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    Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
    Unavailable
    Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
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    Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
    Ebook411 pages6 hours

    Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

    By Robert Kolker

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Soon to be a Netflix documentary 

    One of Slate’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years

    A literary account of the lives and presumed serial killings of five “Craigslist” prostitutes, whose bodies were found on the same Long Island beach in 2010. Based on the New York Magazine cover story.

    Shannan wanted acceptance. Maureen wanted a solution. Megan wanted love. Melissa wanted adventure. Amber wanted to be saved.

    Over the course of three years, each of these young women vanished without a trace: Maureen in 2007, Melissa and Megan in 2009, and Amber and Shannan in 2010. All but one of their bodies was discovered on Gilgo Beach, Long Island, an unsettled, overgrown seven-mile stretch of shoreline on the string of barrier islands along South Oyster Bay.

    Sharing the same profile—all were in their twenties, all but one was under five feet tall, and all were prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist—the police concluded they were all the victims of one murderer, the Long Island serial killer—the most skillful and accomplished serial killer in New York since the “Son of Sam,” David Berkowitz. But as intrepid young reporter Robert Kolker discovered, the truth about these women went far deeper than common assumptions. The victims weren’t outcasts; they weren’t kidnapped or enslaved. All came from a slice of America ignored by politicians and the media: the poor, often rural and white parts of the country hit hard by economics, where limited opportunities force people to make hard choices—choices that lead them to places like Gilgo Beach.

    Working closely with the women’s families, Lost Girls tells the stories of their deaths and their lives, offering a searing portrait of crime and circumstance that goes to the heart of modern America itself.

    Editor's Note

    For ‘Serial’ fans…

    The riveting true account of four internet prostitutes assumed to have been murdered by the same killer. If you’re looking for a chilling but sweetly humane story, look no further — this is investigative reportage at its finest.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 9, 2013
    ISBN9780062183675
    Author

    Robert Kolker

    Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting. His journalism has appeared in New York magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, O the Oprah Magazine, and The Marshall Project. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

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    Reviews for Lost Girls

    4/5

    207 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Good info on this crime. Good background info on the women killed. Gets a little bogged down in their lives but all and all very well done. Keeps you reading.
    • 5/5
      This book should be used in classes on how to write true crime -- tour de force reporting and excellent writing. It's especially impressive since, as the subtitle clearly states, the case remains unsolved. Kolker is candid but compassionate about the lives of the women and how they came to work as escorts -- aka prostitutes -- using Craigslist to connect with clients and, eventually, the person (or persons) who killed them and dumped their bodies on a desolate stretch of Long Island highway. It's heartbreaking to realize that these women come from working class backgrounds where financial and thus family stability was totally undermined by the disappearance of solid jobs in places like Buffalo and Groton. And it's heartbreaking, too, to hear how police blew off the missing person reports on these women once they heard how they earned their money.
    • 4/5
      Why are we drawn to true crime sagas? Is it the voyeur in us, the "there but for the grace of..."? For me, both, and for this book, I grew up about ten miles away from this sad dumping ground for murdered female escorts.Robert Kolker is such a compassionate writer. This book is a true eulogy for five women who came of age in the new area of Craigslist escort services. Common to all is the sad realization that all were born to and parented by very flawed people who should have found something less damaging to do with their lives and time. Very worth a read and I think if this author would do readings at high schools and colleges, some women might not set their feet on the same doom-laden paths.
    • 5/5
      It's difficult to write about serial killers without abstracting the story into poles of dark and light. Serial killers lend themselves to torture porn, flat reportage, and academic treatises. We devour these stories. Their names are famous, their deeds infamous, and their victims - anonymous. In Green River, Running Red, Anne Rule writes about the Green River Killer, except she doesn't - instead, she writes about his victims. We come to the story through their stories and it is a powerful experience. Robert Kolker achieves something similar in Lost Girls, the story of five of the victims of an as-yet unidentified serial killer (or killers) who is at least dumping bodies in a desolate stretch of Long Island. Told from the point of view of the victims and their families, Mr. Kolker unearths not just a mystery, but a story of economic hard times, of family, and of the way we assign value to victims.The Internet has changed prostitution in some fundamental ways. Advertising on Craigslist (when you still could) or Backpages or other websites that take adult ads removes the street and, in some cases, pimps from the equation. It allows people who might not have become sex workers easy entry into the field. Get a room, post a picture with a phone number, schedule the appointments, walk away with better money than you can get from most jobs (minimum wage work, anyone?). On the flip side, when you take away the street, you take away the buffer - on the street you have a moment to size up the customer, to at least pretend to yourself that you can get a feel for them, that you can more easily walk away. Talk to a customer for five minutes on the phone and they're on your doorstep in moments. There is no crowd to see, little protection, plenty of risk.Mr. Kolker tells a good story, writing of the lives of these young women and their families before and after their disappearances. He tells the story of law enforcement and societal indifference and slut shaming. He speaks of real people, forever changed by their encounters with someone who took indifference to its logical conclusion. He does not tell the story of their unknown killer(s), but they're there in the shadows and in the judgments we make about others. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      The unsolved mystery of the deaths of five prostitutes who used the web to advertise. This took place in Long Island. I found the girls' history to be very detailed, but even more thorough was the investigation into the one missing girl which uncovered four other girls' bodies. I don't think I would recommend this to anyone unless they had an interest in the geographical area in which it happened.
    • 5/5
      Analytical yet compassionate towards the victims and families. Offers a lot of insight with nuance and balance.
    • 5/5
      Once you're able to easily distinguish the narratives of the individual girls, whose lives are unique except for their shared lower income background and their foray into the world of prostitution via the growing popularity of Craigslist, then the whole tragedy of Lost Girls comes into heartbreaking focus.The book is better than the Netflix production, and the Netflix one is brilliant. That's how good the book is.
    • 2/5
      This audio book turned into background noise pretty quickly. I don't want to bely the tragedy of the deaths, but I had a difficult time keeping the five women's stories and families straight in my head.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like this book because I was mesmerized by the NetFlix movie of the same name. Based on the true crime story of young women who were found murdered in Long Island, NY. from 1996 - current. Still unsolved, the writer notes that the police were slow to arrive at the scene when a 911 call asked for help, with the statement that she was going to be killed.The movie was clearer and more straightforward in noting that the girls were hookers, and some of them were also addicted to drugs. In trying to solve the crimes, certain people of the area were not investigated, whereas others seemed to be spot on as the potential killer.The writer seemed to ramble and it was very difficult to keep track of the history of each murdered girl.See the movie, and if you like a book cluttered with too much detail, then read the book as well.
    • 3/5
      Don’t expect too much. LOST GIRLS has received so many great reviews, even a NEW YORK TIMES notable book award for 2013, I expected to be mesmerized. Don’t make the same mistake. Then you’ll more readily see what outstanding reporting Robert Kolker does with this book.Not only does Kolker investigate the mysterious deaths of five young prostitutes on Long Island, he also looks at their lives, how they grew up, who loved them, how they chose their “profession.” He provides so many details you might come to understand them. I almost did.My biggest problems with LOST GIRLS were a) too many names and b) too many details. I just couldn’t keep track of all of them.Because LOST GIRLS is nonfiction, all the names are necessary for accurate storytelling. A good reporter is accurate, above all. Fiction can concentrate more on keeping the story readable with fewer names and fewer people who share the same name. But, with LOST GIRLS, at first I was paging back to remind myself who belonged in which girl’s life. Eventually, though, I gave up. Same with all the details. They may be necessary, but I had a hard time remembering which belong with which story, and I eventually gave up.It would have been an enormous help to have a list of names, with reminders of who is who. Then guess what I found at the end of the book: a list of names, with reminders of who is who. WHAT THE HECK IS THAT DOING AT THE END? So, while I admire Kolker’s investigative reporting, as a book, I can’t give it a high rating. At this length, it is too confusing.
    • 4/5
      First off, let me say that Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker was not exactly the book I was expecting. I enjoy true crime novels and I have always been fascinated by the procedural part of the story - how the authorities track down their killer. In this case, the killer was never caught and it looks like the police threw the procedures out the window. This book is truly about the victims and while it is not what I normally look for in a true crime story, it was all the more fascinating for putting the crime on the back burner."Over the course of three years, each of these young women vanished without a trace: Maureen in 2007, Melissa and Megan in 2009, and Amber and Shannon in 2010. All but one of their bodies were discovered on Gilgo Beach, Long Island, an unsettled, overgrown, seven-mile stretch of shoreline on the string of barrier islands along South Oyster Bay."These young women are the center of this story. Some of them came from pretty troubled backgrounds. They had children, family and friends. They had pretty serious addiction problems. And they were all working as prostitutes, advertising on Craigslist.What impressed me about the book is that these young women do not become stereotypes. They are not woman battered by a pimp or empowered feminists taking control of their bodies. They are young women who need money, who don't have any great job prospects, and who find prostitution an easy way to make a lot of money in a short period of time. These women don't deal with pimps. They advertise for themselves. They decide where and when to work (and the amount of work they can find with a simple Craigslist ad is astonishing), and while they make some provisions for their own safety, desperation can make people careless.What infuriated me about the story is the way that authorities treated the disappearances: they didn't care. A hooker disappeared - big deal. In some cases their families were unable to file missing person reports and it was clear that authorities did not consider these women to be worth looking for, at least not until the bodies started piling up. There were so many bureaucratic errors in these investigations, so many oddities, so many times where the police were clearly looking out for themselves and not really pushing these investigations that you can't help but be frustrated for these women and their families. In the end, they still have no closure; they have lots of suspicions, but no definitive answers.It takes a skilled author to write a compelling book without an ending, and I think Kolker did an excellent job. I certainly kept turning pages, alternately absorbed and furious, and I found myself very much engaged with these women and wanting justice for them. He doesn't whitewash their stories, so you still get angry at them for putting themselves in so much danger for a few bucks, but you still wish for a better ending for them.My copy of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I found Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery to be a riveting story that was both informative and well written. The sad fact is that these women, who turned up as victims of a serial killer, were already lost before their bodies turned up in shallow graves on Long Island. What they all had in common, other than their work as prostitutes was their complicated and difficult lives. This case is another example of how, once they were reported as missing, the fact of their working in the sex trade, made it easy for authorities to dismiss and at times outright ignore their case.It was only once the bodies began turning up that the case received attention from both the police and the media. Although ultimately more than 10 bodies were discovered along the roadside, it was five women who were linked together in this book, all five had worked as call girls through Craig’s List on the internet. Four of the women were found buried in shallow graves at the side of the road and the fifth was eventually found in a nearby marsh. What Robert Kolker does in Lost Girls is to humanize these women and their stories. The killer of these women has not been identified, and as the years pass by, the feeling is that he or they will never be found. Although the families did recover their loved ones bodies, true closure is impossible as long as no one is to be held accountable. This book stands as a monument for these women who suffered abuse and neglect as children and then paid the ultimate penalty for the bad choices they made as they became adults.
    • 5/5
      Well researched, written with compassion for the victims and their families.