The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother's Hunt for Justice (Lighthouse Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an uncommonly good Lifetime movie with the awkward title The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother’s Hunt for Justice, vividly directed by Stanley M. Brooks with John Pielmeier as the sole writer. It was one of Lifetime’s “Ripped from the Headlines!” stories, and as in previous Lifetime films made under that rubric, the basis in a true story (even with a closing credit that admitted some characters and events had been fictionalized) helped discipline the writers and steered them away from the usual phony complications of Lifetime movies and in the direction of emotional as well as literal truth. The central character is a single mother in New York City named Mari Gilbert (Kim Delaney, who was also on the writing committee and who turns in a searing performance rivaling Frances McDormand’s Academy Award-winning turn in a very similar role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). She has two daughters, 24-year-old Shannan (Katharine Isabelle), who’s sharing an apartment with her boyfriend – a vaguely Asian-looking guy who shaves his head and isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page – and who turns tricks for a living because she can make a hell of a lot more money doing that than working at Walmart, seemingly her only other career choice; and teenager Sarra (Jessica McLeod). Both are diagnosed with mental illnesses, Shannen as bipolar and Sarra as schizophrenic.

One night Shannan, who’d been staying with her mom for a weekend, announces that she has a “date” that night and is picked up by her boyfriend, who’s taking the basic hooker’s protection by driving her to the gig and waiting for her outside in case there’s any trouble and she needs to be rescued and driven home in a hurry. Shannan doesn’t leave an exact address but scrawls an approximate location on a note pad in her mom’s place, which gives her a lead when she disappears and mom investigates. At first mom tries to get results through the Long Island police department, but the police can’t be bothered: the chief detective assigned to the case, Dominick Varrone (John Cassini), says the usual line about it takes time and patience for a case like this to be solved, though he does give Mari a helpful suggestion: he asks for a piece of clothing Shannen had recently worn and hadn’t been washed since so they can use it to have police dogs track a scent. The dogs don’t find Shannen but do find at least four other sets of remains of young women buried on the Long Island beach, and to the extent they can identify them they turn out to be “sex workers” (the au courant euphemism for prostitutes used throughout the script) who disappeared mysteriously.

In a grimly ironic twist in the tale, all but one of the bodies eventually found turn out to be genetically female – obviously the one that wasn’t belonged to a Transwoman who was working as a prostitute – and slowly as the police identify the remains (thanks to a sympathetic medical examiner who seems to be more interested in solving the case than the actual cops) Mari gets in touch with relatives or friends of the other victims, including a young Black woman (an appealing performance by Princess Davis) who was the roommate of Amber, another victim, and (it’s hinted) a “sex worker” herself. Mari traces Shannan’s boyfriend and also the “john” she was supposed to have sex for money with that night, and both recall that she fled the scene because she was in danger from somebody else and she spent 15 to 20 minutes on the phone to 911 in hopes of getting the police to respond before she was killed by the mystery person … only the cops didn’t come (later Mari is given the excuse that Shannen’s cell-phone signal was being “pinged” across so many towers the cops couldn’t locate it even though the call ran over 15 minutes. Of course, through much of this movie we’re beginning to wonder, “Aren’t 911 calls recorded?: Where’s the tape?”

Mari and the private investigator she hires, an African-American former police officer named Herc Zinnemann (Eugene Clark) who having been in the local police department knows what he’s up against, ultimately obtain the 911 call tape and Mari listens to it and thereby hears first-hand the last minutes of her daughter’s life. (In one of his few miscalculations, director Brooks overdubs a particularly loud and pretentious bit of music – a big orchestra with wordless choir – over the 911 tape so Mari gets to hear it but we don’t.) Meanwhile the Long Island Police Department gets a new chief, who’s been a detective on the force before and within two days of the discovery of Shannen’s body (there’s a marvelous scene in which Herc comes over to Mari’s place to notify her that Shannan has been found dead, Mari collapses in Herc’s arms, and just then Mari’s daughter Sarra comes down the stairs in the house, sees Herc holding Mari and her look of contempt immediately reveals that she thinks her mom and Herc have become lovers, and resents it) Varrone is fired from the department.

There’s a seemingly irrelevant scene whose importance becomes clear later: a young woman named Amy, who was a friend of one of the victims found at the beach, shows up at a party on her first night as a “sex worker,” is cruised by the new police chief and later narrates the story of what happened after that: he took her into a bathroom and tried to have her then and there, only he didn’t climax and he got mad at her and nearly strangled her while having sex with her, but still didn’t ejaculate. The chief becomes one of the suspects, and another suspect is a doctor who formerly worked with the police department who was on the scene with Shannan’s boyfriend and her john the night she disappeared – and who presumably could have given her drugs to make her helpless so he could kill her. In the end the doctor is arrested for two of the murders but we’re left with the impression that there were multiple killers all using the same part of the Long Island beach as a site to dump bodies; also some of the bodies were cut up (which certainly suggests someone with medical training) with different parts dumped in different locations. The FBI steps in and arrests the police chief and also the district attorney for corruption, and a title at the end mentions that the real Mari Gilbert also died by violence – her schizo daughter Sarra shot her in 2016 during a psychotic episode.

The Long Island Serial Killer: A Mother’s Hunt for Justice is that ultra-rare Lifetime movie that’s good enough to have been a theatrical feature: instead of silly plot devices and either overacting or underacting, we get a grim slice of life, with fully professional writing and direction and a quite powerful cast whose members seem to be inhabiting their roles rather than acting them. The writer or writers also deserve kudos for not making Mari Gilbert a secular saint; she has her weaknesses – notably incipient alcoholism that gets not so incipient as she downs bottle after bottle of wine to assuage her anguish at not only the disappearance and death of her daughter but her inability to get the police to move on the case and her growing suspicions that they don’t consider the deaths of a bunch of sex workers to be a high priority. I remember when cops frequently dismissed the murders of prostitutes with the acronym “NHI,” which stood for “No Humans Involved,” and it’s not that big a stretch from the police sloughing off the murders of hookers to the police getting freebies from the hookers and at the same time actively protecting their killers. It’s an excellent movie and the sort of diamond in the rough those of us who slog through innumerable Lifetime movies hoping for the occasional good ones are waiting for and gratified to discover – and I’d certainly be interested in watching any other film featuring any of these talents, either behind or in front of the camera!