‘Gone Girls’: Three Things We Learned From Netflix’s New Long Island Serial Killer Doc

When 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert called 911 on May 1, 2010, she was absolutely frantic. An escort, Gilbert was on Oak Beach, Long Island for a date with a first-time client named Joseph Brewer when she became distressed, eventually screaming in the call to authorities, “they’re trying to kill me.” When she was last seen, she had run from Brewer and her driver Michael Pak, before knocking on several neighbors’ doors for help and running off into the dark. 

Gilbert was a sex worker. She was a diagnosed bipolar who was reportedly not taking her medication. And it felt like the police weren’t taking it seriously. It took eight months from Gilbert’s disappearance for police to look for Gilbert’s body along the stretch of Long Island’s Ocean Parkway where she was last seen. But when police began searching on Dec. 11, 2010, what they discovered wasn’t Gilbert’s remains — it was the skeletons of four women individually bound wrapped in burlap. They were later identified as Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello, four sex workers who all advertised online. The search to find Gilbert, and the discovery of the four women who would later be known as the “Gilgo Four,” sparked a years-long investigation into a mystery figure that haunted the community for a decade: the Long Island Serial Killer.

In Netflix’s latest crime docuseries, Gone Girl: The Long Island Serial Killer, filmmaker Liz Garbus charts the winding story of the Long Island Serial Killer — LISK, as he became known — beginning with Gilbert’s disappearance, the “Gilgo Four” and the discovery of several more bodies, but also exploring the police corruption that stalled the case, and the eventual updates that linked a small amount of evidence to the eventual suspect, 61-year-old Massapequa resident Rex Heuermann. (Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to the murders of seven women. A trial date has not yet been set.) Garbus also directed the 2020 film Lost Girls, a dramatized movie about the murders focusing on Gilbert’s mother — Mari Gilbert, who died in 2016 —and the families of other dead sex workers who banded together to get attention and justice for their daughters’ deaths. 

In an interview with Decider, Liz Garbus said she got back in touch with the families of the women when Heuermann was arrested. “I thought, I have to do a documentary,” she said. “There was so much more to the story.” 

Here are three things we learned from the new Netflix docuseries about the police department that failed the find the serial killer for years, the families that fought back, and the regime change that finally brought about a suspect.

Police delayed the search for Shannan Gilbert

When Mari Gilbert first asked for help finding her daughter, Suffolk County Police were not responsive to her pleas, according to Gilbert family attorney John Ray. Ray says in the docuseries that it took several months for police to even begin searching for Gilbert because of her profession, a stigma that followed the investigation as more bodies — all of them sex workers — were recovered on the highway alongside Gilgo Beach. 

“She went to the police to report her daughter missing,” Ray says in Episode One. “The police laughed at her and said, ‘Oh, you know, she’s a prostitute. She’ll turn up.’” Many experts in the case attribute the eventual discovery of Heuermann to Gilbert’s continued pressure on both the media and police department — even after police found Gilbert’s body and ruled her death accidental. Police allege that Huermann targeted escorts and sex workers because he thought they weren’t likely to go to authorities for help. 

Though Heuermann has not been charged with Gilbert’s murder, her role in the case is significant nonetheless. “Mari saw Shannan as an unintended hero because it was Shannan’s disappearance that ironically caused all the others to have been found and, now, to have at least one arrest,” Ray told CNN in 2024. “Who knows what other lives have been saved because of the exposure of all this?

Police Corruption Stalled The Investigation 

Gus Garcia-Roberts, an investigative reporter for Newsday, reported at the time that Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and Police Chief James Burke began working together when Spota was a prosecutor and Burke was 16 years old. Spota was the working prosecutor on the case of Johnny Pius, a young boy who was found beaten and asphyxiated in his Smithtown, Long Island schoolyard in April 1979. Police got a confession from 15-year-old Peter Quartararo, who implicated himself and his brother Michael. But it was Burke’s statement — where he claimed he’d overheard the brothers discussing the crime with their friends — that got the Quartararo brothers convicted for Pius’ murder. (Peter later recanted the confession.) Burke then became a cop after graduating from high school, working under Spota for many years. Through an attorney, Burke denied any allegations about false testimony in the John Pius case, according to a statement shown at the end of Episode Two.  

As the Chief of Police, Burke was the lead officer in charge of the Gilgo Murder investigation. But during his tenure, officers reported that Spota and Burke discouraged them from collaborating or working with outside agencies on the case — including the FBI. Community members on Long Island were confused by disagreements between the district attorney, FBI, and local police department about whether or not there was more than one killer, and attributed a lack of progress to police indifference about the case. 

Burke’s career was plagued by scandal, including a dozen internal complaints on his official file. But according to Garcia-Roberts’ investigation, it appears that Burke was working so hard to cover up his crimes that the Gilgo investigation was almost completely ignored. 

Burke’s internal investigations included allegations that he often hired sex workers, did drugs, and used his role to keep his actions secret, though he was not charged, and he denied the allegations. Several cops reported hearing Burke dismiss the Gilgo case, saying they were unimportant “misdemeanor murders.” (He specifically denied using that phrase.) In 2012, an addict named Christopher Leob broke into cars in Smithtown, Long Island, one of which was Burke’s vehicle. Leob said that when he was caught and brought into the station, Burke assaulted him, and hid the beating from the FBI. It took years for the FBI to finally get a member of the Suffolk County Police to speak. The Eastern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office found that Burke and Spota used their influence to pressure witnesses and other police officers into staying silent. In November 2021, Burke was sentenced to 46 years in jail for assault and obstruction of justice. Spota was also sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. 

“When a sitting District Attorney and one of his top prosecutors are corrupt and use their power to intimidate witnesses and cover up a brutal assault by a high-ranking law enforcement official, they not only jeopardize the safety of citizens who are entitled to the protection of the law, they also undermine confidence in the integrity and fairness of our criminal justice system,” Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn M. Kasulis said in 2021.

Once Burke and Spota were removed from their offices, it took new investigators assigned to the office and case only six weeks before they were able to identify Heuermann as a suspect. 

Witnesses gave police a detailed description of a suspect in 2011. Officers ignored it 

Amber Costello, one of the “Gilgo Four,” was the most recently deceased woman found in the investigation. According to family members, she went missing less than three months before police found the bodies by the highway.  

Bear Brodsky and Dave Schaller, two friends who lived with Costello, explain in the docuseries that a man came by their house before Costello went missing. Costello had called them for help because she said the man “wasn’t taking no for an answer,” and was asking for his money back because Costello wouldn’t sleep with him. “It’s almost like his eyes got this focus to them,” Schaller says in the documentary, describing how he and Brodsky forced the man to leave. As he did so, Schaller says the man kept his eyes on Costello the entire time: “Imagine a predator who is just tripped. Like off. But his focus was on her.”  Brodsky and Schaller kept pushing until the man left the house and got into his green Chevy Avalanche, but both say in the docuseries that his eyes were fixed on Costello, and he remarked “I’ll see you,” before he drove away.

When police came to Brodsky and Schaller after Costello’s death, they immediately identified the man as someone who would have wanted to hurt Costello and gave officers a physical description. Schaller called him “ogre-like” and specified his height, weight, eye color, hair color, and the color and model of his truck. “How many fucking six-foot-eight giants driving around in Massapequa driving a Chevy Avalanche?” Schaller says. “They had their answers for fucking years.”