Authors: Robert Kolker
I told Kim that her friends were worried about her. They didn’t want another victim. They didn’t want another death.
“And God forbid,” she said. “But it’d be better than living my life like this every day. I’d rather be dead than have to live the rest of my life every single day like this.”
“She’s gotta be there someplace,” Dormer said. “Or parts of her, at this point.”
It was Monday, December 12, six days into the search, and the commissioner had agreed to see me in his wood-paneled office in Yaphank to discuss the case. As he talked, teams of cops thirty miles away were searching the marsh for Shannan. They knew the window of opportunity was closing, that they had to find her before the tide came in and water bubbled up into the marsh again. Dormer strained to explain why she hadn’t turned up yet. “You know, she’s been out there for over a year and a half, two summers, heading into the second winter,” he said. “It’s a wild area, swampy. People don’t go in there. You need a machete to get through this stuff.”
His chief of detectives, Dominick Varrone, was on his way—Varrone was the details man, while Dormer was the big-picture guy—but while we were waiting, Dormer took the opportunity to tell me why he thought Shannan’s death was accidental. “Where she went in, it’s like a little path. I was down there, you could make it through there. So she went in, and now you’re in that area, disoriented.” The things of Shannan’s that they’d found weren’t far from the little path. That made Dormer think she’d headed in there and hadn’t come out. “But it’s very difficult to find anything in there. A lot of animals in there, muskrats and that kinda thing. A lot of wildlife in there that would obviously feast on the flesh.”
Dormer sounded so certain. But the next second, he shrugged and said it was just a theory. “If you’ve been in this business for a while, you start to get a sense,” he said. “You can pick out what’s real and what’s not. They don’t teach this in college. It comes through life experience from dealing with this stuff, dealing with people, and dealing with investigations. And looking at it logically, keeping an open mind—always keeping an open mind. I say that all the time, ‘Never close your mind on something, never throw something out.’ I always keep it there. Keep it on the table. You may have to go back to it. You know, investigations evolve as you move forward.”
Why did they go back to the marsh after all this time? Dormer credited John Mallia, the cop who found the first four Gilgo bodies. Mallia, Dormer said, “had already searched the area there, but there was a lot of water and we really couldn’t get a good search. In fact, he had told the guys, ‘I think we should go back.’ ” With Varrone still not here, Dormer decided to clear up a lot of gossip about the case, starting with the rumors about a second person at Brewer’s house. He said they had no indication that anyone besides Shannan and Brewer were inside. He mentioned the twenty-three-minute 911 call, noting that Shannan got switched away from Suffolk County when she couldn’t say exactly where she was. Once the police got the 911 calls from Coletti and Barbara Brennan, he said, they arrived “within eighteen minutes.” And he scoffed at the rumor that the killer had special knowledge that only a cop would have. Anyone who watched
SVU
or
Criminal Minds,
he said, would know anything this killer knew about using disposable cell phones and avoiding detection.
Dormer detailed how he came to believe all the others had the same killer. “Maybe the killer evolved,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t go through the trouble of dismembering them now. The experts tell us that that happens. They evolve over time. So you put all these things together, and it looks like one person.” He saw more circumstantial evidence in the fact that five sets of remains still hadn’t been identified. “If a young woman from college went missing from the shopping mall, their parents would report them missing. And they would put them in the database. The fact that the others are not in there is an indication to me that they were estranged from their families, nobody missed them, and therefore they didn’t go into the database. Which would indicate that they’re probably sex workers.”
Dormer, in other words, had no special knowledge about these victims. He was playing the averages—working from a set of accepted assumptions made by many people in law enforcement about who typically goes missing and who gets murdered by serial killers. University of Illinois criminologist Steve Egger, author of a popular 2002 study called
The Killers Among Us,
has asserted that nearly 78 percent of female victims of serial murderers are prostitutes. That finding does not seem to have been replicated in any other research, but it’s become received wisdom. Dormer no doubt assumed that in general, prostitutes who are murdered by serial killers aren’t known to be missing until their bodies are discovered, and sometimes not even then; often the killer has to identify his victims and guide the police to the remains. In the case of Washington’s Green River killer, Indiana University criminology professor Kenna Quinet has found that eleven of the forty-eight victims—or 23 percent—were so-called missing missing: victims with no active missing-person case. Faced with a string of bodies along a beach, Dormer decided to work with the assumption that they, too, were missing missing.
None of that explained the toddler. “It’s particularly puzzling,” Dormer said. “Because even if the mother was in the sex business, somebody would know that she had a toddler. But people that I’ve talked to in the business tell me these girls move around a lot. They’re in New York two weeks, they go to Atlantic City, Vegas, Florida, Buffalo. So they’re moving around all the time, a lot of them. And so they go missing, and nobody notices.”
What really convinced Dormer that the victims were prostitutes targeted by the same killer was the low probability that two killers would dump in the same spot. Then again, it could be an unusually good spot. The more he thought about it, the more Dormer couldn’t see any possibility other than one killer. “Do they have a society of serial killers that meet once a month, and they sit in the diner in the back room, and they say, ‘Where are you dumping the bodies this month?’ And they say, ‘Oh, well, Ocean Parkway, down near Gilgo Beach’? I don’t think we have that. They don’t usually work in pairs, either. They’re individuals—psychopathic, the whole bit.”
He was all but certain that Shannan was not one of the killer’s victims. “The MO is different,” he said. “The driver drives her out there. Brewer’s very open that he contacted her through Craigslist. He makes no bones about that, it’s what he does.” The others, he said, “were strictly one-on-one contact. There was no john involved, no driver involved, that we know of. All these gals were contacted by the killer.”
That was when Varrone walked in, a grim, guarded figure with receding hair and a bushy mustache. Varrone talked about the marsh. “It’s a massive search,” he said, “and it’s a search that we really couldn’t do earlier, because of the amount of water in here.” Had there really been enough water for her to drown? “Well, she was exhausted, she was up all night,” he said. “You talk about cocaine psychosis—she could have just succumbed to exhaustion, and she could have drowned in six inches of water.”
Then Varrone surprised me by saying that at first, he hadn’t believed Shannan was hysterical enough to run into the marsh. “Despite the fact that she was acting irrational, she was rational enough to be running apparently to houses that were well lit,” he said. “Some people have cocaine psychosis, and they jump into a lake or something. But we didn’t think she was irrational enough to go into here. But apparently, she did.”
He talked about the killer of the others. “First of all, he probably makes them an offer they can’t refuse. Like we speculated he’ll pay the whole night—a significant amount. And with certain demands, he doesn’t want to be interrupted.” Varrone thought it was strange that Amber had left her cell phone behind. “It’s probably the demand that he has made on some of the victims.” And then Varrone came close to blaming the victims. “And this guy—this killer—is making them an offer that they find very hard to resist. And greed gets the best of them. In fact, most of them are in the business that they’re in because it’s an easy way to make money, and because they’re greedy.”
Not the most compassionate or PR-friendly thing for him to say about the victims of the department’s most famous unsolved mystery. But Varrone, like Dormer, was a lame duck. It’s customary for all the chiefs to leave with their commissioner, and he didn’t seem at peace with that. There was an edge to Varrone’s comments—irritation at, if nothing else, the pressure brought by the families. As he talked, it was clear that he didn’t have a high opinion of them, either. “In a high-profile case, it becomes difficult,” Varrone said, “because everybody is pounding on their doors for information. They’re not sophisticated enough. After a while, you could almost see—I don’t want to pick on one family—but some of the family members start doing their hair and dressing up. They rise to the spotlight. And they criticize us.”
With Mari in particular, he’d been reminded of another famous case he worked on long ago, the 1992 kidnapping of nine-year-old Katie Beers in Bay Shore, Long Island. The girl’s mother, Marilyn Beers, “was a taxicab driver,” Varrone said, smiling at the memory. “And then she got her hair all done up.”
Dormer chuckled.
It was time to go. Varrone left first; he was heading to the marsh. On his way out, I asked about Hackett. “He’s somebody we’ve taken a look at, and we continue to,” he said.
When Varrone was gone, Dormer answered, too. “He’s a kook,” he said. “Have you met him?”
I said yes.
“Does he look like he could commit murder?” Dormer asked rhetorically. “No, he doesn’t.” But then he caught himself. “Unless he did.”
His smile was unreadable. Or rather, it could be read any number of ways.
The bones—an almost fully intact skeleton—were found on the far side of the marsh, about a quarter mile from Shannan’s belongings. The police didn’t wait for a medical report. The metal plate in the jaw gave them all they needed. Mari got the call early in the morning. And at eleven-thirty
A.M.
on December 13—almost a year to the day after the discovery of the first four bodies—the police announced that they’d found what they believed were Shannan’s remains.
They found her on the far side of the marsh, about as far from where they found her belongings as she could be. The remains were close to the southern edge of Ocean Parkway, surprisingly, which brought her a little closer to the other victims. Even though Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber were dumped on the northern side, it was possible that Shannan had been dumped off the side of the road like the others—at least as possible as her clawing her way through a quarter mile of marsh before dying.
The inconsistencies didn’t faze Dormer. When he spoke to the press, he doubled down on the theory that Shannan wasn’t a murder victim—that she’d died after collapsing in the marsh. “It appeared she was heading toward the parkway, toward the lighting on the causeway,” he said. Why were her belongings found so far away from her? “That’s explainable,” Dormer said, “because she’s, you know, hysterical. And she’s discarding her possessions as she moves along . . . Her jeans could have come off from running in that environment. And that is a possibility.”
Dormer was out on his own. Within hours, a former chief medical examiner from New York named Michael Baden, who once worked in Suffolk County, was telling reporters how absurd it was to think that a woman who weighed not much more than a hundred pounds could thrash her way through a marsh that the police were afraid to walk into. “The circumstances are very impressive that the mother is right and she was murdered,” Baden said.
Soon after that, the DA, Thomas Spota, tossed a bucket of water on Dormer’s other theory: that the rest of the victims all were killed by one person. While Spota allowed that everyone involved in the case believed the first four bodies were the work of one killer, he said the others had displayed gruesome tendencies that were all over the map. He also suggested that Dormer had been off the reservation with his theory all along. “I don’t think it’s healthy for us to be talking about a single-killer theory,” Spota said. “[Dormer] has never mentioned it to the prosecutor and, to my knowledge, none of the homicide investigators who are assigned to the Gilgo investigation.”
Some of his motivation was political. Spota was a foe of Dormer’s boss, Steve Levy. Spota hated the way that Levy and Dormer had gutted the police budget, and his investigation into possible campaign-spending improprieties had helped convince Levy not to run for another term. Still, any time a district attorney and police commissioner openly clash over a high-profile unsolved case, an investigation can seem compromised. It was almost as if, by floating two conflicting theories, they were giving a gift to any future defense lawyer handling the Gilgo case at trial. Which might have explained why the incoming interim commissioner, Edward Webber, would announce that the department no longer was pushing any theory of the Gilbert case or any of the Gilgo Beach cases. “The theories are open,” he’d say. “There’s no fixed theories at the moment.”
Mari’s family and friends couldn’t stop picking apart what Dormer had said about Shannan’s death. Would a crazy person call 911? That’s not a psychotic break, they said, that’s genuine terror. How could she be crazy enough to pull off her jeans in the marsh, yet rational enough to keep 911 on the phone for twenty-three minutes? They started teasing out other explanations, conspiracies to explain everything. It seemed to them too coincidental that the police would suddenly look there and find Shannan months after not searching there at all. Some said the body must have been placed there recently. How else could the FBI Black Hawk helicopter not have spotted her on its flights earlier in the year?
And they all marveled at the most poignant coincidence: that Shannan’s body was found on the same day that the rest of the families were convening at Oak Beach for the first-anniversary vigil.