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Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities Pride and Prejudice Winnie the Pooh stories that are great for adults and kids alike For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much-needed Z's, start their next day off fresh, and discover old books that they didn't know they loved. So, whether you have a tough time snoozing, or you just like a good bedtime story...
Fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes each week. Sweet dreams. Mopac Audio. If you love The List Podcast, please make sure you rate and subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode.
Also, take a quick moment to find us on social media where we post case updates, behind-the-scenes photos, and exclusive content. Follow us at our handle, Atlas Podcast, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A note to listeners. Previously on Lisk, Long Island Serial Killer.
My brother came over and we're waiting for the police department. And I'm like, they said they were internal affair officers. And he was like, yeah. And I'm like, you know what internal affair officers are? And he goes... I think an important part of the LISC investigation involves a cell phone tower on Fire Island.
Flower Island, it's a small island off the coast of the mainland. There's one cell phone tower which covers the whole island. So to register off that tower, you either have to be on the island or you have to be... on a boat in close proximity to the island you're not going to be on the mainland and registering a phone call off that tower he always kept it under that minute he knew what he was doing because they say like after a certain amount of time like you know you can track it then
He just called her a whore. He just said what he did to her things like that Because there's very difficult conditions, very harsh conditions out there at Gilgal Beach. And we'd possibly missed something. And so we decided to wait till the winter was pretty much over. before the new growth. In the spring of 2011, the Suffolk County Police Department finally decided to get back to searching. Here's journalist and Lost Girls author Bob Kolker.
So March 29th rolls around and it's warm enough now. The thaw has happened and it's time to go searching for Shannon again. And almost immediately they find another set of human remains. Yesterday, members of the police department... resumed the search for missing person Shannon Gilbert. As part of that search remains that we now know to be human remains, we're located by an officer from the Marine Bureau off Ocean Parkway.
West of Cedar Beach, who's been missing since May 1st of last year. Another set of human remains, and then another, and then another, and as... April proceeds, they keep finding evidence and Shannon's family keeps waiting for an identification and it keeps coming up negative. And the case keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Just before that. You heard a 2011 press conference with former SCPD Commissioner Richard Dormer. Here he is from a later interview with a bit more detail.
An officer from Suffolk County PD was walking along where the brush area is, along Ocean Parkway, and observed something on the top of the surface, which turned out to be the remains of a body. And that was the first one. And to get calls from around the globe, because now there's a serial killer at work. This is Jacqueline Gallucci, a former Long Island press reporter. People care now. They didn't care. Where were you six months ago?
It's just like I didn't return a lot of those calls because it just felt very wrong. Jacqueline Gallucci had begun covering it back when it was all about missing women. And now the world was shocked with the Growing Body Count, but not SCPD. Again, here's former Commissioner Dormer. Yeah, that was our theory, that there was probably more bodies out there. And that was proven when we found the remains.
I should mention remains. It doesn't mean we had a full body. And now, of course, DNA has to be extracted from these remains. They all have to be analyzed. upload it into the database and see if they connect with other bodies or body parts that were. With the newly found remains and the initial Gilgo 4, the total was now at 10 official victims.
And of the six found that spraying, all were unidentified does except for one. Only Jessica Taylor was given her name years before, and only because an observant DC detective happened to cross a blast. sent out by SCPD about a nameless torsos tattoo. However, last year, SCPD announced that one more of the does had been identified. And finally, after two decades,
Valerie Mack's family had answers. Here's former police commissioner Geraldine Hart from that press conference. Thanks to the work of our detectives and our partners with the FBI, today we are announcing that Jane Doe No. 6 has been positively identified as Valerie Mack. Later, we'll get into Valerie's story and the DNA science that brought her home, along with what it could mean for the others. But now, as we did with the Gilgo Four...
We'll cover details and questions about these six newly found victims. We'll also do it chronologically, which means we start back in April of 1996 and at a place we're familiar with. Remains were connected to Davis Park. off Fire Island. Two women's legs washed up in 1996. A man walking along the beach sees a bag floating in the water. He opens the bag. There's two women's legs in there.
Detective in the homicide squad handled that case. Again, it went cold. Never identified where the legs came from. This victim would come to be known as Fire Island Jane Doe. At the time, the papers reported the legs having surgical scars and red-painted toenails. This amount of detail can only mean the legs weren't in the bay for long. Still, with so little to go on, this case went nowhere quickly.
But years later, there's a lucky break that happens to connect Fire Island Jane Doe to remains discovered along Ocean Parkway. Fast forward to 2011. At that time there was a lot of publicity. in the media about dismemberment. A retired detective from homicide in Suffolk County called the Homicide Squad and told them about two legs, ladies' legs, that were found.
in 1996 off Davis Park, which is Fire Island, across from Patchogue. This detective handled that case. It came to a dead end. Could never identify where the legs came from. He told the homicide squad, I bet the medical examiner still has these legs. They checked. The legs were still in the freezer. DNA was done on the legs.
The DNA matches with one of the remains found off Gilgal Beach. So the first doe, she was connected to those legs that were found on Fire Island back in April of 1996. Then, just over a year later... In June of 1997, the initial remains of the next list victim were found about 30 miles west of there, when a hiker makes a horrific discovery. Again, here's journalist Jacqueline Gallucci.
She was found in 1997 at Hempstead Lake State Park in a container, and she was dismembered, and she had a peach tattoo on her chest with two drips coming down from it. And for the List case, that's how Peaches would get her name. Her body, missing its legs, arms, and head, was found with a floral pillow sham and a red towel, and it was thought to have been there for three days. And she had a C-section scar, so they knew she had a child.
And I remember speaking to the detective at the time, and he said, somewhere that child is about 14 years old. And at that time, we figured the child's out there someplace. However, that child... and the rest of Peach's remains, were found along Ocean Parkway in 2011. Well, it appeared like that at that time. And then again, the task force now investigates all missing persons, missing youngsters.
They find two partial remains. One of them, through DNA, connects to the toddler many miles away. And a forensic anthropologist believes that that toddler is connected to the mom. Now, years later, we find out that baby doe on Ocean Parkway and some more remains were connected to peaches. That child never made it to 14.
And the frustrating part, that's 14 years. That's a huge difference. You'd never think that would go together. So there's so many things working against these cases just because it's just hard to know. You don't know things. You don't know who these people are. And the other thing, and your audience is probably asking the question, why didn't somebody report a toddler missing? I mean, if a toddler goes missing in a family, everybody is going to notice it and they're going to report it.
This leads to the theory that the mom was involved in the sex business. The toddler, why would the toddler end up with all this mixture of sex workers? And people in the sex business have told us that Every now and again, the sex worker will take her toddler with her for to meet a client. This is not unusual. I mean, this was shocking to me when I heard it, but...
They tell me that this happens. Minnie thought that the mom and her toddler could be a breakthrough. Perhaps the partner and child of the killer. Nothing about this has ever come to light yet, so for now, Dormer's theory still holds. Perhaps if Peaches and the toddler identified, things could change, like it did for Manorville Jane Doe, the next victim whose partial remains were found along Ocean Parkway in 2011. But her story starts more than a decade before this.
Now, in 2000, year 2000, a body was found wrapped at Manorville, off exit 71, 70-71, off the expressway, many miles from Gilgal. That body was never identified. It was a partial remains. It was missing parts of the body. The detectives at that time came to a dead end. There was no report of a missing person.
It was a female not in the database. And so it became a cold case. Like Fire Island Jane Doe. In 2011, Manorville Jane Doe would be connected to the remains found at Gilgo. And then nothing for years. Until. With advances in DNA technology and through our partnership with the FBI's Long Island office, a genealogy profile was established, which provided Suffolk County police homicide detectives.
investigative leads to pursue. This led homicide investigators and federal agents to areas of New Jersey where they believed Jane Doe number six had ties. Interviews were conducted with potential relatives who provided investigators with additional DNA samples, which were processed and analyzed, leading us to determine the deceased woman's identity. Valerie Mack's identification represents progress in this investigation, but there is much work left to do. That happened on May 22, 2020.
And soon after, we were able to talk to Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills. They made the wide-ranging A&E series, The Killing Season. It had multiple episodes dedicated to this case and did some great work on one of the biggest missing pieces, The Does. We're very excited because we've always believed that identifying the unidentified along Gilgo Beach
is really what's probably going to give us the biggest lead in solving the overall mystery. There's so much information that you can kind of get out from these individuals. of course who they are, but then that also kind of informs where they were placed along Gilgo Beach and why. Having the identification, the connections just keep getting... shorter and shorter so i'm hoping that whoever this woman was can you know open up those leads to possibly peaches as you said you know maybe
Maybe some of these victims ran around with each other. Who knows? This is why DNA is so key. Obviously, it's invaluable when it's the killers, and he's identified because of it. But using a doe's DNA to find their family... not only gave Valerie her name and her family answers, but knowing her story brings us closer to finding the killer. Now here's Dormer bringing us back to our timeline of those six new Ocean Park victims. In 2003,
Another body found in Manorville, about a mile away from where that first one was found, again wrapped, missing parts of her body. She was identified at that time from a tattoo that she had on her back. When the killer murdered her, he tried to erase the tattoo by cutting it out. He didn't do a very good job. The ME's office, the forensic scientists, raised the tattoo.
and through arrest records, identified her as a Jessica Taylor. Last season, we covered what was known about Jessica Taylor. Sadly, even though she had been identified, there was little out there. We know she was from upstate New York, had been estranged from her family, and once she was found murdered in 2003, they were so brokenhearted they've never wanted to talk about it. I drove out to Halsey Manor Road in the Pine Barrens.
And that's in Manorville. It's actually beautiful in the day because all you see are trees everywhere. There's nobody around. This is journalist Jacqueline Gallucci about her visit to the area. And where Jessica was found. It's like a dirt road right off the path, and you could tell kids hang out there. There's like beer cans, there's spray cans, there's debris and garbage left behind. And it looked like when...
Jessica was left there that someone drove up and just pushed her out of the car because she was just found on a pile of sticks. So they didn't make an effort to conceal her. It didn't seem like there was a plastic sheet and that was it. They just pushed her out of the car. It's known that Jessica had been in the D.C. area where she was arrested for sex work. She then went up to New York and was reportedly seen at Port Authority on July 21, 2003.
a woman walking her dog on Halsey Manor Road out in Manorville, came across her discarded torso. And we highlight those dates because if she was seen alive on the 21st and then discovered on the 26th, Those five days could be crucial to cracking the case. But we'll delve into that when we cover the issue of DNA. April 4th. These were the four. One of them, by the way, was an Asian male.
which really threw me for a loop when I heard this. I mean, we were expecting all females. Here, Commissioner Dormer is talking about the last official victim found along Ocean Parkway. And although determined to be an earlier victim like the other five, there were some very major differences beyond the obvious. It took a while for the anthropologists, the forensic people, to analyze the remains.
And we find out that the Asian male, very slight build, was wearing women's clothes. Not in the database again, but probably, the theory was, probably working as a sex worker. and connected with the killer. This is the theory, because they all end up at Gilgal Beach. His manner and cause of death was a little different from the females. It's believed that with the female victims, the cause of death was asphyxia.
Although that's a bit of an assumption with some. It was pretty degraded. These were old remains. Very difficult to determine how they died. And so it was undetermined in a number of cases. And although Asian Do's remains were degraded, his cause of death was more straightforward. Blunt force trauma to the head. Well, we think that the client thought he was making arrangements with the female, found out it wasn't a female, and had an angry, violent outburst. And that's what we believe happened.
And that was publicized. I'm not releasing any privileged information here. So the male is blunt force trauma to the head. And now we have, again, you're up to 10 bodies. The cause of death. of the female bodies. That covers the six additional victims that are officially tied to the List case. There have been others found murdered in the area and time frame that are often discussed as potential List victims.
and they're no less important. But it's difficult to find voices, information, and facts for those deemed official as victims, so we feel inadequate to try to expand beyond that. There is one case to touch on. Here's who we've called... our area detective. So in 2006, the state of New Jersey hit a serial killer case down in Atlantic City, which some people referred to as the Eastbound Strangler, where four girls were murdered.
strangled and discarded right outside of Atlantic City. Referred to as the Atlantic City Four, this case is often connected to the Gilgo Four and the List case as a whole. discarded in similar fashion to Lisk in that they were not put in like a public area. They were put in a remote area near water. That case to this day still remains unsolved. I don't know any.
relation between that case and LISC other than the victimology. So it's definitely, you know, similar in nature and Atlantic City is approximately a three-hour drive to Gilgo Beach. Atlantic City is also... not far from where Valerie Mack resided. She was the most recent girl that was determined to be a victim of Lisk through genealogy. They are similar in nature, so it's something I would look at for sure.
But I would presume that New York has reached out to Atlantic City at some point to see if there's any correlation between both cases. The Atlantic City Four, Molly Diltz, Kim Raffo, Barbara Breiter, and Tracy Ann Roberts were sex workers. And in just a five-week span in 2006, all four of them disappeared before their bodies were found in the drainage canal behind a motel. And when you really look at the details, there's little connecting them with Lisk beyond profession.
So with a case like Lisk, your web sleuths, your people looking at the cases outside of law enforcement will try to tie together a case like Atlantic City or a case in Ohio. of sex workers being murdered and discarded as all being connected. Just as a reminder, the detective has spent much of his career working in this world. Sex trafficking, homicides is a big issue in this country.
The FBI at one point had started a database about it. Sex workers in general, they're meeting up with men that they don't know. They become easier targets. A lot of the times they have... Strain relationships with their families so they're not being checked up on like a non sex worker would be so they're very easy targets, but just because It's unlikely that anyone...
beyond the killer, can definitively say that the Long Island and Atlantic City cases are connected. But the detective's thoughts are a good reminder, as often those researching LISC or cases like it can be drawn into and potentially distracted by the far too many sex worker deaths in a certain area. In that spirit, we return to our timeline, back to 2011.
and the search that had led to the discovery of the 10 official list victims, but still no Shannon Gilbert. Suffolk County police were stuck at the center of a story that had gone worldwide, and Mary Gilbert, along with the other victims' families, We're not going to let them forget that. Here's former journalist Dee Barcelo, who got to know the families, talking about covering the search efforts for Shannon once they finally resumed.
And so they have us up by the road. And we have our tripods set up there. We're filming. And they had these guys on horses. There's police from upstate New York. There's dogs all over the place. So for us, it's great video.
But one of the guys, one of the canine guys from Suffolk came up to me and said, are you enjoying the show? I said, well, yeah, I guess. He goes, they're doing this for you. You know, he goes, almost all those dogs out there are not cadaver dogs. They're bomb-sniffing dogs or this. Those dogs have no interest out there.
He goes, this is purely a show they're putting on to the man. It was just like, you gotta be kidding me. Out of nowhere, the police, they swerve into Oak Beach and they start to search a place where they've never searched before. Here's Bob Kolker picking up the search and alluding to the sudden, strange, and yet long overdue decision SCPD made to Search Oak Beach. A place that's been right at the center of this case.
a place where more than one person said to me over those many months, why on earth haven't the police searched there yet? And that's the marsh that dominates most of Oak Beach. and is right next to where Shannon was last seen, right near Barbara Brennan's house and right near Peter Hackett's house. And lo and behold, on December 5th, 2011, they find Shannon Gilbert's belongings in the marsh.
not far from where she was last seen, and really technically in the backyard of Peter Hackett's house. 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-worshipping cultists prowling their rural neighborhood? Well, the Mr. Ballin podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is nothing but these kinds of stories.
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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. where we get you up to speed on the most terrifying and strange news stories currently happening all around the world. We're covering the topics you want to hear about. Missing persons, killers, UFOs, and more.
Best of all, we don't waste your time with any fluff or fillers, just straight to the true crime details. So go check out the Scary Mysteries podcast, and I'll see you there. If you remember from season one, Shannon Gilbert's belongings were found about 75 feet from the back door of Dr. Peter Hackett's house. That's fact. But there are rumors about the condition to which they were found. That after some 18 months in the elements,
Shannon Gilbert's items were in nearly new condition. This would obviously have huge implications. We don't know where this idea started, but Steve Barcello knows where he first heard it. Mary Gilbert. Telling me stuff she probably shouldn't have been telling me. But basically, ID'ing her daughter's stuff. Now, like I said, it's been a long time. I know it was lip gloss, money, ID. I think they were her shoes, like ballet shoes.
Might have even been pants. I mean, it's been so long I really don't recall all the things. I remember her telling me they were like in really good condition. It wasn't like this stuff was out there for a year. So I think it was these things were someone's trophies.
And they basically, things are getting hot now, time to get rid of them. But they were dumped out there, kind of in, I guess you could say plain sight. And then as they first found her belongings, I remember Mary had to go ID the stuff, it was all upset. Now, these things are fresh. This is almost a year or an hour that she was gone. And their shoes weren't faded or sun rotted or anything like that. I believe it was lip gloss, money, foam.
Obviously, we can't talk to Mary Gilbert about this claim. And SCPD has chosen not to talk to us. But if what Mary told Steve Barcello is true... It's shocking and something that SCPD can't simply dismiss. We do know just days later, Shannon Gilbert's body was found roughly a quarter mile away from her belongings. And almost immediately, theories from law enforcement on her cause of death started circulating. Now, the story they tried to portray at the time was that she drowned.
There's no way in hell, honey. There's not enough water back there. The only way you could drown back there is if you fell in one of the mosquito ditches and weren't able to climb out. If you follow this case, you know that the theory of Shannon drowning is still out there circulating. But for many reasons...
this theory makes little sense. We've been out to the place where Shannon's body was found, and it's marsh. Water seeps up when you step, but is devoid of any standing water. And Steve Barcelo, along with John Ray, visited the area soon after Shannon was found. We walked back there, Johnny Ray, myself, for 48 hours. Same time of day, same time of year, and reenacted it. And besides me getting my boots stuck every now and now. But beyond that, I mean, we made it through.
safely. Didn't lose a cameraman, didn't lose a salmon, nobody. And when you go up with the body, it was found, I mean, it was within, I don't know, 60 feet of the ocean parkway. And then there's Chief of Detectives Dominic Verone. who was there just after Shannon was discovered, and he saw her remains. It's my belief, from what I observed, that after collapsing and being unconscious, she was somewhat supported by the ramble.
which certainly would indicate that she didn't drown. In other words, she was not face down in water of any sort. So Verona's convinced Shannon didn't drown, as are we. However, we want to remind you of what Verona had said, something we played this season, back in episode one. Now the months go on. We're still not exactly sure what happened to Shannon.
But we are concerned that she still may be in the area somewhere. And we did an immediate search of the area, absent the marsh, which for the most part was underwater. But John Mallier, our canine officer, He began going along Ocean Parkway. And in episode one, we mentioned our Google Earth search and the image we found from the area from September 2010 that shows a virtually dry marsh.
And we know Shannon disappeared on May 1st. But again, here's Verone on when SCPD really knew Shannon was missing. The 911 call that she makes, the Suffolk County Police Department don't become aware of until the following month. So let's say that's June when SCPD realizes Shannon's still missing. And again, from Google Earth, we know that the marsh was dry in September. That means they couldn't search it in July or August because, as Verone said, it was underwater.
Well, it could have been after September that the marsh filled with water that they couldn't search, but that leaves a small window because by early December, the K-9 officer had already made it a good distance down Ocean Parkway. searching until he found the first body. All that to say, SCPD's reasoning and timeline does not match up with reality.
There is another theory on Shannon's cause of death, and it's what SCPD seems to subscribe to. So it's my belief that Shannon Gilbert was in a state of hysteria, was in a poor mental state. contributed to her lack of sleep, whatever drugs she may or may not have induced. And, you know, this poor girl just ran off into a very, very bad area and was lost.
and could have been, I think, within one day, or very soon after her disappearance, she already succumbed. Basically, the theory is, certain factors led Shannon into the marsh, where she then succumbed. And that must mean that she succumbed to either the drugs or to the cold. To help us understand this theory and what's feasible, we track down an expert.
My name is David Saint-Singh. I've been practicing emergency medicine for a little over 20 years. With decades of work in the ER, Dr. Saint-Singh has seen just about everything, including every recreational drug situation gone bad. Plus, he's an expert when it comes to hypothermia. But first, we asked him to explain the general term succumbed, as in succumb to the elements, and what that actually means.
It typically is in the setting of heat-related illness, so hyperthermia when you are exposed to extreme heat or generating extreme heat. Or the opposite extreme, hypothermia, when you get particularly cold and your body goes through a process that can eventually lead to death. In Shannon's case, it would have been hypothermia, exposure to cold.
So we wanted to know what happens to a person, how it plays out, how it actually leads to death. There are several different ways that we get cold and when... that starts to occur, our body needs to compensate. There's an initial stage where you're completely normal and as you start to cool, our body goes through an excitation phase.
And we've all experienced a shivering. But then there's a stage that we get into as our core temperature starts to drop. Our body is trying to protect our vital organs. And so it needs to keep the blood flow going to those areas. And so it will preferentially... constrict in the skin and the extremities to shunt that blood to the vital organs and try and keep those organs alive.
But there's some point that we cross where we start to become more sedated. You're in a compensatory state. Your body's figuring out, what can I do to not die? So we go into this phase where everything starts to slow down and that phase can last for a really long period of time before we succumb to the elements. It seems like there's...
This misconception about hypothermia that it only happens to people like lost in the Arctic or, you know, people that are trying to summit Mount Everest. Is that a misconception? Sure, it is. In the real world, whether you're where I live, where it can get obviously quite cold in the winter, or in Los Angeles, where it can get cold enough, the people that are most at risk are...
either people that are intoxicated, so their cognition is impaired. But if you're exposed to 50 degree temperature for long enough, you can become hypothermic. And why it's usually only a risk if you're mentally impaired or intoxicated is because when we're in our right frame of mind, our bodies will naturally defend us from the cold or we'll make decisions like put on a jacket or keep walking.
So how does this relate to Shannon and what happened on that early morning in May? So Oak Beach at its coldest point during the night, which was in the 5 a.m. range right before the... sun came up was in the mid-50s. I did find one source that said 52 degrees, another source that said 59 at its lowest, but it sounds like in the mid-50s with a little bit of wind.
Sounds like gusts up into the 15 mile an hour range. Certainly not gale force winds, but it was windy and chilly. The question then becomes, how long can someone be exposed to these temperatures before it gets dangerous? And obviously, it's a sliding scale, meaning the colder the temperatures, the less exposure we can handle. I think it's important to remember the timing of this, but she left the Johns house at 4.55, 5 a.m.
So let's say that's when she was first exposed to the elements in a persistent manner. So let's say it's 55 and a little breezy. Well, the sun started coming up around 5.45 a.m. And the air temperature curve started to rise immediately. An hour and a half, you know, the temperature was in the 60s. She wasn't even exposed to truly cold weather, cool weather. Let's call it cool. And then it started to warm up.
The high temperature that day was in the 80s. So from a timing standpoint, what's the likelihood that Shannon's core temperature went from roughly 98 degrees to... The mid-80s or whatever for her might have been that trigger point that everything started to slow and she couldn't think clearly. What's the likelihood that occurred in an hour? You know, it's close to zero.
Just to clarify, it's the person's core temperature that needs to drop low enough to dangerous enough levels for an extended period of time for it to be deadly. Here's Dr. Saint saying with what our bodies are capable of. I'll give you an example of a case report. This is a crazy case. This woman who was an orthopedic resident was out in the backcountry with her friends in the winter, slipped down a snowy hillside, broke through the ice in a river.
Anne was trapped beneath the ice, but had an air pocket by her mouth, so she was able to breathe. Ice was toothed, and then as soon as she broke through, she slid down the river, right? It's a moving body of water. So her friends were not able to break through the ice and get her. They were able to activate some form of backcountry EMS. But she was in that water for over 90 minutes before she was taken out. And we're talking...
Not just exposure to cold air, but also to cold water. And we're talking water that since it's not frozen, it's not 32, but it's closed. This woman was eventually freed by search and rescue and then flown to the hospital. They did what they could in the helicopter, but their ability to intervene is limited. And so we're talking about a woman who was exposed to cold for hours and hours and hours and survived.
And the point is, like, look at this drastic situation that this woman was put in. And Shannon was exposed to kind of cool air for... Let's say she had two hours of some kind of mild exposure. It's unfathomable to me that that would take her life. So it's just hard to make a compelling argument that she died from hypothermia. Step into the hidden corridors of the past with hometown history.
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because ain't nobody got time for that. I cover everything from psychopaths to poltergeists, so go check out the Everytown podcast, because Everytown, no matter how nice it may seem, has a dark side. So if it wasn't succumbing to the elements, could it be succumbing to the potential drugs she took that night? This idea is that Shannon was dealing with a combination of drugs and bipolar, and this caused the paranoia that drove her away from help and into the marsh.
where she eventually succumbed to the drugs. Bipolar, by definition bi, right, means two. You know, you have these various emotional states that you may deal with. And at any given time, you may not deal with it at all. It's not like schizophrenia where somebody's floridly psychotic and paranoid and hallucinating, whether it's visual or auditory hallucinations. They're pretty different psychiatric disease processes.
So I'm not saying it couldn't have played a role, but bipolar doesn't typically make you altered on that level. And especially somebody that sounds like they made a calm, cogent decision to... hop in a car with their driver and head out to Oak Beach for a call. And by all accounts, Shannon had been fine leading up to Oak Beach and during most of the date, exchanging calls with her driver, Pac, leaving on this errand with Brewer.
But it seems there was an hour to an hour and a half window where Shannon changed to this dazed and paranoid person heard on the call. So what does that mean as far as potential drugs? And we look at these calls and in the blink of an eye. Something happens, and we see this in the ER all the time. I mean, all day, every day. People use substances. It's too much. They end up out of their minds, and a friend or family is bringing them in, and it happens fast.
So I totally agree the likelihood is, especially if the call really suggests a woman that's paranoid and not thinking clearly, probably substance related. So let's say she's in the marsh. impacted by substance, impacted by exhaustion, she will wake up and those substances will metabolize before she just dies. And...
When she wakes up, what do most human beings do that are now substance-free? They're hungry. Go try it. Go sit yourself out there in the marsh for a day, and you know what? At some point, you're going to get hungry and thirsty, and you're going to get up. and you're going to work your way back to that road, that 75 yards or whatever it was, to the road, and you're going to get help. So then, what about drugs that she might have taken, and what's the likelihood they led to her death?
So let's talk about substances. So cocaine sounds like something she did use at some point, whether she used it that night or not, we don't know. But how might cocaine kill a 20-something? essentially healthy woman otherwise. So it would have to be that she happened to have severe enough vasospasm for a prolonged enough period of time to impact her in a way that took her life.
Seems a little bit of a stretch, but I think we couldn't say definitively that didn't occur. I think it's more likely than hypothermia. Maybe not a lot, but a little more likely than hypothermia. It seems unlikely she's going to smoke enough weed to die, meth. We don't typically see people die from a meth ingestion or smoking meth or shooting meth. They just get pretty crazy.
and psychotic and tend to be out of their minds. It can take a day or more for them to metabolize that and get back to a normal state. Without becoming a pro-drug PSA, we know drugs can kill, especially with prolonged use. But to Dr. St. Singh's point, most party drugs don't result in death. Now, there are others we discussed, the ones known to be very dangerous and that are responsible for most of the drug deaths seen in our country. Now, one thing that could do it...
would be some form of opiate. Opiates, whether that's perxate, oxycodone, fentanyl, heroin, so tons of opiates that are used in a street fashion. And the biggest thing that they do that harm people quickly is they decrease your respiratory drive. And so that occurs at the level of the brainstem. And one of the things that opiates do is they diminish that inherent drive to breathe. Well, you tend to not be in an excited, paranoid state. You tend to be...
pretty sleepy and somnolent and have less ability to walk and move, right? So if you have such a significant opiate overdose, like what happens when police or EMS find somebody in the street that's had an overdose? Well, they're right there where the needle is, you know. So it's hard to tie her ability to run around to these different houses, knocking on doors, asking for help, running down the road, fighting her way through a marsh.
And then the opiate causes her breathing to slow to the point that she dies. So obviously I've kind of thought about the substance abuse angle a little bit and it's hard to make it work as a cause of death. So we asked Dr. Saint-Singh, given all the details and factors we know, what does he think happened to Shannon Gilbert? I think that one thing that hasn't been talked about as much as it should be is her fractured hyoid.
That doesn't just happen. Even in blunt trauma like an automobile accident, I've never seen it in my career. Not once. Where we see it is in hanging or in strangulation. As a reminder... Shannon's family and her lawyer, John Ray, had a second autopsy done by renowned forensic pathologist Michael Badden. His findings stated that Shannon's hyoid bone was damaged.
And this bone, as you might have deduced, is in the throat and wind damage can be often a sign of strangulation. And we know that in roughly 50% of cases of strangulation that lead to death, you break your hyoid. Whereas, you know, at the end of this conversation, we're reaching pretty far into left field to come up with other things in the substance world that might explain it, but they don't explain a fractured hyoid.
Some have suggested that Shannon's damaged hyoid bone is due to 18 months of exposure to the elements and animal activity. A little disclaimer, not a forensic pathologist. So speculating with kind of my level of medical knowledge tucked into this, I think it's unlikely. So let's picture this occurring.
some animal nibbling on the bone. Well, if an animal wants the bone to feed on the bone, the animal will take the bone. And as that tissue that holds the hyoid in place... goes away the bones there for the taking so an animal certainly could bite through that bone but it would seem weird for an animal to come up just bite through the bone and leave it there that seems odd to me and then in terms of
The elements destroying the bone, those things happen over hundreds and thousands of years, not months. And again, I'm sure an archaeologist or forensic pathologist could speak to this in a way that I can't. But you find bones intact well down the road from 18 months, and the hyoid included. So that I don't buy.
To be honest, our leading theory for Shannon's actions and death were a combination of mental health issues, perhaps a reaction to drugs, and then exposure to the elements. And we thought Dr. Saint-Singh would confirm this. But that's what's great about unbiased experts. They're taking what's known and overlaying that on their experience and knowledge. Doesn't mean he's right, but it was eye-opening. The first time I listened to season one, I was just frankly left scratching my head.
And I told several of my friends about it and several other doctors. I'm like, will you listen to this and tell me what you think? And every person to a person was like, I don't know what the hell happened. Like, this is weird. But every doctor that I spoke with, friends of mine.
We're like, how do you explain that hyoid? And I'm like, yes, how do you explain the hyoid? So apologies for continuing to harp on that. But from a medical standpoint, I'm like, the best explanation, this is the only thing where I can say 50% of the time. So we at least have, what's the chance this was hypothermia? I don't know, one in 10,000, one in a million. What's the chance she was strangled? 50%. 50%.
It goes without saying that we'd all like to know exactly what happened to Shannon Gilbert that early morning, but we did think we had a solid idea of what most likely transpired. However, when we take all of the oddities of the various Oak Beach characters, the unexplained actions of SCPD, and then the insights from Dr. Saint saying, it seems like almost every viable theory is on the table. It does, for us, seem more clear-cut on the other big question with Shannon Gilbert.
Was she a victim of Lisk? Something that is added to all of this, we were able to talk with the Oak Beach Drifter. Coming up on Lisk. Joe Brewer, he just got this. holier-than-thou attitude that he rises above everyone else. You know, everybody notices it about him. And that's one of his drawbacks. Well, being that I had the upstairs and he had the downstairs it was difficult for me to monitor who was coming in and out. Did I hear things? Yes, I heard things.
This episode was written, produced, and recorded by myself, Chris Moss, Jonathan Beal, and Shannon McGarvey. Editing and musical composition by Blake Maples. Executive producers are Jonathan Nowzarden, Jonathan Beal, and me, Chris Moss. Brought to you by Mopac Audio.