Will website detectives help crack the Long Island Serial Killer case?
As my time in Zero’s orbit nears its end, he says he’s dealing with another troll. A person claims to have seen a body dumped off Ocean Parkway in June 2010.
“It was 2 A.M. and pitch-dark,” the supposed witness states. He claims he met with then-police chief James Burke on Ocean Parkway to show him the location, but Burke didn’t take him seriously because he dresses like a metalhead. He’d like to talk to the FBI, he says, but worries about his personal safety.
“It’s my fault for engaging these people,” Zero tells me.
I ask him if he ever thinks he’s just talking to the same person the whole time.
“My wife told me that at the very beginning,” Zero responds. “That’s probably why I hit it so hard at first, like I did with you, to see if these people are real.”
WHEN Tricia Griffith became a mother, she spent more time at home than she had in years. It was the late nineties. The JonBenét Ramsey case dominated the news — that still unsolved case of the 6-year-old beauty queen who’d been found murdered in her own basement on Christmas Day, 1996. Griffith turned to the internet, craving more than just TV and newspaper coverage.
She joined Websleuths in 1997. Back then, it was a small site created specifically to discuss the JonBenét mystery. Six years later, the founder of Websleuths called Griffith and said he was sick of running the site. “You can have it,” he told her.
The site could be a snake pit at times, with antisocial commenters posting things like, “I’m gonna kill you.” Other people, though, continued to have meaningful case discussions. Griffith banned a majority of those who did nothing but threaten one another. After the ban, naturally, she got plenty of death threats.
“The only reason we’re heavily moderated is we want people to stay on topic and not be jerks,” she tells me. I ask what her site’s main purpose is when it comes to the LISK case.
“It’s everything,” Griffith replies. “If we can help identify the bodies, that would be wonderful. Those victims didn’t want to end up in some swamp. They deserve to be treated like real victims. Some people these days just go, ‘Oh well, it’s a hooker.’”
Websleuths uses NamUs.gov — the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System — a site run by the National Institute of Justice where citizens can view evidence to try and help authorities locate missing people and identify bodies. When it comes to the Gilgo Beach victims, identification could produce a major break in the case. It could help authorities begin to trace back the last moments of that person’s life and possibly lead to the killer.
I ask Griffith if she suspects Dr. Hackett, like others online.
“That’s a tough one,” she says. “Because he’s a real person who is probably reading these things online. But damn, if there aren’t a lot of big questions. Here is the dilemma — some people think he’s the killer, some don’t. Either way, his whole life has been turned upside down. If he’s not involved, that’s a horrible tragedy. But if he is involved, it was people on the internet who figured it out.”
Websleuths helped solve a murder case in 2009. Abraham Shakespeare, a Florida man, won $32 million in the lottery. Then he disappeared. Up popped a woman, Dee Dee Moore, who claimed to have power of attorney over his affairs. She told Shakespeare’s friends that he “just needed to get away.” Moore moved into his new house and took all his money. Automatically, she became a suspect.
“So we started discussing her on Websleuths,” Griffith tells me. And they discovered that before Shakespeare’s disappearance, Dee Dee Moore filed for bankruptcy. Then Moore herself showed up on the website and started defending herself.
“The more she talked, she just dug herself a huge hole,” Griffith says. “The police contacted me and said, ‘Just let her talk — please don’t edit anything she says.’ So we let her run wild. Then she tried to deny that it was her [commenting on our site].”
Not long after, the body of Abraham Shakespeare was found underneath Dee Dee Moore’s boyfriend’s garage. Eventually, she was convicted of murder. “That was the one time we did have a killer on the forum posting,” Griffith says.
A Websleuths member who goes by LindsayLohan6 keeps a list of unidentified bodies found throughout Long Island. Many of them have been mutilated, dismembered, stuffed in suitcases, found in bins, or discarded along roadsides. These bodies have never been officially connected to LISK, but LindsayLohan6 thinks they’re all victims of the same killer.
“I think the killer’s graveyard extends from Queens to the Hamptons,” she tells me. “Bodies and bones have been turning up along the barrier islands over the last 20 years. I think he’s got way more victims than the police want you to believe. Ridgway numbers probably.” The reference is to Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, convicted of 49 murders, many of them sex workers, killed in the eighties and nineties.
Grisly murders, prolific killers — Long Island has history in this regard. There was Joel Rifkin, who killed and dismembered as many as 17 prostitutes between 1989 and 1993. In 2014, Leah Cuevas killed and dismembered another woman, scattering her limbs and head in different Long Island towns. That same year, carpenter John Bittrolff, from Manorville, was arrested for the murders of two prostitutes in the early nineties and is suspected of killing a third. Following his 2017 convictions, Bittrolff became a suspect in the LISK case, but evidence so far hasn’t linked him to Gilgo Beach.
“What’s the deal with Long Island?” I ask LindsayLohan6.
“It’s cursed,” she replies. And she references a seventeenth-century massacre of Native Americans in Massapequa. According to legend, Captain John Underhill led an attack that killed more than a hundred tribal people. “It left a bad blood in the land,” she says.
When I ask what gets her attention when it comes to the LISK case, she mentions a website devoted to johns reviewing sex workers. The Carney Construction Crew hang out there, and they have her suspicious. Let’s call the site “Paradise.”
I briefly wonder if I’m corresponding with Money — the user who told Zero she can connect actor Michael Fassbender to Gilgo Beach. I fear she’s created a different screen name and is toying with me. I ask LindsayLohan6 if she knows Money.
“Of course I know Money,” she replies, before disparaging her and calling everyone who entertains her theories “sock puppets,” more concerned about causing drama than solving the case.
I follow LindsayLohan6 down a Paradise rabbit hole. She sends me a link to an old thread where CCC is kicking out one of their members, magicfingersny. Commenters trash him, and by thread’s end he’s banned from CCC and their online circle. They also make clear he’s no longer welcome to join them at Shady Al’s Exotic, a now-shuttered Smithtown biker bar/strip joint where this group of men allegedly hung out.
I see familiar screen names in the thread — Teps and Lightweight, two people who supposedly told Zero to back off. I also take note of a member who goes by the name Wolf, since Zero tells me that Money claims Wolf is her ex-husband.
Discussions on Paradise cover how to buy a burner phone, how to lie to police if you’re pulled over with an escort, and baseball. But the main activity is rating sex workers on a 1-to-10 looks/attitude/service scale. If a woman is 3/8/10, that means she is “unattractive, but friendly with good sex.” A 10/5/4 means “model material with a poor attitude and mediocre sex.”
Site users call themselves “mongers,” short for “whoremongers.” They aren’t johns, they contend, they’re hobbyists — purchasing sex is their hobby. Their reviews detail whether encounters involve a mattress on the floor or a five-star hotel room. They appraise the taste and smell of women; whether the sex workers have all their teeth or exhibit track marks; how much English they know; if the photos in their ads match the real product; and if they offer DFK or PSE or GFE or HME (the abbreviations stand for deep French kissing, porn-star experience, girlfriend experience, and honeymoon experience).
Eventually I come across a thread that acts as a kind of eulogy for magicfingersny — he died while in exile from the CCC group. The members share stories about showing up to orgies with him and watching the guy, seventysomething, get naked.
I search the mongers’ comments to see if anyone has referenced the LISK case. It doesn’t seem unlikely that a group of men from Long Island who review escorts might talk about dead sex workers turning up in their area.
I find a thread titled “4 Bodies Found In LI,” created after the first victims were discovered. It discusses whether any mongers would come forward if they recognized a victim. Some commenters say they recognize one of the women. Some say they’d come forward. Others insist they would never do so, since their name could go public. The thread shifts to a discussion about how the killer could get away with it and whether he’s a monger himself:
muffdvr: This guy is a cold calculating serial killer. I doubt he socializes here. He is probably a loner/loser just like Rifkin.
genius: LI is really a small place and has a very good highway system. At 2 am there isn’t any traffic. A 30-minute car ride, even if doing the speed limit, can put the point where they were killed anywhere from Queens to well into Suffolk County.Ocean Pkwy is very straight and you can see cars coming from very far away — be easy to dump a body w/o being seen…. IMHO — the girls were killed elsewhere…. It is easy to drive 20 miles in a half hour doing the speed limit late at night to that spot. That puts the murder scene just about anywhere — even Queens.
I click on genius’s profile. He’d been a Paradise member since August 2002. Active daily. The comment about the killer driving to his dumping ground came from 2011.
Genius unnerves me. Thinking about what Zero once told me (“Comments are the most important thing”), I dig around for every comment genius has made on the site. I find a negative review. It’s about a woman he picked up at a gas station. It was 5 P.M. on a weekday. She gets in his car, pulls her tube top down, and tells him to drive to the local cemetery for privacy. When they get there, they argue over the price of a blowjob. She wants $80. He offers $25.
Genius: She starts punching on the side of my head with one hand and tries to grab my car key from the ignition…. So I deliver a punch to the side of her head and as she is kicking my door and screaming, I put her in a chokehold and squeeze. I tell her to calm down or I’m going to kill her. She can’t answer as I have her windpipe cut off, but she calms down and I let go.
The moderator replies: This story should be required reading for any of us who frequent the SW [street walker] strolls as you always gotta be careful with these whackjob crackwhores.
Another user says: With that chokehold you had on her she almost passed out and died…. Now that would have been a great story — how you got rid of the body and had to explain to cops, friends, and family.
Genius: I could have easily killed her if I wanted. w/o her being able to do much about it and she knew it — knife or no knife, rush hour or not — just break her neck — she was about 90 lbs. and I am 180. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a while and I work out in the gym and eat right.
Genius’s daily routine, according to the site, starts when he leaves home by 3 A.M., wife in bed, to find a streetwalker before work. He also buys sex on the way home or stops at the massage parlors he can trust. He enjoys sitting in parking lots with escorts, especially with traffic all around him. He hides a burner phone he uses to call escorts in the trunk of his car, and replaces it often.
Unable to stop myself, I message LindsayLohan6: I think I found the Long Island Serial Killer.
I send her links to genius’s posts. Part of me knows I’m acting crazy, but I keep going. By now, my living room walls are completely covered in printouts and notes I’ve assembled in an attempt to connect every clue gathered. It’s gruesome wallpaper. My very own Fright Dome. I taped it all up late one night in a kind of manic episode. I decided it was the only way to process everything.
LindsayLohan6 messages back: He could def be the killer. It’s gotta be him or someone who posts as much as him in my opinion. It’s someone who visits prozzies as much as he does.
My attempts to reach the owner and moderators of “Paradise” go unanswered or are deleted.
Why would a killer post on a public forum about something that could lead to his capture? Probably because he’s not the killer. Just a bad human proud of his cruelty. That said, I could believe a cocky killer who has gotten away with murder for two decades might get off on the thrill of alluding to his crimes on a public site.
Tricia Griffith from Websleuths says the idea of the Paradise site sickens her. We talk on the phone while we look at it together.
“Isn’t it weird that we have access to this?” she says. “That we might be reading the actual killer’s words? It’s creepy.”
I’m not sure if she is really buying into my theory, or if she’s just good at humoring people who think they’ve found some case-breaking clue on the internet — people she has experience with.
She tells me a law requires you to list if you own a domain name.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the site’s server is overseas. Like in Gibraltar.” She looks into it. “It’s like I thought,” she says. “It’s registered with a company to protect the owner’s privacy.”
She sends me the “company” name: IB4 Media. When I type their address into Google Earth, the satellite image just hovers over New Jersey, pinpointing no specific location.
I reach out to Gray Hughes to see if he can make anything of the address. He manages to learn that it’s just a firehouse in Freehold, New Jersey.
In the morning, I call IB4 from a payphone. The phone number’s fake. Why am I even doing this? What am I expecting to find? I actually catch myself looking over my shoulder.
I fear all my time spent rooting around the gutters of the internet has got me sliding into madness. I wonder if the Paradise moderators have pinned my IP address. I’ve taken screenshots of the violence mentioned in site reviews. Have authorities checked this website? Was Money right all along? I reach out to Zero and tell him I’ve been talking to LindsayLohan6. He points out something I didn’t notice. LindsayLohan6, LL6, is one letter and one number below MM7 — MysteryMom7. He’s not sure who LL6 is, if it is even a she, or what that all means, but he agrees she’s done some major research. He’s seen her work before. Her name could just be a way of mocking MysteryMom7, he speculates.
I start getting emails from people I’ve encountered in the comment sections of serial killer websites. I get one from Michael Winger, a Norwegian psychic. In 2011, he was the winner of Norway’s Psychic Challenge TV show.
“I believe this is more than just one man,” Winger says. “I believe it is a group of men that know each other. I don’t think the killers have stopped. I believe one is a doctor. Another is a lawyer. I think they play with the victims before they kill them. They are friends with police. The police have no idea their friends are killers….”
I promised myself I wouldn’t become a case obsessive. Nor would I bug the authorities like some kind of crackpot. Yet here I am, after my time on the Paradise website, picking up the phone and dialing the FBI. An operator puts me through to the number of an agent handling the Long Island Serial Killer case. It goes to voicemail.
I leave an out-of-breath message on his phone. “I’ve found this website. I’d like to talk to you about it….”
An FBI operator calls me back. She sounds like she’s used to hearing from people like me. I leave a voicemail for another agent, and imagine my message getting stored on a Zip drive next to voicemails from Zero and Money and LindseyLohan6 and MysteryMom7, and who knows how many others.
Not long after my attempted outreach to the FBI, I ask a former NYPD detective-squad commander if he thinks the internet has made life more dangerous. His first internet-related cases began in 1995. Over the years, he’s followed digital footprints to solve missing person cases, suicides, and hacker intrusions.
“It’s a different kind of dangerous,” he replies. After pointing out that the internet has the power to save lives and disseminate information, he says it also allows people to become targets — of stalkers, identity thieves, and, yes, killers.
I ask his view of civilians on the internet trying to crack a case like that of the Long Island Serial Killer. He responds, “We don’t always have the manpower. I only have so many detectives. Serial killer cases go to the top of the list. But that doesn’t mean I have a taskforce of 60 detectives whose sole purpose in life is to eat, shit, breathe this case.”
Why not tap the LISK online community for help then? I ask. Especially when it comes to identifying victims. It seems impossible for a person today to not leave behind a digital trace. And here, some of the unknown victims may even have advertised online.
“Here’s the problem with prostitutes,” the ex-detective tells me. “Most of them are runaways. You have these guys who pick you up on the street and take you home. There’s nobody that’s going to declare you missing.”
But according to Robert Kolker’s 2013 book, Lost Girls, most of the known LISK victims were not runaways. They spoke with their families often. Some of their families even knew they were escorts.
Escorts, until recently, could advertise on Backpage.com, paying with Bitcoin. (The U.S. government shut the site down
in April 2018.) While researching this article, I answer an ad that says, “Elite Vixen seeks Arts Benefactor.” In her video, she wears a white furry hat, and dances behind a glass door. I tell her my purpose and ask what name she uses. She writes back, “I am known as Agent Provocateur: Confidante of Politicians and Billionaires.”
“I am a very security-conscious business woman,” she replies when I ask if she’s ever afraid of what’s on the other side of the computer screen. “I only reply to emails where there is proper spelling, courtesy, and grammar.” She tells me she prefers conservative white men over the age of 45. Then she adds, “Ted Bundy was that, too, though.”
She’s been an escort for 20 years and has seen the way the industry has shifted from the street to the internet. Basically, she says, Craigslist killed the pimp.
When I ask what she thinks can be done to prevent the sex-worker population from being preyed upon by serial killers, she says, “I feel bad for the [escorts] of the USA who are also persecuted by the police, hence are afraid to call the police. Only a very desperate woman would go meet strange men for sex or money without precaution. There is a lot of prostitution since the market crash…. We need full legalization and taxation of sex and marijuana just like my home country of Germany.”
Agent Provocateur points out that government registration of escorts for tax purposes would mean if they went missing, they’d be easier to report.
Early in her career, she worked at an exclusive Atlanta brothel. Six girls in a town house. Some of her clients were Coca-Cola execs and Atlanta Braves ballplayers. One day, a coworker went missing. The prime suspect was the brothel owner. As far as Agent Provocateur knows, the young woman was never found.
In the case of Shannan Gilbert, she was eventually discovered, of course. Tragically, her mother Mari died before knowing the exact circumstances surrounding her daughter’s death.
In July 2016, Mari Gilbert was murdered. Shortly after I took down my gruesome wallpaper, a friend who worked at a hospital emergency room told me he saw one of Mari’s other daughters, Sarra, brought into the ER covered in blood and strapped into a straitjacket. Sarra had stabbed her mother 227 times and bludgeoned her corpse with a fire extinguisher. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she is serving a sentence of 25 years to life.
Just five months earlier, in February 2016, a second autopsy of Shannan was performed by former medical examiner Michael Baden. Baden was New York City’s chief medical examiner in the late seventies, and a prominent forensic expert on TV.
Baden’s report found evidence suggesting Shannan had been strangled to death. He agreed to perform the autopsy only after Mari and her attorney made enough noise about the police mishandling the case. This mishandling was a belief rooted deep on the internet — the desktop detectives had been heard, and their posting led to some important action.
Law enforcement has now been working the Long Island Serial Killer case for nearly a decade, with no resolution in sight. After my months in the world of online gumshoes, I don’t find it inconceivable that justice might be profitably outsourced — advanced, accelerated — by individuals like Zero and LindsayLohan6, and by Websleuths, people determined to bring a killer out of the shadows.
As for Agent Provocateur, she laments the way too many female victims of serial killers go unreported, but finds comfort in her belief in multiple lives. With great confidence, she tells me, “The killer will be reincarnated as the victims.”
Shane Cashman has written for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, BBC Travel, Catapult, and other publications. He teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and Manhattanville College.
