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 Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. 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 of a Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by author Robert Kulcher, here
to talk about his New York Times bestselling book Lost Girls, an Unsolved American
mystery. Bob, thank you so much for joining us on Mind ever Murder
today. It's great to talk with you both. Thank you. Go ahead,
me 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 future 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 a 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 list, and
that was interesting. And then the second list 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 Gilgo
Beach Killer. At this point we had noticed the same thing because people referred
to it as Long Island Teio killer, and we know people that are written
about it and covered the case on podcast. 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 were four
women who have been at least potentially linked directs humor men, and they're being
referred to as the gil Go 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 all were, 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 commission 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 gil Beach killer, and these other murders are often the ether, and
it's anyone's guests whether they will be tied too. It's a tough one because
you have so many they're 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 an identified 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 one. Long Island serial killer. There was Joel Rifkin from
another generation, who is far more prolific than it appears. Rex Herman was,
so, if you want to get scholarly about it, maybe it makes
sense to be more specific with your titles. How did the gil Go 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 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 when those first four remains, when the gil Go 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,
or sex workers, that's for digital trails from 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 found 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, Grout in 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 stereotomic 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 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. Serial happened, and making a murder happen,
the jinks happened, streaming happened, and suddenly multipart 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 too. 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 spent a lot of time with the
family members of the victims. Are you 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's some who
I haven't really seen since the Last 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 ran in 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 with 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 drama 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 of these
people, left it led and perhaps a non judgmental way, but not in
a way that turned them into a different kind of trope, like the poor
innocent lot 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 towards
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 win a way back into her family, and another one wanted to
have a close relationship with her sister, and another was in love with her
boyfriend and thought that they could build a family together with their money. It's
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
john's. 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 the
escort work puts you for a brief period. It's occurred to me as the
center of attention. You're the star and so and for someone leading an otherwise
humdrum life where you're under it all the time. Maureen Brainard 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
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. She 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 and lost girls about the lives that they were living in Long Island before
she disappeared. And this is the 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 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
if 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 had 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 outcome prooved 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 at night for the first six months.
And the book was due in 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 because I thought that if I had to sit and transcribe
at all, not only would it take a month, but also I probably
wouldn't be the same person at the end of it, because it's 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 sharted 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 was don't just keep going. So if I had a problem with the
section, I would just make a little mark, sing you're gonna have to
come back to this, and then just keep 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 and 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 ending, where they all met are now and how they
looked 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 I had lots of unanswered questions. I didn't know if I was writing
a pulp detective book like I was, 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
on earth 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 Megan Waterman. The chapter begins with me saying, I'm sitting
on a park bench talking to Megan Waterman's mother. But it's been six months
since her daughter's been found, and she lives in Portland, and this is
what her life's seen, 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 said 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 a sen 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 anyway. 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 Campodia exactly
exact exact same fly. 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
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 Craig's list.
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? We're 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
describe the process, I get how you're talking about these women as younger,
really girls growing up. Also talk 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 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 at 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 just 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 of 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 yards. 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 ship that she had
hoped to lead, an exemplary 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. Not I don't mean to be
oblique here, I'm not talking about substances or anything like that. But just
as a personality, she was 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 son 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 Shari,
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 at 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
now 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 Hreman had been arrested for the murders. So it
was weird that way, like the same weather, the same like 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 phone with Liz Garbass, to 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 shock. It's 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 shin and
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, Shari, who if you read Lost Girls,
really is at odds with Mary. Towards the end, she's really angry with
her, and Mary is alienating the people around her. It's a tough time,
but also Sharie 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 auto
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, there were. The world we're
in was a world where 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 but 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 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 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 Suffolk 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 fbiway. 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 Arrastobrex human 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, there 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 it's not 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 Hreman, 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 Herman 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 amongst 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 paying and there was
hope, but there was no suspect. There was 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 Heureman in any way what you expected when you pictured
the perpetrator in these cases. When I learned that he lived in Massapega Park
and commuted to Manhattan, I thought that certainly kids. 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. The 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 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 Human is 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 into 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, tonight, I'm not 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. Now,
that's funny that it was in the background. We'll take that part out,
all right. So you would you would 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 Maureen 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 as 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 Elector. I enjoyed the silence of the lamps as much as
anyone, between that and Dexter and everything else, Like we sit and romanticize
these people and that they're just They're all like Joel Rifken, 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 lose,
somebody's life situation changes, they tick somebody off, they die, or a
witness suddenly changes their mind. Something happens, and that 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. It's next, what else? What else
can I put another Robert Kulker book on myself? 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 have just handed in a draft of
a time New York Times magazine story about the gil Go 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 in 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, do you Bob? It would be great if you wok
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 it has 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. 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 for him? It was in development for
a while and that one. I wasn't creatively involved in the Lost Girls movie
that I was with developing a Hidden Valley Road miniseries, 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've
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,
milbe 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 to 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
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