While the Suffolk County Police Department knew their missing-person search might end tragically, they were unprepared for what they found: four bodies, spread over a quarter of a mile near Ocean Parkway and Gilgo Beach on Jones Beach Island. The women—Amber Lynn Costello, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman—had been buried in the sand and brush in burlap sacks. Like Gilbert, all the women were prostitutes in their 20s who had solicited clientele via the adult classified section of Craigslist.
Shannan Gilbert remained at large for another year, before her remains were discovered in December 2011. In the years that followed, more women’s remains would be discovered in the pine barrens on the eastern half of the island.
Several of the women had been missing for a long time—Brainard-Barnes had disappeared more than three years earlier, in 2007. According to Robert Kolker, an investigative journalist and author who wrote Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery about the killings, the police—both in Suffolk County and elsewhere—would have shown these missing-persons cases greater urgency and respect had the women worked in a different profession.
"If any of these young women had been a college student or the daughter of a judge or the daughter of a doctor, they'd be all over cable news," Kolker tells A&E. "The connections between their disappearances would've been made more quickly, before their remains were found. And the police would've had a jump on the killer."
Nearly a decade since the initial four bodies were discovered, other remains have been found, with 10 victims or more now likely tied to a single perpetrator.
No arrests have been made.
How the Courts Have Handled the Giglo Beach Murders
In January 2019, Suffolk County Police Department refused a judge's orders to release the tape of Shannan Gilbert's 911 call to her family, telling journalists that doing so would jeopardize an ongoing investigation into the killer's identity. But that explanation is inconsistent with other statements the police have made, says John Ray, an attorney representing the Gilbert estate.
Ray notes that the Suffolk County Police Department had claimed in the past that Gilbert had died of natural causes, and that her death was unconnected to the murders of the other women found on the beach.
“It's a dramatic inconsistency," Ray tells A&E. If police think Gilbert wasn't murdered, he says, then the tapes aren't valuable evidence. If police want to acknowledge that Gilbert was murdered, they should do so.
"They've failed her miserably," Ray says of the Suffolk County Police Department. As for why the police department would refuse to release the tapes, he adds, "The only reasonable speculation that could even exist under the sun is either that there's something on the tape that's significant which they don't want us to know…or they don't have the tapes [or]…they erased them. Or they're just pigheaded, and they're full of pride, and they don't want to give in to us."
