On the night of May 1st, 2010, a 23-year-old woman named Shannon Gilbert ran through the marsh grass

of a gated community on the southern shore of Long Island, barefoot, screaming, and begging for help.

She had driven out to Oak Beach earlier that evening to meet a client. She was, in the language

law enforcement would soon insist upon, a client. She was, in the language law enforcement would soon insist

upon, an escort. She was also a daughter, a sister, a singer, and a woman who had been alive

for 23 years, but yet had roughly 20 minutes left. At some point during that final hour, Shannon

placed a 911 call.

It lasted 23 minutes.

The recording has never been released to the public.

We know what her mother was told, and we know what the police acknowledged at the time.

And that's that Shannon told a dispatcher, clearly, that someone was trying to kill her.

She ran from the house that she'd been visiting. She banged on a neighbor's door. That neighbor, an elderly man, opened it and then closed it

in her face. She ran into the brush and then she disappeared. What happened next is why I'm

doing this episode. Because in the seven months that followed, Suffolk County Police, conducting what by all accounts was a half-assed and intermittent search for Shannon Gilbert, sent a cadaver dog and a handler into the thick scrub along Ocean Parkway.

It was on a stretch of barrier island called Gilgo Beach.

That dog did not find Shannon, but the dog did find someone, and then someone else,

and then a few feet further on, someone else, and then someone else.

Four women, all small in stature, all wrapped in burlap, all dumped within a quarter mile of one another, just off the

shoulder of a public highway that runs parallel to the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 40 or so miles from

Times Square in New York City. The search for one missing woman had uncovered the hiding place

of a serial killer, and the man responsible would spend the next 13 years living just 15 miles away,

in a house on a quiet street in Massapequa Park, going to work every morning in an architecture

...