Netflix's Lost Girls is a gripping true crime drama based on the real life story of a New York mother searching for her missing daughter. Arriving on Netflix earlier this month, Lost Girls has been appearing in the streaming service's newly implemented "Top 10" lists regularly. Lost Girls was directed by Liz Garbus and stars Amy Ryan as the tenacious mother, Thomasin Gilbert as a surviving daughter, and Gabriel Byrne and Dean Winter as police investigators on the case.
Often grim and dark, the Lost Girls movie on Netflix is inspired by the book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Murder by investigative journalist Robert Kolker. The book took a deep look at the victims of a notorious serial killer on Long Island. Known as the Gilgo Beach Killer, the murderer is suspected of killing up to sixteen people over the course of twenty years. Like so many other serial killers, this one also preyed on sex workers. The bodies of the sex workers, who used Craigslist to find their clients, were discovered on Oak Beach, which is located in Suffolk County on the south shore of Long Island.
Lost Girls is Netflix's fictionalized account of this true story. Rather than try to cover the sprawling story of a prolific serial killer's victims, it addresses one family's unwanted role in a murder mystery that affected so many. Lost Girls gains poignancy from this approach, and the focus here is on the real person Mari Gilbert of Ellenville, New York. In the movie, Mari seemingly dedicates her life to solving this crime. She does so much legwork in Lost Girls that Dean Winter's police detective barks at her to let the cops do the police work.
In real life, the events of Netflix's Lost Girls were indeed kicked into gear in 2010 by Mari Gilbert, a single mother of three daughters. Shannan, her twenty-four-year-old daughter, was living in the New York City vicinity and working in the sex industry. When Mari could not make contact with her, she reported that she had gone missing. Authorities proved to be unhelpful and did little to pursue the case. She then spent nineteen months pushing the police to take action on her disappearance. Her doggedness prompted Suffolk County police to open an investigation, which ultimately led to the discovery of eleven bodies in the same general area of Long Island, though at different times. Shannan's corpse was amongst them, found face up in marshlands in December 2011.
Netflix's Lost Girls pretty much ends there. However, in real life police initially suggested that Shannan had not been murdered, but drowned while disoriented and on drugs. Mari Gilbert strongly disagreed with that. In a recent statement said the evidence regarding Shannan Gilbert's cause of death was inconclusive, as reported by the Local Freeman, an upstate New York newspaper. However, her mother, who so desperately sought the truth, did not live to hear this. As noted at the end of Netflix's Lost Girls, she had been brutally murdered herself by her schizophrenic daughter Sarra Gilbert in 2016. Sarra Gilbert is currently serving twenty-five years to life in prison for the stabbing death of Mari Gilbert. The Gilgo Beach Killer remains at large.