Shannan Gilbert disappeared in 2010, and the last record of her is a chilling 911 call she made the night she disappeared
Jersey City Police Department
Shannan Gilbert
Shannan Gilbert disappeared on May 1, 2010, after visiting a client she met on Craigslist in the gated community of Oak Beach on Long Island, NY.
The night she disappeared, she terrifyingly called 911.
“Someone is after me,” she told an operator before fleeing the client’s home around 5 a.m. “Someone is after me, please.”
Gilbert, 23, ran to an elderly neighbor’s house, knocked on the door and asked for help before tumbling down the stairs and fleeing the scene. The elderly neighbor called 911, as did another neighbor, who told police she was afraid to let Gilbert into her home.
But when police finally sent officers, Gilbert was nowhere to be found.
Her disappearance sparked a search, which led to the discovery of four bodies – Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello, Megan Waterman and Maureen Brainard-Barnes – in December 2010. All four women, like Gilbert, worked as online escorts and were went missing between 2007 and 2007. 2010. (Additional searches revealed the skeletal remains of an additional seven people, including a toddler.)
Suffolk County Police Department; Barthélemy family; Suffolk County Police (2)
Maureen Brainard-Barnes; Melissa Barthelemy; Megan Waterman; Amber Lynn Costello
The search for Gilgo Beach’s suspected serial killer remained unsolved for more than a decade until July 2023, when authorities allegedly linked 60-year-old architect and father of two Rex Heuermann through DNA evidence and phone calls to the murders of Barthelemy, Costello, Waterman and Brainard-Barnes. He has since been charged in connection with their deaths.
On June 6 of this year, Heuermann was charged with two additional murders in connection with the 1993 deaths of Sandra Costilla and 2003 Jessica Taylor.
“Shannan will be remembered as the girl whose death exposed the truth and the murderer,” Gilbert family attorney John Ray tells PEOPLE. “What Shannan’s case did was it forced authorities to finally investigate the evidence that existed for the other girls. Shannan kept up the pressure all those years, even though she was dead.”
Related: Police say Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann allegedly kept track of his victims’ families
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Mari Gilbert
What happened to Shannan Gilbert
A year after the remains of Barthelemy, Costello, Waterman and Brainard-Barnes were found, Gilbert’s skeletal remains were discovered hidden deep in the overgrown Gilgo Beach undergrowth on December 13, 2011, near the Oak Beach gated community where she was last seen .
Gilbert’s mother Mari became an outspoken critic of the police’s handling of her daughter’s case, insisting Shannan’s death was a murder. (Tragically, Mari was fatally stabbed more than 100 times by her other daughter, Sarra, in July 2016.)
As part of her plea, Mari hired famed forensic pathologist Michael Baden to perform an autopsy on Shannan’s remains.
Related: Rex Heuermann’s estranged wife says suspected serial killer ‘incapable’ of murder: Lawyer
Baden concluded that Gilbert’s death was consistent with homicidal strangulation, and believed that damage to a small bone in Gilbert’s throat may have indicated that it had been broken when she was killed.
The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office
Rex Heuermann
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Mari also fought for access to the 21-minute tape of Gilbert’s 911 call before her death. In 2022, police released the chilling tape in which Gilbert said, “Somebody’s after me.”
Yet the details of how she disappeared remain unclear. Police have long suspected that Gilbert somehow became lost in the inhospitable swampland and died accidentally – either from exposure or accidental drowning.
Related: Where Is Rex Heuermann Now? All About Long Island’s Suspected Serial Killer Accused of Murdering At Least Four Women (Exclusive)
At a 2022 news conference, then-Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said the FBI’s behavioral science unit had evaluated both Gilbert’s case and the 911 call.
“Based on the evidence, the facts and the totality of the circumstances, the prevailing view of Shannan’s death, while tragic, was not a homicide and most likely not criminal,” said Harrison, who resigned at the end of December 2023.
Today, the Suffolk County Police Department still maintains that Gilbert’s death was “an unfortunate accident,” but “police will continue to evaluate any information the public may have to assist in determining a definitive cause of death in [Gilbert’s] case,” according to the department’s website gilgonews.com, which has since been removed.
Ray says he still believes Gilbert was murdered and will continue to search for answers about what happened to her. “It’s not over yet,” he says. “We are going to put pressure on the police and the public prosecutor as much as possible.”
Anyone with information about Shannan Gilbert is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.
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