This is an article from July this year. I don't think it has been posted before. Some interesting snippets.
A SEX worker whose death was initially deemed accidental may have been another victim of the Long Island Serial Killer, her family lawyer has claimed. Shannan Gilbert, 23, disappeared in the early …
www.the-sun.com
John Ray, the family lawyer of Shannan has maintained that her death was not caused by a drug-induced drowning, as has been previously reported by
CBS as the department's stance, but rather by a killer that has yet to be identified.
"When the police claimed that she had wandered into the marsh and managed to kill herself, when I had seen the autopsy report where she's found face up laying on a bush, and the police had claimed she drowned. That didn't make any sense," Ray
exclusively told The U.S.
RULED A HOMICIDE
Shannan's cause of death in her initial autopsy was undetermined, but Shannan's family decided to get a second opinion.
The second autopsy found that Shannan "met a violent end, that she was strangled," Ray said in a previous interview.
Ray was there when world-renowned medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden performed the second autopsy.
"When we looked at the bones, we were able to discern that the very small, significant hyoid bone in the neck, was cracked on one edge," Ray said.
Baden's autopsy "indicated that she did not die of natural causes and it was consistent with homicide," Ray said.
Ray also pointed out that there was a hole at the base of Shannan's hyoid bone that was found in the second autopsy.
"It appears be to something was either drilled or pushed through that bone.
"And we couldn't determine what that was, but it was highly unusual," the lawyer said.
While Ray maintains that Shannan died by homicide, he said it is unclear who murdered Shannan and has never claimed that Heuermann was behind the alleged crime.
INVESTIGATING THE MARSH
Ray said he was concerned by the police's drowning explanation and what he called a "fallback position" where local authorities also claimed she could have died from natural elements after she got lost in the marsh.
"So I said, 'You know what? The best way to learn about this is go there yourself and see what this terrible marsh was like, such that it would've killed her,'" the lawyer said.
Ray, a Long Island native who spent summers at the beach and has experience as a lifeguard, said he thought it was odd that Shannan could have gotten lost in a local marsh.
"I don't believe Shannon ever entered the marsh," Ray said.
Ray went into the marsh to investigate on the same day Shannan disappeared a year before with the conditions and weather being similar.
He began searching the marsh at 4.53am on May 1, 2012, as that was the time Shannan first made her hysteric 911 call.
Ray entered the marsh at the same location, he called it a "quasi opening," where local police said she entered.
"You have to work at it, but you can get in," he said.
It may have been hard to get into the marsh, according to Ray, but he said it was not difficult to get out.
"Either side of the marsh there were escape routes easily found," the lawyer said. "It would be absurd to say somebody got lost in the marsh and died because they couldn't get out."
Ray explained that when walking in the marsh "the loam you walked on was damp and sometimes had a little water that would come up over say the tip of your boot. And that was about it. It wasn't deep at all."
He added: "Even if she fell into the canals, they weren't deep. They're like not even waist deep — they'd come up to your thighs for an average person."
Shannan was seen running out of a client, Joseph Brewer's, house on the day she vanished, rushing to neighbors' houses for help.
Two neighbors called 911, one of them being Barbara Brennan.
Brennan called around 5.30am that day, Ray explained, saying that it was only a few minutes before dawn.
"So twilight would've been the condition, not pitch darkness," Ray said. "So the police theory that she got lost in the dark and got confused is absurd."
"In fact, as we went through the marsh, as we progressed, we could see our way into the homes that lined from Oak Beach — that lined the marsh on the south side of it," Ray added.
SHANNAN'S CLOTHES
Former Suffolk Police Commissioner Richard Dormer claimed to a reporter that Shannan ran through the bramble, which pulled her jeans off, according to Ray.
"First of all, any girl who wears jeans they're not baggies like in the hippie days — they're tight jeans and they don't come off because sticker bushes pull them as you go through the marsh," Ray said.
Ray added: "How do you get them off? You have to take them off, or somebody's gotta take them off for you."
"So then they argue, well she panicked and in her panic because she was on drugs, she was hallucinating and she got wet and she took off her pants," Ray said.
"That's absurd as well," he said, noting that there is
"zero evidence" that she was on drugs the day she vanished.
Ray said in a previous interview that Shannan was wearing a bra in photographs taken of her body and that the band that attaches the two bra cups was cut in half.
"It wasn't torn like an animal would do it," the lawyer said.
READ MORE ON THE US SUN
As questions about Shannan's death continue to go unanswered, the public has been also wondering about the several other remains that were found along Ocean Parkway in 2011.
The Suffolk County Police Department told The U.S. Sun that it has not made any comments regarding statements made by John Ray.
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The public has been also wondering about the several other remains that were found along Ocean Parkway in 2011
www.crimewatchers.net
