How was Shannon’s disappearance handled?

Shannon was reported missing on 1 May 2010, she had been working as an escort that evening and gone to a client’s house in Oak Beach, Long Island. Her last call was to 911 at 4.50am where she can be heard saying someone was ‘after her’ and that ‘they’ were trying to kill her. She was last seen around that time banging on a resident’s door and screaming for help.

Dismissed as a runaway, Shannon’s mother fought for police to pay attention to the case to little avail, they didn’t begin looking for her till six months after her disappearance. Joseph Brewer, the client she visited that night through Craigslist, said she began behaving erratically shortly after arriving and fled. With no evidence of wrong-doing he was quickly cleared as a suspect. Shannon had been missing for seven months when the other victims began to be discovered.

Why is the police conclusion as to what happened to her questionable?

Shannon’s remains were found 19 months after she was reported missing, in a marsh just half a mile from where she disappeared; some of her clothes and possessions had been found a week earlier in the same vicinity. Suffolk County examiners ruled that she accidentally drowned in the marsh and police believe that her fleeing and 911 call were due to a drug-induced panic.

After a law suit from the family in 2012 and further controversy, famed forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden conducted an independent autopsy of Gilbert’s remains in 2014. Baden found damage to her hyoid bone, suggesting strangulation, toxicology reports found no drugs in her system, and her body was found face-up, which is not common for drowning victims. “It’s extremely rare for a young woman to die of drowning yards away from where four young women have clearly been murdered,” Baden noted. “The statistics don’t go along with that.” Her death is still listed by police as an accident.

Why is there suspicion of police cover-up?

The FBI only officially became part of the investigation in December 2015. This was a day after former Police Commissioner James Burke, who had resigned two months prior, had been indicted for alleged police brutality and other issues.

The FBI said that in 2012 Burke brutally beat a man who had swiped a bag from his car containing pornography and sex toys. Burke then conspired to cover up the incident. He pled guilty in February 2016 to charges of a civil rights violation and conspiracy to obstruct justice. He was said to have obstructed FBI involvement in the LISK case for years. In 2016 another escort came forward and she said she partied with Burke at an Oak Beach home in 2011 and engaged in cocaine consumption and “rough sex”.

Two days after Shannon’s disapearance, Dr Peter Hackett, former director of emergency services, and a neighbour of Brewer, called Mari Gilbert and according to her, said he was taking care of Shannon Gilbert, and that he “ran a home for wayward girls.” Then he called again days later to deny any contact or the previous call. Investigators confirmed through phone records that Hackett called Mari twice. Hackett has since admitted the calls but insists he called as a concerned resident. Police ruled out Hackett as a suspect in the deaths of Gilbert and the LISK victims.

There are more questionable lines of investigation and inconsistencies and the general poor policing standard has lead people to question whether it was intentional obscuring of the truth.

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