The beginning of the story was strangely familiar, like the
opening scene in a shopworn police procedural: A woman runs
screaming down a street in Oak Beach, a secluded gated community
on Long Island’s South Shore, only to vanish, it seems, into thin
air. It was almost dawn on May 1, 2010. Hours earlier, Shannan
Gilbert traveled from New Jersey to see a man who had hired her
as an escort from a Craigslist ad. By the time the police
arrived, she was gone. They talked to the neighbors, the john and
her driver and came up with nothing. A few days later, they
ordered a flyover of the area and, again, saw no sign of her.
Then they essentially threw up their hands. She went into the
ocean, they decided, either hysterical or on drugs.
None of this made the news, not at first. A missing sex worker
rarely does. Not even when another woman advertising on
Craigslist, Megan Waterman, was reported missing a month later.
This was, quite obviously, a serial-killer case. The only person
not saying as much was the Suffolk County police commissioner,
Richard Dormer. “I don’t want anyone to think we have a Jack the
Ripper running around Suffolk County with blood dripping from a
knife,” he said in a frenzied news conference. In fact, they had
something almost exactly like that. All eyes were on the Suffolk
Police now — wondering who killed these women, if they would ever
find Gilbert and what it would take to solve the mystery.
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