Original subtitles

[phone line clicking]

[operator on phone] Hello, you dialed into the 911 system.

What's your name?

[on phone] Shannan Gilbert.

[operator] Where are you?

[Shannan] I'm in Long Island.

[operator] Do you need the police?

[Shannan] Yeah.

[operator] What happened?

[tense music playing]

[Shannan] These people are plotting to kill me.

They're gonna kill me.

Please stop it. Please.

No. What are you going to do to me? What are you going to do to me? Stop it!

[operator 2] Suffolk Police 872.

[man] There's a young girl running around here screaming,

and there's some guy trying to follow her.

[operator 3] Suffolk Police. What is the location of your emergency?

[woman] Oak Beach Association.

Some woman is knocking at my door.

She says she's in danger.

[pounding at door]

[woman] I'm not letting her in.

[dramatic music playing]

[reporter 1] It was her 911 call that set off a search in Oak Beach.

[reporter 2] …triggered a massive investigation.

[reporter 1] Women in their early 20s

allegedly answered escort ads on Craigslist,

then disappeared.

[man] The area around New York City, this is his hunting ground.

[reporter 3] Police scouring 10 miles of roadway through Gilgo Beach.

[man] Don't want anybody to think that we have a Jack the Ripper

running around Suffolk County.

[woman] You prey on small, innocent girls, and we're gonna get you.

[melancholy music playing]

[waves crashing]

[woman] Long Island is the largest island on the mainland United States.

It's home to about 8 million people,

and it's known as the birthplace of the suburbs.

[lively music playing]

[woman] New York City is on one side,

and it stretches all the way to the exclusive Hamptons on the other.

I grew up in this area.

This stretch of Long Island, this was like my heaven.

Just so beautiful,

so peaceful.

And it's just completely surreal

because this is the one place I didn't think anything bad could happen.

And it's the one place it did.

Shannan Gilbert disappeared in May 2010, and I had never heard her name before.

But I was a reporter at the Long Island Press

working on stories about local missing women,

so I should have.

[melancholy music playing]

[man 1] There is an obscure beginning

to the night that Shannan Gilbert disappeared.

[eerie music playing]

Shannan undoubtedly left her home in Jersey City

the night of April 30th, 2010,

and went to Manhattan to meet up with Michael Pak,

her driver.

[suspenseful music playing]

[man 2] When Shannan went missing,

she was working as an escort on Craigslist,

so she was working for herself.

She was her own boss.

That night, Shannan was driving around Manhattan

with her driver and friend Michael Pak.

Then it wasn't going very well

until sometime around midnight when they got a call from Joe Brewer,

a client who lived out in Oak Beach in Long Island.

It's a little gated community.

That's a 90-minute drive from Manhattan,

but Joe Brewer is promising them at least a few hours,

which would be enough to make it worth their while.

[Ray] There's a lot of mystery about what really happened that night.

And it matters greatly why she was there

and who did what when she was there.

[Kolker] She was inside Brewer's house for a few hours.

[mysterious music playing]

[Kolker] Then in the hours before dawn, there's a tap on Michael Pak's window.

And it's Joe Brewer who has left his house

and come out to the car to say that Shannan won't leave.

This is according to Michael Pak, who told me his side of the story.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Kolker] What did she look like to you?

[Pak] She looked, uh, paranoid.

Scared.

So I said, "Let's go home. I'll drive you home."

Let's go back to Manhattan.

[Shannan] Something's going to happen to me.

Stop it, please. Stop it, please.

[Pak] I think he wanted to push her out, but he grabbed her and she freaked out.

-[Shannan] Please, stop it. No. -[Pak] Then she ran out.

-[clattering] -[Shannan screaming]

[banging at door]

[man] Somebody was banging on the door yelling for help.

That's when I opened the door

and they jumped in, and they were standing right here.

[Colleti] Who are you?

Somebody after you?

-Are you all right? -[Shannan] I need help.

[Coletti] I told her to sit down in that chair. Police were on their way.

As soon as I said that, zoom, out she went, down the steps.

She ran around this way, but she kept looking down the road.

And she got between the car and the boat and was crouched down, hiding there.

[Pak] I saw her behind the bush, so I was like "Oh, I found you."

So I thought everything was okay, but she ran towards another row of houses.

[running footsteps]

[Pak] And then, eventually I couldn't find her and I just went home.

Michael Pak says he made an effort to find her

and then threw up his hands and just went home.

But the big mystery of this moment is what got Shannan upset in the first place.

That's something that Michael Pak has never been able to explain,

something that Joe Brewer seems reluctant to talk about.

But clearly, something upset her so much that night

that when she was on the phone with 911,

she actually said that people were trying to kill her.

[Cameron] I received a call from a detective

from the Missing Persons Unit about the Shannan Gilbert case.

[tense music playing]

[Cameron] We went out to Oak Beach to see what happened.

We spoke to the client, Joseph Brewer, and people in the community.

She was not there when we arrived, and neither was the driver, Michael Pak.

The assumption was he found her and he left with her.

So basically what the police had

is some type of disturbance that was gone on arrival.

I showed them what direction she went in,

and that was the last I saw of her.

Uh, and quite frankly, the last we saw of the police department too.

Mari Gilbert. I'm Shannan Gilbert's mom.

-[reporter 1] And it's M-A-R-I? -M-A-R-I.

[Ray] When Mari learned that her daughter was missing,

she immediately reacted.

She went to the police to report her daughter missing.

The police laughed at her and said, "Oh, you know,

don't worry, she's a prostitute. She'll turn up."

[reporter 2] Could you speak about why you're here

and what you hope to accomplish by being here today?

I'm here to get the word out to help to find her and bring her home

because we miss her and we love her,

and I want her back.

[Gallucci] There's a lot of coverage when a teacher goes missing,

when your next-door neighbor, who's a mother of three, goes missing.

[dramatic music playing]

[Gallucci] But there's very little coverage

when a woman who's a sex worker falls off the grid.

Right now, people out there who are watching,

who are listening, who knows about Shannan,

I just want to ask you, "What if it was someone that you love?"

"How would you feel if nobody came looking for you?"

I will continue to fight nonstop

until I bring my girl home where she belongs.

[Kolker] Those first few months after Shannan disappeared,

it felt like the Suffolk County Police

weren't aggressively pursuing Shannan's disappearance in Oak Beach.

[Gallucci] I think Mari Gilbert really made sure

that her daughter's name was gonna be in the media,

like, was gonna be in the news. You were gonna hear about her.

[Gilbert] It was always one excuse after another.

"We don't have people. We're on a budget. We can't afford overtime."

"Well, it's getting December."

"It's gonna get colder. It's gonna get more frozen."

"There's going to be more snow. You have to look for her."

And, finally, they agreed to look for her almost eight months later.

[tense music playing]

[Gallucci] It was a Saturday in December.

And I was on the weekend rotation shift, which is usually a very boring shift.

We had gotten a press release that said that remains were found by the beach,

which is not something unusual.

A lot of times they'll find deer bones or something like that.

It's never anything.

So I just wrote it up real quick and didn't really think much of it.

The weekend passed and on Monday,

around four o'clock or five o'clock, I was in the car.

And it was around rush hour,

and I was just listening to the radio, and they said,

"Don't take Ocean Parkway. There's a police investigation."

That piqued my interest because we just got that release

that said remains were found in that same vicinity.

So I went straight to Ocean Parkway.

And when I got there,

there was every police vehicle you can imagine.

[police siren wailing]

[Gallucci] And at that point,

I knew this is not about deer bones anymore.

[suspenseful music playing]

[indistinct chatter]

I'm gonna make a short statement here,

and I'm gonna have to keep it to, uh, that short statement.

This is an ongoing investigation.

Missing Persons Unit called us out on Saturday

to follow up on an investigation.

This is a pretty vast area here.

-At some point… -[dog barking]

…the dog gave me an indication

to a spot off the shoulder of the, uh, parkway.

At that point, I saw the skeletal… Skeletal remains of a body.

They found an intact skeleton, and they found burlap around the body.

[Cameron] The assumption was it was Shannan Gilbert.

We had found her, the case was over. It was solved.

[melancholy music playing]

When the body was found, they called Mari to tell her that.

No mother wants that call.

They knew that Shannan had a distinguishing characteristic.

She had a titanium plate in her jaw from being abused by her boyfriend.

And so they knew right away that this was someone else.

[somber music playing]

The police called Mari back and said, "Sorry, wrong body."

So you can imagine how disturbing that was to her.

They thought it was Shannan. It wasn't Shannan.

How is this not Shannan Gilbert? Who else is there?

[Cameron] Two days later, on December 13th,

we came back to do an evidence search in the immediate area of the body.

[Kolker] They were out again,

searching the side of the highway of Ocean Parkway.

[tense music playing]

And very quickly, they learned that this was a bigger case

than they imagined.

They found three more intact skeletons.

[reporter 1] Not one, not two, but three more sets of remains.

[reporter 2] Three more bodies turned up

in the desolate wooded brush near Gilgo Beach.

[Gallucci] There's four women now found spaced apart,

and they were bound.

So this is definitely, you know, not just a rage killing.

This is somebody who's out there hunting women.

[Kolker] They were bound in burlap along the same stretch of deserted highway,

each about a tenth of a mile away from each other,

none of them Shannan Gilbert.

A colossal meteorite had smashed into Suffolk County.

[dramatic music playing]

As a reporter for New York Magazine,

I would go out to Long Island to report, you know, various subjects.

I had written a lot about crime and criminal justice and murder,

and I had actually reported on Long Island a lot,

whether it was a murder in the Hamptons or a corrupt superintendent in Roslyn.

But when four women were discovered on the side of Ocean Parkway,

I resisted writing about it at first. I thought it would be solved right away.

But the case was not solved right away.

I decided to cover the story.

I wondered how far off the side of the highway

those four sets of remains were found.

[man] It looks like somebody pulled up on the side of the shoulder,

you know, took the remains,

and maybe walked in a little bit into the brush

and tossed it or laid it down.

We may not be able to determine the cause of death.

The elements have taken their toll,

but we work very closely with our partners.

The head of the FBI office here in Long Island has been up here.

[woman] The Bureau assisted in the recovery,

trying to make sure that they had recovered all the remains

and just kind of culling through the evidence that was there.

[man 1] Gilgo Beach, there's salt water, there's wind, sunlight.

All of these things are very inhospitable to forensic evidence.

There wasn't a real lot of things of forensic value left at the scene.

-[man 2] Watch your head. -[man 3] Okay.

It's a very serious incident to have four bodies in one location.

At this time, it appears that the bodies are female.

[reporter 1] Can you say there's enough similarities that you're certain

the same person murdered these four and dumped them here?

Well, look, I don't think it's a coincidence

that four bodies ended up in this area.

You know, that's a good direction to go

that they were all dumped here by the same person or persons.

[reporter 2] You have a serial killer dumping bodies along this stretch.

Well, I'm not going to say that, but certainly we're looking at that.

The medical examiner is assisting with identification of the bodies

so that they can be checked against, uh, missing person databases.

[Gallucci] Police went through all the missing persons reports they had,

and they tried to batch them.

And when they realized that those cannot be linked to these cases,

that these women probably aren't from the local area,

they came to the conclusion that they were probably here working.

Identification is the key at this point.

The history of missing prostitutes throughout the country

will tell you that they're usually not in the database,

therefore not identified,

which really causes major problems for the investigation.

[reporter] Suffolk County Police said

there's still no word yet on who these women are.

We know of at least two prostitutes who disappeared here last spring.

And let me tell you, their families are full of anxiety,

fearing the worst, that this could be another Jack the Ripper.

[Kolker] I thought that we might never find out who these women were.

But I was filled with incorrect assumptions.

They weren't off the grid

the way that we sometimes think people in this situation are.

People were looking for them.

People missed them, wanted to see them again.

-[footsteps approaching] -[clinking]

[cupboard opening]

[woman] Nothing prepares you for this.

You don't expect your life to be in turmoil.

My sister, Maureen, went missing July 9, 2007.

[melancholy music playing]

Maureen is two years older than me.

The two of us kind of took care of each other.

I knew she was traveling to New York City.

She had told me it was for modeling.

That night was late, and she called

and said that she needed a ride from New York City.

We live in Connecticut, so we weren't able to go and get her.

She said she was gonna take the train.

That was the last time me and Maureen spoke.

[lively music playing]

[woman] Maureen and I would drive to New York.

We were the escort version of Thelma and Louise.

You know? Except we ain't driving no car off the cliff.

[chuckling]

[keyboard clacking]

[Karnes] We advertised as a girlfriend experience, or GFE,

which is what we did.

You become what they need you to be in that moment.

We had our rules to keep us safe.

We always had our phones on us. We'd text when they got there.

-[elevator dinging] -"I'm here. We're good."

'Cause we don't have safety or security. We had maybe a pocket knife.

But other than that, we had each other.

Honestly, I still wouldn't trade any of the experience

I could have for that in the world.

Helped me to learn to become resourceful.

How to be more independent.

It was fun.

You know, we're doing this together.

And there's only one thing I regret.

[somber music playing]

[Karnes] Leading up to that last weekend, Maureen was served eviction papers.

Her and her roommate were fighting it.

Still, she had to get money together real fucking quick.

On top of that, her son's father is such a sneak.

He was using that eviction shit to try to get custody.

Well, eviction court was Tuesday.

She wanted to make sure she made three grand.

That would have covered it.

But we just couldn't make enough money.

You know, she was stressed.

It's the 11th hour.

She was at her wit's end.

Monday morning, I told Maureen, "I'm gonna go back home."

Then Maureen said, "I'm just gonna stay."

She was in such a fucking crunch.

And that was the last time I saw her.

What scared me the most was she didn't show up to court on Tuesday.

Missy called me.

[sighs] She asked me where her sister was.

And I said, "I don't know."

It was in that moment Missy found out what we really did.

[Cann] I learned that Maureen had started out modeling,

but I think it gradually kind of got brought into,

"Hey, you could do this, and you could make more money than modeling."

My husband and my brother went down to New York.

There was no GPS back then,

so they were riding their motorcycles, and they had a map.

They just went to the last place they knew she was staying at.

[elevator dings]

Where we knew that she was last located.

We printed out a picture of her to people, but it was a dead end.

I met Melissa Cann, and I listened to her talk about

the situation she was in, and I was amazed.

Nobody wanted to look for her sister.

They couldn't even get Maureen's name onto the list

of missing persons, the national database.

[on recording] Can you tell me about what happened?

[Cann on recording] I contacted, like, 18 different precincts,

and got pushed around, pushed around.

[Kolker] Why do you think that was?

[Cann] It seemed that it wasn't something that they were concerned about.

[Kolker] Is that because they found out about prostitution?

-[Cann] Escorting? -[Kolker] Yeah, escorting.

[Cann] Yeah. Maybe.

They didn't think that it was a priority.

[Karnes] We started getting all kinds of leads from everybody.

She was spotted here. She was spotted there.

I felt it was my duty to help

because we would definitely not be sitting here right now

if I had stayed.

[phone ringing]

[Karnes] About two weeks after she had been missing,

I get a call from a blocked caller, and I said, "Hello?"

-[eerie music playing] -[on phone] "I saw your ad on Craigslist."

"I was wondering if you were from Connecticut."

Yeah. Why?

[on phone] "Because I met with another girl from Connecticut."

"Do you know Marie?"

Maureen's escort name.

He was very articulate, and he was calm,

except for when he described Maureen.

[on phone] "She's short. She has blue eyes."

"And she has a tattoo

on her right arm…

[on phone] …that says Nicole or something in red."

"Yeah, that's my friend. But she's missing."

[on phone] "She's not missing."

"I just saw her at a whorehouse in Queens."

I was excited.

I felt like I had solved the case.

My ass was Nancy Drew.

We're gonna go get her. We're gonna bring her home.

"Can you call back unblocked

so that I can tell the cops, so I can give the cops your phone number?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah sure. That's not a problem."

I waited days that turned into weeks,

that turned into a month

with no return phone call.

[dramatic music playing]

[Karnes] I started losing faith when more of her kid's birthdays passed,

more Christmases passed.

It started getting me wondering, "What if she's never found?"

"Am I ever gonna get closure?"

And then one fine day…

[sighs] …that all changed.

[clattering]

Okay, we're all set. Good afternoon.

As you can see, I'm joined with District Attorney Tom Spota,

and we are here today to announce that all four women

whose remains were discovered in Gilgo Beach last month

have been positively identified.

[somber music playing]

[Dormer] The victims are

Melissa Barthelemy,

last seen in July 2009 in the Bronx.

[woman] We first heard news that the bodies were found

by watching the news ourselves.

We saw literally, like, a skull on TV,

and my mom just immediately burst out into tears,

and she was like, "That's your sister."

I've thought about many different scenarios,

but I just want to know what happened.

[Dormer] Megan Waterman of Scarborough, Maine.

Last seen in June 2010 in Hauppauge, New York.

It was the day of her birthday.

The DNA test results came back that she was one of the victims found.

Liliana is Megan's daughter. She was four.

When the police said, we found her,

she said, "The police found my mommy. Why didn't they bring her home?"

[Dormer] Amber Lynn Costello.

Last seen in September 2010 in North Babylon.

[woman] There was two detectives there that told me

that my sister had positively been identified.

You know, I knew.

I had prepared myself. The whole time I knew.

But of course, the first emotion is, like, "I just don't wanna hear it."

And Maureen Brainard-Barnes of Norwich, Connecticut.

Last seen in July 2007 in New York City.

[Cann] A few weeks after unidentified remains have been found,

the detectives came to my house and told us

that they were able to identify her through DNA.

Maureen was missing for three and a half years

before her remains were found.

And I was so tired being sad that I was just angry.

I was just angry at the whole situation.

Then we learned about the others and who they were.

It was like I finally have someone that knew what I was going through.

To the residents of Suffolk County, the commissioner and I say to them

that the victims of these homicides were engaged in a high-risk business,

and these homicides appear to us to be directly related to that business.

[Gallucci] Police were saying, "If you're not a sex worker,

you don't have anything to worry about."

You don't wanna think

that somebody's going around murdering women,

and you wanna say, "They put themselves in that position."

"This is the reason why this happened to them,

and why this could never happen to me."

[woman] I think that it was comforting when we found out

that he was targeting a specific group of women

from a specific website,

so that it made it something that was removed from us.

[dramatic music playing]

[woman 2] You guys all put out there "prostitutes" and "hookers."

They were just like anybody else standing here with me.

They're still human beings.

Do not use "prostitutes" or "hookers" because they were not that.

That's what the police are saying. That's not coming from us.

Do you think anybody's gonna come forward with any information,

thinking that these guys are doing whatever they're doing? No.

That's why we talk to you guys all the time.

Because we want people to see exactly who these girls are.

That's the only way we're gonna get justice.

[Meserve] The news media was very helpful to us at that time.

But we've learned a lot that, for most people, it's just a story.

For us, it's our life.

Megan was loved by a lot of people.

And this affected a lot of lives.

I want them to find out who did this.

[melancholy music playing]

[Gilbert] It's our last family photo together.

She's gonna come back. She's gonna come back.

I was the last one that Shannan talked to that night,

six hours before she was missing.

We planned for her to come up for my birthday.

She says, "I have to work tonight, Mommy, so I have money to buy you something."

I said, "Look, Shannan, you coming is my gift."

"Don't do it. Just come home and visit me. I love you."

"You don't have to bring me presents. Just come home."

At this point, we don't think Shannan's connected

to the Gilgo Beach murders.

But now that we ended up with four bodies found months later

in near the same vicinity,

it was appropriate that the investigators go back

and interview the principals involved.

They did polygraph examinations

on Michael Pak and Joseph Brewer, and they were ruled out.

[Dormer] Mr. Brewer voluntarily gave up his vehicle to be checked.

He allowed the detectives to check his home and his backyard.

There was nothing to show that they were, uh, being untruthful.

[Ray] Everything we do know

about what occurred on the night that Shannan disappeared

comes out of the mouths of Brewer and Pak, period.

So you're taking all of their testimonies, hopefully with a grain of salt,

maybe a rock-sized piece of salt.

At that point, we weren't exactly sure if Shannan Gilbert was related or not.

So we continued to investigate these four set of remains that were found.

They were referred to as the Gilgo Four.

There are various waypoints along the way

that lead us to learn more about the killer.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes disappeared on July 9th of 2007.

Melissa Barthelemy disappeared in July of 2009,

almost, uh, two years apart.

And then Megan Waterman had disappeared in June of 2010.

Then just three months later, in September of 2010, Amber Lynn Costello,

so he seemed to be getting more prolific.

[tense music playing]

[Kolker] The police started looking at the phone records

of all of the women involved as soon as they possibly could.

The first of those four women to go missing was Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

She was last heard from calling from Penn Station,

but her cell phone last registered

at a cell tower near the Queensboro Bridge,

which is in the direction that someone would be taking

if they were driving out of Manhattan toward Long Island.

The second of the four to disappear was Melissa Barthelemy.

She was living in the Bronx, and according to people who knew her,

she had said something about having an appointment

with a client who was from Long Island.

Her cell phone, sure enough, last registered in central Long Island.

When Megan Waterman disappeared, she was in central Long Island already.

[Meserve] The last place Megan was at was the Holiday Inn Hauppauge, New York.

She left the hotel to meet a client

and never came back.

[Gallucci] Megan Waterman's cell phone last registered 15 miles southwest

of the hotel she was staying at, still on Long Island.

A few months later,

Amber Costello also disappeared from Long Island.

She was living in a house with a bunch of friends in West Babylon.

[man sighs] How do I put Amber? Let me think of this one, uh…

She was different. [chuckling]

Um, like, quirky, goofy, you know, and would give you the shirt off her back.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Schaller] That last night, Amber had put an ad on Craigslist.

-And this one guy called. -[phone ringing]

She was on the phone with him for a little bit,

you know, playing the game back and forth.

When she was going to leave, she was leaving without her bag.

No ID, not even a phone.

Like, everything was left at the house.

[man] "She left her phone at home," what are you talking about?

It was just a rule.

There was a set of guidelines to keep her safe.

It makes no sense.

You know?

It doesn't add up.

[Kolker] Most of her work was done at home,

but on the night she disappeared,

she was convinced to go off and meet a guy who was waiting for her in a car

that was not right outside, but a short distance away,

so as not to be seen.

[Dormer] Here's this young woman who's tied

to the cell phone for her business.

Strange thing. She leaves her cell phone behind.

[Kolker] Yeah, no one she knows understands why.

[Dormer] No way of communicating if something happens, you know.

Ten things can happen. Forget about murder.

It doesn't make sense.

[Schaller] He had talked to her about, you know, like money, like a lot of money.

And I'm like, "What did he offer you?"

She's like, "Well, if I stay with him for 24 hours,

he'll give me like 2,500 or some shit."

Like Amber would do a call for $200.

You know? So imagine, that's 10, 15 dates.

And I guess he convinced her to leave.

While Amber didn't have her cell phone with her that night,

the police did know a bit about the burner phone

that her phone was communicating with before she went on the date.

And that burner phone registered in locations in Long Island.

And so you see a pattern with all of the cell phone data

that leads into central Long Island.

[Coleman] We went to a meeting at the FBI office in Melville.

I remember them laying out

the different panels on the cell phone towers,

and depending on which panels the phone connects to

and how it bounces around, they're able to use their expertise

and determine where they believe the phone calls originated from.

[Tierney] At certain relevant times,

these burner phones the killer was using were stationary.

And when you looked at the confluence of these calls,

it created this box, and that made it likely

that this was the area in which the phones were placed,

and it's a small area in Massapequa Park.

[Kolker] The theory that came forward was that the killer is someone local.

Kind of makes you think that this is someone

who is refining his tactics over time.

The first two victims were picked up in New York City

and then brought out to Long Island.

The second two are people who are found nearby in central Long Island.

And so you get the feeling that this is a local person

who starts to change his tactics

to make things a little bit more convenient for him.

[boat horn blaring]

[Funderburg] We grew up in Buffalo, New York.

[man] What's Melissa doing? There's Amanda. I found Amanda.

Say hi, Amanda.

This was my sister's cosmetology graduation.

[woman laughing]

[indistinct chatter]

After that, she wanted to get a job at a nice salon,

so she moved to New York.

The day that my sister went missing,

her landlord's daughter had said that they had saw her on the stoop

waiting, I assume, for a date.

And she just, uh…

never came home.

[sinister music playing]

[Kolker] Another clue to the killer,

it comes from tremendous amount of phone activity

from Melissa Barthelemy's phone.

[Funderburg] About a week after she went missing…

[phone ringing]

…I got a phone call from her phone.

I was relieved to see my sister's name pop up on my phone,

thinking it was gonna be her, but it wasn't her on the phone.

I hear a man's voice and I just, like,

my whole body like shut down, like I was just in shock.

[woman] He was taunting her.

He was basically torturing her.

She kept asking where her sister was, and he just wouldn't tell her.

[Kolker] He made it clear that he knew who she was

because he was calling from Melissa's phone,

and it was Amanda on the phone.

He had gone through the phone book, had looked at the photographs too,

because he saw that Amanda was part Black.

[Funderburg] "I heard you're a half-breed."

[Barthelemy] Nobody's got her photograph.

[Funderburg] The only thing I can think of,

the only thing I think he might know

is if she had a picture of me on her phone or something.

He was calm. In control.

He was enjoying it, I think. That's the only way I think he'd know.

[Barthelemy] "Are you going to be a whore like your sister?"

Then he said something to the effect of, "I'm watching your sister's body rot."

[Coleman] There were seven or eight calls that were made to the sister.

So, at some point, there was a request

by a law enforcement agency to tap the phone.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Kolker] They started trying to trace the calls,

but this meant that Amanda, teenage girl, was being used as bait, essentially,

sitting around and waiting for this phone to ring

so she could try to draw him out and keep him on the phone.

[Funderburg] It terrified me.

I was terrified to date people I didn't know

because I was just always nervous that it was going to be this person.

I just tried to keep to myself and the people that I already knew.

I'm just always watching my back, checking my house, checking my car,

just always nervous.

I couldn't focus on school, so high school went out the door.

I just quit.

[Kolker] She described the voice as male, middle-aged, not a young person.

She assumed white, but she would have no way of knowing.

But the police start to try to pinpoint a location,

and the location ends up being Midtown Manhattan.

This suggests somebody who works in Manhattan.

Then they live in central Long Island.

Then they commute back and forth.

Then the calls stopped very abruptly, and that's as best as they could do.

[somber music playing]

[reporter 1] Police on Long Island, New York,

are searching for a serial killer.

They say all four women whose bodies were found

were killed by the same person.

[reporter 2] Police say they still have no suspects in this case.

[man] I was the Babylon Town Supervisor at the time.

I was preparing and I was beginning this run for Suffolk County Executive

at the same time that the first victims were discovered

over on the barrier beach.

So I'm observing this as an outsider,

but also as somebody who was running for the office.

It was on people's minds, certainly, who had done this.

A lot of questions, a lot of anxiety, a lot of concern.

There was, you know, a ton of leads coming in

and making sure we're covering those and making sure we didn't miss anything.

The Behavioral Analysis Unit gave their input,

which was very helpful to get a profile.

[Dormer] They say that he's a white male, probably in his 40s.

He's socially competent,

but they're very, very devious.

He blends in very well in the community.

He may even be a family man,

but if he's living with a family, his family is away.

Because examining the crime scene,

it was pretty obvious that they weren't murdered at Gilgo Beach.

The investigation would indicate that wherever they were killed,

they were wrapped, carried to the vehicle,

and then driven to Gilgo Beach and disposed of.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Gallucci] The bodies were all found wrapped in burlap.

It just made you think, "Is it somebody who works at a nursery, a garden center?"

[Kolker] There was a theory that he was a hunter or a fisherman

who was able to be undetected because he was out on the water

most of the time, and that's where he brought the bodies.

But by the spring of 2011,

there's still no leads, no suspects, no persons of interest.

[Gilbert on recording] I just wish that they would find her

and track the psychopath who's doing this and put an end to it.

[somber music playing]

[Ray] The police were supposed to have been working with Mari.

She was urging them to find her daughter,

and Mari felt they weren't doing much or anything.

Look at the consequences here.

Two of those girls who died after Shannan disappeared.

If the Gilbert case had been pursued immediately

that might not have happened.

[Kolker] Mari kept the pressure on the police to look for her daughter.

Finally, in the spring of 2011, they ordered a new search for Shannan.

[helicopter blades whirring]

[tense music playing]

[Gallucci] So spring comes, things start thawing out,

and the search resumes.

[reporter] By air, by foot, and by bucket truck,

state police scoured the thick, thorny brush.

We're doing as thorough a search as we possibly can.

A diligent, systematic, and thorough search.

[Gallucci] They're closing the roads down.

And they keep going farther and farther and farther down.

And then, March 29th, they find more remains.

A head and hands on Ocean Parkway.

[suspenseful music playing]

And they kept finding more bodies.

[reporter] Bombshell tonight, more bodies on that same strip of beach.

On April 4th, we found three sets of human remains in one day.

"What is going on here? Are these bodies all related?"

[Gallucci] Now we're up to eight bodies in two months.

And they're finding literally body parts.

A skull, teeth.

So how many people are there?

[Cameron] The entire search area along the north side of Ocean Parkway

was about 12 miles.

We continue the search to make sure there's nothing else here.

[reporter 1] More remains turn up on a beach on Long Island.

[reporter 2] Ten sets of human remains have been uncovered.

[reporter 3] Their manner of death? Police won't say.

And the grisly mystery just deepens.

Now we're faced not just with four women, but a fifth person.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

It's unbelievable.

[reporter] And through all this, Shannan Gilbert,

the woman that started the whole search, still has not yet been found.

[Kolker] This is the biggest serial killer case

in Long Island in a generation.

And you have someone who's been potentially living in Long Island,

refining his techniques, and going after women,

basically with impunity right under everyone's nose.

We didn't know. Is this person still around?

[sinister music playing]

[Bellone] Did this person move?

Did he die?

Now, it was years later that I came to find out the serial killer.

He was living amongst us the whole time.

[dramatic music playing]