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Thank you for joining us on this special episode of LISC, Long Island Serial Killer. On the 10-year anniversary of Shannon Gilbert's disappearance from Oak Beach, we had the opportunity to get on a call with attorney John Ray. The Long Island lawyer is well known for the years he spent representing the Gilbert family, and he's both revered and reviled for his ability to court the media and to do whatever he can to keep attention on the case.
He's also a wealth of investigational and legal knowledge, especially when it comes to Shannon's story. But please note, we suggest that you listen to our previous episodes, especially episodes 1 and 2, so you have context for the topics that John and I discuss. I'm John Ray, and I'm a lawyer for 37 years. in the metropolitan New York area. So I've tried every kind of case you could imagine under the sun. I'm a general litigator and also a criminal defense lawyer.
I've had many well-known cases, many high-profile cases in which I've played a part or which I've tried. I guess that's what brought me into the Shannon Gilbert case. They've been involved in 26 homicide cases now. So there was a murder, actually multiple murders, in a drugstore on Long Island in Medford, known as the Medford Pharmacy case.
in which a fellow named James Laffer entered the pharmacy and assassinated five people. He was there to get hydrocodone, oxycodone, and he walked in and just shot people in the head. His wife... sitting in the car outside. So he went to prison, of course, and one of the women who died, the family had me represent the little children at the sentencing.
And the family had a right to speak. Well, these were little girls. They couldn't speak. They wouldn't speak. So I spoke for them. And when I did, I took on the personality of the little girls. It was a moment, shall we say, that was very effective in causing the judge to really slam this guy and his wife and put them away for life in prison. Well, there were many reporters there.
And one of them, Steve Barcelo from the Daily News, approached me after the sentencing and said, listen, we could use you. We need your help on another case. Well, that other case was the Shannon Gilbert. case. And at that time when he approached me in December of 2011, I'd been following it very lightly in the press because Shannon's body or the remains of Shannon were found.
only several days before that. So Steve arranged for a meeting between me and Mary, the mother of Shannon Gilbert, who was found in the marsh in Oak Beach in December of 2011. She had disappeared 10 years ago today, actually. It's the 10th anniversary of her disappearance. Well, anyway, she was having trouble because the Suffolk County police were saying that Shannon had drowned.
They believed in the marsh, although they hadn't found her body. And after they finally found her body, they said she died of natural causes. This didn't sound right. So I went to a meeting with... Steve Barcelo and Mary Gilbert. Mary and I, we hit it off well enough, and I agreed that I would help her, but only to this extent that I would call a press conference on her behalf.
to excoriate the police and say that we really needed an investigation of this because we believe Shannon was murdered. And by the time that interview was over with Steve and Mary, I was convinced that, yeah, Shannon Gilbert had been murdered. So in that press conference, we held it at Oak Beach in late December, I believe it was, nearby the site where she was found. And in that press conference...
I brought a big chart. And essentially, my purpose was to not only criticize the police, but to ask the FBI and the United States attorney to enter the case. so that we would have a more objective approach than what was going on. Now, mind you, at that time, the Suffolk County Police Commissioner, who was in charge of the police, his name was Dorber, had made a speech.
before Shannon's body was found, but some of Shannon's belongings were found in the marsh. Gorma said the police believed she had drowned in the marsh. Okay, so when they found her body... Her bones were found laying on a bush, her head face up, sort of on an angle. Her body was laying with her head up. And Dorman then said, well, regardless, she died of natural causes.
And when he was more closely questioned by the press, he said things like, well, she ran into the marsh and it was cold and she probably... would have died of some natural cause. And when Burma was asked by the press, why were her genes found a third or so of a mile away from her body? And he said, there's sticker bushes.
The pants came off as she ran in the marsh. You can tell it was an absurdity just by the way he explained it. But apparently he believed that. He himself had not toured the marsh. But he believed that because he was told that. And therein lies a very important issue, because who told him that is a big question. Emerging from what I've just said is the name James Burke, who was...
The head of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Investigative Unit, the DA had his own little praetorian guard of detectives from the police department who worked for the DA directly. And Burke was the head of that unit. Soon after Channing was found on days later, Burke was appointed as chief of police of Suffolk County. So Burke was playing a key role.
in the investigation of the death of Shannon Gilbert. In any event, it probably bears noting that Shannon was a tax worker and she hooked up. On May 1st, 2010, with a fellow by the name of Joe Brewer, who was a John, Shannon went with a man named Michael Peck, her escort driver, from Manhattan to Long Island. to meet up with Brewer in Oak Beach, where he had a small house in the marsh, or at least on the sand in Oak Beach. We all know that Shannon ran from the house.
while Pack and Brewer supposedly was in the house. And she bolted out. She had called the police, or had called 911, rather, while she said on the tape of the 911 call, worse to the effect that they're trying to kill me. And she ran out and she ran for one minute to 23 minute tape, knocked on doors and finally disappeared, never to be seen again until her bones were found.
in the marsh so here we are now i'm just coming into the case in december of 2011 several days after the bones are found and mary is certain that the police are wrong that her daughter did not die of natural causes. There were reasons she believed that, which were perfectly good reasons. And one of them, for example, is that Shannon was very much afraid of water.
So why would she run into a marsh? Another reason was that she's saying they're trying to kill me, and then she's found dead. You might put two and two together. Another reason is that her jeans and her pocketbook... cell phone, perfume bottle top, were all found sort of in almost like a large semi-stunnel in the marsh, directly behind the house of a guy named Dr. Peter Hackett.
I would say 20 yards in, 20 to 30 yards in, to the marsh right behind his house. Of course, Mary rightly surmised that something's wrong with these fact patterns because the cell phone... was intact. Her wallet was not decayed. None of the items found there were very decayed at all, but Shannon's body and the clothes on her body were completely decayed, gone.
So none of this made much sense. And to say that she drowned was also absurd. Or that there were natural causes that killed her. It was in May when the temperature at that time was in the high 50s to mid 50s. You don't die of natural causes like that, especially where her body was found. So Mary thought that the police were misleading her. And we thought, okay, well, the right answer is bring in the feds.
So I called that press conference and we demanded at the conference, I did it by letter as well, that the U.S. attorneys get involved. They did not answer our letter. So I thought my job was over. Then a detective named Vincent Stephan, who was the vice president of the detectives union and had been part of the homicide team investigating Shannon's death.
He wrote a letter to me. It was a long letter in which he told me I was all wet. I was all wrong in my press conference and what I had said. And he explained what he heard on the 911 tape. I had called Commissioner Dormer, Inspector Crusoe, and that this was a Pink Panther investigation by the police. So that didn't sit well with Stephan. I thought it was amusing.
when you read the letter, but it also had information in it. However, it was Stefan who chose to take that letter and publish it in Newsday as a feature letter. When he did that, now I'm annoyed and I'm going to help this lady. And so the battle began. The next thing that happened was that there was an autopsy. The autopsy took way too long, much longer than it ought to have. I accompanied the Gilbert family to the autopsy.
What happens is when an autopsy is done, the medical examiner who performs it meets with the family and discusses the cause and the manner of the person's death. It's a civil proceeding. It's not a criminal proceeding and the police should not be involved in it. And then normally they're not. So we were finally invited to the medical examiner's office for this purpose in the springtime of 2012.
When we went to the meeting, the press was all gathered outside. And when we went inside the medical examiner's office, there sat three detectives, homicide detectives in the room. unheard of. In many cases, I never saw this before. And they're sitting there with their arms folded in a very hostile manner. The medical examiner went over some of the evidence with us. She did not show us the photographs.
of Shannon's body and so on. She did produce a layout of her bones, of Shannon's bones, and she did discuss what she herself said she heard on the 911 call. mentioned that Shannon did say words to the effect that they're trying to kill me. She said she heard that there was a great deal of anger and anxiety. There was a fight of some kind. Now this was directly contrary.
to Vincent Steffen's letter to Newsday and to me, wherein he said Shannon was at all times calm. So somebody was not telling the truth. I did not cross-examine or closely examine the medical examiner because... i didn't know enough to do this so i just listened but one of the things i noticed in the layout of the bones was that the hyoid bone in the neck which is a tiny bone it's a u-shaped bone that has sort of
two little horns on the tips of the bone was indicated in the report as having a dent in the center part, the base part of the bone. So I asked him. The medical examiner, the assistant medical examiner who was there, why is there an indent in the hyoid bone, which is the neck bone? She said, well...
Either Shannon had a growth in her throat, and maybe it just indented the bone, or little animals could have done it. But it was an indent. It was clearly an indent, and the bone is tiny, so you can see it. It was odd that you could see it. But there were fingers missing on her left hand, and I believe there was a toe missing. And I asked her, why are those fingers missing, the digits of the fingers? And she said, well, small animals could have taken them.
She also said that as to the hyoid bone, where it looked like there was jagged edges on the tip of the bone, their horns were missing. She said little animals probably nibbled at that. And that's what happened. That struck me as odd because why would a little animal, not that they think like we do, but why would they just nibble at a bone and not take it when it's such a small bone? It didn't make sense. But whenever I asked a question,
even an uncontroversial one, she would get up from her chair, the medical examiner, and walk over to the detectives. They would whisper together, and then she would come back and answer the question. So clearly... The medical office was under the thumb of the homicide squad. And the homicide people never talked to me while we were there, nor to the family. Another thing that came out at the autopsy was that...
I asked, what happened to Shannon's jacket? We were told that her jacket was found in the driveway of Brewer right after she ran away a few days later. She replied that they lost the jacket. The police department somehow misplaced the jacket. I had asked if they had done any DNA tests and such on the jacket, and no DNA tests were done.
So now I began my own investigation and I went to the marsh on May 1st, 2012, which was two years after Shannon disappeared. But we checked and made sure that we were going.
when the weather conditions were correct, that they would have matched the conditions. Shannon was there, and I went at the same time. We know that Shannon's phone call took place at 4.53 a.m. I went there and went into the marsh at around 4.50 a.m. to see whether or not Shannon really would have drowned or died of natural causes or anything else.
And I was accompanied by my then-associate lawyer, a young fellow, and by my consort, who looked like the same size and shape as Shannon. We thought we would test this out.
We went to an Army-Navy store and bought Vietnam-era fatigues and some boots and rope because the way Dormer had described the marsh, we thought we were going into a swamp where there was... all kinds of creatures and possibly quicksand and so we had no idea well first we entered the marsh at approximately the same spot that the police had identified
as the likely spot that shanning would have entered it and we followed a path that we thought would take us to where the body was about as i said about a third to a half a mile away from the entry spot we made sure We went through high grass because the police had chopped down some of the grass. So we avoided those spots and we went through high grass the way Shannon would have done. In other words, we tried to replicate her trip. We came to wear the jeans.
Shannon were found in the pocketbook, and there was still little flags marking where they had been found. So we were able to see that. And then we went from there and eventually we got to where the body was. The problem with all this was the water was no deeper than the top of my shoes, except for mosquito canals, but there were boards over the canals. You could see where they were at that time of day, and even though it was still dark.
You could see them and you would have crossed over mosquito canals. She didn't drown anywhere near a mosquito canal if she drowned at all. But in any event, the marsh was just that. It was nothing but loam and weeds. So to say she drowned would have meant that she would have had to have put her face in the water and sucked it into her lungs, which is a turf. We also learned that her walk through the marsh couldn't have been that harsh. Why not? Well...
To enter into the marsh, which is interesting, it was very difficult to get in because there's so many weeds and weeds and thorn bushes that to get in would be difficult. So for Shannon to... purposely try to go through the entrance areas of the marsh, there was no cutaway where you could just walk in. She would have to have pushed aside all of those bushes and such to get in, which would be unlikely. And then once you're in...
then all that goes away. All there is is loam and weeds. And the weeds are, at that time of the year, they're not growing in green. They're still from the year before, so you can push your way through. So if she did take that path, if she did walk in the wash at all, she wouldn't have removed her jeans and then continued to walk. That's absurd. So what happened?
Well, we found where her body had been found. And to the left, as we went east, there's Ocean Parkway. You could hear the cars. You could even see their lights. You could hear their tires. as men and women were going to work on the right side that is to say facing south houses along the roadway in oak beach were not only visible you could see into the dining rooms
and see people sitting there having tea or coffee early in the morning. Then Madeline tried shouting out to see if her voice would have been muffled, and it clearly echoed across the marsh. So if Shannon were in trouble, she could easily have seen help to her right because you could see people or you could go to the left and end up by the Ocean Parkway without too much difficulty.
So it was absurd that she would have died of natural causes. So the more I spoke to the doctor, the less impressed I was with the efficiency with which this autopsy was conducted. Sharon's bones should have been taken. A very small amount was taken. They could have done what's known as a diatomaceous test on her bones, and that would have told them that she drowned. They never did the test. The test is expensive.
We also had the sense that the police considered her being a sex worker to be of no value to society and they didn't want to spend the money. There was some testing done of the remains of her hair. They did some kind of test on that. to see if she had any kind of drugs. No drugs turned up. Now, if Shannon was a habitual drug user, there certainly would have been cocaine, some drug that would have turned up.
in her hair, but it didn't. Now, if she ingested drugs that night or that morning, it would not have turned up in the hair. It wouldn't have been there yet. But it didn't make sense that... She would have ingested huge amounts of drugs enough to make her hallucinating, such that she would enter the marsh and die there. Her history was that she didn't have that habit. Now I became more intensely involved.
I went to Oak Beach to knock on doors. That was in June of 2012. I went with my associate vest, Mitev. We traveled the neighborhood. We knocked on several doors. I found a neighbor of Dr. Hackett. By now, I was aware of who he was. And the neighbor told us he had heard that girl had been at Dr. Hackett's home, the girl being Shannon Gilbert. He was an older gentleman, and his son owned the house. But when he realized who we were, he stopped talking.
Have you ever heard about the woman who woke up in a cold sweat like she just had a nightmare, but she knew what she saw while she was sleeping was more than just a bad dream? Or the violinist who disappeared from the orchestra pit in front of thousands of people in the audience? What about when a mark left behind at a crime scene led investigators to wonder if there were devil-worshiping cultists prowling their rural neighborhood?
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Follow Mr. Ballin' Podcasts, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Prime members can listen early and ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 in El Salvador? How the Russian Mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab?
or why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos. I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Golds. And we're the hosts of the Underworld Podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week, we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there, we've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it.
We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts. One thing I wanted to say was you talk about the condition of her items. One, I love that you pointed out, and I just want to reemphasize that they were about 25 yards from the back door of Hackett's house.
75 feet, if you will. And then the condition of the items is important. Tell us about that. This is 18 months after she's disappeared. After Shannon's belongings that were found. nearby and behind Dr Hackett's home. The items themselves were in much better shape than they should have been if they had been laying in a wet marsh for a year and a half. The phone was intact.
Apparently Mary was able to turn it on. Apparently the wallet was wet. There was money in it. I don't know how much. We didn't get to see it. But these items and the jeans were not rotted away. They were intact. So the inference could be that they were much more recently put there. But then again, I don't know the forces of nature. It could be that where they were laying, they weren't deteriorating. I don't know.
Another thing that I wanted to point out that you said, dying of natural causes, 10 years ago today, actually, as you pointed out, the weather in Oak Beach was in the 50s.
at this time and i'm not a climatologist but that does not cause hypothermia the 50s right well it would require an incredible stretch of the imagination that even if she was cold and was missing her genes for bizarre reasons even and was walking through this cold marsh it requires a stretch an incredible stretch of imagination to believe that she would just say okay right there i'll just drop dead here i'll just stay here
fall asleep and never wake up when you could a few yards to the left you could get out of where she was and a few maybe 200 yards to the right where the house is from the spot where she's found why would anybody do that
I have been to the marsh, as you have, and I've seen the spot where she was found. And you're right. It is just yards from the freeway. So if she was headed there, there's no reason why she wouldn't continue. And then the pants missing. People are like, well... they were wet or they got caught in brambles and like you said once you get through that initial thicket that surrounds the marsh once you get into the marsh there's no reason to take pants off
And think about it. This girl is a sex worker. She's wearing jeans. Do you think she's wearing baggy jeans or tight jeans? Either way, do you mean to tell me as you're running through the wash, sticker bushes, as Commissioner said, could... pull the jeans off? Yes. Absurd. That's an absurdity. So why would she have abandoned her jeans deliberately? That also doesn't make any sense. Even if they were wet, why would you take them off when the whole marsh is wet?
Even let's assume she did that. There's some bizarre reason for doing that. Well, when she got to the point where she could have gotten out at the spot where she was by merely going to the parkway, why did she not make any effort to do so? and die face up. Normally I would think you'd take a fetal position if you just gave up. You know, you wouldn't be laying on your back like you were sunning yourself. You know, we talked to Verone, who at the time was chief of detectives.
And he said, there's no way she drowned. So it's weird that that whole theory took off for some reason. And part of that reason he gave, and again, this is chief of detectives who was there, said that she was... over kind of a bush part of her body was elevated right she was kind of laid over a bush so that right there rules out that she was face down in water which who would have done that anyway
Which also brings to the point that you were talking about the hyoid bone and that the horns of the hyoid bone were missing. Those break off in strangulation. If she's elevated... I don't see critters getting to that bone if it was elevated off the ground, the hyoid bone. Yeah, I'm not even sure that a body would decay by complete disappearance as it did, in her case, in a year and a half.
It's possible. And it appears that there are hormones and there's not much else besides that. But it struck me as fairly odd that there was almost no physical tissue left at all in the marsh. I don't know. I don't know how that would happen. And I just wanted to highlight, too, what you said about her hair, because there was hair left, and they tested that, as you said, and it would have shown drug use. Now, not that night. You're right.
but it would have shown a consistent drug use if that was there. And it didn't, which is interesting because she was no angel and we know that, and none of us are, but she was not a consistent drug user. Like people want to. portray and for some reason that night she used so much it sent her over the edge not only is that so what you've just said but also consider this
Anybody in our generation knows about the hallucinogenics and their effects and so on. You're not going to convince me that anybody using even the worst, most LSD or... or methamphetamine, crystal meth, whatever it may be, that she would be so crazed and unable to negotiate her environment at all that she would blindly run into a marsh and manage to remove her clothing and then...
drag herself all that distance through the marsh that she did and not notice anything else and then die from what? Overdose? None of it makes sense. It can't possibly be. And let me go back a second, if I could. Sure. We know that she arrived, and we've covered this in episodes one and two, that she arrived at Brewers. They had some sort of date going on.
She called her driver, Pac, who's out in the driveway sleeping or playing poker online or whatever he's doing. That's what he says. The only way you know that is because he says that and Brewer says it. They both say it, but you have no other way of knowing whether that's really true. That's a good point. Go ahead. They do say at some point, four in the morning, Shannon and Brewer leave.
How long they're gone, 15, 20, 25 minutes, it varies. What do you know about this trip that was supposedly made, allegedly made, and what have you found out about this trip? Well, the story goes, according to PAC, And in its way, according to Brewer, that Shannon wanted to go to a CVS pharmacy to pick up playing cards and KY clean. She called.
Pack, who was sitting out in his car, and asked Pack to take her to pick these items up. Pack refused. And so she got angry, said she'd find her own way home, and left with Brewer. then came back 15 minutes later. So that's the story told by Pack and Brewer. It doesn't make sense. To the very closest convenience store, you'd have to go over the bridge, just there alone.
and back, it would take you more than 15 minutes. It'd take a lot more than 15 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, maybe more. The other thing is Fuller later on claims that the reason he got rid of Sharon is because... she looked like a man and that he didn't want to have sex with her because he thought she might be a transvestite. That's complete nonsense because she went there for the initial two hours and the two hours expired.
And then she continued to stay there and supposedly rearranged a new deal with him for the rest of the time. Why would she be there that long if he thought she looked like a man and didn't want her? So why is he telling fake stories? Well, there could be a number of motives for it, one of which is to say that he didn't actually engage in an act of prostitution so that he couldn't be prosecuted for it. And by the way, he talked to me off the record.
when I took his deposition, and he admitted a lot more to me than he was willing to admit on the record. He claimed that he did have sex with her, but the sex was oral. He also claimed that he did agree to pay her more money. Why would you do that if you thought she was a man? Another thing never really addressed. The only way we know the hookup between Shannon and Brewer took place is because Shannon went on Backpage.
And so did Brewer, and they hooked up that way. That's what Brewer's story is. You have no evidence that that's true except Brewer's word. Pack is driving from Queens to pick up. Shannon in Manhattan and they're hanging out waiting for a John to come along. This is Pat's story. And then Brewer checks in and they decide that they agree to go to Brewer's house in Oak Beach, Long Island.
now packing driving an suv and they're going to use up the gas and go all the way to suffolk county to obscure a place like oak beach for a two-hour tryst pack will make about $50? That doesn't sound right either. Keep in mind that the immediate spin has been that Shannon was in an unknown place and had never been out there and so on. She was scared, whatever.
But Shannon says on the 911 tape that she's nearby to Jones Beach. So she was paying attention to the signs as they were driving out there. But more importantly, Shannon was not unfamiliar with Long Island. And I have... other evidence that Shannon had spent her time at the Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, apparently looking for customers, but that she also had a regular customer in Kings Park.
and that he was a very wealthy man, and also someone who was a very wealthy man out in, I believe it was Amagansett. This is a place where the nursery landscaper visit. who was suspected at one point in the case. This is where he lived. And one witness has told me that Bissett was her client. She was not unfamiliar with Long Island.
And she was looking to break into the East End market of wealthy men. So maybe that's the reason she went to Oak Beach. Well, that's interesting because according to PAC, they had worked together six to nine months. He says they'd never been to Long Island. But you have evidence that points that she did have clients out there. Is that correct? That is correct. And so whether Pat drove her there or not, I don't know.
yeah i don't know and and you know it could have been that she had somehow gotten out there on her own at different times before this night 10 years ago but according to pack and diaz if you will They had kind of gotten away from the agencies and were posting ads and doing their own work. And it seems like he would know if she'd been out to Long Island. You don't just wander out to the east side of Long Island and not remember that.
She was out there, and that's the evidence I have anyway. It makes some sense as well, logically, because Shannon was not a broken-down drug addict, as many sex workers are. which would just take anything that came along and was barely making a living. That's just not true. Shannon had been part of the ring of sex workers in New Jersey before this happened, and she was busted.
And the police let her off light and told her, don't come back, don't be in this area anymore, or you're really going to be in trouble. So she knew very well she couldn't work the Jersey market anymore. Therefore, she had to go to another place. So that's why she's in Manhattan. But Manhattan is not necessarily fruitful because there's an awful lot of sex workers there. And Long Island is a promising area. And she was ambitious.
She was looking to be a star. She was looking to be a singer. And she was not a broken down person. So it makes sense that she would try to get into the rich man's market on Long Island, which is exactly the evidence I have. Yeah, that's a great point. Since we've talked about Joe Brewer a little bit, you've heard the first few episodes where we discuss Brewer, and we don't get into him in depth. He wasn't too keen to talking to us.
Is there anything about his backstory that needs telling or clarifying? Yeah, I met Joe Brewer several times. This happened because I chose to go to his house and knock on his door. He knew who I was when he answered the door. He came out on the patio, talked to me at length, tried to befriend me. He hugged me. He wept on my shoulder. He said he would talk to me again anytime I wanted. He did. He spoke to me again.
So I've had a lot of encounters and I've come to know Joe Brewer. Joe Brewer came from a wealthy family. His mother owned a lot of property in Long Island. And Joe is a college grad. I think he went to Hofstra. He was involved in accounting. So his background was fairly solid in that regard. But Joe, as a person, he has great election for sex workers and he had some sex issues.
He has this little house his mother, I believe, purchased in Oak Beach, and it's kind of an isolated house. It stands in the Oak Beach area alone and is west of most of the houses that... are part of the Oak Beach Association. It's perfect for if you want to conduct any kind of illicit activities, parties, drugs, whatever.
So Joe went there, and apparently at one point his girlfriend lived there with him, but then she left. He claimed he was lonely. He would comfort himself by bringing escorts to the house. He admitted that. He admitted to me that he had had parties with escorts at his house. There are all kinds of other stories about an unknown man who lived with Brewer at his house.
He admitted to me that he had a friend that lived there but was not present that night, he claimed. He wouldn't go into details about who the friend was, but that he was a friend who Joe knew and let him stay there. Not much I know. So we know that she went to Barbara Brennan's. There was this interaction, Shannon and Barbara Brennan. And then there was another 911 call from Barbara and then Shannon disappeared. What do you think happened from there? Well.
I interviewed Barbara Brennan at length. I also interviewed her neighbor across the street, Thomas Canning, and I interviewed Canning's son, Justin Canning. Brennan claims that Shannon... was not only knocking on her back door, her front door faces the water, her back door faces the street. Brennan hears the knocking, and she approaches the door, and she sees Shannon trying to pry open the door.
So she then calls 911. She sees Shannon texting on her cell phone, sitting on the steps of her deck. And when she looks down to make the call and then looks up, Shannon is gone. That's what Brennan claims. However, Brennan also called, and she admitted this, Thomas Canning, the neighbor across the street. So you have to picture that Brennan's house that's on the water, then across the small street is Canning.
And then behind Canning's house and down a ways is Hackett's house. Canning's son, Justin, tells the New York Post reporter that he and his father saw Shannon Gilbert at Brennan's house. And that she looked at devil and she looked like he was confused. He then, when I took his testimony later on, he claimed that Kieran Crowley, who was the New York Post reporter.
made up the story when he reported this in the post that they had encountered Shannon at Brennan's. And he then claimed that he contacted the post and told them the story was wrong and they did not print a refutation. None of that sounds right. So already we have a problem because Thomas Canning, the boy's father, told a totally different story. His story was that he went alone to Brandon's house after he received the call.
and that his son was asleep when he got the call from Brennan. Now, Brennan's call is around 7 o'clock, I believe, in the morning on May 1st. Canning claims that he then went across to see what was going on. and he brought his dog with him. He saw the deck that went from the back door of Brennan, and there was mist on the deck, and he saw footprints in the mist going toward the water.
They look like female, he said, ballerina slippers. Now, mind you, Shannon's belongings include slippers that look like ballerina slippers. Why would Canning say that he knew? that that's what they look like. It was a very odd statement. He also says that the police came while he was investigating this. They drove up in two SUV vehicles and...
He told them what had happened, but the police officers never got out of their vehicles, according to Canning, to check the footprints and where they went. And behind them, when they drove up... was Gus Colletti, the man whose door Shannon knocked on and who also called 911. And Colletti drove up with a police officer. That's what Canning said. I interviewed Gus Colletti.
several times. Coletti claimed that Coletti stood at the gate of the association. He stood there and waited for the police who came about 40 minutes later. And one police car came, he said. The police officer drove around the neighborhood, built some hoods of cars to see if their engines were warm, came back to him and said he saw nothing and left. Now, his story does not match Canning's story.
If Coletti stayed the whole time at the gate, how did he show up driving in his car with the two cops at Canning's house? How were there two cops, not one cop, as Coletti had said? We talked about... In the first few episodes, how Hackett had lied about calling Mary Gilbert, Shannon's mother. It's believed that Hackett got Mary's number from Pac and Diaz.
boyfriend and driver when they came out looking for her. Does that make sense to you? It might. He acquired Mary's number either from Shannon or from Shannon's cell phone. or from Diaz or both. And he called Mary. Now he denied to the reporters from 48 hours that he had ever called Mary Gilbert. But when I talked to Mary Gilbert,
He definitely called, and Cherie, Mary's daughter, also confirmed that Hackett called, and that he called more than once. Hackett denied it vehemently in 48 hours, and 48 hours got a hold of... the phone records that show that he did make the call. So when they went back and confronted him in Oak Beach,
He then changed the story and said, oh, he had forgotten that he made the call, but he had made the call just to reassure Mary and make her feel better because her daughter was missing. Well, that makes no sense. How would Mary Gilbert know? that her daughter was missing on the day that she was missing. She didn't live with her mother. She lived in Jersey City. Her mother lived up in Ellenville, New York. You might want to know also that...
Hackett wrote a second letter once she was confronted with the truth that he had made the call on Monday and said that he and his wife had thoroughly searched their phone records and he had made no other calls. That was the only call he made, and that was only to sympathize with Mary. That turned out to be another lie, because he had made a call on Thursday, May 5th, with Mary, and that call pinged off of a tower.
in hasbrook new jersey and so when he made that call he had to have been either in new jersey or on the george washington bridge near hasbrook when that call was made the thing could not have come from Oak Beach or Babylon or that area to take off a tower in Hasbrook, New Jersey. So why is he in New Jersey on that day? And remember, Shannon lived in New Jersey. And remember that Mary lived in Ellenville, New York.
So if he went over the bridge or went through the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and was near Hasbrook when he made that call, he was either on his way up to Ellenville or on his way to Shannon's home in New Jersey. Why is that happening? Nobody's bothered to look at that. And I caught him because I got full records and I confronted him with it at his deposition. And he said he couldn't explain it. He didn't know why he insisted that he had in New Jersey.
He was lying to his teeth. Yeah, and if he's kind of a retired guy who's hiding out in Oak Beach, there's no reason to be in Hasbrook, New Jersey. Correct. And he denied that he was there. And there's the phone record to show he was there. In any event, he made that second call. Now, the gate issue, Hackett claimed that Hackett had nothing to do with the front gate, which was the entry exit for the Oak Beach Association. That gate had a camera.
that was filming who went in and who went out there's a lot of speculation about well why was he in new jersey or when did he call or why did he call But knowing who he was, there's no reason why he wouldn't have pulled those tapes to look at that and to know what was going on that night. This is Andrew from the Scary Mysteries podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and creepy true crime compilations on Mondays, and on Wednesdays we have our twisted news episodes.
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Hackett testified that there was a young man whose name he couldn't recall, who was in charge of it and was working with it and fixing it. Nobody else confirms that there was ever any young man. retained by the association working with or fixing the video at that time. But there's another man, and his name comes to mind, is Sirota, who was on the board at... the same time that Hackett was in May of 2010. And Sirota testified that two weeks or so before May 1st of 2010, Hackett
himself was in charge of the videos and remained in charge of the videos until after this whole incident was over. Hackett claimed that those videos were taped over and that's the reason they disappeared. However, Hackett also testified that Hackett knew that these tapes were important. He knew that they should have been turned over to the police.
And he told the board members that nobody should touch the tapes because of important evidence. So why in the world would this man who's in charge allow them to be taped over? Yeah. You've taken a lot of depositions with... key players. Is there anything from those depositions that you can share that people might not know about? Well, I mentioned Sirota's testimony about the control of the gate. It's odd to me that the Suffolk County Police never interviewed.
Sirota. They've never interviewed Justin Canning. They interviewed Thomas Canning early in the case before homicide was involved, when the Missing Persons Bureau was involved, and then they left him alone. It appears that they never went back and interviewed Hackett's son about where Hackett was that morning. They never interviewed Barbara Hackett about where she was and where he was that morning. I have all of those people's testimony.
There's huge quantities of contradictory and self-contradictory evidence in transcripts. Almost everybody testifying to my mind was not telling the truth.
For example, I mean, take when Hackett is home in his house, supposedly asleep on May 1st, 2010. The wife claims that they went to bed at 10 o'clock on Friday night. That would have been... april 30th and uh one of the children came home at 2 a.m woke them up to kiss them good night and then everybody went to sleep and then she went to work the next morning
And that Peter Hackett never got out of bed during all that time. So therefore, he could not have been involved in Shannon Gilbert's disappearance. Hackett testifies. Very much the same, that at 2 o'clock in the morning, one of the children came in, kissed him goodnight, and went to bed. And he claims he didn't wake up until 10 o'clock the following morning, so he could not have been involved. He also claimed that he made no phone calls. And when he was awoken...
He was woken because his daughter, who was 18 years old, came in and hopped on his bed to wake him up at 10 o'clock in the morning. But I interviewed the daughter. That's not the story she told. The dog remembers him sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee at 6.30 in the morning. Somebody is lying about Hackett's whereabouts at that time in the morning. Now, big picture.
What are those key elements, those key points of evidence that lead you to believe Dr. Hackett was directly involved with Shannon that night, that morning? Well, the key pieces of evidence regarding... Peter Hackett's involvement with Shannon that morning are largely coming from Peter Hackett's mouth. When he testified under oath, he told over 300 different self-contradictory stories about what occurred in this whole case.
That's the key piece of evidence. Another key piece of evidence is that Packett did make the call to Mary on two occasions, one while he was in New Jersey. In addition, he certainly had control of the tapes and he certainly... caused those tapes to be erased, whether he did it directly or indirectly by waiting until they were erased by the dint of the cameras working or not, we don't know. He had control of those tapes and he made sure that the police didn't get them.
Another very important fact, he claimed under oath that he conceived of the idea that Shannon fell. We know she did fall because she ran down the steps at Brewer's house. hit her head, had intracranial bleeding, was on drugs, ran into the march, and died. He claimed that he formulated that theory immediately as...
as soon as he learned of Shannon's disappearance, which would have been May 3rd, if he was telling the truth about that. He formed that, I believe, and he testified that it was his passionate duty or some words to that effect. to find Shannon, why in the world would he not have looked in the marsh? He never looked in the marsh. In addition, if...
He was so intent upon finding Shannon Gilbert. She was missing only for a day and a half when Diaz and Pat came to his home. He called Mary Gilbert. He went out of his way to call the mother. Why didn't he call Shannon Gilbert? He never called Shannon Gilbert. It makes no sense at all. There can be only one reason he didn't call her, because he knew she was dead.
Now, here's a big question I've always had, and you were there when all this went down. So, in December of 2010, they're looking for Shannon, allegedly, SCPD is. And they start finding bodies just a mile or so away from Oak Beach and along Gilgo Beach along Ocean Parkway. They find four bodies, the four known as the Gilgo Four. And then...
They shut down the investigation. They shut down the search for three months plus. We know at least one family is still wondering where Shannon is because that's the whole impetus of this. The Gilbert family's wondering, why don't you keep looking? And I'm sure there's other families who have ties to missing loved ones in Long Island that are also wondering, is my daughter or my child there?
What was the reasoning that SCPD gave? It just never made sense to me to shut down. It's winter. We can't look. What do you understand about that? Little logical sense that they would shut down the investigation because it's wintertime. Did you ever hear of the police not investigating a murder case because it's wintertime? Anywhere in the world, much less on Long Island, where the winters are not that harsh.
You mean to say there are no days in the winter when it's warm enough you can look around? Are your fingertips cold? It's absurd. What's bothersome to me in that regard is what I had said at the beginning of this interview, and that was that... One of the other events that emerges here is the involvement of James Burke. Now, this guy has some very bad background, very bad character. He was in charge of the investigation by the DA's office.
until December of 2011, and then he was in charge of the entire police department from that point on as the chief of police. You've got to wonder what his role was in... this whole investigation. Was it a cover-up? Was it intentional? Does he have something to do with it? I had a sex worker come forward to me, many of them actually, in talking about Burke and other individuals involved in this hole.
arena. Her working name was Luann. We held a press conference with her where she said that Burke had sex with her twice in Oak Beach, but it was after 2011 on. It was after Shannon's disappearance. But he was involved. He was down there. By the way, I found an old report by the police department, internal affairs investigation, wherein Burke, when Burke was investigated for...
his illicit association with a prostitute, with a sex worker named Loretta Rickenbacker, who's, by the way, become my client because of this case. When he was involved with her back... years ago in the early 2000s, the police reported how Burke had a unique, extremely efficient knowledge.
of the area that he worked and the street people, the people who were there in his area. He was known for his acumen in that regard. And they mentioned this in their report about him when he was involved with Morita. So Burke would have known Hackett. He would have known the players down there. He would have been very familiar with that whole area. So we talked about how they shut down the search for more bodies, which is just shocking to me.
But then later in December of 2011, they're looking along Ocean Parkway again for Shannon. They're still trying to find Shannon. They found all these other bodies. They're not finding anything. And then they just moved the whole operation finally. to the marsh where they've never really looked and then the next day almost from what i understand they find her belongings what comes to mind for you when all of this goes down well what comes to mind is is that
It was an attempt to stretch this search out until things grew cold, not just literally, but figuratively cold. So it became a cold case. And it was an attempt, therefore, to avoid the discovery of the evidence. It appears to have been possibly deliberate. And this is generated by somebody in charge. Somebody in charge made that decision. And it would seem to me that would be Burke.
Maybe he wasn't the only one making that decision, but why are they making that decision at all is absurd, really. It's another absurdity of the many in this case. The other thing is that the police bragged. through Detective Vincent Steffen, who I mentioned before, the detective who wrote the letter excoriating me for what I said at the press conference about bringing in the feds. And he pointed out that the feds had come in and they had used their...
helicopters to fly over the area to look for Shannon. Those helicopters have equipment that enables them to see pretty well, to find things that are on the ground. So if Shannon's body was there... When they flew over, why didn't they hear? That concludes part one of our conversation. Please know part two will arrive in a matter of days, so be on the lookout.
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