Part 13 (2/2)

Alex's life was further complicated by the way he was perceived by people aware of Shannan's case. ”The media tried to make it seem like I'm a pimp,” he said, ”because they found out I didn't have a job. And the family used to trash me and say I was using her.”

Mari and her family were happy to let Alex twist in the wind. He was matter-of-fact when he defended himself, much the same way Blaze was when talking about Melissa Barthelemy. ”If I was using her, you guys are just as guilty,” he said. ”They knew what she was doing. And the mother would take the money, the sister would take the money. And they would judge me? You want to put me in that category, then we're all bad people. We're taking the money, and we know where it's coming from.”

In the summer, Peter Hackett's neighbors at Oak Beach noticed that his car had a brand-new set of Florida plates. The doctor spent much of the year on Sanibel Island in the Florida Keys. Back in December, Hackett had told me that had been the plan for some time. ”I've been hurt so many times in my life that I've had to use the money to help my children with their habits-like eating,” he'd said sardonically. ”You've caught me in the last couple of years of making sure my kids all grow up in the same place, have the same memories. Now I need to move somewhere warm so I won't slip on the ice.”

When he came back, Hackett put his house up for sale, listing the four-bedroom, two-bathroom cottage for $399,000. ”Our plan is to see if we can sell the house,” he told me in October. ”Or we'll just stay right here. We're just taking a shot in the dark. I've been disabled, and now because of this miserable story that the Gilberts and everybody else have made up, I'm essentially unemployable. I've already missed getting a job because somebody went on the Internet and saw my name.”

From his cottage in Oak Beach, with the autumn sun low in the sky, Hackett was more talkative than he ever had been, eager to discuss the damage the case had done to him. ”My family's been threatened, people have called me to threaten me. I have no apologies to make. I've told no lies.” He insisted yet again that he'd never seen Shannan, never treated her. ”My daughter and wife were home. That would be pretty difficult, to treat somebody.” He reiterated that no neighbors called him that morning. ”Just check my telephone. Anyone like the police can just check my phone and see that. I would have known more about it on Monday when I met the boyfriend and the driver.”

What about the neighbors who apparently heard him say that he saw her?

”I told neighbors like Gus and Barbara, 'If this was you and your wife, and someone was hurt, who's the first person you'd call?' They said, 'Oh, you.' They said, 'Oh, we didn't want to bother you.' I did say to people, 'I wished somebody had called me.' Having started the trauma program in this county, I would have been able to get her to the right trauma center. And I did say that to people, because I was annoyed that somebody was missing, sitting outside people's houses, and they bothered to call the police, but normally, if somebody were hurt, for twentysomething years I've gotten up many, many nights to take care of them when they were sick and injured. I felt poorly that they didn't think to call me to help Shannan out.”

That didn't jibe with Gus Coletti's denial that he'd talked with Hackett at all. But Hackett continued to profess bafflement at how anyone would think he was capable of anything like this. ”They seem to imply I chased after this girl or something? I can't catch up to myself walking backwards. What I've found with the press is if you don't talk to them, they make it up.”

He'd denied making the calls to Mari at first, he said, because ”I'd forgotten I'd called her” until he'd checked his phone records. Recently, he had looked at the notes from his meeting with Alex Diaz and Michael Pak-notes that, he mentioned, were the main reason the police wanted to talk to him about this case-and remembered that they'd been concerned because Sherre told them Shannan's cell-phone account was turned off. Hackett said he thought that the police might be able to track Shannan better if her phone were active. That, he said, was why he had called Mari. ”My downfall only started because I didn't want my community to be seen as uncaring-rich people who didn't give a d.a.m.n,” he said. ”I tried to do what I could for the family, and then I guess the family did what they could for me, which was to make up a lot of hooey.” He talked about his physical limitations-the false leg, the back pain, the pacemaker and implanted defibrillator-and he wondered aloud why, if he was such a suspicious character, the police never so much as wrote him up or booked him.

He'd tried not to pay attention to the blog attacks, but that proved impossible. ”This Internet mechanism of prosecuting people. Where do these people come from?” The malpractice cases that Truthspider dug up, he said, were practically pro forma. ”I'm not going to deny I've been sued for malpractice, but I'm an ER doctor in New York. ER doctors in New York are sued once or twice a year.” The question of a rehab raised by one court doc.u.ment, he didn't answer directly. ”This is just mean,” he said. ”If I were intoxicated or whatever it was they said it was, why didn't I lose my license?”

For the first time publicly, he talked about the Scalise family. ”They're using this as an opportunity to make me look as bad as possible,” he said. He couldn't understand why. He claimed to have been on the Scalises' side during their battles with the a.s.sociation, though he allowed that ”if I were to go over there and tell them that, they'd never believe me.”

That said, Hackett wondered if the bad blood would ebb. His term as a board member was ending. Taking one of the free spots on the board was Joe Scalise's sister. ”Maybe things will change,” he said. Meanwhile, he and Barbara, now empty-nesters, were contemplating starting over in Florida. ”I'm trying to get a job with the VA program to work with the doctors there. I'm writing a book about people coming home from war who have lost their legs. My dad was a writer. He said never tell anyone what you're working on.” Putting all the rumors and accusations behind him, he said, would be the hardest thing he'd ever have to do.

What did he think had happened to Shannan? Hackett said he believed the police. Years as a trauma specialist, he said, confirmed it. ”People on c.o.ke,” he said, ”if they hit their head, they're going to get intracranial bleeding and get confused and run in some random direction.” The marsh was right there on Anchor Way. She saw the lights from the highway. She ran. She fell. End of story.

”I mean, just think about it,” the doctor said. ”If I was involved in this thing-if any of this had any substance-would the police be so stupid to miss somebody as obvious as me?”

That same day in October, Joe Jr. was doubling down on his suspicions. ”The guy's no good,” he said triumphantly. ”Around the Oak Beach community, he's been thought of as this hero personality. Now they can't wait for him to get the h.e.l.l out of here.”

Did he still believe Hackett killed Shannan Gilbert?

”I know he killed Shannan Gilbert,” Joe said.

He kept going, offering more rumors, all unsubstantiated: Shannan's hyoid bone had been crushed because the doctor thrust his knee into her neck . . . The police never investigated the morning Shannan vanished; they were waved off by a neighbor, and now Gus and everyone else was lying to cover up for the doctor . . . Hackett was seen making someone erase the security video . . . Neighbors suspected Hackett of mistreating his local patients . . . ”Don't you think it's strange that all these supposedly G.o.d-fearing people were invested in saying she ran off to the beach, she ran to the water?” Joe said.

It was just like Richard Dormer had said. The thing'll never die down.

The barrier islands are supposed to be the rest of Long Island's first and last defense against ocean storms. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy turned that axiom on its head. The trajectory of the storm brought the whirlwind in from the west, hitting the South Sh.o.r.e inland towns before the barrier islands. Ocean Parkway had buckled and crumbled into pieces, but in something of a miracle, all the crosses on the north side of the highway were still standing after the storm pa.s.sed. The bramble had protected them, just as it had protected ten sets of human remains. Oak Beach fared better than many inland towns, such as Ma.s.sapequa or Seaford. Dunes were flattened. Houses all along the Fairway and the Bayou and Larboard Court were flooded and lost power. But the people of Oak Beach were always ready to lose power and deal with a little water. Besides, they had been through a hurricane of their own a year earlier.

Two weeks after Sandy, on November 15, Shannan's family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Peter Hackett. With distinct echoes of the scenario that Joe Jr. said he'd heard from Bruce Anderson, the complaint alleges that Hackett gave Shannan drugs that morning, implying a doctor-patient relations.h.i.+p, and then let her leave his home, demonstrating negligence. Mari and John Ray held another press conference, accusing Hackett of controlling the security video and tormenting Mari with his phone calls. ”The words he chose, his tone of voice-it made me feel like he was more concerned about himself instead of truly wanting to know where Shannan was,” Mari said. ”And it was already proven that he was a liar once by denying he called me for over a year.” As a new smoking gun, Ray finally unveiled Mari's phone records, which showed that the doctor had made a five-minute phone call to Mari on May 3, 2010, two days after Shannan disappeared and three days before the calls he'd previously admitted to. ”Hackett told 48 Hours the first conversation was May 6,” Ray said. ”And he claimed he and his wife searched their records and this was all they came up with. Hackett is deliberately lying.”

Like the civil suit against O. J. Simpson filed by the family of Ron Goldman, Mari's lawsuit was designed as a wedge to force Hackett and others to be deposed in court. ”Our intent is to uncover what happened in detail,” Ray said. ”That has not been done by the authorities to date. So we're just going forward with every legal means that we can find to accomplish that.”

What the complaint didn't have behind it was anything other than Mari's phone records. Ray explained later that he had no affidavits from neighbors, neither Joe Jr. nor Bruce Anderson. When reporters at the press conference brought up the fact that the police didn't think Shannan had been murdered at all, Ray brought the questioning to a close. ”There's no direct evidence as to who killed this lady,” he said. ”But circ.u.mstantial evidence can be very strong. And the circ.u.mstantial evidence right now is very strong to support what we're doing here. And I don't care what the police believe. The facts are the facts.”

Sometime after Melissa's funeral, Lynn Barthelemy got a call from the coroner's office in Suffolk County, saying they had found more remains along the side of the highway with her daughter's DNA. She wasn't told exactly where these remains were found, and it never was made clear to her what had happened: whether the body had been dismembered or an animal had gotten to Melissa's remains before they were discovered. She wasn't told what it meant in terms of the case theory, whether finding part of her daughter elsewhere meant one more link between the four bodies in burlap and the other six found along the beach.

What it meant, first and foremost, was the need for another cremation, another interment. Lynn and Jeff arranged to pick up the remains in New York. They found a funeral home that wanted to charge them $3,400, but Bill McGready, a detective who had worked Melissa's missing-persons case when it was still an NYPD matter, had a friend who ran a funeral parlor and got them a cheaper rate.

When Lynn came to Bill's office, she saw that he'd draped an American flag over the container. Bill had on his white dress uniform gloves when he handed the container to Lynn. When she took it from him, he started crying.

Melissa's friend Kritzia Lugo and her son, Jemire, had started the year in their third-floor apartment in a walk-up in Newark. In January, Kritzia was set to start cla.s.ses at a community college to earn a certified medical aide degree when she was told at the last minute that she wouldn't be able to enroll: They needed her birth certificate, and she didn't have a copy. She took it hard. She couldn't stop crying. Then she took a whole bunch of Tylenol and some sleeping pills. The day she was supposed to start school, Kritzia was admitted into a psychiatric unit at Clara Maa.s.s Medical Center in Newark. After eight days, they let her make calls again.

On the phone, she sounded tired but resolute. She'd been on this detour before. ”I'm thinking I'm going to go down to city hall and find some judge and get a court order or something to find my birth certificate,” she said. ”They're trying to put me in some program. My first day would be tomorrow. But I'm going to go to school. Because that's what I want to do.”

A Facebook status from Dave Schaller on February 10, 2012: Today is my friend Ambers birthday she was taken by the cowardly piece of s.h.i.+t ”serial killer” on long island from me casa! He will pay for what he did. It just hurts to have to live this everyday that I could have stopped u or remembered him if I wasn't so high. I'm sorry!

The last time I saw Bear in Tompkins Square Park, he said he was planning to move to Las Vegas with a friend, ”a junkie that turned his life around.” Bear said he thought he could get straight in Vegas. ”I'm not going to get any better if I don't get the f.u.c.k out of this neighborhood. I am not well. I'm twenty-seven years old, and I have stage-one cirrhosis. My liver is shutting down. Some other guy could end up raising my kid. And that's my worst f.u.c.king nightmare-that people tell my son that his dad was a junkie who's dead because he chose drugs and alcohol over you. I can't deal with it.”

A week later, on the phone, Bear sounded different, less manic. He said he'd asked his parents for help, and they'd found him a bed at a detox on Long Island. The Vegas plan was off the table for now. Bear had been welcomed back into his family for as long as he stayed sober.

In a rest home in Wilmington, Al Overstreet said a miracle had happened. ”I come in here and I get all kinds of stuff. I caught pneumonia, I almost died from that. I got cancer, tumors, six of them. Five in my lungs, one in my chest. But you know what? The five in my lungs disappeared. No treatment. I think it was Amber, praying. She told me one time, she said, 'Dad, you're not gonna die from cancer.' She went to church. I mean, even with the lifestyle she lived, she was really religious.”

Al wanted to come live with Kim on Long Island. Kim refused. ”I can't take care of him physically,” she said. ”His skin is literally so paper-thin that it's like a wet paper towel.” Once, he did live with her and Mike, and he fell backward into a coffee table. They found him sitting in a pile of gla.s.s shards. ”It takes someone being with him all day, because sometimes he just falls.”

Sitting on his bed, Al asked for news about Kim. He knew she was still doing calls, and he knew that she had been avoiding him because of it. ”Kim's afraid to call me,” he said, ”because it's been about seven months, eight months. If you get the chance and see her, tell her to give me a call. Tell her I ain't gonna fuss at her. She don't know how many nights I couldn't sleep, wondering.”

But then he brightened. Kim, he said, was always the stronger of the two girls. ”Kim's a worker,” Al said. ”Not talking about the escort service, but any job she's ever had, they loved her to death. Because she's got a good personality.”

Amber, he worried about more. ”Amber was raped when she was young,” he said. ”It messed her mind up. And then when her mother died, she was mama's baby, so she just . . . broke down. She was hooked on heroin. Otherwise, she was a real nice person.”

When the FBI filed to seize Akeem Cruz's laptop, they found it at the South Portland home of Ashley Carroll, the girl Vybe had been seeing behind Megan's back. When Ashley relinquished the laptop, Vybe's friends a.s.sumed she'd turned against him. ”That turned into a s.h.i.+t show,” Ashley said. ”I had to do it, but in his pea brain, he didn't understand I had to do it. He doesn't understand what a search warrant means?”

Vybe started making menacing calls to Ashley from prison. ”He'd be saying, 'Why don't you like me?' And he'd ask about my son.” The last time he called, she said, ”he told me he was going to kill me and violate me. He said he was going to break my jaw and break my ribs. Because it doesn't leave marks when you break ribs.”

Weeks before Vybe's scheduled release date in early 2012, prosecutors found a way to keep him in jail. That April, Akeem Cruz pleaded guilty to violating the Mann Act, transporting Megan several times across state lines, and eventually received a sentence of three years. In jail, Vybe still wasn't saying a word about what he might have seen the night Megan vanished. While the police have never officially connected him to her disappearance, that didn't stop some members of Megan's family from laying the blame at his feet.

A few months later, when Lorraine finally sc.r.a.ped together the money for an eight-hundred-dollar headstone for Megan, Greg complained that it wasn't good enough. ”She deserves one with a vase and with angels,” he said.

Sometime earlier, Greg had a chance meeting with an important person in his sister's life-someone whom, until then, he'd only heard about. Officer Doug Weed of the Scarborough police said they met when Greg had a ”law-enforcement contact,” though he won't be any more specific. Until then, Weed had only heard of Megan's older brother, Greg. When he noticed Greg's last name, he made the connection. ”Megan Waterman?” he said.

Greg's eyes widened. ”You're Officer Weed? I know all about you!”

The news about Megan's disappearance, and later, her murder, had surprised Weed as much as anyone. He'd never known anything about Megan and prost.i.tution, and he thought he'd known her pretty well. Once he had time to consider it, he thought he should have seen it coming. He knew that she was in the wrong crowd. It made him think about what chance there really is to help a person with such narrow options. Maybe, he figured, if you got to a point in your life where someone comes up to you and says, ”I've got money, I love you, you're beautiful,” you're just a sitting duck.

A few months after meeting Greg, Weed got a letter in the mail. Inside was a school photo of a kindergartener-a girl with brown eyes and a heart-shaped face that, to Weed, was unmistakably familiar.

Hi Officer Weed, Its me Lili. Here is a picture of me from school. I hope I get to see you again someday. My mommy lives in Heaven now she is an angel. Nana says she is proud of me and she doesn't lie so I guess she is. I am five years old and I go to J.F. Kennedy School. I am in kindergarten and I am real smart. Nana says you are real nice and you knew my mommy, she was nice too. I hope you like my picture. Nana says I am beautiful just like my mommy.

Love, hugs and kisses.

Liliana R. Waterman.

Doug Weed usually doesn't cry. But that letter put him over the top. ”I literally had to stop when I read it,” he said. ”I told my wife, if we get the chance, we'd adopt her. I'm not kidding. My wife said, 'That's fine, absolutely.' Because she knows.”

Maureen's family was Catholic, but no one ever went to church. ”With Catholics, it doesn't matter,” Missy said as the car, driven by her husband, Chris, approached the cemetery. ”As long as you believe there's a G.o.d and the mother Mary, you go to heaven. You believe in Jesus, all that stuff.”

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