( Kevin P. Coughlin / AP Photo )
Now that there has been an arrest in some of the murders, Robert Kolker, journalist and the author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery (Harper, 2013) and Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Doubleday, 2020), and Crystal DeBoise, psychotherapist and co-founder and director of strategic partnerships for Decriminalize Sex Work, talk about the lives of the victims found on Gilgo Beach, the vulnerabilities specific to sex workers and what's changed for those workers in the years since the bodies were discovered.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. You've heard by now about the arrest of 59-year-old architect, Rex Heuermann, as the alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer. Most of the coverage so far has focused on him, which is fair enough. He was just arrested and just identified publicly, and there's the whole "you never know who the serial killer next door might be" angle. Talked about profiling, people are surprised that it was a white middle-aged, professional creative class person, married with kids in a conservative South Shore suburb, but then the creepy stories emerge about him as an individual, not a profile.
Women recently who had uncomfortable encounters with him, him seeming kind of off and volatile to people he worked with and to some of his neighbors, and even bringing up the Gilgo Beach murders in conversation with people. He is also said to own more than 200 guns. Based on the individual, not the profile, people are less surprised. He's pleaded not guilty and the legal process is underway. The other main angle has been the true crime plotline of piecing together the evidence that led to accusing him.
For the show today, we will leave those parts of the story there and focus instead on the victims and the families of the victims. 11 women in all are believed to be Gilgo Beach victims. Heuermann is charged with killing three of them and is said to be a suspect in a fourth. We'll talk mostly about those four and their families and the social context of how they wound up in harm's way.
My guests for this are Robert Kolker, a journalist who wrote a book on the subject back in 2013, called Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, and now has new articles in both the New York Times and New York Magazine, and Crystal DeBoise, psychotherapist, co-Executive Director of the Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights Institute, which advocates for people in the sex work industry. Bob Kolker, welcome. Crystal DeBoise, welcome back to WNYC.
Robert Kolker: Hello, good morning.
Crystal DeBoise: Thanks for having me back, Brian. Good morning.
Brian Lehrer: Bob, let's start with some of your reporting on some of the individuals, then we'll pull back to a bigger picture. The first one of the victims to go missing, your New York Magazine article recounts, was Maureen Brainard-Barnes on July 9th, 2007. You describe her as having been a straight-A student in high school in a working-class town in Connecticut, but got pregnant, got married, and dropped out. Can you tell us more about Maureen Brainard-Barnes as she came of age and who she was, besides a future Gilgo Beach victim?
Robert Kolker: Sure. Lost Girls is really almost like five different biographies of five different women. That means the four women who are implicated in this arrest, and plus Shannan Gilbert, who was an escort who disappeared several months before the discovery of these four sets of human remains.
Maureen grew up in Connecticut, had a brother and a sister she was very close to. She worked a variety of odd jobs and had a serious boyfriend and then also two children, and then she got caught in a bind that I found to be quite similar to the quandary that some of the other women I wrote about got into.
These are people who are bobbing up and down right at the poverty line but getting by, but they're in places like Northern Connecticut, Groton Connecticut, and Buffalo, New York, and other parts of the country, where options are narrowing, where their parents or their grandparents might have worked, had factory jobs, but now their jobs are at the Dunkin' Donuts.
Suddenly, along comes the internet, and the nature of sex work changes a great deal. I'm sure Crystal will have a lot more insight into what has changed, but essentially, for these women, it meant that it didn't have to be a full-time endeavor. It's something they could make an insane amount of money at compared to the other options, and it could solve a lot of problems in their life.
That's what happened with Maureen. Her problems were solved when she would take the occasional trip into New York and work the Craigslist page and have some escort appointments, and then go home and pay the rent and be a mom. This worked for a while until it didn't, until one day she disappeared.
I think it's important for listeners to know that she disappeared three and a half years before her remains were found. That was three and a half years where her family got next to no traction from law enforcement. They couldn't even get her name on the National Registry of missing persons. Everyone assumed that because she was over 21 and because she was an escort, that she just flew out of town and didn't want to be found. There's a fair amount of victim-blaming that goes on with law enforcement, not just law enforcement, but the media too, and society in general,. That victim-blaming winds up being a constant theme in the lives and the disappearances of all four of the women who are implicated in this case.
Brian Lehrer: In fact, in your New York Times article, the headline is The Gilgo Beach Victims Were Always More Than Escort, but then it says, "From the beginning, the women who were found murdered, were reduced to being prostitutes, more than a decade after they went missing, that seems to have changed." Changed how and why?
Robert Kolker: I'm noticing something very specific in the arrest that happened on Friday, and that's that at the press conference, not only were several family members of the victims there standing up there with the district attorney and with the police commissioner. That, you could argue, was stagecraft, but then some of the things that were said were simply stunning to me as someone who had covered past district attorneys and past police commissioners out in Suffolk County.
The DA, Ray Tierney, said that while the suspect may represent the worst of humanity, the victim's families represented the best of humanity. Then Commissioner Rodney Harrison, he went one better, and he turned and he gave every single person on stage a long meaningful hug, and then thanked them. This is a guy who is clearly trying to walk the walk when it comes to respect for families.
As someone who covered this case 10 years ago, and interviewed past police commissioners, it has not always been thus. In the past, they've had a very uncomfortable relationship with this case, with the idea of sex work with the victims, and with the victim's families. In many moments, it seemed as if the police just wanted the case to go away, and the media to go away. It was night and day as far as I was concerned.
I'm not saying that the problem is solved or that misogyny is over or that sex work is now completely safe. Obviously, it isn't, but I did see a difference on Friday, and it was interesting.
Brian Lehrer: Just one or two more details about Maureen, and then we'll bring Crystal into it. How old was she when she went missing?
Robert Kolker: Gosh, I would have to look. She's in her 20s. She was out in the world and had her own life. That's the interesting thing. The name Lost Girls is a playful name and to question the true crime trope that you have in a lot of these stories, but the fact is that these were women all in their early to mid-20s, all of whom were out in the world. They were not 15 or 16-year-olds. Trafficking may have played a role in one of their fates, but certainly not the others. You have portraits of people who are living in a part of society that most readers might not understand, and that was the purpose of the book.
A lot of people ask me, why would you write about a case with no killer? Why would you write a crime story with no ending? My answer was always, that's not the point. The point is, what made these women vulnerable? Why did they make the decisions they made? Then, why did we neglect them? Why weren't they safer?
Brian Lehrer: Crystal DeBoise, can you tell our listeners about your work and your group, the Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights Institute? What do you do personally? What's the mission of the organization?
Crystal DeBoise: Sure. Thanks, Brian. I want to say a quick thank you to Bob for covering this, the way he has writing the book, and putting the message out there when no one else was to really humanize these women. I know a lot of people in the sex work community really appreciated it, so thanks, Bob. Thank you, Brian, for covering this from a different angle than the ones that you discussed early on.
I currently am a psychotherapist, and I've worked for decades now with people involved in the sex industry and survivors of human trafficking. I started one of the first human trafficking programs in the United States way back in 2001. I'm also a co-founder of a group called Decriminalize Sex Work, which works nationally on policy that would make sex workers safer. I've sat with hundreds of people involved in the sex industry for years and heard their stories.
Brian Lehrer: What are you doing with any of the people you work with today, if anything, around the arrest in the case? Since it just took place last Friday, what impact is it having on people you work with, or anything current you would want to describe?
Crystal DeBoise: First of all, what I'm hearing is a real compassion for the families and a real feeling of connection with some of the things that they have gone through. A lot of people are really feeling this on a deep level. On one hand, there's a sigh of relief because sex workers in the New York Area have been living with the reality that this killer is out there every time they go out for a date, and that's in the back of their mind, so there's a sigh of relief.
On the other hand, the knowledge that there are more bodies and that the structures that lead to these killings are still in place on a societal level. There's a real chill among people that I talked to that the killer was still actively seeking out sex workers up until the point of his arrest and was still going out with people. One statement I've heard many times is really bittersweet, "If only law enforcement had worked with us, they would've caught him sooner," and I can say more about that if you want.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, in fact, I'm going to set up a clip of you from this show 12 years ago in which you said something to that effect. Listeners, Crystal DeBoise was a guest on this show the first time we talked about the Gilgo Beach murders back in 2011. She said at that time that sex workers were obviously hearing about the killings, might be reluctant to tell police if they had any leads. She talks here about how she advises them to protect themselves in their work. Let's listen back to about 30 seconds from 2011.
Crystal DeBoise: Sex workers often come up with very creative ways to keep themselves safe, and we are encouraging that they continue to do those creative techniques such as checking in with friends when they go out on dates, making sure that people know where they are, doing background checks when possible for clients, getting references for clients, and a whole host of other things that people are doing to try to stay safe. We are trying to help them to do that.
Brian Lehrer: That's the stay safe part. The part about reluctance to deal with the police and how frought it is to deal with the police, even when they are victimized, has to do with the nature of the law. Here is Crystal from 2011 here on that.
Crystal DeBoise: We look at the criminalization of prostitution from the perspective of preventing violence against women and sex workers. It does seem to get in the way of preventing violence in terms of people being afraid to come forward and report their crimes. People are afraid to report crimes against them or crimes against their friends because they don't want to get arrested. Arrest often results in trauma and difficulties, a court, a criminal record, which could prevent them in the future from leaving the sex industry. The criminalization of prostitution in general definitely prevents efforts to minimize violence against sex workers.
Brian Lehrer: Crystal, do you think any of that has changed since 2011?
Crystal DeBoise: I think there have been a few positive changes, and we're moving in the right direction. First of all, we do have a lot of DAs around the United States who are adopting a non-prosecution to sex work position because they're just seeing how it prevents the other violent crimes from being solved or investigated, and it's a very practical thing that's happening. We did repeal the loitering for the purposes of prostitution law here in New York, which is one step towards full decriminalization, which would be the ultimate goal for health and safety of sex workers.
We have seen an increased media representation since 2011. We have celebrities like Roseanne Barr and Maya Angelou coming out and saying how they had been sex workers early on in their careers, and we have representations of sex work in movies and television that is really new.
On the regressive side, in terms of safety, our federal government passed a law called SESTA/FOSTA, which took down a lot of those websites I was talking about in 2011 that helped keep sex workers safe. It does remain true that sex workers know how to stay safe, but we are removing the tools. Maybe, it's unintended consequences, but it's well-documented that the FOSTA/SESTA law has created a lot more danger for sex workers.
Then we do see progress. There's a bill in New York right now called the Immunity Bill. It's Senate Bill 1966, Assembly Bill 7471, and that would say that statewide in all of New York, if you're coming forward to report that you have experienced or witnessed a violent crime or any other crime, you will not get arrested if you're a sex worker. If you come forward and say, "I was on a date and this guy beat me up, and he fits this profile," you will not be arrested for the sex work that you were doing on that date.
Several states have passed this. We're hoping New York does. If people want to do something really important, they can contact the representatives and ask them to pass S.1966 and A7471 come January.
Brian Lehrer: Good. I'm glad you got specific about that. We'll bring Bob back in a minute and have him tell the story of the second woman who went missing and was later found dead on Gilgo Beach. The point he was making about police often don't take them seriously, he reported on one or more of these cases where family members of the victims didn't even report the missing person because they thought because of the nature of the work that she was involved with, the police wouldn't take it seriously. You've had that experience, Crystal?
Crystal DeBoise: Definitely, over the years, we've had the experience of advising clients that they should go forward to law enforcement with an attorney. They shouldn't just walk into the police station alone. There are certain jurisdictions that are handling these reports better than others, but people change and leadership changes so we have to be on top of who's currently in charge and how they're handling these kinds of reports.
Brian Lehrer: Bob, we've talked a little about Maureen Brainard-Barnes, the first woman to disappear and later to have her remains found on Gilgo Beach. You write that the second person to disappear who is considered a Gilgo Beach victim was Melissa Barthelemy, two years after Maureen Brainard-Barnes. This was on July 12th, 2009, two years almost to the day. You have some of her early life in Buffalo and in Texas. What was her early life like?
Robert Kolker: Melissa grew up in Buffalo, and her mother worked as a dishwasher at an old folks' home. Her grandfather mowed lawns there, but her grandfather before that, actually had factory jobs, but then the factories left Buffalo. If you wanted to do a little armchair sociology, you would see exactly what happens to the family over generations.
Melissa, as she grows up, is faced with a choice. She wanted to work in cosmetology. Either she stays in town and works at Supercuts, or perhaps goes to work for the old folks' home like her mother, or she tries to do something else. A boyfriend took her to New York where she was going to do some modeling. Then, of course, in her story that segues into her being caught up in a slightly older model of escort work where she had a boyfriend who she was in love with, who was also her pimp for a time.
Then they split up, and she went on her own because the great revolution of the internet allowed for this. It allowed for women to not need a pimp, necessarily, but it also isolated them. She was working on Craigslist when she disappeared. It's an interesting case because she stayed in touch with her family the entire time. She did not fall off the grid.
Even if you could argue that the broad outlines of Melissa's life and the lives of some of these other women were the sort of thing you'd see in television but then, the closer you look at it, the more you see, they didn't fall off the grid. They had people in their lives all the time. They came home and bought presents for their family members. They were in touch. You see a slightly more nuanced look at these people as individuals.
Brian Lehrer: You referred to what you called an-- Oh, go ahead. Did you want to finish your thought? Go ahead.
Robert Kolker: Yes. Her disappearance is the one that was followed by some mysterious phone calls to her family, harassing phone calls that it seems clear now were from the killer and that everyone assumed at the time were from the killer. He was taunting them. Now, we see that the cell phone pings from those calls are just a block away from this suspect's place of work.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, and you write, chillingly, in your New York Magazine article about these mysterious and menacing phone calls that Melissa's younger sister got. What did her sister have to hear on her phone that you now believe was from Rex Heuermann?
Robert Kolker: Melissa's sister, Amanda, was a teenager and had visited New York once and had a fair idea of what her sister was doing but like a lot of these family members, knowing what your sister or daughter is doing is different from being able to do anything one way or another about it. You don't want to push someone away who might be engaging in risky behavior and so they remained close.
Now that her sister was disappeared, she was overjoyed to get a call from her because the caller ID said it was from her phone, but it was a man on the other end of the line. He was seeming to toy with her. He was calling her sister a whore. On his last call, he said that he was watching her rot. It was just despicable behavior.
By the time they finally got the police involved and they tried to trace the call, they got cell phone pings from Midtown Manhattan, which would seem to be the least useful lead imaginable, but it did get people thinking that this was a Long Island person who commuted to Manhattan, who spent time in Manhattan, which it seems this suspect fits.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, so creepy, so psycho to think that after he killed this poor teenager's sister, that he's then calling her on her dead sister's phone and harassing her. I can't even imagine. Crystal, have you ever heard of family members of sex workers, short of in this exact kind of situation where there's been a murder, being contacted by John's for any reason, adding to the family's pain or fear? Or is this really unique?
Oh, we lost Crystal's line. Okay, we'll get Crystal back. I'll stay with you, Bob. What you said before about Melissa's boyfriend also being her pimp, some boyfriend, how did that work? Go a little more into why you called that an older model that may not be so prevalent anymore.
Robert Kolker: There's just one more thing about the suspect, really quick on that score about those phone calls. I don't want to get too profiley here, but it's interesting that the same person who set up burial sites close to one another, in a very specific spot, a spot that he could drive by. Is the same person who was making harassing phone calls to one of the victim's families. This is someone who you could imagine is trying to prolong the experience, is trying to be proud of what he's accomplished, which is just completely gross. Your other question was about--
Brian Lehrer: The boyfriend/pimp.
Robert Kolker: There's a model that people refer to, the Romeo Pimp model, where it's not like you're in business with your pimp and it's a professional relationship. It's an emotional relationship, and you're doing it because you're in love with your boyfriend, and your boyfriend is there to protect you while you are technically the breadwinner. It's an exploitative relationship and it's quite often an abusive relationship physically as well as obviously emotionally.
It was certainly the case for the next woman to disappear, Megan Waterman, who disappeared in June of 2010. She was from Portland, or from Scarborough, Maine, right outside of Portland from a struggling area. She was brought up by her grandmother because her mother had addiction problems and couldn't take care of her. Her grandmother tried her best to provide a stable upbringing, but Megan ended up falling in love with a guy from New York who came up to Portland. He quite clearly was in a relationship with her and also her pimp at the same time. He was a Romeo pimp
You could argue that this is human trafficking, and it would be interesting when Crystal returns to hear her take on this. It certainly is exploitative.
Brian Lehrer: I think Crystal is back on the line now. Are you and did you hear that?
Crystal Deboise: I did, and I heard about half of it. My take on if the boyfriend would've been considered a trafficker, I would need more information if there was force, fraud, and coercion in the relationship if he took her money and things like that. Many sex workers sometimes have these experiences. The law on what is human trafficking, what isn't is specific.
Brian Lehrer: How would you, as a psychotherapist though, talk about what you've heard from your clients over the years about this kind of I think Bob called it a Romeo/pimp relationship, somebody who's the person's boyfriend having a romantic as well as sexual relationship while that same person is arranging for her to sleep with other guys for money?
Crystal Deboise: I think within the sex industry, there are as many stories as there are people and as many relationships. I waitressed a lot in through high school and college and I had great managers who promoted me and who wanted the best for me, and I had abusive and toxic managers. I think it's really the same in the sex industry as in other industries. If it's at a certain level of abuse, it does meet the legal definition of human trafficking.
Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Crystal DeBoise, psychotherapist, co-executive director of the Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights Institute, which advocates for people in the sex work industry, and Robert Kolker, a journalist who wrote a book on the subject of the Gilgo Beach murders back in 2013 called Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, and now has new articles in both the New York Times and New York Magazine upon the arrest of Rex Heuermann over the last few days, charged with at least three of those murders.
Listeners, we can take some phone calls. I'm not entirely sure what your way into this is. If you're just joining us, what we're trying to do in this segment is not focus on the alleged perpetrator, but talk about the stories of the victims so that we humanize them as full people, not just sex workers, not just people who were murdered. We'll also talk about their families a little bit as we go, who Bob has also profiled.
Listeners, if anyone knew any of the Gilgo Beach victims, or knows any of their loved ones, or if you are yourself, or if you are a sex worker or close to one yourself, we welcome your phone calls as we talk, again, not about the alleged serial killer himself, but the victims as full human beings themselves. What do you want to say or ask? 212-433-WNYC. You can call or text 212-433-9692 and we'll continue in a minute.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we talk about Gilgo Beach murder victims with Bob Kolker, who wrote the book, Lost Girls about the Gilgo Beach Murders, and Crystal DeBoise, who is a psychotherapist who advises and advocates for people in that business. Bob, victim number four, the fourth of the four, who we're going to talk about as an individual a little bit. Victim number four, as you reported, was Amber Costello last seen in North Babylon, which is in the Gilgo Beach region of Long Island on September 2nd, 2010, was that? Do I have the year right?
Robert Kolker: That's right. Amber was renting a house in North Babylon with a couple of friends and she was originally from North Carolina. She grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. She overcame some tragic early years with parents who both had addiction problems, and she was essentially brought up by her sister, Kim. In Lost Girls, the relationship between Amber and Kim is explored very deeply. These are people who both saved each other's lives in a way, and provided family for each other in a way no one else did but also, both engaged in not just sex work, but very dangerous risk-taking behavior including eventually addiction.
By the time the killer finds Amber in 2010, she is really in a bad way in terms of her addiction. In order to make money, she's doing escort work and she's also engaging in some rouzes. She and her housemates who are male are interrupting Craigslist calls and chasing people away and keeping the money. That gets her a bad reputation online. She's really on the edge at the time that the killer finds her.
It's easy to imagine him offering her enough money to get her out of the house and to go with him into his truck, which is what happened that night. She was never really seen again. This was just a few months before the four sets of remains were found. That makes her the last of the four.
Brian Lehrer: Crystal, Amber Costello's sister who Bob's article reports talking about her sister as a "basket case" and "struggling most of her life with drugs", those are quotes, she also said when Amber started in sex work on Long Island, she was making "$3,500 a week easy." another quote from the sister. Is that unusually high? How would you say the potential income from that kind of work dovetails with the life that she had lived up to that point?
Crystal Deboise: That's a really good income and afford someone a middle-class life. I think especially living in the New York area, it's very difficult to make ends meet on even a minimum wage income. I've certainly talked to a lot of sex workers who have tried to do that, have worked full-time jobs and supplemented their income through sex work.
Sometimes that is for family values, for instance. I've certainly met people who- want to raise their children and don't want them to be in daycare while they're working 50 hours a week or more trying to put food on the table. Doing sex work one or two days a week allows them to raise their own children. That makes sense to me, what you have described as her motivation, which was to survive and to make money and to try to live a comfortable life.
Brian Lehrer: Before we take some phone calls from listeners, Bob, on the Amber Costello story, and this gets back to a barrier to justice and a barrier to safety we were talking about earlier in the segment, you quote someone in your New York Magazine article saying about Amber Costello going missing, that the person didn't file a missing person report on Amber because she knew it wouldn't be taken seriously. Can you tell us who that refers to and why they thought that?
Robert Kolker: That was Amber's sister, Kim. Imagine this situation; your sister disappears and there's not a hint of where she might have gone. You don't want to go to the police because you don't think you'll be taken seriously, but also you think you might get into trouble as well. This is what makes legislation like what Crystal mentioned earlier to your listeners so important and so key.
I just got an email overnight from someone who said she was a witness in a case in the Midwest against somebody who was drugging and attacking escorts. She said that with the help of organizations like the one that Crystal does over in New York, she was able to testify safely but she was the only one because everyone was afraid. Everyone was afraid to go to the police and to say that they were in an unsafe position.
Back when I reported Lost Girls, there was data from the Sex Workers Project here in New York that suggested that about half of the people who were surveyed who were sex workers, said that they had been put in an unsafe situation, either coerced to do something they didn't want to do or actually beaten and hurt. That's what you're dealing with when you're in an environment where you can't go to the police and you don't feel safe and you don't feel protected.
Brian Lehrer: I want to go to the phones. As part of my invitation to callers, I said if anybody is a family member or knew any of the Gilgo Beach murder victims personally, that you, among other people, are welcome to call in. It looks like we have a cousin of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, again, to refresh who was the first or second woman to go missing way back in 2007. Mel, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mel. Thank you so much for calling.
Mel: Hi. Thanks. I just wanted to say thanks for reminding me that she did get really good grades. She lived with me in Massachusetts with her mom, but it was a good idea for her to live in a different environment and try to go to a different school. She was extremely book smart and amazing. I just wanted to say thanks for telling us part of the story.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Mel. Thank you very much. That was in your article, Bob. Anything you want to say in response to Mel? That obviously matters to her.
Robert Kolker: I want to thank her as well. It was something that I encountered from the very beginning. I just want to say that working on this story back in 2011 and then the book in 2012 was an enormous education for me because I had been trained by television to think that these women didn't have stories. When I first read about four sets of remains in late 2010 being found along Ocean Park way, I thought two things. The first was they're going to solve this in 10 minutes. The second was we're never going to learn who these women are because I'd watch TV and I knew that they would be trafficked in and had been off the grid and had no family and nobody who cared about them.
Almost immediately, I learned I was completely wrong. People loved them. People cared for them. They felt they had no recourse and that they felt that the powers that be didn't care. Again, Maureen Brainard-Barnes , three and a half years of nobody caring until it was part of a big true crime case, a big serial killer case.
Such a peculiar position for their loved ones to be in. They're happy that the case is getting attention. They're happy that people might want to solve the case, but they also are sitting there having to talk about the plot devices that the media was treating their loved ones as, saying that they were nothing more than prostitutes. In The New York Times last week, I tried to get that across. They obviously were much more than that. It was us, you and I, and the authorities who put them in a box.
Brian Lehrer: Mel, thank you again for your call. I know that took courage even just to place that short thank you call and amplify the smarts of your late cousin.
Crystal, when you were on the show first talking about the Gilgo Beach murders back in 2011, I was listening back to that segment. I sometimes use the word prostitutes, and you always use the word sex workers. I was getting educated still about terminology back then.
Even in the context of sex workers, which is how we've been referring to these individuals today, we have a caller who doesn't like that terminology and thinks it dehumanizes them to some degree. I'm going to take that call right now. Alexi, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alexi. Thank you for calling in.
Alexi: Hi. Thank you for having me. Look, we should absolutely talk about the humanity of the victims. I'm so happy that you're doing that and shining light on who they are. I know that when you use the term sex worker, you probably think it's the right term. What it inadvertently does is it strips the entire sex industry, the sex trade, of its harms. It inadvertently legitimizes a brutal industry that's founded on the exploitation of marginalized women and children like those who are recovered in Gilgo Beach. I really wanted to draw light to that.
You also talk about legislation that would solve this problem, but I'm here to say it wouldn't. The legislation that was referred to, the full decrim legislation, would actually legitimize sex buyers. It would decriminalize them and allow sex buying to flourish. The Gilgo Beach murderer is a sex buyer. We really need to talk about that and shift the blame and the stigma from people who are in prostitution to those who sex buy. It's men like Rex Heuermann, a white man of privilege, who buy marginalized women and often end up murdering them and abusing them and subjecting them to violence.
Brian Lehrer: Crystal, it sounds like you and the caller have a policy difference. Do you want to engage on this and talk to Alexi?
Crystal DeBoise: Yes. There's a vibrant debate about full de-criminalization of prostitution. I guess I'd like to say that I am totally convinced after many years of being involved in the community, that having the police totally out of this interaction, these businesses for consenting adults is what many, many organizations have said is the most important thing to combat trafficking and increase safety for sex workers. Even though I know it's a stretch and I know it's difficult for people to do that sea shift, we have been negative about prostitution for a very long time.
Just like we have changed the way we feel about it's not that long ago that marriage between Black people and white people was illegal, gay sex was illegal. Decriminalizing prostitution among consenting adults is the next step in that progression. The World Health Organization, Amnesty International, the list goes on of organizations that have endorsed this based on data. I'm totally convinced after thinking these issues through that that is the way to go. I respect the caller and I think that it's a vibrant debate that's happening.
By the way, the bill that I referred to is not the full decriminalization of prostitution. That's something else. It's the Immunity Bill. It's S 1966, which simply says that if you're a victim, you can go forward and you will not be arrested for prostitution. I'm pretty sure the caller would agree with that legislation based on what she's discussed.
Brian Lehrer: Alexi, yes?
Alexi: I do, sorry. I absolutely do support the Immunity Bill. I think it's very important that people in prostitution are not prosecuted for any, whether they're a victim of a crime or witness to a crime, and they should receive that immunity.
I just also wanted to direct you toward the piece of legislation called the Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act that would do the same if it were to pass. It would provide immunity to people in prostitution while providing them with social services and the robust strategies that they would need to exit the sex trade but would still criminalize people like the Gilgo Beach murderer for sex buying in order to strengthen [unintelligible 00:39:53].
Brian Lehrer: Just to come full circle to the beginning of your call, if not sex worker, what term do you prefer that people use for the work that these folks do?
lexi: Yes, the survivors that I work with prefer to just be referred to as a person in prostitution, a person who had been exploited in the sex trade, a survivor of criminal sexual exploitation. I think it is really individual.
I work at an organization that provides services to survivors, and they are really insulted when they hear the term sex worker. To them, it is saying that everything that they went through is just being really stripped of its harm, and it's in the front to their experiences.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for your call. I want to read a few texts that have come in. One listener wrote, "I just wanted to say, the Romeo Pimp concept is very real. I was in a very toxic relationship with a narcissistic abuser. He would've had zero hesitation to pimp me out had I said yes. It is a very twisted dynamic." Someone else wrote, "I grew up in Babylon and new families who lived at Oak Beach. I used to sometimes play down the road or across the street from the house that Shannon Gilbert disappeared from. I urge you to recognize that the suspect is only suspected of three to four murders while there were 14 bodies found, I believe," writes that person. I had seen the number 11 but I certainly take your point.
Someone else writes, and actually, I guess two people writing about the Suffolk County Police, who we haven't brought up yet. Listener writes, "I worked for the Suffolk County Police Department. I saw firsthand their often poor and insensitive response to domestic violence victims shameful." Someone else writes, "Not one police executive cared, including internal affairs." Bob, you reported on the police aspect of this. Can you say a word about it?
Robert Kolker: Absolutely. That's a really, really valuable perspective from that text you got. The police back then, the chief of detectives had a public safety meeting. He spoke in the spring of 2011 as his people and others were combing the bramble in Long Island, searching for more human remains and finding it. It was a scary moment. In the public safety meeting, he got up and said everybody could relax because whoever did this was just targeting sex workers. T
To me, it just seems to put everything in black and white right away. If you're in the news business and you cover this, you see not only do a lot of serial killers target women for this very reason that no one will care about them, but you see that when the victims aren't sex workers, like the victims of the Son of Sam, for instance, who are just people out on the town, then suddenly it's a horror movie happening all around you.
I wanted to explore that disconnect. It's right smack dab in the middle of that debate over prostitution versus sex work, whether it's empowering or exploitative. I had long conversations when reporting Lost Girls with people who thought that sex work was empowering. I had long conversations with people who thought it was, by nature, exploitative.
My position, which has developed over time, has always been that the demand is never going away. That you can outlaw it or not outlaw it but if it exists in the shadows, it winds up being more unsafe. That you can't just pretend it doesn't exist and so we need to be very careful about what we do when we, as the society, weigh in on that issue.
Brian Lehrer: And on the murders that have not yet led to an accusation of an individual, a listener texts, "I also want to remind that Shannon Gilbert's 911 tape was not released for many years, and it should be listened to again today in light of these developments. It's not entirely solved, in my opinion."
Last thing, Bob, as we run out of time, I want to acknowledge that your New York Magazine article is in part about the bonds and ongoing contact that family members of five Gilgo Beach victims have had over these years. Did they create a formal group of any kind? How did they arrange to stay in touch? What purpose did it serve for them?
Robert Kolker: They were annual vigils for many years, and then a lot of social media contact. I last saw all of them in person when Lost Girls was adapted into a film and there was a screening beforehand and then there, of course, there were opening nights and such. Even Kim was there, and she doesn't always appear at these things. There's just a lot of tenderness. It's like being around people who understands something that nobody else understands. It's lovely to see them, but it's also more lovely to see them interacting with one another because they speak the same language.
Brian Lehrer: Robert Kolker is a journalist who wrote a book on the subject of the Gilgo Beach murders back in 2013 called Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery. It was made into a film too, as he just referenced. He now has new articles in both The New York Times and New York Magazine.
Crystal DeBoise has been with us, psychotherapist and co-executive director of the Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights and Institute which advocates for people in the sex work industry. Thank you both so much for joining us and talking not about the alleged perpetrator but the people he allegedly killed.
Crystal DeBoise: Thanks, Brian.
Robert Kolker: Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Crystal.
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