Richard Dormer said the SG death and GB4 are not related. A reason he gave for that conclusion is with the GB4 the gals apparently got to their dates on their own power. In SG's case she was driven there and being driven there suggests a witness to a murder. In other words he is saying the killer(s) had no intention of killing SG. OK, perfectly reasonable thing to consider but not nearly enough to exclude SG from the rest of the cases.
I think if we really knew what was going on we would find the killer(s) had no intention of killing any of the GB4.
Speaking of, this reminds me of a Suffolk County meeting minutes I stumbled across some time ago.
Excerpted, with link at end:
[excerpt from page 9]
Just to give you a quick overview of where the case is, and forgive me because I know most of you know all of this, but I'll just mention it. Of course this whole case started with the disappearance of Shannon Gilbert which occurred on May 1st -- almost a year ago, a few more days -- and Shannon Gilbert was a young woman who advertised on Craig's List. On the day in question she left her home in Jersey, took a train into Manhattan where she engaged in one, maybe two tricks, and she had a driver who was contacted by an individual in the Oak Beach Association and she was taken there at approximately two o'clock in the morning.
She spent a couple of hours with that client and then she became disoriented, confused. We're not exactly -- what happened, we have some ideas; we believe drugs may have been involved. And that led to a 911 call which went to our operator initially, but she had no idea where she was and all she remembered was Jones Beach on her way out there. And once she relayed that she thought she was at or near Jones Beach, that call was relayed to the New York State Police, and she was on the phone for about 18 minutes and then she was disconnected.
[...]
So number one was the first set of remains that John Malia found, and everyone, everyone thought that it was Shannon Gilbert. We continued the search within the ensuing days to broaden the crime scene, and much to our surprise we found other remains and continuing the search more and more, initially, then, within those few days in December, finding four sets of remains. As you see listed, Maureen Brainard Barnes, who had been reported missing in July of 2007, last seen in New York City; Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in July, 2009 in New York City; Shannon Gilbert, we
haven't -- still not part of this; Megan Waterman, June 6th, 2010, last seen in Hauppauge; and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen on September 2nd, 2010 in West Babylon, right around the corner from where I live, in fact.
The common denominator with these missing persons, they had all advertised on Craig's List. Some of them, the initial investigations on Barnes and Barthelemy were conducted by NYPD; these were cold cases for the most part. We took over the investigation, again, with the belief that some of the remains or one of them would have been Shannon Gilbert. Forensic -- our Medical Examiner had entered into an agreement with the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, their Forensic Anthropologist, and that served us very well. Brad Adams, nationally recognized, kind of was instrumental in doing the forensic analysis of the remains that were found and we were able to quickly -- they were able to quickly identify the four.
A task force was created, a homicide task force, involving three immediate supervisors and
13 -- about 13 Detectives. We took the best of our best, we took a couple of our best people in cell phone technology as well as computer forensics and assigned them to this task force; we've been working on the case ever since. The FBI was contacted and brought in in December, we had a number of contacts with their Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. Many of us, almost the entire command staff of the Suffolk County Police, have gone through the FBI National Academy, we're well aware of their abilities and capabilities; many of us trained down there, myself included. We were in phone consultation with them and then finally in February of 2011 they flew up an entire team of their investigators from the Quantico unit. They spent a couple of days with us, we took them to the sites where we recovered the remains, we showed them everything that we had in the case. We sat down at a round table and brainstormed and discussed all the ramifications and possibilities and discussed various investigative strategies and we've been consulting with them since.
[...]
More in PDF at link:
http://legis.suffolkcountyny.gov/clerk/cmeet/ps/2011/PS050511.pdf