Just as there is no single form of poverty, neither is there a distinct set of family patterns or life circumstances that lead to the choices these women make. There is no formula to explain what brought them to Gilgo Beach. Human trafficking is a cause for one of them, addiction for another.
But if they share something, it’s that they don’t fall off the grid or live on the streets in the manner dictated by TV procedural stereotypes. They all remain close to their families. They all come from cities with narrow options and are looking for a way out. That’s one way of looking at “Missing Women,” the title of my book about this case, later adapted into a movie: They just “disappeared” until we – the police, the media, the social safety net – chosen to lose. them, by deciding that they deserve to be rejected.
Serial killers understand this, of course. Jack the Ripper targeted the women he did for the same reason the Green River Killer and Joel Rifkin say they did: These were women they believed no one would look for. And more often than not, unfortunately, they are right.
Now, 16 years after Ms. disappeared. Brainard-Barnes, we have an arrest, a suspect: Rex Heuermann, it seems, lives in plain sight, in a town on Long Island a short drive from where it was found the bodies. He has a spouse and children, and a relatively high-profile job. In a place as densely populated as New York, being accused of a double life seems hard to imagine.
To his advantage, no one seems to be looking for him, either. In cases involving escort work, male customers often seem like footnotes, at least to the public. The police locked Mr. Heuermann last year, more than a decade after four bodies were found on Gilgo Beach.
For Ms. For Cann and other family members, it was an eternity of wondering and waiting, and feeling every bit as rejected as the loved ones they lost.
Robert Kolker is the author of “Missing Women: An Unsolved American Mystery,” the best-selling nonfiction account of the Gilgo Beach murders.