You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by author Robert Kolker, here to
talk about his New York Times bestselling book Lost Girls, an unsolved American mystery.
Thank you so much for joining us on Mind Ever Murdered today. It's
great to talk with you both. Thank you. Go ahead and start off
by telling us a little bit about your professional and educational background. I grew
up in Maryland and went to college in New York and stayed there. I've
been a New Yorker for over thirty years. I've been a journalist for thirty
years, mostly in magazines. More than half that time I was a staff
writer at New York Magazine, writing feature stories and cover stories, a lot
of crime stories, a lot of narrative stories about complicated subjects. Lost Girls
actually evolved from a cover story about the Long Island serial killer case that I
wrote back in twenty eleven. Then the book came out in twenty thirteen.
Since then, I've written another book, Hit in Valley Road, that was
a number one bestseller and an Oprah book. And I like to go back
and forth between magazine stories and books. It's a dream career, so I'm
very grateful to be able to do it. When we talk about Lost Girls,
the book and this case, where do you find yourself coming down in
terms of referring to this case by name? Are you going with Gilgo Beach?
Are you going with Long Island serial Killer? It's the most amazing thing.
The entire time I wrote the book, people were saying Long Island serial
Killer. I called it the Long Island serial Killer. Then Shortly after the
book was published, people started to shorten it and call it LISK. There's
a fine documentary series called The Killing Season with some nice people who run it,
and they suddenly it's all lisc, lisk, lisk, and that was
interesting. And then the second this arrest happens, it's the Gilgo Beach murders
and the Gilgo Beach Killer, which I hadn't seen in such high circulation before.
So I'm happy to go where the wind blows and go with gilg Beach
Killer. At this point we had noticed the same thing because people referred to
it as Long Island serial Killer, and we know people that have written about
it and covered the case on podcasts. And then with the arrest, we
find ourselves stumbling to describe the series of murders accurately. Now people are almost
talking about them as if they're separate events. We've got four or four women
who have been at least potentially linked to Rex humermen and they're being referred to
as the Gilgo Beach four. It's almost like Long Island Serial Killer or LISK
is a separate case. Any thoughts on that those four sets of remains were
always set apart from the others. They were very particular compared to the others
that were found, but there was a constant debate about whether they should be
a separate case or not, or whether it's all one potentially one killer.
In fact, there was a huge breakdown from the very beginning between the COmON
Police Commissioner at the time and the district attorney at the time about whether there
was one killer or more than one killer, and that was one of the
first reasons why the case centered paralysis in my opinion. But it interests me
now that there's an arrest that this becomes the Gilg Beach killer, and these
other murders are often the ether, and it's anyone's guests whether they will be
tied to. It's a tough one because you have so many victims to account
for, some of whom have been identified and some of whom still have not,
which is just stunning to me that someone in New York City could be
unidentified in a murder case like this for ten years. It's interesting to think
that we need to be that specific with our killers because there are so many
of them, and certainly there is more than Long Island serial killer. There
was Joel Rifkin from another generation who is far more prolific than it appears.
Rex Huerman was, so, if you want to get scholarly about it,
maybe it makes sense to be more specific with your titles. How did the
Gilgo Beach cases actually come onto your radar? I was on staff at New
York Magazine. I had lived in Brooklyn. I had a car, which
meant that it was the pretty easy for me to get out to Long Island.
I had done some Long Island stories in the past before this, there
were crime stories, and in those first four remains. When the Gilgo four
were found in December twenty ten, my editor turned to me and said,
this looks like it's for you, and I resisted. I was probably intimidated
by such a competitive story because it was already national news. But also I
was jaded and I was skeptical. I thought, they're going to solve this
case in twenty four hours. Just a year and a half earlier, there
had been a Craigslist killer in New England who murdered one person and the police
found him within forty eight hours. So I thought, for people who the
police say are sex workers, that's four digital trails from the Craigslist. They're
going to find this guy before I even get in my car. But also
I had that wasn't the only incorrect assumption I made. I also was dead
wrong about something else, which was when I learned that these four women were
supposedly escorts. I thought, we're never going to learn a thing about these
women. At the time, I subscribed to the cultural stereotype that had been
part of even good true crime shows like The Wire, where they find a
bunch of dead bodies and it propels the plot in motion, and we assume
those people were trafficked, and that we don't know their names and we'll never
learn from them again. I assumed that these women lived off the grid,
that they were outcasts from their families, that they were lost long before they
were lost. But in fact, the only reason they were lost is because
we decided they were lost. They had families, they had people who loved
them, people who wanted the police to look for them when they went missing,
people who were frustrated by the lack of efforts made by the police,
people who had trouble even getting their names onto the registry of missing persons.
And only when it became a big serial killer case did suddenly law enforcement have
a vested interest in trying to solve their cases. It became interesting to me
how wrong I was at first, And it became more interesting to me once
I met the families how much they had to talk about with one another,
not just about their lost loved ones and the lives that they led, but
about the struggles that all of the families had faced. They all were from
different towns within striking distance of New York, places like Portland, Maine,
and Buffalo, New York, and Wilmington, North Carolina, Grouton, Connecticut,
and Jersey City, New Jersey. And these are all places that never
really recovered from the Big Crash of two thousand and eight, places where people
were still struggling, places where a young person didn't have the entry level job
opportunities that their parents or grandparents have. And it's a time where sex work
is changing. You don't have to walk down the street, you don't have
to be under the control of a pimp, you don't have to be a
social outcast to be a sex worker. And if you work on Craigslist,
you don't have to work full time. In fact, most people don't,
and you can make far more money than you would make at the dunkin Donuts
or at the Walmart. It's not even close. And it's time after time.
As I researched these women's lives, I saw people who were experiencing economic
shocks of a certain sort. Maybe they're facing eviction, and they see in
a way to make money quickly. They see it as a means for social
mobility. To me, that is the opposite of the stereotym type. To
me, the stereotype is somebody who is leading a life of drug addiction or
is traumatized from a life of abuse, and falls into this work because they're
desperate and addicted. If substances became a problem for some of these women,
it happened later, it happened after, and that was interesting to me too.
And then abuse was way inconsistent. Some of them had been abused,
and then others had not, but their sisters had, and yet they were
the ones who became escorts. I just became more and more interested in how
surprising their lives were, and I thought this could be a potentially small but
special book, a book that could come out with or without a killer.
I was a little worried the publisher would force me to wait until there was
a killer. But I was very pleased and grateful that my editors and my
publisher, HarperCollins, they subscribed to the same idea I had, which was
a sort of off the beaten path true crime book that was as much about
the ways of life of all of the women and their families and the media
maelstrom that engulfed them after the case happened as it was about the search for
the killer. And so I was. I thought it would be a very
small, but potentially highly regarded book. And what surprised me was that within
a year or two, unconventional, socially minded, high minded true crime suddenly
became everyone's favorite thing. Cereal high happened, and making a murder happen,
the jinx happened, streaming happened, and suddenly multi part documentaries happened, and
then finally podcasts happened, And to the extent that Lost Girls had a life
for many years after it was published. It was because it hit that wave
and rode that wave with so many other really excellent works of true crime.
And I think that's why the movie got made too, Because it was time
the world was ready, particularly with me too. The world was ready for
a story about listening to women, about women who had been forgotten. It
is a very sensitive portrait and it definitely opened my eyes to what it is
like for women who work as sex workers, because it isn't something that I
had given it a ton of thought to. But as I'm sitting here reading
this, I'm going, Wow, this is heartbreaking in a lot of ways.
I really appreciated the sensitivity and the warmth that you gave to these women.
And it's very clear that you spend a lot of time with the family
members of the victims, still close with them, especially now in light of
the recent arrest. Are you still talking with them? Is this relationship that
you've continued to cultivate over the years. There are a few who I'm send
happy texts back and forth with over time. There are some who I haven't
really seen since the Lost Girls movie came out, but I've just hit the
like button when they've done something on Facebook. It was a horrible time in
their lives when I was talking with them, and for some of them,
talking with someone who ranted to write a book was the last thing they wanted
to do. After they had already taken time off from minimum wage jobs to
go down to New York to be interviewed for forty eight hours or dateline.
They didn't understand and didn't necessarily want to be a part of it. I
traveled where they were. I tried to see them whenever I could. And
I was witnessing them as the case was still fresh on Long Island, as
there was news coming basically every day, and I was watching their reactions,
and I think that that's a traumatic time for them. And I've been talking
withlaw enforcement people recently since the arrest, and they've talked with some of these
family members recently, and they talk about how they seem very normal until you
start talking about the nitty gritty of the case, and then it's like a
film covers over them and they stiffen up, and it's like they go back
to that time when the case was fresh. So I'm not out barbecuing with
them these days. No. Also, I appreciate what you said about the
book's warmth and it's compassion. It's a very tricky thing. I'm a consider
myself a traditional journalist, not an advocacy journalist. I didn't want to write
a book that sort of turned these women into angels, or carry the flag
for them, or to beat the drum and say, who will speak for
these women? I will. I wanted to do a book that was anthropological,
that kind of looked very carefully and sensitively at the lives these people left
It led in perhaps a non judgmental way, but not in a way that
turned them into a different kind of trope, like the poor innocent babe in
the woods who gets killed by a hannibal lector monster. I didn't want to
fall into that trap either, and I end up toward the end of Lost
Girls, just coming out and saying it like they weren't angels and they weren't
devils. They each got involved in escort work for different reasons, but they
were deeply personal reasons to each of them. One of them wanted to went
away back into her family, and another one wanted to have a close relationship
with their sister, and another was in love with her boyfriend and thought that
they could build a family together with their money. It just everybody's reasons were
different. When I read these sort of deep dives of the biographies of the
women that you focus on, I do see a through line though, of
some terrible choices and drug addiction and abuse, and even a mix of escort
work with providing drugs cocaine and other drugs to their johns. Don't you think
that's part of the mix. For a lot of these women, the idea
of being your own boss is attractive, and escort work puts you for a
brief period. It's occurred to me as the center of attention. You're the
star, and for someone leading an otherwise humdrum life where you're under it all
the time. Marian Brainerd Barnes in Connecticut, who always is having trouble paying
the rent and is always having trouble keeping a job, to be able to
go down to New York and stay in a hotel room and walk around Times
Square and see the lights, and then go see men who want to see
her, who want to give her money. You can tell yourself a story,
and I wanted to make sure that aspect of things really appeared in the
book. With drugs. The bleakest story becomes Amber Costello, who really is
a tragedy that began years before she even came to New York. Her parents
essentially are deteriorating because of health problems standing from their own addictions. All she
has in life is her big sister, Kim. Kim is an escort.
Amber becomes an escort. They travel together, they do everything together, and
eventually addiction follows. By the time she's in Babylon Long Island, the addiction
is in full effect. Actually she came to Long Island to go into rehab.
Her sister paid for it. But then she came out and the boyfriend
who she met there, the two of them went right back into it.
And so yes, the sex work at that time is fully sustaining the drug
habit. And there's really gruesome detail in Lost Girls about the lives that they
were living in Long Island before she disappeared. And this is this gets so
bleak that when she does disappear, no one, not even her sister,
goes to the police because they don't think they'll be taken seriously, and also
because they don't want to draw attention to the lives that they're leading. And
that's as bad as bleak as it can get. It seems to me,
as the English teacher in the room, I do want to ask about your
writing process, because I ask this of every author that we have on the
pod because I think that in some way it will probably help me teach my
own students. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and
how that process is informed by your vocation as a reporter. I'd never written
a book before Lost Girls. I'd written magazine stories. Those stories, a
lot of them were narrative in nature, and a lot of them involved interviewing
people who were in difficult life situations and telling their stories. And I understood
that to talk chronologically with those people was interesting and helpful. Didn't even didn't
just help with writing, it also helped create a cogent way of thinking about
their lives. And so I thought, I talked myself into thinking this would
be easy. I thought, this will be like five magazine stories about five
women and their families, and then a six magazine story about the case and
Bibbity Bobby boo. There'd be a book, maybe a small book, a
very short book. Then I would be done. And of course it wasn't
that easy. I had just enough of an advance to afford to take six
months off of work from New York Magazine without us so that and so I'd
outcome proof the book for myself. I said, even if the book sinks
like a stone and nobody reads it, I won't have lost any money and
I will have had a good experience working on something that I thought was interesting.
So that's how I was able to go to sleep night for the first
six months of and the book was due a year. So for six months
I stayed on the clock at New York Magazine, and I took little side
trips here and there to all the hometowns, and I interviewed everybody I could,
and I racked up hours and hours of audio, and I didn't really
look at the audio, and I had an extravagance, which is I paid
to have all the audio transcribed. I thought that he if I had to
sit and transcribe it all, not only would it take a month, but
also I probably wouldn't be the same person at the end of it, because
I find it to be rather demoralizing to sit and listen to my own voice
talking to people. So six months go by, and I have six months
left before the book is ready, and I have all this transcribed interviews,
and that's when the clock starts. That's when I take off work and I
sit down and I created six buckets, one for each woman and her family
and one for the investigation. And I looked at a calendar and I charted
out how much time I would divide it up, how much time I would
spend trying to write the sloppiest, worst possible draft version of each of these
stories. And I went to work, and the time pressure kept me from
stopping. My motto don't just keep going. So if I had a problem
with a section, I would just make a little mark saying you're gonna have
to come back to this, and then just kept going. But the real
thing that kept me courage as I was working on it was that I already
had an idea for what the book would look like. I was influenced by
the Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, which is really two books in one.
I hear you say, yeah, the first part of the book is the
prelude to the crime, and the second is the aftermath, And so I
thought that that would work here. You'd have a part one that is the
lives of the women from the moment they are born to the moment that they
disappear, and then part two would be everything that happened after their bodies were
found, the blow by blow of the media Maelstrom, the trauma of the
families coming together and finding each other, the police dysfunction, the rumor mill,
the conspiracy, theories of who've done it, and then finally, as
an end, where they all are now and how they look toward the future.
And so I knew that it was going to look like that, and
that kept me going as well. But as I wrote Just to I had
lots of unanswered questions. I didn't know if I was writing a pulse detective
book, like if I was writing an Elmore Leonard novel that was nonfiction it
was something grizzly and tough, or if I was writing something intellectual and removed
and anthropological and that would read like a sociological study of these people. I
didn't know which way I was going. I couldn't figure out what the voice
was going to be, and so I decided to just hit the gas and
be as explicit and tough as possible, and then I could always dial it
back, and that's what I did. But somewhere in there there was a
second question I realized, which was, how OnEarth are you going to not
just differentiate these women for readers, but lead the reader through and around these
worlds. And so I had lots of chapters where I was the intermediary.
Say, a chapter begins, it's going to talk about Meghan Waterman. The
chapter begins with me saying, I'm sitting on a park bench talking to Megan
Waterman's mother. It's been six months since her daughter's been found, and she
lives in Portland, and this is what her life, saying, this is
the story. She tells things like that that got me through the first draft.
But then when I handed into my editors, they immediately said, you
don't need to be in this book so much. And I immediately was relieved.
I was so psyched because what I said to them was, so you
think I have enough? I have enough without me, And they said,
oh yeah, yeah, You've learned enough about each of these women that you
don't need to be in it. And that was extremely encouraging. And so
the rewrite became about finding new ways to start those chapters. So you then
found yourself pulling back a little bit, and there wasn't so much of I'm
sitting here on a park bench on a sunny all day or whatever. Yeah,
I was going in with the impression that the world I was describing was
so alien to most readers that they would need someone to hold their hand and
take them through it. But actually, what I learned was that wasn't necessary
at all, and I was really happy about that. I am not the
sort of magazine writer who puts myself in stories, and so it was an
uncomfortable place to be in any way. So I was like, great,
I show up in the book at the moment that I show up in the
chronology, when the case is when the families have surfaced and the media is
paying attention to them and somebody wants to get to know them better. That's
when I am there as a fly on the wall. But you don't learn
about me. I'm just part that allows for scenes where it's just me and
one person, one on one talking about things, that allows for those scenes
to appear in the book. But it's not like it's me as a character.
It's me as an interviewer. You didn't Truman Capodia exactly exactly fact,
same thought it is. It really is just a wonderful piece of writing.
Honestly, Bob, it's amazing. Well, thank you. I was.
I thought that the biggest challenge would be to try to understand women who I
was never going to meet through the eyes of the people who knew them,
And at first I thought it might not be possible, but then I realized
that the women were in their twenties, that they weren't sixteen, They had
lives independent of their families, and so I thought of I could talk to
hopefully more than one, but at least one person who really knew them well
in their adult lives, and I was lucky enough to talk to more than
one for each of them, then I would have a fully dimensional view of
who they were. And I decided that I would try to solve the answer
of why did each of them become a sex worker? Why did they become
an escort? Why did they make the decision that their cousin or their sister
never did. What was it about it for them? And I had trouble
finding the answer to that question for each of them, because even as I
interviewed people who knew them well, at no point did any of those people
say to me. And that's the day I remember that she looked at me
and she said, you know what I'm going to advertise on Craigslist that just
never happened. There was no moment where it happened, and so I changed
the question. I realized that the way to understand anyone in fiction or in
nonfiction is to find out what they want out of life, what they want,
And so I sat down and I did some thinking based on all my
interviewing. What does Maureen want, what does Megan want? What does Shannon
want? What does Amber want? What does Melissa want? And what they
wanted were all different things. I talked before about Shannon being alienated from her
family and wanting to get back in. In the book, I talk about
Melissa wanting to be successful and not to lead the life that her mother,
who had her when she was sixteen, led. She came to New York
for a whole different life, and Maureen wanted to pay for her rent so
that she wouldn't be evicted, so that she could prove that she could have
custody of her son. It goes on, and Amber wanted to be close
to her sister Kim, who I talked about a moment ago. Everybody had
something different, and that suddenly was to me, was the key to understanding
these people as individuals and not as plot devices in a true crime story.
You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from
our sponsors. We're back here at Mind over Murder. One process question.
You're talking to a number of different people, and even listening to you described
the process. I get how you're talking about these women as younger, really
girls growing up. Also talked to people that were more of their contemporaries,
that were their friends, that were able to tell what they were up to
pretty close to the moment they disappeared. Were any of these people resistant to
the idea that you were going to plunk down a digital recorder and record the
conversation. Did you encounter much resistance, because some of this is a painful
and b some of these people are involved in illegal activity, particularly the friends
and associates. Did anybody say I don't want to be recorded or you had
to do the traditional reporter's notebook approach. That's a very interesting question because while
it's certainly true that a lot of people resisted being interviewed at first, and
I just kept asking and kept moving, kept on moving through the book,
and eventually, through gentle positive pressure, people agree to be interviewed. But
once I actually sat down to be interviewed, nobody flinched it the tape recorder.
And that's something that I've noticed over the years. I first was a
reporter working on news stories in like nineteen ninety two or nineteen ninety three,
and it was terrifying to take out a tape recorder because you would think that
the person would completely freak out and it would spoil the entire encounter. Quite
often, you wouldn't want to do it. You just sit there with your
notebook. But the reality TV era has changed it all. It's changed everything,
and I'm sure podcasting has changed it as well. It's a different time
now where I can't remember the last time someone has been upset about having a
tape recorder out. In fact, they're upset if you don't. They're like,
what, you're not going to record me? Because everybody thinks that they're
going to get recorded. It's a night and day change. And of course,
the other night and day change is that recording is so much easier now
you're not flipping tapes and buying new tapes, and god, it was horrible
changing batteries in the whole nine yard. Yeah, exactly. It was like
a like this own age. Talk to us a little bit about Mary Gilbert
and her murder at the hands of her daughter Sarah. When and how did
you hear about it? And what was your emotional response to it? Such
an awful turn of events, really a real tragedy. Most tragic of it
all was that the life that Mary had been leading in the years since since
Shannon's death had really been, in many ways the life that she had hoped
to lead, an exemplarly life where she was really caring for the people around
her. That wasn't always the case with Mary. She was a really erratic
person and had her own personal problems. I don't mean to be oblique here.
I'm not talking about substances or anything like that, but just as a
personality, she could she was a handful, but with her daughter Sarah,
she was a caregiver. She cared about her, and she cared about Sarah's
son as well, who was in the mix. Sarah had mental health problems.
Sarah had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Sarah's mental health took a nose
dive after Shannon's body was finally found and her relationship completely disintegrated, She was
on her own. She had psychotic breaks more than one. She had meds
that she was supposed to be on. There was a sun that she was
supposedly taken care of, and she was taking okay care of him, but
she became more and more angry with her sister Cherie and also with Mary,
particularly with Mary, and one day Mary came and visited and was murdered by
Sarah. Sarah you could say that she was psychotic, she also was planning
it, so she ends up getting convicted of murder. The insanity defense doesn't
work. It rarely works in the United States, actually, but it didn't
work for her. So she's in prison there and Mary is gone, and
it's just awful. It was July. It was basically the same time of
year as when I first went this year when I heard that rex Hureman had
been arrested for the murders. So it was weird that way, like the
same weather, the same stuff I was doing outside, and the call come.
The call came when I learned about Mary. I was really brought low
and immediately on the phone and Facebook and email and texting with everybody involved in
the case. And at that point. Actually, I was on the film
with Liz garbus too, the director of the Lost Girls movie, because even
then she was still she was trying to develop it as a movie, and
she had met with Mary just a few months earlier and was ready to make
a movie about Mary and her life. And suddenly Mary was gone. It
was a real shocks. Something you highlight in the book. In the latter
part of Lost Girls, you talk about the fact that Mary really seemed to
find purpose in life following Shinnon's disappearance and then ultimately her body being recovered.
That seems to just make that losing her that much more profound a loss,
I think for all of us, because I don't think she had great purpose
in her life prior to losing her daughter. I think the best way of
explaining this is to talk about the relationship with another daughter, Sharie, who
if you read Lost Girls, really is at odds with Mary. Toward the
end, She's really angry with her, and Mary is alienating the people around
her. It's a tough time. But also Shari is upset with Mary for
falling short in a lot of ways as a mother. I want to focus
on that because that changed after Lost Girls came out. In the years before
Mary's death, she mended fences with Shari. She worked hard to take care
of Sarah as well, and she worked hard to try to keep the police
focused on shin AND's death and to get the nine one one tape released,
and to get the as second autopsy done, and to get the remains away
from the possession of the police department so that she could have a proper burial.
She had real challenges towards the end of her life, and she was
rising to those challenges and repairing her relationships with people. And that's the tragedy
I think. So let's shift gears for a minute here. What would you
say, especially given the fact that now we've finally seen an arrest in this
case, what would you say were the biggest missteps in this case on the
side of law enforcement and investigators if you had to name the biggest couple,
because it seems like there were a lot of missteps, what would you say
some of the biggest ones were before it was a serial killer case. The
world we're in was a world where the when these women were leading were at
risk in their lives that nobody was really coming in to help them. Or
support them, and when they disappeared, nobody was really working over time to
find them. If they finally was a murder case, suddenly the media was
paying attention, but the police, some of them were resentful they had inherited.
Suddenly it's like a not just one cold case had crash landed in their
backyard, four of them had. And then they found more bodies, six
more bodies, ten cold cases, and then the whole riddle of Shannon Gilbert
and eleventh problem. They're sitting there with eleven problems, none of which they
think are going to get solved anytime soon, and everybody's mad at them,
and they've got other work to do, and they're annoyed. Part of this
annoyance is apathy towards sex workers, and part of it is misogyny, and
part of it is class because god knows, if these women had been high
school cheerleaders or college students or workers in Manhattan who had gone missing, it
would be a very different story. Lots of different pressure involved to try to
solve the case. In terms of police work. It wasn't just apathy or
misogyny. There was a tip that we now know about, a witness statement
that somebody who saw an individual and a car the night before Amber Castella disappeared,
someone who was big enough to look like an ogre and who drove a
car that looked like a Chevy Avalanche. This tip went nowhere early on,
and then it sat in the case file. No one worked on it at
all, No one talked about it at all for more than ten years until
a year ago. And then suddenly it pinpointed our suspect. If that tip
had gone somewhere twelve years ago, then they would have had that suspect that
much sooner. There was resistance to innovation. There was cell tower technology where
they could have tried to match up the movements of the various burner phones that
were used to contact the women. This, to me, I would think
would be the first thing you would want to do in a case that's based
on technology, like a Craigslist case. They didn't want to do it.
They were resistant to it. The FBI offered help to expand their work that
they had done early on in it, and the Suffolk County authorities resisted it.
They wanted to do their own thing to find to complete my list,
which is already really long list. There's corruption there's police corruption because at the
beginning of twenty twelve incomes a new Chief of Department in the Suffoc County Police
Department, a guy named Jim Burke, who is a known quantity, a
problematic figure for years. He had been working for the DA and now he
was over in the police force again after being away, and he turned the
place into the KGB. He had people followed, he had people wire tapped,
He went after his enemies, He beat up a witness and then tried
to cover it up. It was a misery for four years he was involved
in the department and it was just a shocker there that happened. But the
shocker for the Gilgo Beach case is that he kept the FBI way. That
the FBI was there, ready to do work, and he didn't want the
FBI looking over his shoulders, so he kept them away. The lack of
cooperation, particularly with the FBI. And I don't mean to attribute the recent
success with the arresto rex Huermann strictly to the FBI, but it's pretty striking
that six weeks or so after a new task force is formed with a high
level of cooperation between Suffolk County new York State Police, FBI, and other
agencies. It can't be lost on anybody that six weeks after this new team
energized, working together, cooperating, they're all of a sudden making progress,
significant progress, including the tip regarding this so called ogre and the Chevy Avalanche.
He was a very distinctive physical figure and the truck was a very unique
vehicle, and they knew they should be looking for that truck and that individual
in Massapequa or Massapequa Park. Once they actually put the team together that weren't
playing politics and weren't covering up corruption, the case started moving forward. I
think that's accurate. I'm starting to get a more detailed view of how that
went down. The corruption then did a couple of years before this new administration
came in, there was an interim period where they did do some significant work
on the cell tower stuff, and they even limited the area even better,
and they had an even more narrow list of possible homes where a killer might
live. They still didn't have a suspect, though, and that's because it's
not just that nobody was acting on the tip about the Chevy Avalanche, it's
that people didn't even know it existed anymore, and it disappeared into the case
file. The file wasn't even searchable, it wasn't digitizable. At the beginning
of twenty twenty two, there's a new police Commissioner, Rodney Harrison, and
there's a new District Attorney, Ray Tierney, and they both have done work
in New York and they both worked on gang cases, and they both understood
how important cell tower technology is because it puts people in places without meeting witness
statements, and so they're ready for a task force and the FBI that helps.
It's the state police as well state troopers. And it's a state trooper
on the task force who does a different kind of search for the Chevy Avalanche
that turns up a guy Rex Hureman, who's huge, like an ogre,
who lives in massive people park and not incidentally has ninety seven gun permits.
So it suddenly becomes someone they can look at. They don't just have all
this cell tower data which they've assembled in recent years. Now they have somebody
to square it against. But it is amazing. As you said, the
task force began February first, I believe, twenty twenty two, and I
think they found the Chevy Avalanche attached to Hereman on March fourteenth, so no
time at all, about six weeks I think, from the time they got
started just after the beginning of the year. Credit to everybody who worked on
this thing, but of course it was all sitting there waiting to be discovered.
I know we hear a lot of cliches about fresh eyes, but I
think fresh eyes, fresh enthusiasm, a new team with all this talent.
Six weeks later, they've actually got strong leads which led them directly to a
suspect. Yeah, and I think there's a frustration there among some of the
people who immediately preceded this group, because they did some good things too.
They identified an additional victim, Valerie Mack, who had been anonymous up till
then, and gave her family information that they sorely wanted for years, and
they made pieces of evidence public, and there were things they did, and
as I said, they refined the geographic area where cell signals were pinging,
and there was hope, but there was no suspect. There was no the
suspects that they were going after, none of them panned out, and you
can't have one without the other. So when the arrest was made back in
July. What was your response, was Rex Huerman in any way what you
expected when you pictured the perpetrator in these cases. When I learned that he
lived in Massapago Park and commuted to Manhattan, I thought that certainly is.
But when I learned that he had a family, that surprised me. And
when I learned that he had a public facing job where he was. He
wasn't a landscaper gardener like Joel Rifkin. He wasn't bopping around in his truck
not talking to anyone all day long. He actually talked to people and had
to impress them and went over their business. And some of these people were
powerful people in New York City that he had to be a consultant for.
I wasn't expecting that. And it's not like he was some super charmer like
a Ted Bundy figure. But he was public. He was gregarious and ambitious.
And then he went home and had a wife and two children. At
first you wonder, how do you find the time, how do you manage
a life to be able to do this? And then you think, clearly
he found a way, And then you learn about a vaults down in his
house with not just ninety seven guns, but two hundred and eighty guns,
and it starts to become something really gothic going on there in that house.
The sixty four thousand dollars question, maybe do you think that rex Huerman was
responsible for the other victims in the Long Island serial killings. I'd like to
give you an answer, but I need one second. The dog here is
eating a napkin. Bob went under the table for a second, and I
was like, I don't know what's going on there, but we'll give it
a second. I saw the I actually saw that beautiful dog. Oh I
didn't see the dog. And now I saw the dog in the background,
and I was like, I think he just grabbed something off the counter.
Really, I thought I saw it. And I was like, I'm sure.
I'm not always looking at the screen, of course, I'm looking at
the questions and other things. I think it's grabbing something off the counter.
That's funny that it was in the background. We'll take that part out,
all right. So you had asked about more so I think that's a great
question. One of the first things I certainly thought was, how does somebody
who apparently is responsible for three or four women on the beach continue to live
his life for another twelve years after those bodies are discovered. How does that
person not try something else, not hurt someone else? How does he just
stop? And I think it's going to be pretty dreadful to learn exactly what
kind of life he was leading in that time and before that time? Was
this his first was mourning Brainerd Barnes in two thousand and seven, really his
first victim. That we have a lot left to learn about him. I'm
no profiler, but it seems odd to me that he would stop being interested
in this sort of thing and just turn it off. When you've finished your
book and turned it in, that is the first edition of the book,
because now you've added an afterward. Did you think someday, I think this
case is going to be solved or did you always think it was going to
remain a terrible unsolved part of Long Island history. I had really placed myself
in the lane of focusing on the victims. In fact, I started to
get to a place where I thought our culture thinks too much about Hannibal Lecter.
I enjoyed the silence of the lambs as much as anyone that between that
and Dexter and everything else, like we sit and romanticize these people and that
they're just they're all like Joel Rifkin, they're just disturbed, gross people who
need to be put away. But I'm not going to think about it.
And I had skepticism about whether the Long Island authorities would ever have any headway.
The only thing, the only silver lining I thought of at the time,
over the years was that a lot of these cases do tend to get
solved ten or fifteen years later. All over the country, you hear about
it ten or fifteen years later, something shakes loose, somebody's life situation changes,
they tick somebody off, they die, or or a witness suddenly changes
their mind. Something happens, And I think that's in fact, really what
happened here at administration changed and the corrupt culture started to wither away, and
suddenly there was cooperation with other agencies. That's what changed in this case.
What is next for you in terms of projects, I know you've had a
lot of success with Lost Girls. You had a ton of success too with
Hidden Valley Road, which actually is in my classroom at this very moment on
my bookshelf. Next. When else can I put another Robert Kulker book on
my shelf. I would love to write another book. At the moment,
I have a lot of magazine work going. The books are always really big
gambles, and I need to do what I did with Lost Girls, which
is outcome proof them. In my head think this will be worth putting a
couple of years into, and so it's tricky there. I usually have to
kiss a lot of frogs before finding another book. But in the meantime,
I just panted in a draft of a timed New York Times magazine story about
the Gilgo case to try and chime in with the rest of the world.
Perhaps that'll be the last thing I do in it, Perhaps not. And
then I'm thrilled to have a nice relationship with the Times magazine now where I
can write about any number of different subjects. I've written about a plagiarism case
and about a family with dementia. It's a thrilling career where I can have
a lot of variety and jump around, but I do keep coming back to
families. I do end up writing about families and crisis, families facing challenges.
I did it with Lost Girls and with my other book as well,
and so I imagine it's going to take me somewhere new before long. Do
your publishers and editors call you up and say, g you, Bob,
it would be great if you book or I think I'm feeling the pressure more
than they're like, you can't hurry love. They get it. They understand
that it has to be a good idea too, so they've seen it before
that it takes some time. Do you know roughly when your New York Times
magazine article will appear? I don't, but I assume it'll be sometime in
late September or in the month of October. It won't sit around for long,
so it's not going to wait until the trial or anything like that.
So Fall twenty twenty three, it's coming soon. We hope, Yeah,
I hope so. And then is Hidden Valley Road getting the Netflix treatment or
is that one going to remain purely in book form? It was in development
for a while, and that one. I wasn't creatively involved in the Lost
Girls movie, but I was with developing a Hidden Valley Road mini series and
I really enjoyed working on I really grew and developed as a writer trying to
work with a screenwriter. It was really a thrill for me, and at
the moment it hasn't been picked up. These things go up and down and
have different lives. Lost Girls went to three different studios before Netflix finally made
it. You got to kind of divorce myself from the outcome with that one
and hope for the best. The book is Lost Girls and Unsolved American Mystery.
And where can our listeners look for this amazing book? Lost Girls is
still in print, which means it's everywhere. You could buy it on the
internet or you could buy it in your bookstore. And it does have an
afterward about Mary Gilbert and perhaps one day when the case against Rex Herman proceeds
in court. Mailby another thank you so much for joining us on this episode
of Mind Ever Murder. We really appreciated talking to you. I really like
talking with you guys. Thanks so much. That's going to do it for
this episode of mind Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our
logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media. You can follow
us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You can also follow our page
on the Colonial Parkway Murders on Facebook, and finally, you can follow Bill
Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas. Five six. Thank you for listening to
mind Over Murder.