"I do, too," Lorraine said.

They talked about the case again, its logistics and forensics. There was a robust discussion about whether the salt air from the ocean corrodes human flesh more quickly or acts as a preservative.

"So Shannan had a metal jaw?" Kim said.

"I can't say," said Mari coolly before Kim asked her why the police weren't searching the bramble with metal detectors. "It's t.i.tanium. That can't be detected by a metal detector."

Missy and Kim glanced across the table at Amanda's caramel skin. They both wondered if one common bond among the girls was that they dated black men. "Everybody's a.s.suming he's white," Kim said. "Maybe that was the connection-they would see black guys. The profile says white, but you never know."

The women talked about the vigil they were planning. They hoped to march down Ocean Parkway, near where the bodies were found, but the police were pushing back. "They don't want us walking down that road," said Missy, who was serving as the group's liaison to the Suffolk County police. Missy wanted the people of Oak Beach to be as upset as she was-or, failing that, at least to understand. "I may never get closure. But that's still a place where she was. And I just feel like that community has to see the families. All they care about is the values of their houses and how their community looks. Because they're just stuck-up rich people that don't care."

"Look at Natalee Holloway," Kim said-the white blond Alabama girl whose disappearance in Aruba five years earlier had become a cable-news staple. "People should have been elbow to elbow out there, walking for this girl, Shannan Gilbert. Why not? What makes her disappearance any different?"

Missy had taken it upon herself to police anyone seeking to exploit the case. One target was Longislandserialkiller.com, a site that reprinted every news story about the case and invited anonymous comments. "They were selling freaking T-shirts!" she said. She told the others that she had asked the police to shut down a posting of a rap video called "Ocean Parkway" that used photos of the dead girls without permission (sample lyric: The white girl had to get it because she could snitch on me / They killed you because you were a menace to society). Searching the Web, Missy had discovered the message board on Longislanderotic.com where anonymous johns had threatened to take revenge on Amber months before the media found it.

In the middle of dinner, two NYPD detectives who worked on Melissa's disappearance dropped by the restaurant to say h.e.l.lo to Lynn and Jeff. Jeff said the two detectives had been a.s.signed to the NYPD's terrorist task force, but after being turned on to the case by Lynn and Jeff's lawyer, they went out of their way to help. "They went above and beyond. They were bangin' on strip club doors." As soon as they showed up, Mari scurried away for a cigarette. "I hate cops. I'm outta here."

When she came back, Mari was distant again. "What I'm going through is different," she said. "Shannan is still missing. She's not a body."

Kim reached out, trying to take the sting out of their conflict earlier. "We're all here together because of Shannan," she told Mari. "I don't care if they ever find her. As long as I live, she will always be dear to me."

After dinner, we returned to the hotel lobby to say goodbye. The women seemed to have wilted. The hugs started. "We'll be friends till the end," Lorraine said. "Even after they find him. We'll all be friends till we all go upstairs."

Lorraine handed the others identical trinkets she'd picked up at a shop in Maine. They were little pink hearts with angel wings. "It's because the girls are all in our hearts," Lorraine said, "and they're all in heaven." The other women loved them. They were a new family, for now.

Mari liked the trinket, too. "I always worked for, like, normal-cla.s.s people, like fourteen dollars an hour," she said. "But Shannan just liked really expensive things. I don't know who she picked it up from." She remembered the night Shannan disappeared and their last phone call. "I said, 'Look, Shannan, you coming is my gift. You don't have to bring me a present, just come home.' " After hanging up, she said she texted Shannan: Be safe.

Right away, she said, her daughter answered: I always am.

Everyone showed up at the June 11 vigil except Kim, who wasn't answering her phone or returning calls or e-mails. The others were concerned that she'd gone back to work.

The media was there, paying attention to the girls, and that counted for something. The TV outlets were stumbling over one another now. A News 12 camera crew was joined by crews from Dateline, 48 Hours, and a British crew preparing a doc.u.mentary for A&E. Lorraine rolled in a little late with Greg and Nicci. In front of the cameras, Lorraine was transformed, so different from the woman who sat so quietly a month ago with the others. "I have to keep her name out there until this person is caught," she said. "She can't speak for herself."

Lynn and Jeff brought Lynn's sister, Dawn, and her father, Elmer. They all were wearing T-shirts in honor of Melissa. "We're celebrating the lives of the girls," Lynn said at a short press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot, "and just want everybody to know that you know these girls, they were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins. You know, it doesn't matter what they did for their profession that they were victims."

Missy didn't speak directly to reporters-she was too self-conscious for that-but off-camera, she arranged a balloon release in honor of the dead and missing. She also got the police to arrange for the families to spend five minutes along the highway where the bodies had been found. The shoulder was narrow and the roadway dangerous. Everyone came away with ticks. When they spent a little longer there than they'd planned, the police urged them to finish. Mari cursed them out: "f.u.c.k you, you f.u.c.king cops!"

Missy was appalled. So was Lynn. In time, Mari would do other things that puzzled them. When Missy planned another visit to Oak Beach for early August, to do some recon work of her own about Shannan's disappearance, Mari caught wind of it and got angry at Missy for not including her. "Shannan's my daughter," Mari said. "Not her daughter."

Missy didn't understand what had set Mari off. This was the first time that Mari's combativeness had come in her direction, though it wouldn't be the last. Missy decided to be diplomatic. She canceled her trip. "Mari is a peculiar person," Missy said.

That night they all jammed into a few rooms of a local hotel, playing with Missy's kids and bonding some more before heading off to bed. The next day, Lorraine returned home to Portland, Lynn to Buffalo, Missy to Groton. They resumed their Facebook relationships. Now and then, a few would be brought into the city again for on-camera interviews with networks and cable channels that had picked up on the story. In August, Lynn hosted a get-together for a few days, and she and Lorraine and Missy all got a chance to bond without reporters and camera crews. Mari was not invited. Kim didn't come, either. No one had heard a word from her since May. As she had before, she'd dropped out of sight.

CONSPIRACIES.

Joe Scalise, Jr., lives with his wife in a house at the far end of the Bayou, the long east-west road in Oak Beach that connects to the Hacketts' street, Larboard Court. His father, Joe Sr., lives next door to Joe, and his sister, Dawn, is nearby, too, in a house with her husband. Together, they've a.s.sembled a little compound. Still stinging from the a.s.sociation's attempt to oust the whole family in the nineties, the Scalises do their best not to mingle with most of their neighbors.

Joe's father first bought a bungalow in Oak Beach in 1971, when the taxes, including a.s.sociation fees, were under a thousand a year. Services like sanitation and power were spotty at best in the winter, and most people flew the coop in the colder months. Today each house in the neighborhood pays about twenty thousand dollars a year in taxes, and the a.s.sociation fees are close to $3,800. What hasn't changed, according to Joe Sr., is the way the people of Oak Beach feel ent.i.tled to more than their share of privacy. "The interesting thing about Oak Beach," he told me, "is within that gate, it's like its own little country. You can do anything you want behind that gate."

Since Shannan's disappearance the previous May, Joe and his father have stood in disgust at the behavior of their neighbors, at the indignation over the investigation, as if they were only being threatened by the backflow of traffic clogging the quiet streets. Both the elder and younger Scalise were accustomed to feeling disgusted with Oak Beach. They would be the first to admit harboring a grudge against many of their neighbors for years-at least those who voted to have them drummed out. Come April, they watched as Hackett denied Mari's claim that he'd called her, and they watched Barbara Hackett deny it, too. For the Scalises, who had been listening carefully to every rumor floating around the neighborhood for the past year, their neighbors' paranoia made more sense: The killer, the Scalises said, was one of their own.

Neither Joe nor his father had ever liked Peter Hackett. He was friendly with Gus Coletti, who had led the charge against them. Beyond that, Joe and his father thought the doctor was a strange guy. "He's a wannabe cop," Joe Sr. said. Father and son heard a rumor that Hackett would offer neighbors a deal to be their doctor for life for twenty thousand dollars. Joe Jr. remembered the way Hackett used to tell people about a supposedly surefire way to ace a lie-detector test-by pressing a tack into your hand or foot each time you answer truthfully, giving the machine a faulty baseline to work off of when you lie. Joe Sr. remembered one night when there was a jumper on one of the bridges over the Great South Bay. "I get there, and there's Peter Hackett saying, 'I got this, Joe.' He must have been listening to the scanner."

Once they heard the reports on the news that Hackett might have called Mari Gilbert and said he'd helped Shannan, a lightbulb went off. Joe Scalise and his father became convinced that their neighbors had been covering up for a friend. They had no proof, of course. And Hackett repeatedly denied having ever seen Shannan. But Joe Jr. was offering Mari and the victims' families something every bit as powerful as proof: unfettered testimony from an Oak Beach insider. In late June, two months after Mari started pointing her finger at Hackett, Joe Jr. made his debut as the self-appointed Deep Throat of the Long Island serial-killer case. Using the pseudonym Flukeyou, Joe posted close to a hundred times on Longislandserialkiller.com over the next several months.

The Dr. is a true psychopath!!!!!! He's been flying under the radar for years and has a whole pack of loyal followers inside the community. These are really sick people! There are only 72 houses in the a.s.sociation . . . everyone knows everyone's business and there is definitely something going on with the Dr!!!

One morning after a volley of e-mails and phone calls, I drove out to Oak Beach to visit with Joe and his father and hear them make their case against Hackett in person. The younger Joe is tall, handsome, and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and dark eyes. In his thirties, he works from home mostly as a financial consultant. His father has the tanned, leathered skin of a year-round beach resident; he still supervises the Jones Beach lifeguards every summer. "There are seventy-two houses here," the younger Joe told me over coffee in his airy kitchen. "There's about twenty-five people that are totally uninvolved, twenty-five that are in bed with Hackett, and about twenty-five that are, you know, free-thinking normal people that will go, 'What's going on here?' "

The Scalises are used to gossip. In their view, everyone is suspect. Joe Brewer is a slob, a party animal, out of control. Gus Coletti is a toady for the a.s.sociation, forever tainted in their eyes. And Peter Hackett? Over coffee, Joe Jr. unspooled his suspicions and theories, all as vividly and elaborately worked out as they were colored by his hatred for the man. He noted how Shannan and Joe Brewer had left the house briefly toward the start of their date, and that while no one knows where they went, he a.s.sumes, like a lot of people following the case, that they went to get drugs. Hackett, as a doctor already well known for treating his neighbors, would be-according to Joe Jr.-an ideal resource for anyone in the neighborhood who wanted a prescription. Hackett didn't seem to have a job at all, hadn't for years. Maybe he could use the money. What if Hackett sold drugs to all the teenagers, too? What if Hackett was Brewer's connection that night? And what if it wasn't the first time?

All through the summer after Shannan disappeared, Joe Jr. said he'd been hearing scuttleb.u.t.t from the neighborhood that when Shannan pounded on Barbara Brennan's door, Barbara didn't just call the police. She called a neighbor named Tom Canning, another active member of the a.s.sociation, and then Canning called Hackett, which would have put Hackett in a position to help Shannan, just as Mari said he professed. It made sense that neighbors would have called Hackett because of the role he'd always played at Oak Beach. He was even listed in the Oak Beach phone directory as the "medical director" of the defibrillator the community kept on-site. For anyone looking for evidence that Tom Canning had been involved that morning, they needed only to look in the Post a few days after police found the bodies in burlap, to see his son, Justin Canning, talking about the scene with a lot of familiarity. "She was in a panic," Justin said. "We thought she was on drugs."

In the Scalises' theory of that night, Hackett wasn't merely a Good Samaritan who tried to help Shannan and then was left with a body on his hands. Joe Jr. believed Shannan wasn't the first girl to get caught up in a party gone bad at Oak Beach, and he believed Hackett was one of the hosts that no one knew about. "Shannan was hunted down that night," he said. "These games have been going on at Oak Beach for years." He said he believed Hackett had killed the other four girls, and that Shannan was the one who'd almost tripped him up. He said Hackett's neighbors were in on it, and as proof, he mentioned a recent report about a black escort whom police found running down a highway on Long Island, saying she was part of a drug- and s.e.x-trafficking ring and that people were trying to kill her. According to the Long Island Press, the woman spent some time in Na.s.sau University Medical Center's psych ward before being released. "I've lived there my whole life, and for a girl to disappear, something happened," Joe Jr. said. "It's not a satanic cult. But there's a lot of s.h.i.t that's not kosher about Oak Beach."

There was barely enough time to digest everything before Joe and his dad offered to show me where they thought the doctor got rid of the bodies. We got into Joe Jr.'s car and slipped up the Bayou to Larboard Court, stopping outside the Hackett cottage. Joe noted how close the doctor's place was to Barbara Brennan's house; then he noted that Hackett's house was right up against the edge of an enormous marsh. This marsh, Joe and his father said, was where they thought Shannan was now. The police hadn't searched there yet, despite how close the marsh was to where Shannan was last seen. The Scalises thought her body might be there because of the way they said Hackett reacted when he'd heard that the marsh would be drained as part of a mosquito-abatement project. "They wanted to dredge all back in the wetlands," Joe Jr. said. "If you Google Map it, it looks like a giant bathtub with one major artery that runs through it and a bunch of off-sprits. And one of those runs right to the back of Hackett's house."

Joe Jr.'s sister had led the movement to dig out and restore the marsh. The board didn't know about the project, Joe said, until his sister told them. "Peter Hackett starts calling my sister, asking, 'When are they gonna be digging?' " This, he said, was just a few weeks before-"lo and behold," Joe Sr. said-the four bodies were discovered on the side of Ocean Parkway.

They had more to show me. Joe drove down Anchor's Way-the street Shannan is believed to have run down from Coletti's house to Brennan's-and stopped at a pair of storage sheds about a hundred yards from Hackett's house, near what used to be a tennis court. From the car, Joe pointed toward the marsh again, then the sheds. "If the bodies weren't behind Hackett's house," he said, "then he was storing them right back here." Both sheds were empty now. But the Scalises believed that as soon as Hackett learned the marsh would be drained, risking the discovery of Shannan's body, he had to take action and dispose of the four girls in burlap he had hidden in the shed near his house.

Why just four bodies? I wondered. As long as Joe Jr. was saying Hackett killed them all, why wouldn't Shannan have been in the shed, too? Because, Joe explained, the attack on Shannan hadn't gone as planned. There wasn't enough time. She'd gone running, and people had seen her, and the police had come. After the chaos that early morning, she'd ended up in the marsh. Joe imagined that Hackett probably thought no one could possibly find her there-until the mosquito project was announced.

Ever since the morning Shannan had vanished, Joe and his father a.s.sumed that Hackett had been working to cover his tracks. They believed that Hackett had erased the security video. They thought that he was tipped to the search by his next-door neighbor, a Suffolk County cop. And they thought the doctor started acting especially guilty afterward. "Peter's a s...o...b..ater," said Joe Jr. "He can't help himself. Which is why, if he wasn't involved in this, this would be his great moment. His big chance to catch a serial killer." In other words, the fact that Hackett had shied away from the limelight was, to the Scalises, at least, only further proof that he was hiding something.

We drove out of the gate, down the access road, and over to the far side of the parking lot to the old community center built by the Reverend John Dietrich Long, the building where the a.s.sociation holds its meetings. Next to the community center was a driveway, a direct egress to Ocean Parkway. The Scalises said that anyone in Oak Beach could have driven four bodies out via the driveway without ever being caught on the gatehouse security video. Only a few people had a key to the lock on the metal chain securing the driveway. The Scalises said that Hackett-the self-appointed emergency-preparedness expert of Oak Beach-was one of those people.

"Once you pop out through this thing," said Joe Sr., "you can actually make a left across the parkway, and you'll be almost to the dump sites."

The problem with conspiracy theories is what they don't say. Mull over any theory long enough, and suddenly, everything you see around you is proof. Aside from the fact that an astonishing number of neighbors would have had to be in on it, one of the biggest problems with the Scalises' theory is the simple lack of corroboration. Aside from Mari and Sherre, no one, except one CBS radio reporter, who didn't have a direct quote, had stepped forward to confirm hearing Hackett say he saw Shannan that night or tried to help her.

It would have been no exaggeration to say that ever since the first reports surfaced, every reporter working on the serial-killer story had been trying to find someone who had heard Hackett say he saw her. No one had found a thing. The closest I came myself was hearing from a private investigator, working briefly on behalf of a supporter of the families, who said that "everyone was calling Hackett" the morning Shannan disappeared. This investigator had gleaned this not by looking at phone records, which only the police possessed, but through interviews. Maybe everyone really was calling Hackett that morning. Or maybe everyone was repeating the same gossip that the Scalises had heard.

During my visit, the Scalises said they'd finally found the corroboration everyone was looking for. Joe Jr. said that one morning not long after Shannan vanished, an Oak Beach neighbor named Bruce Anderson had been standing near the front gate, talking with Coletti and Hackett, when Hackett said, "I was the last one to see her alive." The doctor then apparently told Bruce and Gus that he'd sedated Shannan and she'd stayed inside his house for a short time. When she was conscious, around seven in the morning, he said, he put her in Michael Pak's car.

If Bruce really had heard Hackett say this-and if it all really happened that way-then Hackett had harbored Shannan inside his home on Larboard Court, sedated, at the same time when the police responded to the 911 call. Hackett, the theory goes, must have known from his neighbors that the police were on their way.

After my visit with the Scalises, I reached Bruce Anderson at his second home in Florida to ask him directly. "Doc Hackett is a very strange individual," he said. Without my prompting, he told me what he'd heard-or thought he'd heard. "Hackett was telling everybody, including Gilbert's mother, that he found her that morning, gave her that sedative, he has a home for wayward girls in his house, and that she left the next day."

At the very least, Bruce had been hearing a lot of the same things that the Scalises had heard. What wasn't clear was whether he'd heard them straight from Hackett's mouth. I asked Bruce: Did he ever personally hear Hackett say anything about seeing or treating Shannan that morning?

"No, not personally heard him," he said, "but I heard through other people that he said it. And then I got talking with a couple of the detectives, and they said that he told the mother that."

Once again, an echo chamber: First Mari says Hackett called her, then the police tell neighbors about her claim, and then neighbors come away believing it.

As Bruce kept talking, he suggested that the police had more of an interest in Hackett than Dormer had ever let on. "The cops caught wind of this," he said, "and brought him in for questioning, and after a few hours he said, 'Well, I just said that.' "

Why would he just say it?

"He makes up a lot of stories," Bruce replied. "All kinds of crazy stuff, he makes up. So people say, 'Oh, that's just Peter, he wants to be a big shot.' "

And how did Bruce know that the police were looking into Hackett?

"Because they came door-to-door, saying, 'How well do you know this guy Peter Hackett?' " Bruce said. "And I said to them, 'You know, I wave to the guy, he waves back. I really don't socialize with the guy.' I heard through the grapevine he's a wacko. There's enough wackos in Oak Beach. I don't know if it's the salt air or the water. One of the locals told me it was the water."

Bruce had revealed something about the doctor and the police's suspicions. But he hadn't confirmed hearing anything directly from Hackett about seeing Shannan. When I circled back to Joe Jr., he said he wasn't surprised that Bruce had denied hearing anything firsthand. Like everyone else in Oak Beach, he said, Bruce didn't want publicity. He was careful. His wife had panicked when the police came to talk to him. He didn't want to be known as the neighbor responsible for fingering Hackett.

All that really mattered, Joe said, was that Bruce had told Mari everything. Joe had arranged the phone call himself, sometime after my visit. Thanks to Joe and Bruce, Mari felt she had confirmation that the doctor had said what he said, even if the police didn't seem to care. If nothing else, Mari was relieved. Before speaking with Bruce, she said, she had begun to wonder if she had dreamed up the whole thing.

Gus Coletti spent much of his time sitting on the porch of his two-story house on the Fairway, down the road and around the corner from the Scalise family, watching for strange cars coming through the Oak Beach gate. He and his wife, Laura, have lived in Oak Beach for thirty years. They bought their bungalow for twenty-two thousand dollars, and they used it as a summer home while Gus spent eight years building it up. He hired an engineering company to put in a foundation. Then he rewired the house and had the plumbing done. He replaced the windows and doors, added a room, redid the bathroom, and insulated the whole thing. By the time he added siding and replaced the roof, he'd spent more renovating the place than he would have if he'd knocked it down and built a new one.

The longer he stayed, the richer he and Laura got, at least on paper. A few years ago, they were offered $850,000 for their house. Gus wasn't ready to sell. It might have been the wrong decision. Now he didn't think he could get $500,000 for it. He got slammed twice: first by the economy, then by Shannan Gilbert and the bodies on Gilgo Beach. Two houses that were already sold, the buyers had backed out. Now they were both in court. One of the sellers refused to return the deposit: Where in the contract did it say that dead bodies nullified the deal?

In his golden years, Gus had indulged his two great loves: restoring old cars and caring for pigeons. On the wall of his little living room, amid photos of his five grandchildren, was a plaque in his honor, bestowed by the Na.s.sau Suffolk Pigeon Fanciers Club: For your untiring efforts throughout the years. (Gus is the president of the club.) Now that Oak Beach has become a possible crime scene, Gus remains the only neighbor who saw anything and is willing to talk. He's old. His story changes, the details shift: exactly when Shannan came to his door, whether he called 911 while she was there or after, whether he went to the front gate as soon as she ran away or waited a bit. What didn't change, in every telling, was that Gus behaved n.o.bly. He talked to Shannan. He tried to help her. He even let her into his house-something Mari didn't believe was true, based on the excerpts of the 911 call that the police shared with her. Gus pointed to where she stood: a swath of carpet in front of a woodburning fireplace. There hadn't been much room for her to go beyond that. Gus said that when Shannan was there, Laura had been sleeping on the lower level, to recover from a knee replacement.

Gus headed over to his porch, reliving that morning yet again. He remembered her hair, the blond streaks, and her clothes, a white halter top covered by a sweater or jacket. He didn't remember a cell phone, though she apparently had it later when she knocked on Barbara Brennan's door. As Gus recalled, Shannan did nothing but scream, and then she ran away.

Gus said he believed Shannan was under the influence. "I had four kids. I'm sure one or two of them could probably tell you more about drugs than I could. But that girl was pretty well drugged up. She couldn't hardly stand. She almost fell over twice while I was talking to her. And she wasn't making any sense. Even though she was in the house and I was talking to her, she still was screaming, 'Help me, help me!' "

He said he picked up the phone in full view of her and even started talking to the dispatcher as she watched: "This girl here is screaming for help . . . " He said he finished the call and turned to her and said, "Sit down in that chair over there. Relax. I called the police, they're on the way here." As soon as he said that, out the door she went.

He pointed to the porch stairs. Gus said he saw Shannan stagger halfway down and fall the rest of the way. She got up and started running around to the right, back to the Fairway toward Joe Brewer's house, against the weeds on the far side of the street. Gus watched as she pounded on a neighbor's door, one she'd skipped on the way to Gus's because he'd had his light on. Then she ran back out to the road and stopped, looking down the road toward Brewer's house.

"It was obvious she was looking at something," Gus said, "and she started to run again and she fell a couple of times and she ran around here."

Gus was pointing to his front yard, where he'd parked a small boat. A car had been next to the boat that morning. Gus said Shannan got in between the car and the boat. "She knelt down there, like she was hiding."

Gus saw a car coming down the road, a black Ford Explorer, rolling a few feet and stopping, then rolling a few more feet. This was Michael Pak. "I stopped him right here," Gus said.

"You stopped him?" I asked. It seemed like a big step to take, to walk down the porch to the road and flag down a strange car.

Gus nodded. "I said, 'Where are you going?' And he said to me, 'I came from Brewer's house. We were having a party and the girl got upset, and she's running around here. I'm trying to find her.' "

What did Gus say to Michael Pak?

Gus a.s.sumed his best John Wayne posture. "I said, 'Well, I've called the police, and they're on their way, so you stay right here.' "

And Pak's reaction?

"He said, 'Oh, you shouldn't have called the police. She's going to be in big trouble.' I said, 'So are you, if you leave. I already got your plate number, and I can identify you.' "

That was when Shannan got up and ran off again. Gus returned to his house and told his wife to stay by the phone in case the police called back. Then he went back out, walking over to the gate, where he stood waiting, he said, for over a half hour.

"I stood by the gate till the police came," Gus said. He said he never saw Shannan or Michael Pak again. "n.o.body left here with a body in their car, because I would've seen it."

n.o.body left here with a body in their car. That was exactly what the Scalises said did happen. They also said Gus was supplying a front, a cover story-"He would've at least seen Michael Pak drive out," Joe Jr. said. "Where did Michael Pak go that morning?"-and that all of Gus's accounts in the media were part of a community effort to stay silent about what really happened to Shannan.

What did Gus think of Peter Hackett? "He's one of the best neighbors you can have," Gus said as soon as the doctor's name was mentioned. "He's always ready to help everybody. He's always, if he hears you're sick, he's over here in minutes. He's helped more people on this beach than anybody else around has. He's a doctor. And he's a great guy. He's got the one weakness. He tells stories."

"He overelaborates," Laura said.

"Yeah," said Gus. "You tell him a little story, and he stands up making it a big one. But do I think he had anything to do with her disappearing? No."

Did he ever hear the doctor say that he helped Shannan out?

"No," he said. "I never heard that. As a matter of fact, we never even had any discussions about it, and I see him regularly."

This was strange, too. Shannan's disappearance was easily the biggest thing ever to happen at Oak Beach. If he and Hackett were so close-and if Hackett was such a big storyteller-how could they never have discussed it?

I asked Gus what he thought happened to Shannan.

"She died in the water," he said.

How?

"She was scared. She was drugged up pretty good. I think she slipped and fell. Have you looked at any of the jetties? They're as slick as gla.s.s when they're damp in the morning. If she ran out on one of them, she's gone."

Into the fall, the Scalises kept beating the drum about a conspiracy. They had company now. The first TV reports about Hackett had made the doctor a regular subject of scrutiny on Websleuths, a well-established Internet chat group devoted to dozens of open murder cases around the country. The armchair detectives pored over TV news reports, searching for snippets of the doctor warding off reporters, a.n.a.lyzing his repeated use of "No comment." I've been watching that interview of the Dr. and observing his body language, one commenter wrote. He is blocking the doorway like he is afraid the reporter will try and go inside. He also averts his eyes down and to the left a few times while he is speaking. Isn't it a sign of deception when someone averts their eyes down and to the left? . . . Something about him seems, well, off!

A commenter calling himself Truthspider seemed determined to pin every murder on Hackett-not just Shannan and the four in burlap but the unidentified ones, as well as the ones in Manorville. The handle Truthspider belonged to a Long Islander named Brendan Murphy, a skilled researcher who dug up some court doc.u.ments about Hackett suggesting that he'd been sued twice. The first case stemmed from January 17, 1989, when, according to the doc.u.ments, Hackett, working as a volunteer member of the Point LookoutLido Fire Department, responded to a call in Inwood, New York, where an infant was suffering a febrile seizure. The suit, filed eight years later, accused Hackett of negligence, saying he failed to administer intravenous fluids, treat the seizure, doc.u.ment the treatment he rendered, supervise the emergency personnel, communicate with the hospital, or hydrate the infant. Hackett defended himself by saying he was protected by the Good Samaritan law; the suit was later abandoned. But before it was over, the plaintiff's attorney filed a Notice of Discovery and Inspection seeking information about "medical care providers furnishing care and treatment to [Hackett] for substance abuse for the period one year prior to the incidents at issue and two years subsequent to said occurrence." The Oak Beach doctor in rehab? Truthspider couldn't help but take notice of that.

The second lawsuit was a malpractice suit involving another infant, though details of what happened and Hackett's involvement weren't available in any public doc.u.ments. The lawsuit was originally filed in 1996 against three other doctors, Long Beach Hospital, and a lab called National Emergency Services, Inc. Three years later, in 1999, the hospital filed a third-party claim against Hackett in what appeared to be an attempt to shift some or all of the responsibility to him. The original case was settled shortly afterward, in July 2000. Hackett was not required to pay any fines, nor was any judgment made against him. Three years after that, the case against Hackett by Long Beach Medical Center was also dismissed.

The meaning of the court doc.u.ments is a matter of interpretation. It isn't unusual for ER doctors to be sued for, in the heat of the moment, not being able to help. Even the first lawsuit's request for a rehab record was ambiguous: Either the plaintiff was on a fishing expedition, trying to dig up dirt on Hackett, and no such rehab records even existed; or, as Murphy decided, Hackett was a drug-addled predator masquerading as the neighborhood Boy Scout. As Truthspider, Murphy posted online about how the first lawsuit demonstrated that Hackett was an addict-an unstable, unethical doctor with access to prescription drugs that he could have used on Shannan that night. Others on Websleuths promptly accused Murphy of tunnel vision, bending all facts to fit his opinion. They saw no evidence of wrongdoing in the negligence cases, and in fact saw plenty to suggest that the lawsuits had no foundation at all.

But for Truthspider, the Hackett question was simply a case of Occam's razor: the simplest explanation being the most likely. For Murphy, any number of simple explanations implicated Hackett. That early April report in the Post about a second man, a "drifter," at Brewer's house-could that have been Hackett? Or maybe Hackett didn't come there at all, but Shannan and Brewer went to him on their quick errand out of the house. Maybe Brewer brought Shannan there to get painkillers or other pills. And maybe Hackett, upon seeing Shannan, asked Brewer to lend him the girl for a few hours.

This was all conjecture, of course, and widely disputed. But to hear Truthspider tell it, wouldn't that have been enough to make Shannan not just frightened but terrified, afraid for her life? Wouldn't it have been a short leap for her to be convinced that her driver, Pak, was in on the deal? Wouldn't that suspicion-her own driver selling her out to another guy-have been scary enough to convince Shannan to call 911? To send her running into the dark? As Truthspider, Murphy wrote as early as May 2011 that the man with all the answers would have to be Brewer, and Brewer had to be covering for Hackett. Everybody inside knows, they just can't say. [Brewer] was able to piece it together . . . He was [saying] to the media "the truth will come out." He just can't say what the truth is. The police told [Brewer] he has to wait until they have the proof they need.

For his next trick, Murphy pieced together Hackett's entire work biography and tried to match it up to other bodies, deciding that many of the early nameless victims were conceivably on the doctor's commute. As Suffolk's emergency medicine chief after the Flight 800 disaster, Murphy said, Hackett would have driven down Halsey Manor Road in Manorville to get back and forth from the recovery operation at the East Moriches Coast Guard station and a secondary recovery location at Calverton Executive Airpark. When Hackett moved on to Suffolk Central Hospital in Riverhead, his commute down the Long Island Expressway from Oak Beach would have brought him past the same area near Halsey Manor Road, possibly at an ER's very odd hours. A few years later, in 2000, a torso would be found in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens, a state-protected wooded region just off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville. Portions of Jessica Taylor's body were found in the same area in 2003. Both of these discoveries, of course, were later linked by DNA to body parts found along Ocean Parkway. For Murphy, that sealed the deal. How many people on Long Island are familiar with the back roads of Manorville and Ocean Parkway? For all you non-believers out there, Truthspider wrote, it's time to take your head out of the sand and start believing.

Truthspider saw clues everywhere. An old Babylon Beacon story about Hackett speaking out against a proposal for developing the old Oak Beach Inn site led Truthspider to conclude that Hackett exhibited "territorial behavior" and that, he hastened to add, Hackett made those comments at roughly the same time as the toddler and a Jane Doe's head, hands, and right foot are believed to have been dumped by the killer. When something didn't quite fit the theory, like the dismembered legs found all the way in Davis Park, he made it fit: I am certain they floated to Davis Park from elsewhere due to severe coastal flooding from the Nor'easter in January 1996, he wrote, noting that the marks on the legs were consistent with the work of a surgeon.

Another prolific commenter named Peter Brendt wrote, So . . . Truthspider . . . you tell me, how someone with one leg prosthesis and breathing problems can alone carry a body from his vehicle down to where the [four bodies in burlap] were found?

Truthspider responded coolly: He worked for years as an EMT with a prosthetic leg, as part of that job you have to be able to pick up victims, put them on stretchers, or boards and carry the board or stretcher possibly up and down stairs. I think he can handle a sedated 110-pound girl. From my personal experience with the Gilgo dump sites, the full skeletons were 3-5 feet into the bush, whereas the dismembered parts seemed to be buried further into the brush a decent distance from the road.

Brendan Murphy is about thirty years old and won't divulge where he lives, except to say that he spends part of the time in a barrier-island community that is not Oak Beach. When I met him for dinner in Manhattan, he struck me as calm and reasonable but every bit as fervent in his belief that Hackett was the killer as he was on Websleuths. He said he thought Hackett might have gone into his chosen career with fantasies of being an angel of mercy, but from there it was a short leap to becoming an angel of death. He pointed to other medical people who have become ma.s.s murderers, like Richard Angelo, the registered nurse implicated in at least eight deaths during the 1980s; and Michael Sw.a.n.go, the doctor suspected of poisoning some sixty patients and colleagues over twenty years. Murphy's favorite comparison was John Edward Robinson, an accomplished con man and killer from the eighties, who got away with it as long as he did only because people considered him too old, too nice, too soft-spoken, and not physically capable, all while he maintained a sparkling public image as a do-gooder, a good neighbor, and a family man.

As the summer went on, Murphy developed an intricate theory of how Hackett grew up to become a serial killer. He'd read a war novel written by Peter's father, Charles Joseph Hackett-The Last Happy Hour, a semiautobiographical romp in the mode of Catch-22 or M*A*S*H, published by Doubleday in 1976-and discovered a pa.s.sage in which the main character goes on about how impossible it is to "convert" prost.i.tutes by arguing with them, then travels the country with his young son after the war, spending nights in motels with "dancers." It's really a very unfortunate description of a boy's early life if people are suspecting him in the Long Island serial-killer case, Murphy wrote. He decided that Peter's mother's death in childbirth and his father's presumably strange predilections created a monster. He pointed to the car accident that took Hackett's leg, and the carnage of the TWA Flight 800 crash. He cited a theory called "Trauma Control Model," put forward by Eric Hickey, a researcher of serial killers, which argues that an early childhood catastrophe can set up a child for deviant behavior in adulthood. Murphy decided that something in Hackett's childhood-the feelings of abandonment caused by not having a mother, perhaps-got dredged up in these adult traumas, and Hackett descended into deviant behavior.

Murphy also thought that Shannan's disappearance was a turning point for Hackett, a sign that he was getting sloppy. He did something out of the ordinary on May 1st by going after [Shannan], he wrote, and it's also why she got away from him for almost an hour. Like Joe Jr., Murphy believed the bodies of the other four were stashed locally until shortly before they were discovered. Since his dump site-the shed beside the marsh-was undiscovered for 10+ years, he felt he didn't need to dismember and leave torsos far from his house, he wrote. Then, in a panic, he dumped them. He was extremely organized, but got lazy, then slipped with [Shannan] and now he is going down.

Murphy told me that he believed Hackett started tentatively, picking up people along his work commute and leaving parts of them in parks. He noted that all the bodies along Ocean Parkway and Manorville were found on state parkland. "In the middle of the night, parks are not patrolled," he said. "I can tell someone I have a reason to be in a park. I can con them."

The same way, he said, that Hackett might have conned Joe Brewer into bringing him a victim.

On July 11, Hackett blinked. CBS aired a one-hour report of 48 Hours Mystery devoted to the bodies at Gilgo Beach and the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert. The show featured a section on Hackett in which the doctor, after numerous interview requests, reversed himself, admitting to making two calls to Shannan's family on May 6, a few days after she disappeared.