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
Shannan Gilberto
Shannan Gilberto disappeared on May 1, 2010, after visiting a client she met on Craigslist, in the gated community of Oak Beach, Long Island, NY
The night she disappeared, she made a frightening 911 call.
“There’s someone after me,” she told an operator before fleeing the client’s home at around 5am. “Someone’s after me – please.”
Gilbert, 23, ran to an elderly neighbor’s house, knocked on the door and called for help before falling down the stairs and running away. 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 dispatched officers, Gilbert was nowhere to be found.
His disappearance prompted 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 disappeared between 2007 and 2010. (Further research revealed skeletal remains of seven more people, including a child.)
Suffolk County Police Department; Bartholomew Family; Suffolk County Police Department (2)
Maureen Brainard-Barnes; Melissa Barthelemy; Megan Waterman; Amber Lynn Costello
The search for the suspect Gilgo Beach Serial Killer went unsolved for more than a decade, until July 2023, when authorities allegedly linked a 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 counts of murder in connection with the deaths of Sandra Costilla in 1993 and Jessica Taylor in 2003.
“Shannan will be remembered for the girl who in her death exposed the truth and the killer,” Gilbert family attorney John Ray tells PEOPLE. “What Shannan’s case did was force authorities to finally look for the evidence that existed for the other girls. Shannan kept the pressure on all these years, even though she was dead.
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Mari Gilberto
What happened to Shannan Gilbert
A year after the remains of Barthelemy, Costello, Waterman and Brainard-Barnes were found, Gilbert’s remains were discovered hidden deep in the Gilgo Beach bush on December 13, 2011, near the Oak Beach gated community, where she was last seen.
Gilbert’s mother, Mari, has become a vocal critic of law enforcement’s handling of her daughter’s case, insisting that Shannan’s death was a homicide. (Tragically, Mari was fatally stabbed more than 100 times by her other daughter, Sarra, in July 2016.)
As part of her defense, Mari enlisted famed forensic pathologist Michael Baden to perform an autopsy on Shannan’s remains.
Baden concluded that Gilbert’s death was consistent with homicidal strangulation, opining that damage to a small bone in Gilbert’s throat possibly indicated that it was fractured when she was murdered.
Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office
Rex Heuermann
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Mari, before her death, also fought for access to the 21-minute tape of Gilbert’s 911 call. In 2022, police released the chilling tape in which Gilbert said “someone is after me.”
Still, the details of how she disappeared remain unclear. Police have long suspected that Gilbert somehow got lost in the inhospitable swamp and died accidentally – either from exposure or from accidental drowning.
At a 2022 press conference, then-Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said the FBI’s behavioral science unit evaluated Gilbert’s case as well as the 911 call.
“Based on the evidence, the facts and the totality of the circumstances, the prevailing opinion in Shannan’s death, while tragic, was not murder and most likely was 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 “the department will continue to evaluate any information the public may have to help determine a definitive cause of death in [Gilbert’s] case,” according to the department’s website gilgonews.com, which has since been taken down.
Ray says he still believes Gilbert was murdered and will continue to search for answers about what happened to her. “It’s not over,” he says. “We will keep the pressure on the police and the district attorney as much as we can.”
Anyone with information about Shannan Gilbert is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.
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