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Crime Story Episode 49: Bob Kolker

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It was almost dawn on May 1st, 2010, when Shannan Gilbert called 9-1-1.

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DISPATCHER: State Police.

SHANNAN GILBERT: Yeah, there's somebody after me.

DISPATCHER: I'm sorry?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: When she made this call, the frantic and scared young woman was in the remote gated community of Gilgo Beach on Long Island.

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DISPATCHER: Where in Long Island are you?

SHANNAN GILBERT: I don't know. They're going to kill me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Shannan repeated to the dispatcher that someone was after her. That they were going to kill her. And in that call you can hear her knocking on doors, asking for help. Police would arrive 45 minutes later, but by that point, Shannan was gone. It would take years to find her remains. But the search for Shannan would lead to the discovery of a serial killer who targeted sex workers he found on Craigslist, knowing that their disappearances would more than likely be ignored by police. Bob Kolker wrote about it all in his bestselling book Lost Girls. Bob, welcome to Crime Story.

BOB KOLKER: Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for talking with me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thanks for being here. So let's start with that early morning/late night. Tell us where Shannan is and how this whole bad night begins.

BOB KOLKER: It's late at night in the spring of 2010, and what happens really doesn't get reported by the media for months and months and months. So I think that that's important to start with. That the disappearance of an escort generally wasn't something that would make headlines, which I think speaks to a lot of the issues of this case. Shannan was an escort who was working mainly on Backpage and Craigslist, these websites where you meet clients. She posts an ad, the client calls the cell number on the ad, and she sets up a place to meet. Shannan was working with a driver, a man named Michael Pack, who was also a friend, and he drove her around to appointments. And that night they were in Manhattan. And there were no appointments to go to, and they got a call from someone in Oak Beach, which is basically a long drive -- way out in the farther reaches of Long Island. And it really feels like the middle of nowhere. And they had never been there before. She gets there, and in the middle of her appointment with the john, Joe Brewer, she runs screaming from his house and knocks on doors. Two different neighbours call 9-1-1. And by the time a police officer gets there in the early dawn hours, she's nowhere to be found. And basically nothing happens after that. There are a few followup searches. Shannan's boyfriend and the driver go back and try and knock on doors. A couple neighbours make, you know, faint gestures, saying maybe they would help find her, but really, nothing happens. And the police don't seem to be taking it terribly seriously either.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In fact, they didn't pay any attention to it until there was a major break in the case, right? When was that, and what happened?

BOB KOLKER: The following December, seven months later, when a cop with a cadaver-sniffing dog out on maneuvers finds a set of human remains just three miles away from where Shannan Gilbert was last seen. And this is when the real case begins. This is when the media starts paying attention. Because at the end of the day, in that December, they didn't find just one person, they found four people. And they all were a short distance away from each other and they all were more or less in the same condition. They all were tied up with burlap. And the police all said immediately that they believe that all four women were Craigslist escorts. The, the shocking thing is that none of them were Shannan Gilbert.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was just about to ask you that. So these were four other women. Who were they?

BOB KOLKER: They were Maureen Brainerd Barnes, who had disappeared in 2007. Maureen's family had been searching for her for three and a half years. And the search had gone cold, and they basically had no support from anyone in local law enforcement. She was last seen at Penn Station, calling home, saying that she wanted a ride home to Connecticut, which is where she was from. And then there was Melissa Barthelemy, who had disappeared in the summer of 2009. She had been gone for a year and a half. When she disappeared, her sister started to get taunting phone calls from her cell phone. The killer had taken Melissa's cell phone and was dialing her sister and tormenting her. Six, seven calls; the police tried to trace them. They only got as far as saying that they came from somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And then the third person was Megan Waterman. She disappeared from a hotel in central Long Island in the middle of the night in the spring of 2010, just a few weeks before Shannan Gilbert disappeared. And then there was Amber Costello, who disappeared a few months after Shannan and a few months before the bodies were found in September. She disappeared in September of 2010. She was last seen walking out of the house to meet a client in his car, and was never seen again.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I don't think a lot of people today understand the impact and the sort of the cultural phenomenon that was Craigslist at the time, and especially when it came to sex workers and the access. Um, can we talk a little bit about that? Because that really did shift the way that a lot of these women got work. And it also shifted what was already a very vulnerable job into an even more vulnerable job.

BOB KOLKER: Yeah. I would say before smartphones really took over and people were still on laptops or home computers, something like Craigslist was really a huge game changer in every walk of life. It was this very low-tech website, still is. It's basically a lot of text. You don't have to be a genius to use it. And that's where, um, escort work really thrived in those years of the internet. [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] And if you think about it, it's a very attractive thing. I mean, let's say you're someone who is engaged in escort work. Instead of being under control of a pimp, you could be your own boss. And instead of going into a difficult part of town and walking around at all hours of night, you can make appointments on your computer. And if you don't want to, you don't even have to go to their place. You could have them come to you, which is what Amber Costello did most of the time. And so, there was a presumption of greater control. And there was a feeling among a lot of escorts that it was a key to social mobility. That, you know, you had a choice when you were younger: do you go work at Walmart or Dunkin Donuts and, you know, make minimum wage, or do you make more than you could make in a week there, in an hour as an escort? And you don't necessarily have to do it as a life choice. You could do it on the weekends. But the flip side of the greater control that the internet gave escorts was that it also gave a certain amount of control to the johns as well. They could go shopping in a way. They could select the people who they wanted. It was a, became a consumer business in a way that analogously, you know, Amazon did for conventional goods and services. You know, here was a way for johns to really have greater control. And so if you're a predator, if you're a killer like this person was, they could actually choose people who they wanted to victimize.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right. I mean, that makes sense because the police find that these women have very similar profiles. But what about Shannan? How does she compare?

BOB KOLKER: They find these four women. They all fit the same physical profile, they all turn out to be escorts who use Craigslist and Backpage. They all are women who originally came from places outside of New York; small towns to come and work. They all just have a tremendous amount in common. And Shannan is like them in all of those ways. And I think that because she remained missing for so long after those first four women were found, it gave the impression to the public that there was a serial killer on the loose and that there was one victim who had not yet been found. And that was enough for everyone to link them together in their minds.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: When do they finally find Shannan?

BOB KOLKER: Shannan was just three miles away from where the other four women were found in December 2010. They looked for her for a few weeks, and then it got too cold and snowy for them to look. But when they started again at the end of March, they almost immediately started to find other sets of human remains along the highway. And none of those were Shannan either. There was a period where day after day they keep finding more and more sets of remains. And news crews are parked outside just waiting to hear whether it's Shannan Gilbert. And it never is. It took months and months later for them to search a marsh that was right next door to where she had first disappeared. A marsh that they had claimed was too hard to search before. They went in with bulldozers and finally found her in December of 2011.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how many remains did they find in total that they think are all related?

BOB KOLKER: Well, the related question is a tough one, [KATHLEEN: Fair.] that those first four sets of remains are definitely related. And then they found six or seven other sets of human remains, some of which were actually partial remains that were linked to remains they had found years earlier in other parts of Long Island. So the-- it became clear that somebody was getting rid of bodies in more than one location. And that was, you know, shocking in and of itself. I think if you count Shannan, it's 12 cases in all, [KATHLEEN: Wow.] um, but the police would say 11.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And to this day, the police don't think she is a victim of the same killer.

BOB KOLKER: Yes, and this has been a really problematic part of this story, because the language the police were using and the assumptions they were making, all sort of engaged in victim blaming. This is a woman who's on 9-1-1, on tape, screaming for 23 minutes, saying, they're trying to kill me. And the police were saying that no one killed her, that it was death by misadventure. That it was an overdose or a psychotic break. This is a woman who two male witnesses saw running and screaming. Those witnesses were questioned and never declared to be persons of interest, never arrested, never blamed for anything. Never even arrested for hiring an escort. It just seemed like they were bending over backwards to blame her and not blame anyone else for what happened. It just seems like almost Victorian to suggest that she, you know, died of a broken heart or died of hysteria at that night. Something else must have happened to her. And yet, it's also possible that she really was not targeted by a serial killer, that her death really was this amazing coincidence that led to the discovery of the other human remains. It's really an astonishing story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You do such a lovely job of doing what the media and the police didn't do at the beginning, which was, like you said, actually look at these victims as human beings with a past and a family. Tell me a little bit about that whole process. You spent so much time; these were complicated people. You know, what was that like and what did you sort of discover in the work that you did?

BOB KOLKER: I was a reporter for New York Magazine at the time, and so when those first four sets of remains were found, it was a natural story for New York Magazine to look into. But I wasn't sure what more there could be said about it beyond, Are the police going to catch the killer? [KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm.] But then the second that they were identified and their families were identified, I began to see that the families started talking to one another, first on Facebook and then on the phone. And they were comparing notes. And I met with a sister of Maureen Brainerd Barnes. We, we met in Connecticut and we had lunch, and I talked with her about what she'd been going through in the weeks and months since her sister had been found. And I heard this amazing story of a woman who loved her sister, who was close with her sister, who was still trying to care for her sister's two children who are now... lost their mother, and who nobody seemed to care about since 2007 when she disappeared. It's almost like it's the leftovers or something, where her sister vaporized off the face of the earth and the world just keeps turning. She was desperate to get anybody to care about them. And then suddenly, you know, three and a half years later, her sister's remains are found and the whole world is beating a path to her door, saying, what about your sister? Was she a prostitute? What was she like? You know, what, what did she do on Craigslist? It's all very untoward and very strange. And part of her is excited because she thinks there might be a solution to the case soon and that there's interest, finally. And part of her is feeling this intense dread because she knows her sister was so much more than the woman who made money as an escort at the moment so that she wouldn't be evicted from her house so that she wouldn't lose custody of her son. And so now she has to become her late sister's representative, her PR representative on Earth, at the same time that she sees her sister's life being wildly misinterpreted by people. I was just... again, I was, my breath was taken away talking with her, and when I spoke with my editor about it, he said to me, Why don't you speak with them all? Why don't you get them all together, all of the families? They're already talking to each other. And that's exactly what we did. We brought them all to New York, they all sat around a table for the first time. I was there with a tape recorder, and I listened to them all compare notes and talk about each of their lost loved ones. And they all went through a version of what I just described. And I, my eyes were open that day. I was, I was pretty dizzy for the next couple of days because I was sort of unpacking what I learned. I mean, the stereotype is you're some sort of victim of childhood trauma who then develops a substance abuse, and then in order to maintain the substances, you become an escort. What I learned was exactly the opposite. Was, you know, these women were adventurous and enterprising and wanted to get a leg up. Young women whose, you know, parents weren't working and whose grandparents had lost jobs at factories. And then once the escort work was solving their problems, then sometimes substances came into play in order to maintain your work schedule. And, and then, of course, the worst thing happens. That you think you're safe because you think you're getting control of your life, but in fact, there's somebody out there who is looking for someone just like you. Someone who they think no one will miss. And that's what really got me. Like, the reason I wanted to write a book about this was I wanted to write about why they were so vulnerable. Why the media, the police and the killer all assumed the same thing, which was that no one would miss these women.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And in a way, sadly, they were right, until it became sensational.

BOB KOLKER: Exactly. And I think this is a... it seems like this is a killer who was throwing bodies in one particular location so that he could perhaps drive by and relive the experience. But he wasn't leaving them there so that he could be found and so that he could become famous. I don't think he ever wanted to be discovered. And so he was-- he felt like he had the perfect crime going.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: There was a lot of finger-pointing that went on. And one specific person, Dr. Hackett, was sort of the one who a lot of people thought might have been the killer. Who was he, and why did they think... why was he so suspicious?

BOB KOLKER: Yes. Lost Girls gets into a lot of that finger-pointing. The community of Oak Beach is a small little gated community on the shore, filled with people who've known each other for years. And because Shannan Gilbert disappeared there, and because there were so many months spent looking for her and because she was eventually found on the marsh near that community, the people in that community all got examined by people on the internet. And all of the armchair detectives were looking at various people in that community. And many of them zeroed in on a Dr. Hackett, who sort of fancied himself the emergency response guy in that community, and had even placed phone calls to Shannan Gilbert's mother to learn more about her and then denied having made those phone calls. His behaviour was erratic and strange, and so people decided that he was potentially the killer. The book kind of gets into the game of telephone that happens, that helps people assume certain things to be true when they aren't really true, and kind of gets into exactly how a rumour takes flight. But, you know, Dr. Hackett, of course, had the bad luck to be living at a house that was right next door to where Shannan Gilbert disappeared. And so it made him sort of a sitting duck for these sort of conspiracy theories.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did the police look at him?

BOB KOLKER: Yes, immediately, and they didn't take him seriously at all for a second. They didn't think that he was, you know, anything close to a suspect.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me a bit about the investigation. Once the police were sort of forced to take this seriously, obviously, they start to see a serial killer on there... in their area. The media is not going to let it go. The families weren't going to let it go. How did that investigation move forward?

BOB KOLKER: The police investigation was hindered from the very beginning. They really inherited four cold cases... when those first four sets of human remains. And then the more women they found and the more victims they found, the more sets of mysteries they had to solve. And so they were behind the second that it all began. And instead of reaching out for help from other jurisdictions, which they did initially but then it all fell away, and instead of even accepting help from the FBI to do cell tower research, instead of deciding that they were a small municipal police force that was handling the case of the century for them, they basically developed a bunker mentality. And many of the people in that department started to say things like, why is this happening to us? Or, why are people taking this seriously? It's a bunch of women who aren't even from here. There was a parochialism, there was apathy, there was misogyny. And at the end of the day, there was corruption because the district attorney at the time and the chief of detectives who took control shortly after the bodies were found, turned out to be so corrupt that the federal government had to step in and prosecute both of them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

BOB KOLKER: And it was while they were doing their corrupt stuff that this case was lying fallow, that leads weren't being pursued, that cell tower data wasn't being researched. It's really kind of a slow-motion tragedy that happens after this case begins.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you think that... well, you said it, it was wrapped up, but part of it was their dismissal of these women?

BOB KOLKER: There were months when Shannan was missing, and that was a lot of time to discover a lot of inconsistencies with the police investigation into her disappearance. First of all, the lack of response. Then, the fact that there was supposed to be a security video of her disappearance, but the video was taped over and the police never got that video. There was belongings of hers that were eventually found; a jacket that then the police lost in evidence years later. The number of slip-ups was really quite astonishing. And you can't help but wonder that if this had been a medical student and not an escort, or a, or a... [crosstalk]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Or a housewife or...

BOB KOLKER: Yeah, a housewife or a mother.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: ...a grocery store worker.

BOB KOLKER: Yeah, suddenly the pressure would be on and the police would be, you know, stepping up and crossing their t's and dotting their i's. But in Lost Girls I write a lot about sort of an institutional apathy among the police and I guess the media as well, too. Just saying, like, these are, these are people who were leading risky lives and maybe this sort of thing just happens sometimes. The kind of thing that sort of blames the victim in a really kind of bizarre way. As those bodies were being found along the beach, the chief of detectives at the time made a public statement at a public meeting saying that the, the public could rest easy because the killer was only targeting a certain type of person, which is-- kind of says it all. And [KATHLEEN: Yeah.] um, a lot of the police were working hard, but they also were not embracing any new technology that could help solve the crime. They were doing cursory searches for various things, like hunting licenses and such. And they never really followed up because as we know, the man who's been... being prosecuted right now for the, for the crime has 97 gun permits and even more guns at home. Like, they really overlooked someone who was in plain sight and was a very glaring example of someone they should have been looking at. And they did this because they considered the whole thing to be a lost cause from the very beginning.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: From the very beginning, yeah. When, eventually, and who do they arrest?

BOB KOLKER: There's a new version that was published in May that includes the arrest of Rex Hurman, who at the time he was 59, was an architect who was living in Massapequa Park, Long Island, which is exactly where a lot of people were saying the killer would live -- in the middle of Long Island in commuting distance of New York. The public knowledge of the phones that the... that the victims used all pointed towards someone who lived in Central Long Island and commuted into Midtown Manhattan. Here was a man who'd lived in Central Long Island and commuted to Midtown Manhattan. He was an architect. He had a public-facing job. He dealt with a lot of movers and shakers in New York and had meetings and even was interviewed on YouTube once. This is a little different from what some people might have expected about the killer. When you think about a serial killer, you often think about someone like Joel Rifkin, perhaps, who was also on Long Island, who was a, a landscaper who just sort of roamed around in his truck alone and didn't have to talk to people, didn't have to put up a front. This guy put up a front. And yet, he really was hiding in plain sight. He lived in this dilapidated house that creeped people out around him. We, we know now from police statements that he was still seeing escorts for years after this case happened. God knows how many people he might have harmed. I guess we're still going to learn. The latest criminal charges against him indicate that he is perhaps responsible for a murder that stretches as far back as 1993. That 1993 is, is amazing. That's, you know, that's, that's almost 20 years before Shannan Gilbert disappears. That means that for 30 years he was at large, since 1993 to 2023. Thirty years when he could have been harming people. It, it-- the mind reels.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And speaking of Shannan, she is not one of the charges.

BOB KOLKER: Exactly. He hasn't been charged with her murder, they still aren't even calling it a murder. They're-- I think they have an undetermined cause of death for her. But in their public statements they suggest that it is a coincidence and unrelated, which is their way of saying they believe that she had a psychotic break, perhaps drug-induced, and ran into the marsh and drowned. This, in a marsh where the water's very shallow. This, from a woman who the autopsy doesn't reveal any substances being used. It's, it's all... it's all a little sketchy. But again, quite possible that the neighbours around her that night didn't help her, or even perhaps chased her away. These are things that, that a lot of people are still wondering.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What do you think?

BOB KOLKER: I think the neighbours know more than what they're saying. I think it's not realistic to think that they, um, just heard screaming and didn't see anything. Particularly when that one neighbour, Dr. Hackett, was an emergency response guy who at the drop of a hat would jump outside. And he was there that night. And because he followed up with Shannan's mother and called her completely out of the blue... it suggests a certain amount of involvement that I think there's more to be told to that story. But I don't think that she was targeted by a serial killer, no.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You don't, eh? You don't think she's part of that group?

BOB KOLKER: I don't. It makes it the most, um, bizarre coincidence ever. But the fact that she went with a driver, the fact that it was a last-minute call, it doesn't fit the pattern that way.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It was... I mean, another part of your book, I mean, it's associated, obviously, is your real deep reporting on the families, including Shannan's family, which was very complicated. And her mother was a very difficult person. Can you tell me about Mary? Like, she... she was a bit of a leader in the group, but also pretty hard to get along with.

BOB KOLKER: A very contradictory figure. Very charismatic, very loud. She would say things that the other family members wouldn't. Things that would get the media attention and would keep the focus on... you know, less on the killer and more on the victims. So I think there's a lot that she did that was good. But she was a very polarizing figure. She would seem not to be very comfortable with, um, quiet moments. So any time that the families seemed to be getting along, she would sort of jump up and say something provocative that would be polarizing that some people would disagree with. And in the beginning, she didn't even want to be part of that group because Shannan was still missing. She didn't want to admit that she might be dead, and so she didn't want to suggest that she was killed. And so it became difficult for her as time went on. What's interesting to me about Mary is that, is that she evolved over time. That she grew into her role, until finally she embraced her role as activist on behalf of not just her own daughter, but, but of all of the people who were victimized. She ended up sharing the stage.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did she accept that Shannan wasn't part of the group?

BOB KOLKER: No. And, um. And I don't think that her daughter, Cherie, who is still active in this case, is ready to accept it either. I think she wants the case reopened, and she wants any possibility of it being a homicide being investigated.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And a horrible twist to this -- Mary was killed by her daughter.

BOB KOLKER: Yes. She had another daughter, Sarah, who several years later had a psychotic break. And, you know, the, again, the other irony here is that Mary had been really tending to Sarah, and really trying to care for her and for Sarah's son as much as she possibly could, as Sarah was dealing with severe mental illness. And um, finally one day she went to her house... after Sarah had been detained for a few weeks in a hospital and not given her psychiatric meds. Sarah was off her meds and she murdered her mother, she murdered Mary. It was a shock to anyone who had been following this case. But the more people I talked to about those years, you know, since Shannan was found, was that Mary suddenly had become this very attentive, very responsible parent in a way that perhaps she might have been criticized for not being, years earlier.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Hmm. What did this all do to you? Like, how did it shift who you were and how you thought about life?

BOB KOLKER: Well, I'm drawn to, to journalism that helps people understand parts of the world that they might not otherwise ever come into contact with. I had always wanted to write books that lift the veil on foreign places and help people understand that we're not so different from one another. I, I come from that direction where I think that the best journalism connects us as people. And so, with Lost Girls, I was really trying to show that these people weren't... were being overlooked for no good reason. That they, that they were people, and that they were making decisions that were not so different from the kind of decisions that, that anyone makes. And so I... to that extent, I feel a certain sense of, um, satisfaction that the book accomplished that. But I think it's a lesson that I constantly have had to relearn over and over again. You know, Mary's death did that for me. I had to turn around and say, wait a minute, what did she do? What kind of person had she become? And then I learned again exactly, you know, what... you know, what people are capable of. That they aren't so different from you and me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thank you. I mean, you did it. You did a great job. All of your stories, the things that you gave in the book really did just, again, like what you're saying, make you realize that everybody comes from somewhere and we're all important to the people who love us. So, it was really well done.

BOB KOLKER: Thank you, Kathleen. Glad to talk to you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We release a new episode every Monday, so please remember to follow the show in your podcast app. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel or by subscribing to CBC Podcasts' True Crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime channel also listen ad-free. Crime Story is hosted by me, Kathleen Goldhar. Our producers are Nikki Manfredi and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Julian Uzielli. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard, and our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive Producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager of CBC Podcasts, and Arif Noorani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 49

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