"48 Hours": The search for missing escort Shannan Gilbert - what went wrong?
Shannan Gilbert had a lot of dreams. The 23-year-old hoped someday to become a writer or a singer. In the meantime, she needed to pay bills so she went for a job that she believed would reap a lot of money in a short period of time: online prostitution.
For women like Shannan, the internet has transformed the world of prostitution, attracting those who might never walk the streets and ply their trade. In the privacy of her home, Shannan could accept "dates," and most important, without a middleman, she could collect the entire fee. Shannan Gilbert thought she was in control. She was not.
On May 1, 2010, Shannan was on a job in a gated community on Long Island, New York, when she disappeared. It was during the search for Shannan, in December of that year, that the police stumbled upon four bodies of young woman who, like Shannan, worked as online escorts. Within three months, six more bodies and body parts of victims, all believed to be connected to the sex trade, were discovered. Proof, that while the internet has made prostitution more accessible, it is as dangerous as ever. There is a killer or killers at work on Long Island preying on these vulnerable young women. Once a young woman gets into a car with him, she is no longer in control.
Shannan Gilbert's case is a perfect example of what can go wrong in the investigation of a missing woman. Often, women working as escorts and prostitutes are not reported missing immediately by family members, but even when they are, police officers aren't always willing to take the reports. And there's another problem: the women often disappear far from where they live. Shannan's boyfriend and mother reported her missing just days after she disappeared. They were required to file that missing persons report where Shannan lived, in Jersey City, N.J. That report included vital information including the fact that a surveillance camera may contain evidence and the name of a man who might have been the last to see Shannan. However, Shannan disappeared almost 50 miles away in a different state, New York. Investigators there didn't get that information until it was too late to obtain the surveillance tape. The possible witness mentioned in the report wasn't interviewed in-depth until seven months later.
Shannan Gilbert might have been saved if not for a confluence of events that occurred the morning she disappeared. Before she vanished, at 4:51 a.m., she made a chilling 911 call telling the operator that "there's someone after me, there's someone after me." When Shannan couldn't say exactly where she was, the operator transferred the call to the New York State police. Later, residents who heard Shannan screaming, also called 911. Those calls were handled by a local operator in Suffolk County, N.Y., who didn't know about Shannan's earlier panicked call. When local police arrived at Oak Beach, Shannan had vanished and they -- unaware she had reported her life in danger -- just assumed she had left the area and didn't do a thorough search. If they had, they might have found her and saved her life.
Shannan Gilbert's remains were found in December 2011 in a marshy area just a quarter mile from where she was last seen. The medical examiner has been unable to determine the cause of death, but investigators believe she is not the 11th victim of the Long Island serial killer. They think she died accidentally. We may never know. You can't help but wonder: what if police had acted immediately? What if a thorough search had been done for this lost 23-year-old? What would Shannan Gilbert be writing and singing about today?
Erin Moriarty reveals new details in the search for Shannan Gilbert Saturday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on "48 Hours: Long Island Serial Killer." Click the video above to watch a sneak peek.
Coverage of the Long Island serial killer case on Crimesider
