Wilmington Star News: ‘Lost Girls' with local link wows the critics

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Robert Kolker's true-crime story "Lost Girls" (Harper, $25.99) has been drawing some terrific reviews since it came out last month. It was an Amazon "Best Book" for July, and Mimi Swartz in The New York Times called it "a gothic whodunit for the Internet age."

The book tells the story of a possible serial killing on Long Island. In December 2010, the corpses of four missing women were found wrapped in burlap and buried in dunes near Ocean Beach, N.Y. The remains of a fifth woman were found a year later in a nearby marsh.

All five women had been prostitutes in their 20s. All five had advertised their services online on Craigs­list or its competitor, Backpage. Police suspect a serial killer is involved, but no arrests have been made.

This Big Apple tale has a local angle: One of the dead women was Amber Lynn Overstreet (later Costello), a former Wilmington resident.

Although born in Pennsylvania, Overstreet spent much of her childhood and teen years living in Carolina Beach – which Kolker describes as a "redneck Riviera" – and later in the Nesbitt Courts housing project. Sexually molested by a neighbor when she was 5, she grew up troubled.

When she was still a teenager, an older sister to whom she was close recruited her to work in an "escort" agency, entertaining bachelor parties at golf clubs and on Bald Head Island. The money on a good night was much better than either girl could make in a week waiting tables.

Much of that money, however, went to drugs, which were an integral part of the lifestyle. Amber Overstreet ended up addicted to heroin. She tried to kick the habit, and at one point moved to Florida, joined a church, married and planned to have a family. Then she backslid, re-entered the lifestyle and headed for New York. She was last seen alive on Sept. 2, 2010, leaving her home in North Babylon, N.Y., to meet an unknown client.

Kolker, a contributing editor for New York magazine, chose to tell his account through the victims' eyes, interviewing dozens of families, friends and others who knew the dead women. (Disclosure: I emailed Kolker some material on the history of Nesbitt Courts and got a half-sentence worth of credit in the acknowledgements.)

"Lost Girls" will add fodder to the current debate over human trafficking and whether prostitution should be legalized. One thing is clear, though: These five victims will never be faceless again.

- Ben Steelman, Wilmington Star News (NC)

 

Q & A in Bookslut.com

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"There are no easy good guys and bad guys here. The issue of blame is a trap. It keeps us from understanding in a way that dehumanizes them. If you say, 'Oh it's okay that they got killed because they are prostitutes,' it dehumanizes them. If you say, 'Oh they became prostitutes because they had a horrible childhood,' that dehumanizes them. If you say, 'Oh they got killed because the Internet is a scary place,' that's a very superficial way of looking at it too. I hope the book goes a little deeper than that."
 

- "An Interview With Robert Kolker," BOOKSLUT

 

CBS This Morning

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Saturday night's episode of 48 Hours (10pm on CBS) has new information about how and why law-enforcement fell short when Shannan Gilbert disappeared, as well as a focus on Lost Girls, which investigates the case and helps readers understand all the Long Island Serial Killer's victims, showing how they have been poorly served. Here, correspondent Erin Moriarty and I discuss the case on CBS This Morning.

- "Lost Girls: Author delves into the lives of Long Island serial killer's victims," CBS THIS MORNING

Interview with Susan Shepard

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The website Tits and Sass ran a Q&A with me and writer Susan Shepard.

"I did come away feeling that predators target people who are vulnerable, and what made these women vulnerable is that they worked in the shadows. The Internet might have put them on the grid, but ironically it also isolated them, so they hid what they did from view. No one close to them knew where they were at different moments, because their whole lives were so secretive. I think that for generations, we’ve tried stigmatizing sex work and we’re tried (many of us) pretending it just doesn’t exist and the people who do it don’t matter. None of that seems to have had any impact on demand for commercial sex. And that attitude turns women like this into targets for violence."

- "Bob Kolker on Lost Girls." 

"Remembering the Lost Girls" - Kirkus Interview

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Kolker joins the cast in the second half to facilitate movement between different points of view: He meets with the families, who reward his dedication  with intimate disclosures. He knocks on Hackett’s door and is invited in for a seemingly candid interview. Gilbert’s john, Joe Brewer, asks to be paid to tell him the truth. Barthelemy’s friend Kritzia takes him on a streetwalker’s tour of Times Square at night. “I end up entering the book exactly when I enter the story, as low profile as possible. I really didn’t want this book to be about my journey. All I wanted it to be about is the case and the families,” he says. In the initial draft, he was visible in Section 1, too, but revisions revealed that the women’s stories could stand on their own. This is a testament to Kolker’s researching and reporting. He counts himself a “huge fan” of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Alex Kotlowitz, and Lost Girls similarly fulfills the promise to move disadvantaged subjects from marginalization to the center of the page.

 

- Interview with Megan Labrise, KIRKUS

 

Interview in New York Observer

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Columnist Nina Burleigh wrote about Lost Girls and prostitution, reviewing the book and interviewing me:

By humanizing the women, Mr. Kolker has produced a subtle indictment of the sex trade. But he says that was not his intention. He got into the story when he learned that the families of the girls were meeting together and he joined them in New York. He expanded a magazine article into the book.
“I didn’t have a strong feelings about prostitution pro or con,” he said. “I wanted to write this book because the women surprised me. Their home lives were unstable, but no more unstable than those of thousands of other people in struggling parts of America.
“Their lives were a window not just into a new era of prostitution, but also a struggling segment of America that just doesn’t get written about often. There’s a level of despair in working-class communities around the country that we tend to overlook. These are places where prostitution might still be frowned upon but is nevertheless becoming a highly attractive option.”

- "Getting Off Easy: How Prostitutes Became the New Expendables," NEW YORK OBSERVER

 

New York Times Op-Ed: 'The New Prostitutes'

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"In the two years I’ve spent learning about the lives of all five women, I have found that they all defied expectations. They were not human-trafficking victims in the classic sense. They stayed close to their families. They all came to New York to take advantage of a growing black market — an underground economy that offered them life-changing money, and with a remarkably low barrier to entry. The real temptation wasn’t drugs or alcohol, but the promise of social mobility."

 

Robert Kolker, "The New Prostitutes," THE NEW YORK TIMES 

Interview with True Crime Diary

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I'm delighted to have spoken with the great Michelle McNamara for her amazing website, True Crime Diary. And very flattered that she said of Lost Girls: "The whodunit aspect of the story was compelling enough, but the vivid portraits of the victims and their families are what stayed with me.... The book’s greatest achievement, I think, is the delicate balance it strikes between compassion and suspense. The book’s quality instantly elevates the true crime genre; more importantly, I think it’s an important work of social commentary."

Interview with Robert Kolker (True Crime Diary)

PW: Telling the Victims' Stories

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In addition to a very nice starred review, Publisher's Weekly has run this short Q&A with me about Lost Girls.  Since it's behind a paywall, I've reproduced it here.  

​Telling the Victims’ Stories: PW Talks with Robert Kolker

By Lenny Picker | Apr 19, 2013

Reporter Robert Kolker examines the troubled lives and lurid ends of a quintet of call girls—possibly the victims of a serial killer (or killers)—in Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.

How did you find this story?

I first learned about the Long Island serial killer case in December 2010, when the first reports surfaced of the discovery of four skeletons, wrapped in burlap. When the police said they suspected the four victims were escorts, I figured the police would find the killer quickly. But then spring came around and the police still seemed without any leads—and then they found more bodies, and the story became something bigger and stranger than anyone imagined.

Did your emphasis shift as you continued to investigate it?

In the beginning, I hadn’t thought much about the victims. As I kept reporting and got to know the victims’ families, I became struck by how all the attention was on the crimes and the killer, and the victims were being overlooked. To me, the reason for this was obvious and unjust. If they had been fresh-faced middle-class girls, like the ones killed in the late 1970s by David Berkowitz, aka the “Son of Sam,” all of New York would have been in lockdown. But because they were prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist, they were considered almost expendable.

What did you learn about them?

That everything that was commonly assumed about them was wrong. They weren’t outcasts. They stayed in close touch with their families—their mothers and sisters, and, in some cases, boyfriends and children. These weren’t classic cases of human trafficking, either; they weren’t kidnapped or enslaved or held hostage as undocumented immigrants. What they had in common was that they all came from parts of the country the media overlooks—poor, struggling areas where becoming a prostitute might not have been the most desirable path, yet somehow has become a valid, almost normal option. What made the choice to be an escort easier than ever was [Web sites like] Craigslist and Backpage. Prostitutes no longer have to walk the streets or even work with agencies or pimps. The backdrop of an open murder case offered an ideal opportunity to write about the story of five young women’s lives and their families in a way that would make people rethink the mythology and clichés that our culture projects onto prostitution.

Do you think the murders will ever be solved?

Lately, I’ve been reading about more and more serial-killers who aren’t captured or discovered for decades. I would hate to think that would be the case here. Every month or so, there is still a new development or two in the case. Usually, it’s minor, but I keep hoping for a breakthrough.

​Publisher's Weekly