Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
Trade paperback edition in good condition. Some wear to cover. Fine reading copy.
“A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.”
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life—went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unespected discovery near remote Gilgo Beach on Long Island turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. None of them were Shannan’s.
There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannan’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.
Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
Trade paperback edition in good condition. Some wear to cover. Fine reading copy.
“A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.”
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life—went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unespected discovery near remote Gilgo Beach on Long Island turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. None of them were Shannan’s.
There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannan’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.
Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
Trade paperback edition in good condition. Some wear to cover. Fine reading copy.
“A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.”
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life—went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unespected discovery near remote Gilgo Beach on Long Island turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. None of them were Shannan’s.
There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannan’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.
Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
ISBN 978-0-06-301295-0
Robert Kolker
2013