And She Was Holding My Right

The last ten minutes of last night’s 48 Hours made me so angry I was still stomping my foot this morning. You can watch it here, but I’m warning you: you will come away howling. And though it’s a story about murdered women and dismembered body parts, you will know whose head has got to roll.

Pete says the cop is setting someone up. What I hear is a man blotting women out.

Added In the CBS interview, the cop says Shannan Gilbert got disoriented in the woods and drowned. Erin Moriarty gives him several opportunities to walk that back, but he doesn’t. Here we find this nonsense in another form:

Theories going around the past couple weeks were that she got disoriented trying to navigate the mud and thicket, and possibly fell, got stuck and drowned. This should come at some relief to her family who have been searching for the girl since she went missing in May, that it was a random accident and not a sinister and sexually motivated crime by some sicko. Still, getting trapped and dying in a swamp seems like something more apropos for the dessert, the mountains, or the Everglades and not a quiet little beach community on the South Shore.

Gilbert was last seen knocking on a stranger’s door and acting irrationally before she vanished, so clearly she was distressed and not thinking properly, or under the influence, which would not have been unusual in her profession – working as prostitute.

IQs plunge when people talk about prostitutes. No opinion is too stupid to articulate. Most of the victims were women and one was either a fetus or an infant. They were people. And the police are now saying there’s a serial killer on Long Island who dumped bodies in a small area and Shannan Gilbert, fleeing for her life, stumbled into that area, accidentally got separated from her clothing and belongings and drowned.

Yeah. That happened. Sure.

Second addition Ah! Transcript found. Here is where I shouted at the TV.

In most of these cases, police sat on missing persons reports – losing not only time, but valuable evidence. In Shannan Gilbert’s disappearance, security video at the Oak Beach gate that could have provided important clues was apparently recorded over. Shannan’s jacket, which Joe Brewer says sat in his driveway for days, may have been lost.

“This is a tough question Commissioner, but, if that had been a wife of a resident there who had made this panicked 911 call and then suddenly disappears, wouldn’t there have been much more of a search than there was for Shannan Gilbert?” Moriarty asked.

“No, I disagree with you – strongly,” [Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard] Dormer replies. “Number one, when the officer responded, he didn’t know that that was a sex worker. …he conducted a search in that area. … this was a normal – if there is such a thing – normal missing case of an adult. And the officer responded.”

“This wasn’t normal,” Moriarty says. “She was hysterical. She said, ‘they’re trying to kill me’ on the phone. This wasn’t a normal missing case.”

“I don’t want to, in any way, say that we didn’t do the right thing that morning,” Dormer responded. “The officer – we looked at his actions and he searched that area that morning, which was appropriate…”

And, says Dormer, they have devoted unprecedented manpower and resources to finding Shannan.

“We kept going back there over the months…and never gave up,” he said.

So far, I was only shouting about how a frightened woman is a frightened woman, no matter what job she does, but then there was this that sent me over the edge.

Asked if he believed Shannan Gilbert was murdered, Dormer told Moriarty,” There’s no evidence whatsoever to show that anyone was out to harm her that night…”

OMIGOD, WHAT?

“She clearly was in fear for her life,” noted Moriarty.

“Now, we’re awaiting results of the medical examiner’s examination of her remains. And so we have to have an open mind on that,” Dormer said. “But I would caution right now that we don’t believe that she was a victim of foul play…”

DID HE JUST BLAME THE DEAD WOMAN? HE DID!

Even though the autopsy is not yet complete, the police commissioner says he believes a disoriented Shannan ran into the tangled brush of the marsh – possibly trying to make it to the parkway – and accidentally drowned.

“But does it make sense, Commissioner, that her belongings would be found in one spot, including her clothes and her body a quarter mile away?” Moriarty asked.

“That’s explainable because she’s hysterical,” Dormer replied. “And she’s discarding her possessions as she moves along.”

I SWEAR TO GOD I SAW HIS MOUTH SAY THOSE WORDS.

“But her clothes?”

“Well, her jeans could have come off from running in that environment,” Dormer explaine[d], “and that is a possibility that the jeans came off and she kept running…”

THIS MOTHERFUCKER WILL DO ANYTHING IN HIS POWER TO AVOID SOLVING THIS MURDER, INCLUDING DETACH WHOLLY FROM REALITY.

Vernon Geberth isn’t buying it.

“Did she take her clothes off before she went for a dip,” Geberth asked. “I think that the fact that her purse, her cell phone, and her pants were found in this location and her body someplace else is highly consistent with someone dumping the body and getting rid of evidence.”

Yes. Yes, it is consistent with dumping a body, isn’t it? It’s the Long Island connection, but when Dormer talks, all I hear is the Mayor of Amity refusing to close the beaches as the corpses pile up.

3 responses to “And She Was Holding My Right

  1. Yes, women’s clothing explodes all the time. Haven’t you heard? We’ll be standing at the busstop and BLAMMO! our clothes land a quarter mile away. We don’t even think about it after the first dozen or so times our clothes go KABOOM! and we toddle off to work naked, though we do have to so, so careful not to trip in the marshes and drown ourselves. I mean, really. The first few times I did that I was sooooo embarrassed!

  2. Yeah, happens to men too, but we all wear magic undergarments.

    No, seriously, the cop sounds like he’s completely batshit crazy. It makes me wonder if he’s covering up for someone.

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