The Mystery of Shannan Gilbert
Long Island was different then, thirty years ago. Oak Beach was the personification of its seaside innocence and yearning for life. It wasn’t, in the words of Shannan Gilbert’s mother, “an evil dirty place.” Now, “It’s isolated. It’s desolate. It’s a rich community. You’ve got doctors and cops and very very wealthy people who live there. No one’s ever going to think that that’s a bad dangerous area. But it is.”(53 – 0:16)
Sometime around midnight of Walpurgis Eve 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a twenty-four-year-old call girl, left Manhattan and took the last ride of her life in Michael Pak’s SUV. They would have got off Ocean Parkway where the OBI south once stood and gone left about a half-mile down the pitch-black Oak Beach Road till they got to the gate and someone let them in. Pak, her regular driver to escort appointments, says it was Oak Beach resident Joseph Brewer and they followed his car to his house (54 – 2:32). Brewer admits to hiring her but says it was not for sex (55 – 27:28). Brewer and Pak’s stories collaborate and they both passed lie detector tests but sociopaths laugh at lie detector tests.
At 4:51 AM Shannan made a terrifying 911 call from her cell phone that for reasons that are unclear to this day was transferred to the state police who no longer have jurisdiction in Oak Beach (56 – 9:02). Although she was on the phone twenty-three minutes screaming “their trying to kill me” the 911 operator was unable to get her location. Two male voices that have been identified as Pak and Brewer can be heard in the background.
Shannan then showed up banging on the door of Oak Beach resident of over thirty years Gus Colletti. Colletti, perhaps not coincidentally, comes across as the only witness in the CBS 48 Hours news investigation who is not being disingenuous. According to Colletti, he opened the door. “And I said to her … ‘What’s the matter?’ She wouldn’t answer me. She just kept staring at me and going, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ I reached over and grabbed that phone, dialed 911. When I said to her, ‘I called the police. Sit down in that chair. They’re on their way.’ She just looked at me and she ran right out the door.”
When Colletti followed her outside he saw her cowering under his boat in the driveway. He says “I could see a car coming down the road very slowly … would stop and then go a little bit. Stop, go a little bit.” Colletti ran up to the car and confronted the driver; Michael Pak, asking him ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Pak replied that he was looking for Shannan and Colletti told him ‘Well, I called the police … they are on their way to bring her back,’ to which Pak replied ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ Colletti answered ‘Well, I did.’ At this point, Shannan bolted from under the boat and into the darkness. Pak drove off after her ignoring Colletti’s shouts for him to stop.(57 – 7:07)
Pak claims that they had been at Brewer’s house for about three hours when Brewer came out and got him. When he went in Shannon was “freaking out” and accused them both of trying to kill her. She then went behind the couch and crouched down. Pak says he followed her and asked her if she had seen the movie Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. She replied coherently and at that point, he says he realized she wasn’t high.
It was then he heard the 911 operator on her phone and he thought Shannan might be trying to set him up. So he left. When he was outside he saw her run out of the house and tried to follow her. From there his story match’s Colletti’s. With him giving up and leaving when he couldn’t find her after pursuing her from Colletti’s house.(58 – 56:39)
The next 911 call came from Oak Beach resident Barbara Brennan, who says Shannan showed up banging at her door at 5:21. But neither Shannan nor Pak was anywhere to be found by the time the Suffolk County Police Department (SCPD) got there at 5:40. SCPD was unaware of Shannan’s initial panicked 911 call received by the state police and wouldn’t find out about it for at least a month. So when they didn’t see Shannan or Pak, SCPD assumed they had left together.
Two days later on Monday May 3 at 1:42 PM, Oak Beach resident Dr. Charles Peter Hackett made a phone call to Shannan’s mother Mari (59 – 31:34). Mari says that Dr. Hackett told her Shannan had been staying at his house in Oak Beach which doubled as a halfway home for wayward girls. Dr. Hackett told her that Shannan had been agitated, so he had sedated her and she had left with her driver.
Dr. Hackett at first denied making the call but after 48 Hours dug up the phone records he wrote 48 Hours’ investigative journalist Erin Moriarty a series of letters claiming he hadn’t said he had seen Shannan nor did he say he ran a halfway house out of his home. He was just trying to help. According to him, he had become involved after meeting with her family and Pak and Shannan’s boyfriend Alec, when they came looking for her in the ensuing days.(60 – 30:36)
But Alec did not even realize Shannan was missing until Sunday night (61 – 6:06). Shannan’s family only came to Oak Beach to look for her eight days later (62 – 4:38) after SCPD refused to take the case seriously and made them file the missing persons report in New Jersey where Shannon lived.(63 – 8:25)
In August, under relentless pressure from Shannan’s family and their pit-bull of a lawyer, John Ray, SCPD finally got around to interviewing Gus Colletti (64 – 9:14). By December they began their search for her and on the eleventh a K9 team working its way down Ocean Pkwy, less than three miles from where Shannan had last been seen, turned up the first body.
In the following days, they found three more in the same area within five hundred feet of each other. All of them had been asphyxiated, wrapped in roll-off burlap used by landscapers, and dumped haphazardly a few feet from the road in marshland bordering one of the most crowded beaches in the world. (65 – 11:26)
All of the dead were call girls, petite, attractive, and White, between the ages of twenty-two to twenty-seven, who had advertised their services on Craig’s List just like Shannon Gilbert. But none of them were Shannan Gilbert. The girls had all disappeared between 2007 and 2010.
In March of 2011, the remains of six more bodies were found by SCPD in the marsh’s bordering Ocean Pkwy between where the first four were found and Oak Beach where Shannan disappeared. Only one could be identified. She was a twenty-year-old escort who had gone missing back in 2003. One was a baby girl and another a slightly built Asian man dressed in woman’s clothes. The rest were women. Again none of them were Shannan.(66 – 25:48)
It wouldn’t be until December that SCPD would finally find the first sign of Shannan. Her pocketbook, jeans, and shoes were found just about in the driveway of a house on Hatch Way Street. A week later and about a quarter of a mile from where they found her clothes, less than a hundred feet from Ocean Pkwy, Shannan’s rotting corpse was found face down in the marshes.(67 – 33:29)
Unlike the other four call girls, two of which were dead longer than Shannan, the Suffolk County coroner was unable to determine a cause of death for Shannan. Case closed for SCPD. Former Suffolk County Chief of Detectives Dominick Varrone says Shannan died of “fatigue and exhaustion” after becoming lost in the marsh grass a hundred feet from the well lit and heavily-trafficked Ocean Pkwy.
Varrone insists over and over again that her panicked flight was drug-induced, and she shed her clothes because it is easier to run through razor-sharp marsh grass naked. The fact that he found eleven dead bodies while searching the area she disappeared in, nine of girls exactly like Shannan, doesn’t sway his conclusions in the least.(68 – 34:11)
Varrone also says that Dr. Hackett is not a suspect. Although he admits that Dr. Hackett might have made that phone call Varrone feels that Dr. Hackett is just a busybody who is prone to exaggeration (69 – 32:10). When pressed by Erin Moriarty about the nature and timing of Dr. Hackett’s call Varrone actually accuses the victim’s bereaved family of lying and then claims that SCPD did not know about the phone call till months later. The call and the details of it are contained in the New Jersey missing persons report made two days after Shannan disappeared.(70 – 37:08)
Shannan Gilbert was a resident of New Jersey. Her strange death is clearly the FBI’s case. She crossed state lines to commit an act of prostitution, which facilitated her death in circumstances that are more than a little suspicious. Perhaps they can start by arresting Varrone, if not for deliberately ignoring the best lead he had on the investigation of at least 11 homicides, then for criminal incompetence. All the evidence they need is right on the internet due to CBS’ crack piece of investigative journalism: “48 HOURS” UNCOVERS MISSING ESCORT SHANNAN GILBERT’S FINAL MINUTES. (71)
If that’s not enough; before the conclusion of this piece right before Christmas, Newsday miraculously managed to obtain a report on the autopsy. Shannan’s autopsy, just like a full transcript of her desperate 23-minute 911 call to the police, has been kept from the media at all costs by local law enforcement. Shannon Gilbert’s remains tested negative for drugs and parts of her fingers and toes had been eaten off. There was also a small piece of her neck bone missing. (72)
Back in September, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, at the request of Shannan’s Family and their attorney John Ray, asked the Suffolk County coroner for Shannan’s body. Apparently they had seen this report or parts of it, and Dr. Baden wants to take a closer look at her hair and bones for drugs. He also wants to take a good look at her larynx and windpipe. Turns out the missing piece of her neck is the Hyoid bone. Coincidentally, a fractured Hyoid bone is the primary determinate for a coroner in detecting strangulation in skeletal remains.
Dr. Baden’s credentials include being the former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and former chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. While serving in these prestigious positions, he participated in the investigation of more than 3,000 homicides, suicides, and drug deaths, including the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. By law, the Suffolk County coroner must turn Shannan’s body over to Dr. Baden. (73)
The coroner’s office has now agreed to release Shannan’s remains to a Long Island funeral home that will turn them over to Dr. Baden for an independent autopsy but not before someone coughs up sixteen thousand dollars. They say that will be the minimal amount for a funeral, headstone and burial plot. (74)
All over the world people simply ‘vanish into thin air.’ The saying itself is a platitude. There are geographic pockets where it happens with alarming regularity. Some like the Bermuda Triangle are part of human folklore. Others like Myrtle Beach in South Carolina and America’s national park system are popular tourist destinations. Even when the missing turn up, no explanations are ever forthcoming.
Evil stalks the human race and evil with millennia of practice at remaining invisible. But if you know where to look you will see the footprints of evil.
Excerpted From: Footprints of Evil by Jack Heart - The Human: Jack Heart, Orage and Friends (jackheartblog.org)
Post Birthday Babble & a Formal Message to the "Long Island Serial Killer."