Release Date: June 9th, 2013
Genre(s): Non-fiction, True Crime
Publisher: Harper
Pages: 399
Rating: 
.5
Lost Girls is a true crime book that investigates the murders of several women found alongside Ocean Parkway on Long Island, New York. The book covers the lives of each of the women who were found on Long Island, and seeks to find answers for a case that has since gone cold. The discoveries of the women’s bodies happens due to the investigation on Shannan Gilbert, who went missing after a job in Oak Beach, Long Island. Between the delay in response to the missing person investigation and what the citizens of secluded Oak Beach may have known, Kolker looks at different perspectives to find out what happened to Shannan Gilbert and the others found along Ocean Parkway – and who could have been at fault for this tragedy.
Lost Girls was written only a few years after the initial discoveries of the bodies found along Ocean Parkway. As I’m reviewing this, it’s been about ten years. When I found out about this book, I knew I had to read it – as a Long Islander myself, I was shocked to hear that a place so often frequented, especially over summer, was a place for a serial killer (or perhaps many killers) to dispose of their victims. But after a few months of coverage of this soon-to-be national headline, there was no news about the victims or the killer(s) at large. What happened to these people found? Why did it take so long to find them? What was being done to find the perpetrator(s)?
Something that Lost Girls aims to do (and does very well) is humanize the victims despite their lives as escorts. Escorts are not often given the same treatment as others due to the nature of their work – and the lives they live aside from their professions are often forgotten. Kolker takes an in-depth look at each of the women’s upbringings, their families, and how they became escorts. The author also reports on the profession itself, different types of escorting, and why these women began to work independently. A common theme represented throughout this book is how these women’s professions impacted the investigative and national response regarding what may have happened to them. Once the women were identified and their professions found out, less people worried for the killer(s) at large. The more true crime I read about, the more common of an issue I realize this is.
The second half of the book features the investigation, and how the victims’ loved ones are handling the discoveries of the deaths of these women. In this section, Kolker continues to emphasize the fact that these people are, just that – people – and how the delay in discovery and investigation of the crimes at hand led to lesser chances of closing the case, forcing the family and friends of the victims to take action.
The book also covers the mysterious Oak Beach town that Shannan Gilbert disapperared from and looks at her case from a separate lens. The town of Oak Beach is filled with politics and suspicious residents – and Kolker spends adequate time investigating the strange behavior that took place before, during, and after Shannan Gilbert’s disappearance.
Despite all the good that this book does for humanizing the victims, I can’t help but feel like the reporting part of this book could have done more. It is a cold case, so having some sort of lead would have been difficult for the author. However, I do find it surprising that, despite the fact that this book does well to point out that it took eight months to take Shannan Gilbert’s missing person report seriously, that this wasn’t brought up with the police commissioner when Kolker interviewed him. It was mnentioned in this book that the delay was supposedly due to New Jersey’s filing process (Gilbert was from New Jersey), but why not confront New Jersey’s PD and investigate why it would take so long when time is of the essence in these situations? Enough time passed here that any helpful digital evidence was wiped (as well as the misplacement of physical evidence), and if this was the case for Shannan and the other women gone missing, it’s likely an issue that’s happening around our country.
In comparison, I’d like to highlight another interview with Suffolk County PD over a more recent crime – the serial murders committed by members of the MS-13. This episode of This American Life features an interview with Suffolk County PD where it demonstrates that there were flaws with the way that these cases were handled, and I was expecting similar questions to be raised with Kolker’s interview. And while I do believe that Kolker’s interview with the police comissioner provided a lot of information about their investigative practices, given that this book mainly showed how poorly these women were treated in the investigation, likely due to their professions, that this would have been discussed somewhere. More specifically, I do think the author should have investigated further into what specifically took eight months for Shannan Gilbert’s investigation to open – and why missing person cases are able to linger for so long without action.
But despite all this, Lost Girls is a book I still recommend due to its emphasis on searching for justice for the victims. There are so many cases of victims’ investigations being looked over due to being part of a “high-risk population”, which de-humanizes the victims and makes them less likely to find justice given the circumstances. While I’ve found many cases that showcase this issue, Lost Girls is the first to take a look at this topic in-depth, and demonstrate the frustrations and pain that the victims’ families and loved ones endure in what has been neverending for them.
