| Publicity: | One by one they disappeared. Then a deeply disturbing discovery. In a remote, bracken covered patch of ground in Long Island not far from the rolling Atlantic surf there they were - decomposing bodies in what locals call burlap sacks and we know as hessian bags. They were sex workers who advertised on the popular website Craigslist. |
|
|
| Then another gruesome find. Decapitated bodies – torsos and heads buried kilometres apart - and so a very different modus operandi. Police are almost certain two serial killers are at work. There remains the possibility that 4 killers may be responsible for the murders. |
|
|
| The glib detectives and razor-sharp forensic profilers of a Network TV crime show would have this wrapped in prime time. In reality – of course – that’s not how it works. |
|
|
| “There's never been a crime solved in this country by a profiler. They are always after-the-fact people. They are always super egg heads who think they know all of the answers after you catch 'em. Profilers are full of crap. OK ? Make it very clear.” JOE COFFEY - Former NY Homicide Detective |
|
|
| Joe Coffey hunted one of the big ones. Over the course of a year in the late ‘70’s a killer was striking time and time again in New York City. Eventually Coffey got his man. David Berkowitz – Son of Sam. And he didn’t do it tweezing definitive DNA from carpet or tricking his quarry into a withering confession. It was hard, relentless, procedural police work. |
|
|
| “What’s it like ? I would say hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. That's essentially what it is.” JOE COFFEY - Former NY Homicide Detective |
|
|
| Reporter Michael Maher examines a bewildering confluence of true crime that’s a long way from being solved. New Yorkers are gripped by this serial killer casebook, including one who’s seen it all – legendary newsman Pete Hamill, the only editor to head up both New York tabloids – the Post and the Daily News. |
|
|
| “(New Yorkers) left for Long island because of the city’s heroin or because of the crime but there's still crime because there's one big problem. There's still human beings out there and there are no perfect human beings and some of them are really bad”. PETE HAMILL - Author ‘Tabloid City’ |
|
|
| Among the many desperate that these cases are cracked is Mari Gilbert – a mother, treasuring her last photo with daughter Shannan and waiting for news. Shannan – a sex worker – disappeared 12 months ago and it’s feared she’s one of the serial killer’s victims. |
|
|
| “Her last phone call was to 911 lasting 23 minutes long screaming Help me! Help me! He's trying to kill me! And the police never got there. And they didn't arrive until 45 minutes later after the call and she was already gone. What breaks my heart the most is that - you know - what her emotions were, what her feelings were.” MARI GILBERT Mother of missing sex worker Shannan Gilbert. |
|
| Misty Long Island. Man arrives in motor boat and dumps bag on jetty | Music | 00:00 |
|
| DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “If you’re going to dump bodies, desolate area, what better place? In the winter time there’s nobody there. | 02:26 |
| Joe Coffey | Ideal spot to dump a body”. | 00:32 |
| Long Island. Trees. Desolation | MANNY FERNANDEZ: “It’s an odd little crime trend. In the last 22 years, three serial killers have operated on Long Island | 00:35 |
| Manny Fernandez | targeting the same types of victims – prostitutes. | 00:44 |
| Jetty/beach | It is a weird little serial killer cluster. It is a very weird, spooky thing that’s happening”. | 00:48 |
|
| PETE HAMILL: “It’s as old as Jack the Ripper, who was a serial killer, | 00:58 |
| Pete Hamill | not on Long Island, although who knows, because they never caught him. He might have ended up there for a while”. | 01:03 |
| American flag flying | Music | 01:09 |
|
| MAHER: Long Island is meant to be New York’s playground, | 01:12 |
| Suburban Long Island | a safe haven of beaches and tidy hamlets. Many of the people who live here left New York City years ago for the perceived safety of suburban America, but they’re now having to contend with a terrible evil in their midst. | 01:15 |
| Long Island beaches | PETE HAMILL: “They left because of the heroin or they left because of the crime - and get out there where they think they’re sealed off from it and there’s still crime because there’s one big problem – there’s | 01:34 |
| Pete Hamill | still human beings out there, and there are no perfect human beings, and some of them are really bad”. | 01:45 |
| Car drives along wet road past burial ground | MAHER: So far ten sets of human remains have been found in this bracken-covered burial ground about an hour’s drive from Manhattan. Police fear they may be dealing with not just one, but at least two serial killers. | 01:52 |
| Ocean. Photos of murdered women superimposed over | Four of the murders are thought to be the work of the Long Island “Craigslist Killer” – so called because his victims were sex workers who advertised on the popular website. Their bodies were all found in hessian bags. | 02:13 |
| Police chopper/Police search | With at least two suspected serial killers on the loose, one of the biggest police searches ever mounted on Long Island is now under way. County police, State police and the FBI are all involved, but in the crime solving business, tracking down a serial killer is one of the most difficult tasks to undertake, and while anxious Long Islanders want these murderers caught as quickly as possible, it could take months or even years to solve these cases, if indeed they’re ever solved at all. | 02:29 |
| Manny and reporter walk through bush to site of body dumpings | MANNY FERNANDEZ: “All of this sort of started with the disappearance of a prostitute named Shannan Gilbert. She disappeared from a beach community further up the road and the police started looking for her, and looking for either her body or any traces of her”. MAHER: Manny Fernandez | 03:04 |
|
| has been covering the case for The New York Times. “And this is actually where they discovered some of the bodies?” MANNY FERNANDEZ: “Yes, yep this is it right here | 03:24 |
|
| and they’ve cleared this kind of area that we’re standing in. They found that first body and then in the days after that, they found three more bodies. All found in burlap sacks - disintegrating burlap sacks”. | 03:31 |
| Arrow on road pointing to body site | MAHER: In the hunt for one missing sex worker, police stumbled over the bodies of four others. | 03:48 |
| Police cars/Police search at scene | “Given that it is so desolate and out of the way, how difficult has it been for the police in terms of their search? Just how tough is it to find anything here?” MANNY FERNANDEZ: “I think it has been tough. Some of it was found a little bit by luck and a little bit by the noses of the police dogs who’ve turned some of this stuff up. | 03:54 |
| Fire trucks being used in search | It’s just so hard to even take a step forward and it’s so hard to see. They’re had to stand in the buckets of fire trucks parked nearby to kind of look over and look down and sort of see if they see anything unusual. It’s very rough terrain”. | 04:13 |
| Long Island water shots. Dissolve to: | Music | 04:30 |
| Photo. Shannan Gilbert | MAHER: Shannan Gilbert, the sex worker whose disappearance led police to this field of horrors has yet to be found – although the worst is feared. | 04:43 |
| Home of Shannan Gilbert | In the small, hardscrabble town in New York state where Shannan grew up into a sometimes troubled teenager, her mother Mari’s endured a torturous twelve months, waiting for news about Shannan’s whereabouts and her fate. | 04:56 |
| Reporter with Mari Gilbert looking at photo | MARI GILBERT: “She took the picture and then she had given it to me for Mother’s Day 2009”. MAHER: “And that was the last | 05:12 |
|
| Mother’s Day you spent with her?” MARI GILBERT: “That was the last Mother’s Day. That was the last Mother’s Day. When we spoke she was supposed to come down for last year’s Mother’s Day and never showed”. MAHER: “Mother’s Day comes around again tomorrow”. MARI GILBERT: “Yeah it’s going to be sad, it’s going to be really sad but I’ll just hold on to this. | 05:17 |
| CU Photo. Mari and Shannan | There’s always Mothers’ Day”. MAHER: “It’s a beautiful photograph, it really is”. | 05:41 |
|
| MARI GILBERT: “The last word I said to her was I want you to be safe and she says, ‘Don’t worry Mummy I’m always safe”. MAHER: “What do you think | 05:45 |
| Mari Gilbert. Super: Mother of Shannan Gilbert | happened to Shannan?” MARI GILBERT: “I think someone or more than one person could have hurt her. | 05:55 |
| Photo. Shannan | Her last phone call was to 911 lasting 23 minutes long, screaming, ‘Help me, help me! He’s trying to kill me!’ | 06:09 |
|
| And the police never got there. And they didn’t arrive until 45 minutes later after the call and she was already gone”. | 06:21 |
| Driving shots. Night. Oak Beach | Music | 06:33 |
|
| MAHER: Shannan Gilbert was last seen in the secluded village of Oak Beach in May of 2010. This is one of the most isolated parts of Long Island and at night it’s pitch black. Police have interviewed a number of people in the Oak Beach community, including the client Shannan visited that night and the driver who dropped her there, but so far no arrests have been made. For now, darkness surrounds this case, the very same darkness that allowed this serial killer to go about his gruesome work, seemingly undetected. | 06:44 |
| Skull photo. | DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “Tracking a serial killer is probably one of the most difficult things a policeman could come upon. He could be still at large, he could kill again, he could be dead, he could be in prison – | 07:38 |
| Joe Coffey. Super: | who knows? I mean these bodies have been there for a while”. | 07:51 |
| Laneway. Coffey walks | MAHER: Retired cop Joe Coffey spent more than twenty years patrolling the streets for the NYPD, becoming one of its most celebrated detectives. | 07:56 |
| Photos. Joe’s career | As well as years of fighting major mob figures, he’s best known for his leading role in tracking down the notorious serial killer, Son of Sam. | 08:06 |
| New York from bridge. | Music | 08:16 |
| Archival. New York shots. | MAHER: It was the summer of ‘77 and New York, as Joe Coffey tells it, was going to hell in a hand basket. DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “Well it was going to hell in a hand basket for a lot of reasons – political reasons, economic reasons – it was the disco era. It was the time when these kids were all involved in drugs. It was | 08:20 |
| Joe Coffey | that type of atmosphere, drugs, sex, rock ‘n roll”. | 08:37 |
| Archival. New York shots. | Music | 08:41 |
|
| MAHER: It was in this cauldron of urban decay and excess that David Berkowitz struck. | 08:44 |
| Photos. Berkowitz | Dubbed the Son of Sam, Berkowitz claimed his neighbour Sam Carr has possessed him and ordered his killing spree. DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “It takes a lot of years off your life, believe me. | 08:50 |
| Joe Coffey | There were no days off. Once we realised it was a serial killer we formed a task force and I was put in charge of the night time operation and my job with my team was to catch him in the act and kill him if we could. | 09:06 |
| Newspaper article Berkowitz | The nature of our criminal justice system, he never would have got the death penalty. He deserved to die and that was our job to take him out, but unfortunately we weren’t able to”. | 09:18 |
| Photo. Older Berkowitz | He’s still alive. Now he went out and killed six innocent women for no reason”. | 09:29 |
| Montage. Sky shots/ Oak Beach | MAHER: The Son of Sam’s reign of terror in New York City lasted just over a year. The first of the four sex workers discovered in hessian bags on Long Island went missing as long ago as 2007. | 09:37 |
|
| “How close do you think the police are to solving this crime out on Long Island?” DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “They’re not close at all. | 09:54 |
| Joe Coffey | There’s some suspects around. One guy who was the John who actually contracted that girl who ran from that house screaming has been eliminated already. I don’t think they’re close at all”. | 10:00 |
|
Super: CSI Alliance Atlantis/CBS television
Super: | MAHER: But many Americans fed on a diet of cop dramas like CSI, expect a case such as this one to be solved in prime time, not real time. When it comes to crime, the line between fact and fiction can get very blurred indeed. Perhaps more than any other nation, crime has been woven into the very fabric of the American story, through novels, TV, tabloids and film and the serial killer is the genre’s kingpin. DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “They never lose their fascination. | 10:10
10:40
|
| Joe Coffey. Super: | Here we are 35 some odd years later from the Son of Sam, I’m still getting calls from all over the world to do interviews on the anniversary of the Son of Sam case. Why? It’s the human psyche. Curiosity more than fascination, that’s what I think”. | 11:01 |
| Pete Hamill book launch | PETE HAMILL: (book launch) “There’s a double homicide at the beginning of the book which in the world of tabloids, a homicide at a good address is the most wonderful story of all. When you get two of them, stop the press”. | 11:16 |
|
| MAHER: Pete Hamill is launching his latest novel, Tabloid City, before his devoted hometown audience. He’s been writing about New York for 50 years and is the only person to have edited both the Post and the Daily News, the city’s two tabloids. | 11:38 |
|
| PETE HAMILL: “The Post and the Daily News were not places where you checked on the status of the sisal crop in Singapore. You didn’t do that. | 11:57 |
| Pete Hamill. Super: | The basic great stories were about, were dramatic. Not necessarily melodramatic where you hype the drama, but they had drama at the heart of it, which meant conflict. There was a good guy and a bad guy. | 12:11 |
| Hamill signs books at launch | There were things that resembled classic drama and you would find them all the time – incest, murder, rape – the whole thing that the Greeks found centuries ago”. MAHER: But the drama of crime as it’s presented on the printed page and TV screens, | 12:26 |
| NYPD Exterior | often bears little resemblance to the drudgery and painstaking work of detectives like Joe Coffey. DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “What’s it like? | 12:43 |
| Joe Coffey | I would say, hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. That’s essentially what it is”. | 12:53 |
| Joe Coffey walks | MAHER: As for forensic profilers tracking down serial killers in the course of a prime time show… DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “Let me tell you something about profilers, absolute BS! | 13:03 |
| People on NY streets | There’s never been a crime in this country solved by a profiler. They’re always after the fact people. They’re always super eggheads who think they know all the answers after you catch them. | 13:13 |
| Joe Coffey | Profilers are full of crap, okay? Make it very clear”. | 13:24 |
| Long Island – Seagulls/beach | Music | 13:29 |
| New Jersey, Atlantic City | MAHER: An early trail in the Long Island serial murders case led to nearby New Jersey and one of the most storied cities in the United States. | 13:39 |
|
| Since its heyday in the 1920’s, Atlantic City has been synonymous with gambling, graft, violence and prostitution. | 13:53 |
| Boardwalk Empire excerpt. Super: Boardwalk Empire HBO |
| 14:04 |
|
| Dramatised in television series like Boardwalk Empire, try as it might this Sodom and Gomorrah by the sea still can’t hide its dark places behind dazzling casino lights. | 14:11 |
| Casinos | Music | 14:23 |
| Alex driving. Night. | ALEX SINIARI: “If look back here down this little alleyway you’ll see the entrance to the Clover Spa. What kind of legitimate business has its entrance in that shady little alleyway there?” MAHER: Alex Siniari is a social worker. In 2006 one of the women he was counselling was found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of the city, along with three other sex workers. | 14:33 |
|
| ALEX SINIARI: “Some people are callus to what these girls are going through out here, so you, know it’s, almost like it’s a hazardous line of work and those are some of the inherent risks. | 14:56 |
| Alex | It’s a twisted thing and it’s tough”. | 15:05 |
| Long Island | MAHER: Seemingly the work of a serial killer who has never been caught, at first police thought there might be a link to the Long Island murders. | 15:09 |
|
| ALEX SINIARI: “Once these murders in Long Island occurred and the facts started to come out, there is this. | 15:17 |
| Alex | eerie sense that revisited us and you know made us remember, called us back to that time in 2006.” | 15:21 |
| Brothel signage. | MAHER: Those 2006 murders have now joined a lengthy list of unsolved crimes against sex workers in the United States. | 15:30 |
| Atlantic City. Night. | ALEX SINIARI: “After the story hits and the sensationalism dies down, you know law enforcement maybe begins to focus on other things, you know the leads go cold, no big breaks occur in the case and they move on. | 15:40 |
| Alex. Super: | And it kind of reinforces the way that these girls feel who are in the life, the hopelessness and the peril that they feel that nobody really does care about what happens to them”. | 15:53 |
| Long Island beach |
| 16:01 |
| Alex walks with Natalie | MAHER: Eighteen year old Natalie was in the life only for a short time, lured to sex work by her mother who’s been a prostitute since she was fourteen. | 16:15 |
|
| NATALIE: “They get themselves so deep and wrapped up in it that you can’t get out, and if you try to get out, then you’re risking your life”. MAHER: “How are | 16:25 |
|
Natalie. Super: | you risking your life? Who’s threatening your life if you try to get out?” NATALIE: “The pimps. Because the clients, they don’t care, they just want to have fun for that short amount of time and give you money, but the pimps want you for your money because you’re making them a lot of money. | 16:33 |
| Woman sitting on bench singing | They threaten your life, your family, and beat you, drug you. It’s not a normal life. | 16:57 |
| Natalie | It’s very, very hard”. | 17:08 |
| Atlantic City. Night | Music | 17:15 |
|
| MAHER: The police have now discounted a link between the Atlantic City and Long Island serial murders, but both cases graphically underline the dangers sex workers face every day. It’s estimated that about 130 female sex workers are murdered each year in the US and that they’re nearly 20 times more likely to suffer such a fate then women in the wider community. | 17:21 |
|
| MARI GILBERT: “She was lured into the idea that you’re going to | 17:50 |
| Mari Gilbert. Super: | have a glamorous life, a high life, you could have, you know, clothes and shoes and make up and jewellery, and they showed her the glamorous side and not the evil side”. | 17:54 |
| Mari at computer | MAHER: Mari Gilbert has started a Facebook page where she stays in contact with the families of the young women whose remains were found on Long Island. | 18:12 |
|
| MARI GILBERT: “We speak to each other every day. We support each other every day and it’s a beautiful thing that there is love | 18:23 |
| Mari | inside of pain and hurt”. | 18:32 |
| Facebook/Craigslist pages on computer | Music | 18:37 |
|
| MAHER: But it’s also a cruel irony that in this digital age, the very social media they’re using to keep in touch, also played a role in their daughters’ disappearances at the hands of a suspected Long Island Craigslist Killer. | 18:42 |
|
| MARI GILBERT: “You know, there should be definite guidelines on what can be put out there and what certain websites and web companies can allow. And I think they should also be |
|
| Mari | held accountable for knowing what is going on and allowing them to do it”. | 19:11 |
| Web page montage | Music | 19:18 |
|
| PETE HAMILL: “In one odd way | 19:23 |
| Pete Hamill/ Web page montage | this case in Long Island is about another whole category of crime which is digital based crime that comes from the web. The uses of websites to meet women or pick up prostitutes has been facilitated by the new technology and that’s another whole category of crime that wasn’t there twenty years ago”. | 19:25 |
| Long Island crime scene | MAHER: Back on Long Island police are grappling with a chilling development. It’s becoming increasingly clear that this killing ground isn’t the province of just one murderer, another is at work with a very different modus operandi. The bodies of two more women, one of whom has been positively identified as sex worker Jessica Taylor who disappeared in 2003, weren’t found in hessian bags. Instead the torsos and heads were ghoulishly separated and scattered kilometres apart. | 19:58 |
|
| Another four sets of remains have yet to be identified and the police are not discounting the astonishing fact that they might be dealing with four murderers in all. | 20:36 |
| Beach | MANNY FERNANDEZ: “They had divers come in and they did check these little sort of inlets, | 20:53 |
| Reporter and Manny walk | I think further in towards where those first four bodies were found”. MAHER: Like everyone else watching this shocking case unfold, reporter Manny Fernandez is asking what sort of person could possibly commit such crimes. MANNY FERNANDEZ: “One of the experts we talked with said | 20:57 |
| Manny. Super: | when he walks into a room he’s probably an average Joe and that’s because a lot of these kind of serial killers, who are fairly methodical | 21:13 |
| Man walks along beach | and who are very careful about what they do and how they do it, and those are the ones that, you know, are probably maybe the most frightening, because they do have a seemingly stable life and they have this Jeykll and Hyde sort of thing where they have a stable life but they’re also out there killing people”. | 21:21 |
| Jetty | PETE HAMILL: “I think there’s a certain kind of psychopath that blames women, | 21:47 |
| Pete Hamill | particularly prostitutes, for something – who knows what? | 21:52 |
|
| And he goes out and he kills as many of them as he can before they catch him or before he kills himself”. | 21:58 |
| Jetty | DET SGT (RET) JOE COFFEY: “It may take a long time to solve these things. See, | 22:10 |
| Joe Coffey | the thing about serial killers, the thing about assassins, they’re kind of the same. Some of them can’t be caught unless they hit again”. | 22:13 |
|
| MARI GILBERT: “What breaks my heart the most is how. You know what her emotions were, what her feelings were 23 minutes screaming to 911, | 22:26 |
| Photo. Shannan | ‘help me, help me, he’s trying to kill me. He’s after me. Help me’. She must have really been terrified”. | 22:36 |
| Mari | MAHER: “Are you still holding out hope that Shannan is alive or do you think that’s a very remote possibility?” MARI GILBERT: “No I believe that she’s still out there and she’s alive. I have to believe that. You know I’m not going to give up. | 22:44 |
| Grass blowing in wind/ beach | We’re not going to stop looking, stop searching, until she’s found, regardless how long it takes. We’re going to keep looking for her”. | 23:00 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Michael Maher Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen Camera: Mark Hiney Research: Janet Silver Producer: Michael Maher
| 23:24 |