Lost Girls
On May 1, 2010, at 4:51am - 911 operators received a distressed phone call from 24-yearold Shannan Gilbert, an escort from Jersey City, New Jersey who was visiting a john in the remote, upscale Long Island gated community of Oak Beach.
‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she screamed amidst panic, confusion and voices in the background trying to calm her down. Emergency dispatchers struggled to determine Shannan’s exact location over the 23-minute-long phone call that suddenly cut out. Shannan took off running down the road, shrieking for help. Two different neighbours called in to report a civil disturbance but operators had not yet drawn a connection to Shannan’s panicked 911 phone call. By the time police arrived on the scene at 6:10am, Shannan Gilbert had vanished into the night and was never seen again.
It was her disappearance that would inevitably crack open a much larger, serial murder mystery. One that, ten years later, still has more questions than answers; with as many as
16 victims, no arrests, no suspects and no persons of interest, the Long
Island Serial Killer is still at large to this very day.
Lost Girls, directed by Liz Garbus, is a new
Netflix feature adapted from Robert Kolker’s 2013 investigative book with the same title. The film focuses on Shannan’s mother, Mari Gilbert as a tireless champion for her missing daughter against resistance from the Suffolk County Police Department who was all too ready to dismiss cases involving sex workers.
Tragically, four years after Shannan’s remains were finally uncovered in 2012 - Mari Gilbert was brutally murdered by her other daughter, Sarra Gilbert during a psychotic breakdown. She was stabbed 227 times, nearly decapitated and beat with a fire extinguisher before having it sprayed into her mouth in an attempt to drown her.
Lost Girls is a movie about a mother’s journey to find justice for her daughter while fighting against systematic victimblaming of the women who were killed while working as escorts. ‘As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate,’ wrote Kolker in New York Magazine.
Mari Gilbert - who lost a child to Long Island serial killer and inspired Netflix biopic Lost Girls was beaten to death by her other daughter during a psychotic breakdown