Money fueled drug habit
Amber Costello's rule about staying out of a john's car came after a brutal lesson.
Her roommate Schaller, who helped her with clients, said he could recall her getting into a man's car only once -- after their session was over and he offered her a ride to a convenience store.
"She called me from the side of the Southern State Parkway. Her head was bleeding," Schaller recalled. "He had punched her three times in the face and left her on the side of the road."
Costello told her boyfriend, Bjorn Brodsky, 26, that sex work had been part of her life since she was 17. She was also a heroin addict, according to Schaller, Brodsky and her relatives.
A Wilmington, N.C., native, Costello did not graduate high school, married and divorced twice and bounced around jobs in North Carolina and Florida before moving to New York in late 2009. Schaller, a friend of Costello's sister Kimberly Overstreet and then a commercial fisherman, said he paid for her plane ticket.
She attended a 28-day rehab program at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, where Brodsky said he met her. Both of them relapsed into drug use by the following spring.
Costello bought a prepaid cellphone and uploaded a Craigslist post advertising herself as a private dancer named Carolina, Brodsky said.
"That phone never stopped ringing," he said.
Schaller allowed her to work from his home. He and Brodsky say they did not act as pimps for Costello. But one of them was usually in another room when she had clients over. There were rules: Clients came to her and paid $200 an hour; she went only as far as she wanted to; and if a client demanded more, she called out for Schaller or Brodsky. The men would make the client leave -- in some cases physically removing him.
"It was a very controlled environment," Schaller said.
By midsummer, Brodsky said, Costello was earning $7,000 a week.
"She would lay the cash down on the table and say, 'Here, you can have $3,000 and I'll take four,' " Brodsky said.
By August, Brodsky was back in rehab. Costello kept living with Schaller until her disappearance the next month. Her vanishing didn't immediately cause alarm, since she had left at other times as well.
But in December, when Costello was finally reported missing by her sister after remains were discovered at Gilgo, a homicide detective called Schaller. The investigator wanted details about her clients, especially regulars, and the last caller who persuaded her to go for a ride.
"It had to be somebody she was comfortable with," Schaller said. "Or maybe all that money just got her in the head."