Episode Details

The Mystery of Shannan Gilbert

Long Island was different then, thirty years ago. Oak Beach was the personification of its seaside innocence and yearning for life. It wasn’t, in the words of Shannan Gilbert’s mother, “an evil dirty place.” Now, “It’s isolated. It’s desolate. It’s a rich community. You’ve got doctors and cops and very very wealthy people who live there. No one’s ever going to think that that’s a bad dangerous area. But it is.”(53 – 0:16)

Sometime around midnight of Walpurgis Eve 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a twenty-four-year-old call girl, left Manhattan and took the last ride of her life in Michael Pak’s SUV. They would have got off Ocean Parkway where the OBI south once stood and gone left about a half-mile down the pitch-black Oak Beach Road till they got to the gate and someone let them in. Pak, her regular driver to escort appointments, says it was Oak Beach resident Joseph Brewer and they followed his car to his house (54 – 2:32). Brewer admits to hiring her but says it was not for sex (55 – 27:28). Brewer and Pak’s stories collaborate and they both passed lie detector tests but sociopaths laugh at lie detector tests.

At 4:51 AM Shannan made a terrifying 911 call from her cell phone that for reasons that are unclear to this day was transferred to the state police who no longer have jurisdiction in Oak Beach (56 – 9:02). Although she was on the phone twenty-three minutes screaming “their trying to kill me” the 911 operator was unable to get her location. Two male voices that have been identified as Pak and Brewer can be heard in the background.

Shannan then showed up banging on the door of Oak Beach resident of over thirty years Gus Colletti. Colletti, perhaps not coincidentally, comes across as the only witness in the CBS 48 Hours news investigation who is not being disingenuous. According to Colletti, he opened the door. “And I said to her … ‘What’s the matter?’ She wouldn’t answer me. She just kept staring at me and going, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ I reached over and grabbed that phone, dialed 911. When I said to her, ‘I called the police. Sit down in that chair. They’re on their way.’ She just looked at me and she ran right out the door.”

When Colletti followed her outside he saw her cowering under his boat in the driveway. He says “I could see a car coming down the road very slowly … would stop and then go a little bit. Stop, go a little bit.” Colletti ran up to the car and confronted the driver; Michael Pak, asking him ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Pak replied that he was looking for Shannan and Colletti told him ‘Well, I called the police … they are on their way to bring her back,’ to which Pak replied ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ Colletti answered ‘Well, I did.’ At this point, Shannan bolted from under the boat and into the darkness. Pak drove off after her ignoring Colletti’s shouts for him to stop.(57 – 7:07)

Pak claims that they had been at Brewer’s house for about three hours when Brewer came out and got him. When he went in Shannon was “freaking out” and accused them both of trying to kill her. She then went behind the couch and crouched down. Pak says he followed her and asked her if she had seen the movie Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. She replied coherently and at that point, he says he realized she wasn’t high.

It was then he heard the 911 operator on her phone and he thought Shannan might be trying to set him up. So he left. When he was outside he saw her run out of the house and tried to follow her. From there his story match’s Colletti’s. With him giving up and leaving when he couldn’t find her after pursuing her from Colletti’s house.(58 – 56:39)

The next 911 call