An arrest has been made in the Long Island serial killer case, featured in a magazine cover story in 2011. Five prostitutes turned up on a beach, and their families asked: Who murdered my daughter? Who was my sister — really?
Photo: Courtesy of Gilbert family
Megan Waterman vanished next, on June 6, 2010. Moon-faced and bubbly, Megan lived in working-class Scarborough, Maine. She had been more secretive about escorting than Shannan and Maureen; her family learned about it only when her mother, Lorraine Ela, had a chance run-in with a grocery-store checkout clerk who had heard about it secondhand. Ela says she missed out on a lot of her daughter’s childhood “because I was a drunk.” She says she got sober eight years ago, when Megan was 15.
The most recent victim, Amber Costello, was last seen in North Babylon, Long Island, on September 2. Her sister, Kimberly Overstreet, makes no effort to sugarcoat her story. “Amber was a basket case,” she says. “She struggled most of her adult life with drugs. She was addicted to heroin. That was the biggest strike against her. Secondly, I was involved in this.
The women are too polite to zero in on Amanda right away, but it’s lost on none of them that Melissa’s little sister is the only person who may have spoken with the killer. “The media pounded the shit out of us to get the content of the calls,” Lynn says. “And we’re like, ‘We can’t let you know anything more than what’s already out there, because the only other person who knows what was said besides the police is the killer.
So little is known about the nights the other girls disappeared that the women tend to focus on the evening Shannan Gilbert went missing, replaying the details of what happened again and again, searching for clues to who the killer might be. No one engages in that exercise more than Mari Gilbert.
Shannan was in line to become their next victim, Mari believes. But Shannan, she insists, wasn’t like the other girls. She would not go quietly. “I think they underestimated her,” Gilbert says. “She knew, ‘This is not what I want to do.’ And without her running and screaming, none of these other bodies would have been found.”
The others want to know why Mari thinks Shannan suddenly wouldn’t share her fee with the driver. “I was the last one Shannan talked to that night, six hours before she was missing,” Mari says. “We had planned for her to come home for my birthday and for Mother’s Day.” Gilbert thinks Shannan didn’t want to give the driver his cut that night so that she could have enough money to buy her a present. “She said, ‘I have to work tonight, Mommy.
Jeff Marina, Lynn Barthelemy’s fiancé, seems to want to break the tension and bring everyone back together. “I just think all these girls, all our daughters, our sisters, whoever they are, I think they all met the same nut.” The women gather again for dinner, where they talk about the joint vigil they’re planning on Ocean Parkway, along Gilgo Beach, on June 11. The purpose, Cann says, is to persuade people to come forward with information and keep pressure on police to crack the case. “I may never get closure,” she says. “But that’s still a place where my sister was. And I just feel like that community has to see the families. All they care about is the values of their houses and how their community looks.
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