Bill Kupersmith's Reviews > Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

True crime books are a lot different from detective fiction. Even the most hackneyed & clichéd mystery novel ultimately upholds our belief in a world where evil, however unacceptable, can be dealt with, explained, & set right. But with real crimes we’re appalled by the unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victims & disgusted with the murderer even when found & punished. And when he remains undetected there seems a mysterious hole in our world. That’s so with the murderer known only as the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer, who may have committed as many as 10 murders. Lost Girls focusses on five victims, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, & Amber Costello, whose bodies wrapped in burlap were found, apparently carefully planted, alongside the ocean parkway on the Long Island shore. There was a fifth girl, Shannan Gilbert, whose body was found in the wild not far away, but it’s unclear that she was a victim of the same killer, or even was murdered. All were prostitutes who found their clients on Craig’s List, but so far as we know had nothing else in common except their fates.

The first part gives us the backstories of the victims, telling how they came from Norwich, Connecticut, Buffalo, New York, Ellenville, New York, Portland, Maine, & Wilmington, North Carolina, to take up the life they did & to find death between July 2007 & September 2010. In crime novels the victims’ histories prepare us for what will happen to them. Here the absence of resolution makes Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, frustrating but almost an obsession. We learn nothing from the victims’ stories that tells us anything about the murderer except that he probably lives on Long Island, patronizes prostitutes, & may be attracted by petite women - three of the girls were under 5”. Serial killers seem often to have a particular physical type that triggers their urge to murder.

In the latter part of the book Kolker describes the discovery of their remains, the finding of remains of other possible victims of the same killer, as well as those aspects of the investigation that the authorities are willing to disclose, & the efforts of the victims’ families & friends to keep their memories alive & to find the killer. It seem an anticlimax but that’s not the author’s fault. The murders may never be solved & often serial killers who specialize in easy targets such as prostitutes are caught only when a potential victim escapes & identifies the criminal. The kinds of forensic miracles we expect weekly on CSI are all too rare in real investigations, tho’ it’s hard to believe the authorities don’t know from post-mortem examination more about the circumstances of the girls’ deaths than they seem to be telling.

Kolker tells their story very well but I wish there were pictures of the victims. Fortunately there is a memorial on Facebook for them & some other internet sites with pictures. I find the photos of Maureen & Amber particularly haunting. So far as I could tell from the book, Amber is the only one of the victims who seems to have had any sort of spiritual life, & had been an active church member @ times. Maureen may have had some psychic gifts & premonitions in dreams.

We come away from Lost Girls feeling that however messy & disordered their lives may have been, these girls deserved our love & respect, & that we should join their families & friends in mourning & remembering them.