http://nymag.com/news/features/long-...milies-2011-6/
....For three years, the NYPD had reported no trace of her—except,
in 2008, for one cell-phone-signal ping off a Long Island tower, just a few miles from Gilgo Beach. “Someone was trying to access Maureen’s cell-phone voice-mail,” .....
http://www.newsday.com/news/breaking/did-gilgo-victims-let-their-guards-down-1.2950472
Abandoning their own rules
Crystal DeBoise, co-director of the nonprofit Sex Workers Project in Manhattan, said most prostitutes -- from street walkers to high-end call girls -- develop safety rules. Many work only in hotels, others inform friends and pimps of their whereabouts and some even ask clients for references.
"Are there people who can't follow safety precautions all of the time? Yes, just like any industry, sometimes those rules are abandoned," DeBoise said.
Brainard-Barnes' sister still wonders how she ended up on Long Island. "My sister said she would never go outside the five boroughs," said Melissa Cann, 27, of New London, Conn. "She would only do in-calls at hotels where she knew that the front desk had security and video cameras."
Brainard-Barnes, a single mother from Norwich, Conn., struggling to support two children, was introduced to prostitution through a modeling job in Manhattan, her sister said.
To her family, it was an unexpected path for a bookish young woman who published poetry on her MySpace profile and invented games for her children. Brainard-Barnes insisted to her sister that it was not her full-time profession and in early 2007 she worked as a telemarketer.
By July, however, Brainard-Barnes had been laid off and faced eviction from her apartment, Cann said. On Friday, July 6, 2007, Brainard-Barnes left her children with their fathers, took a train to Manhattan, got a hotel room near Times Square and posted an ad on Craigslist, Cann said.
Brainard-Barnes did not return to Connecticut the following Monday, as she had promised, Cann said. She did call friends that day -- her last contacts before going missing. "There was nothing distressful," Cann said.
The next year, police contacted Cann and asked whether her sister had ever worked on Long Island. "Never," Cann replied.
Police then told Cann a surprising detail: Her last cellphone call pinged a tower on the South Shore, Cann said.