some new friends from Long Island she’d made through Facebook who had become devoted to Shannan’s case: a Glen Cove resident named Michele Kutner and a Massapequa native named Mike Dougherty, who, on Facebook, darkly calls himself Jim Jones. The publicity had also brought two local psychics into Mari’s life—Cristina Pena and Joe Agostinello—and they came to Oak Beach, too. Jim Jones later recalled that when they got to the spot on Anchor Way where Shannan was last seen, Joe the psychic, who is Hispanic and Native American, took out a crystal pendulum, let its chain hang from between his index finger and thumb, and watched its movements carefully as the late-day sun moved through it. “Something happened here,” Joe said, his voice rich and deep. “I’m picking up a whole lot of vibrations right here.”
They were standing next to the marsh.
They continued down Anchor Way to where it intersects with a road called the Bayou. This was supposedly where Shannan’s jacket was found. Joe shook his head. “I felt more back the other way,” he said.
They decided to walk up toward Hackett’s house, a Cape-style cottage, raised high with a carport at the ground level. Mari wanted to knock on Hackett’s door and confront him. Before she had the chance, the doctor appeared down the road, lumbering toward them from a neighbor’s house.
Mari stood as the man she’d been thinking and talking about for over a year walked toward her, his hand outstretched. A portion of the encounter was caught on video. Hackett was wearing a deep blue polo shirt tucked in, accentuating his big belly. His white shorts showed off his prosthetic leg.
Hackett was surprised to learn the woman whose hand he was shaking was Shannan Gilbert’s mother. As soon as Mari introduced herself, he grimaced, looking this way and that as she and others in her group fired questions at him.
“What I don’t understand is, what happened?” Mari said. “Did you see anything? What did you hear?”
“I never saw her,” Hackett said evenly. “I never met her.”
Mari’s friend Johanna spoke up. “You must have heard something, because everybody here has heard something, one way or another. What’s the rumor you heard?”
Hackett squinted at her. “Rumor?”
“Everyone’s heard a rumor here,” said Johanna.
“What’s been on the news,” Hackett said, shrugging. “That’s it.”
“Yeah,” Mari said, “but this is my question. You called me. And for over a year you denied it.”
“I didn’t deny it,” Hackett said.
“When there was proof you did call me, you admitted it,” said Mari.
Michele Kutner spoke next. “But you never saw her that night? You never heard?”
“Didn’t hear, didn’t do anything,” Hackett said. “Whoever Alex asked me to call, I called. All of this stuff about a rehab or something? I don’t have any rehab. I don’t do rehabs.”
“Then why would you say that to me?” Mari asked.
“I didn’t,” Hackett said, some irritation coming through.
“But my point is this,” said Mari. “How can we not know in another year it will be proven that you
did
say that to me?”
That startled Hackett. “I didn’t say anything!” he answered. He glanced at the camera crew. “If you want to talk, I’d be happy to chat with you, but not with whatever this is.”
What happened next, as Jim Jones remembers it, amazed them all. Someone in the group wished they’d brought some water, and the doctor’s wife, Barbara, invited them all inside. Mari and Jim took her up on the offer as Hackett stayed outside with the others. As they walked in, Mari’s body shook, and she clasped Jim’s hand for support. They saw Hackett’s daughter’s paintings, and detective novels on the tall bookshelves in the living room.
The doctor’s wife did her best to show some sympathy for Mari. She said she couldn’t imagine what she was going through. Then she talked about the pressure her husband had been under—the media assault, the constant questioning. She recounted her husband’s life of selfless service: Countless times, she told them, he wouldn’t make it home for dinner because he was out helping someone who needed assistance in one way or another.
Asked about the security video, Barbara said it ran on a two-week loop and got taped over automatically. That was all.
On her way out of the house, Mari finally lost control and started sobbing. In the months to come, she’d get angrier, returning for Shannan’s birthday in October. She was backed into a corner. Nothing anyone said would alter her conviction that the conspiracy was real.
“That girl standing there?” Kritzia said. “She’s working. And the guy in front of her is her pimp.”
We were standing on Seventh Avenue at about one-thirty
A.M.,
across the street from Lace, the strip club. She and her friend Melissa used to spend hours on end on this corner. Kritzia was tiny, plump, and sultry, with bright red lips and wild hair. But she was dressed conservatively, like a mom at a PTA meeting. Since hearing about Melissa’s death, she’d sworn off working as an escort, and so far, she’s kept the promise to herself. On a clear night in October, she agreed to show me around where she and Melissa used to work, to get a view of the women who have taken their place.
“Does she look familiar?” I asked about the girl in front of us.
“Yeah. She knows me and I know her.”
“Why not talk to her?”
“Because the girl’s pimp is there, and I don’t want her to get in trouble.”
When Kritzia pointed to the pimp, I saw him for the first time, even though he was under ten feet away—skinny, white, and dressed plainly, eyeing us both suspiciously over a thin trace of a mustache.
We walked away a bit, then circled back around to Lace. “I’m trying to bring you closer but so we don’t look so obvious,” Kritzia said.
A new man, dressed in a suit, came walking down the block. The woman approached. “She’s trying to talk to him,” Kritzia said. “But he’s probably not going to leave with her.” She was assessing every aspect of the encounter with a professional eye. “I don’t know, but it looks like he’s staying at a nice hotel, and you can just tell she’s a ho. But he might take her because she’s pretty and she’s white—you know, just because she’s white and it looks more regular. But it’s hard convincing men. You don’t just walk up to a guy and he says, ‘Yes, let’s go.’ ’Cause remember, you’re talking hundreds of dollars.”
As she finished speaking, we saw the man walk away.
“Yeah,” Kritzia said, laughing. “I could always tell which guys would go with me and which guys wouldn’t. Some girls talk to every man. I wouldn’t, ’cause some guys would be a waste of time.”
Everywhere she looked, there were memories. The McDonald’s on Broadway, where they gathered in cold weather; the Batcave on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Seventh, where they hung out in the summer. The cross streets on this side of Seventh Avenue were dark this time of night, and Kritzia was muttering almost to herself, “Drug dealers. Coke. Pot. Pimp wannabes. Stone-cold fake-ass rappers.”
Between the Batcave and Seventh Avenue, we saw a collection of people outside a deli on the north side of the street, and she stiffened. Then, just as though he were another bullet point on her list of what she’d left behind, Kritzia said, “That’s my son’s father right there. The one next to the one with the red jacket. We don’t talk anymore.”
Mel was in the center of the crowd, right in our path. We walked by, but not fast enough. As if to announce herself, Kritzia called out, “Excuse me!” and Mel whipped around and feinted a punch at her. She staggered back and was still reeling when, a half second later, he hit her for real this time. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing from anyone watching, but no one around him seemed to notice. Maybe they were too afraid and were looking the other way. Or maybe confrontations like that happened all the time.
I was startled, but I tried to stay close as Mel leaned toward her again, growling something only Kritzia could hear. She wouldn’t let him touch her; she was weaving out, running for cover into the deli. Mel followed. The Asian guy behind the counter recognized Kritzia and said, “Oh, hello!” The shouting continued. After a few seconds, Kritzia darted out and rushed past me, down the block. I followed her.
She was trying to laugh it off. She lifted her iPhone and waved it at me; the screen was shattered. Then she locked eyes with mine. I saw a small bruise on her cheek and tears streaming down her face. She grunted. “You know, that’s just the way of him talking to me, and getting to
touch
me, and feeling me up.”
She wiped her nose and fixed her hair. We kept walking west, to Eighth and Ninth avenues, where she said the girls were cheaper, and where Kritzia had gotten her sad start. “You saw the way he was now? That’s why nobody would ever fuck with me or Mel. ’Cause they’re fucking scared of him.
There’s nothing to be scared of!
Like, I got hit by him just now, and did you see me crying? Every other nigga would have been, like, running. ’Cause they’re just, like, pussies.”
Kritzia was smiling. I wanted to see what it was like? Mission accomplished. She raised her hands in the air and let out a long, hearty laugh.
“This is the fucking life, yo!”
Kritzia had been out of circulation for a while. Back in 2009, shortly before Melissa disappeared, Kritzia had gotten pregnant with Mel’s baby, a boy she would name Jemire, and moved to New Jersey. Her life had changed for a time. The pregnancy had compelled Kritzia to connect with her parents for the first time in years. A sort of armistice was declared: Kritzia didn’t have to talk about where she’d been or what she’d done. Mel lived with her for a while. “Mel was paying all the rent, all the bills, taking care of everything. My parents weren’t giving him nothing. They took our living room and made it my little brother’s room.”
Kritzia applied to school, and Mel found a straight job, in carpentry. “I thought everything was going to change.” But when Jemire was born, Mel wasn’t around. Then came a rent dispute with a landlord, which Mel sat out, and a move into a homeless shelter with Jemire. “Then one day I realized, this nigga just wants to be in the streets—he don’t want to be a father. He don’t want to work, he don’t want to do what he’s supposed to do. He just wants to be free. There are people that are like that.”
Alone with Jemire, Kritzia broke down. She saw a psychiatrist for depression, and without her knowledge, the psychiatrist filled out an application on her behalf for SSI, the Social Security program that supports mentally or physically disabled people. It wasn’t the money that Kritzia objected to; it was the possibility that being on SSI would flag her as an unfit mother. Sure enough, along came Children’s Services. “They came after me and took me to court, to take my son.” She appeared before a judge and made her case. She told him everything about her life. She got to keep Jemire. And when she needed money, she returned to Times Square to work.
One night in July 2011—a few weeks after the family vigil at Oak Beach in June—Kritzia ran into Blaze, standing outside of Lace.
“Is that
Mariiii-ah
? Hi,
Mariiii-ah
! How you
doin’
?”
They exchanged a few pleasantries. Kritzia showed him a photo of her baby. Then she asked, “Where’s Melissa?”
“That bitch is dead,” Blaze said.
“What?”
“Yeah, a trick killed her,” Blaze said. “She was one of those girls they found in Long Island. All they found was her bones.”
Kritzia had been so consumed by her own life in New Jersey that she didn’t even know about the bodies on Ocean Parkway. She didn’t believe it until she Googled Melissa’s name. Then she saw the news and the video and the pictures, including one she’d seen before, of Melissa with red hair pulled back in a ponytail. That picture transported Kritzia to a night long ago, when they were riding into work from the Bronx. She even remembered what she was wearing that night, a tight white tank top with little spaghetti straps.
Kritzia started crying and couldn’t stop. Then she started breaking things, and the people downstairs knocked on her door. When she saw how scared her son was, Kritzia finally calmed down. She went into the bathroom and shut the door.
She really had thought Blaze was lying.
The next day Kritzia jumped onto Facebook and joined all the memorial groups. She got on the phone with Lynn in Buffalo—they’d never spoken; not even Amanda knew Kritzia existed—and learned how Melissa’s whole family had blamed Blaze for the life she’d been leading. Melissa’s family had so many questions about her disappearance that Kritzia served at least as a kind of confirmation. “They were like a lovey-dovey couple,” Kritzia said. “That’s how Blaze treats his girls: hugs, kisses. I mean, pimps, they still beat you when you go to work, but then they act like they love you. That’s why it makes you want to stay.”
Kritzia didn’t stop with Lynn. She was shattered by the idea of a serial killer going after girls just like her, and she needed to talk to someone about her lost friend and the fear of being preyed on herself. She friended Missy, Lorraine, and Sherre. Unlike Kim, Kritzia was an escort who spoke out with deep regret about the life she’d chosen. “I want it to be exposed, what goes on in Manhattan, what goes on in Times Square,” she said. “There are so many other girls that are out there working right now. And they don’t know. I want girls to get scared and stop working—which I know is not gonna happen, but some girls get scared. I got scared.”
As she showed me around Times Square, Kritzia barely stopped talking long enough to catch her breath. She talked about what she and Melissa used to do, and why they did it, and why so many other people were still doing it—by some estimates as many as five thousand underage girls and boys in New York City are working as prostitutes at any given time. She talked about being seventeen and homeless in Times Square, too angry to go home to her mother, rejected by cousins already packed into her grandmother’s place. A bed at a city-run nonprofit social-service agency seemed out of the question. The city has about 250 beds available in all of New York for some four thousand homeless young people without families. When she met her first pimp, a guy everyone called Baba, Kritzia needed more than cash; she needed a reason to go on. “It’s not just about the money. There are so many other things. You don’t have family, you don’t have friends, you don’t have nobody. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, you don’t have a place to live. When I was underage, nobody wanted to help me—because I was underage! Nobody wanted to give me a job, no one wanted to give me an apartment.”
Kritzia said that escort work gave her something to do, someone to be, though selling her body meant living in a shadow world that everyone ignored. “And then you’ve got pimps who follow you and beat you up. And then you go in front of the judge, and they don’t care, they throw you in jail.” She believed that Melissa’s online career was her way of escaping that cycle. “People think,
Oh, the money, the money,
but do you know how hard it is to get a guy to date you? I’m not just standing on the corner, waiting. You have to go to them, walk to them, talk to them, convince them. Then you have to agree on a price, convince them, and a whole lot of fucking bullshit.”
She was crying now. “I was thinking about her all day today. That’s why she didn’t walk the streets—because it was so much work. It was too much walking. Like, you have to walk all over Manhattan, like, all night on these heels, and you don’t know who you’re gonna meet, you don’t know if you’re gonna make money. You just walk all night in the cold, in the heat. And that’s what Melissa didn’t like and why she started advertising on the Internet.”
Online, Kritzia became an honorary family member, representing Melissa’s memory in the memorial Facebook pages, posting constantly. She was mostly steering clear of contact with Mel, and she had no use for Blaze anymore.
But someone who knew Blaze, near the Batcave on Forty-seventh Street, was able to relay a message to him, and a few weeks after my visit there, Blaze and I spoke on the phone. Straight away, he denied being a pimp. He said he was a musician and a rap producer. Kritzia had predicted this: “Blaze wanted to be everything, but he really was nothing.” Blaze, in turn, had some unfriendly things to say about Kritzia: “She probably gets a check from the state for being slow.”
But he stayed on the phone. He seemed eager to get a message to Melissa’s family in Buffalo. He surprised me by saying that he used to call and talk with Lynn all the time when he and Melissa were together. Though he seemed to want to meet in person and agreed to have lunch at a Caribbean place in Washington Heights, not too far from where he lived, he never showed up.
“I’ve got a lot of stress,” he said later, on the phone. He had three kids, and for the first time in his life, he said, he was being hit up for child support. He agreed to stay in touch with me. A few months later, after a flurry of texts, he was on the phone again. In a more tender moment, Blaze told me what he loved most about Melissa: “The way that she would go hard for me. The love that she had for me. The way she was there for me, no matter what people said. Like, when we used to argue or break up, she would call me back on the phone and rush back to the house or whatever and try to fix it.”
He even said his mother liked her. “My moms loved her. My moms, you know? She would come over and help the best way she can, always. Always.”
He revealed a little more about himself. He said his kids were nine, twelve, and thirteen. He’d gotten out of jail recently, after serving a brief stretch for credit-card fraud. “That was bullshit,” he said. In one of our last conversations, I brought up the attack on Melissa in the street, the one Kritzia said he ordered. That was when Blaze exploded. “I took care of her the whole time she was out here! Any time somebody is with somebody in a relationship, you can’t tell me that people don’t have fusses and fights and arguments. So if I’m guilty of fussing and fighting with my girlfriend, yeah, I’m guilty for that. But hurting her and harming her? No, no. Not at all. I’ve been through some stuff because of her, stuff a lot of homies could’ve got killed for, and I still took her back, you know what I mean?”
He shifted the focus away from himself, back to Melissa’s family. This time he was less tender. “She sent Lynn the money to pay her bills, for her diner and all that. Did you know
that
? Did you? So come on. Like, everybody’s putting me out to be the bad guy or whatever. But your
daughter
was the one who was in the streets doing stuff, not me. Not
me
.”