A Cruel Hoax
Despite the freezing December chill, twenty-four-year-old Rebecca Koster wore only a black tank top under her black puffy jacket on the evening of December 3, 2009. She wanted to look sexy that night and she didn’t have to work hard at it. Her petite frame, dark skin, and long, black, curly hair gave her an exotic look that attracted plenty of young men. She slipped her fur-topped boots over her tight light-blue jeans and sent a text message to her mother before she headed out to meet with her friends.
Rebecca’s mother, Barbara Ross, was working the graveyard shift as a nurse at a nearby hospital that night. She made her daughter promise she would message her when she got back home safe and sound, just as she always had.
It was a Wednesday night in Medford, New York, on Long Island. Like her mother, Rebecca was in the healthcare industry. Rebecca worked as a home health aide for the elderly and autistic children and, even though she had to be at work the next morning at 6:00 A.M., she was out to have a good time that night. Sleep be damned.
Rebecca and her boyfriend, Dan Mayor, drove to Holbrook where they met with her friend, Nicole Longo, and another female friend for drinks. As the night progressed, the four of them moved on to a livelier bar called Butcher Boys Bar and Grill.
She had only been dating twenty-eight-year-old Dan Mayor for two months. Dan was mesmerized by her dark brown eyes and infectious smile. He was in love. Rebecca, on the other hand, felt that the relationship was much more casual. To her, Dan was just a nice guy to hang out with and they got along fine. But as a long-term relationship—she wasn’t too sure yet. She was young, beautiful, had a promising career, and men fawned over her. She had no intention of settling down anytime soon.
Rebecca and her friends drank, chatted, and mingled with the local crowd while Dan played pool and spoke with other friends in the bar. On several occasions, Rebecca had to chase away men who offered to buy her drinks. Her beauty stood out in a crowd, so she was used to the constant attention. However, she was a bit shocked when one man, a little more aggressive than the rest, took her cell phone from her hand after she shot him down, entered his phone number into it, and handed it back to her. Rebecca just rolled her eyes as he walked away.
By midnight, Nicole was ready to go home for the night. She had to work in the morning and so did Rebecca. But Rebecca was having too much fun. If she went home now, she would still only get a few hours of sleep. Why even bother? Nicole had planned on giving Rebecca a ride home that night, but they agreed that Dan could give her a ride home later.
It was 3:30 A.M. before Dan Mayor and two friends dropped Rebecca off at her home on Falcon Avenue. Immediately after getting home, she messaged her mother to let her know she was home safe, just as she had promised.
* * *
The next morning, when Barbara Ross got home from her shift at the hospital, she checked Rebecca’s bedroom and saw that she was gone. “Good, she made it to work on time,” she thought. But when her work called to find out where she was, Barbara’s first instinct was anger. She assumed that Rebecca had stayed the night with Dan and slept in—that she had blown off work.
Barbara called Dan’s cell phone when there was no answer from Rebecca, but she was confused—Dan claimed she wasn’t with him. Barbara checked the garage and found Rebecca’s car. In her bedroom, her purse lay on the dresser with her driver’s license inside. Besides Rebecca herself, the only thing missing was her cell phone.
Barbara frantically called and texted her daughter’s cell phone, but there was still no answer. She called Nicole and the other friends she had been out with that night, but nobody knew where she was. Barbara knew that Rebecca had made it home that night because she had texted and her purse was there, but sometime after 3:30 she had simply vanished.
Barbara and her husband, Larry Ross, immediately contacted the police to report their daughter missing, but Rebecca was twenty-four. Although she lived with her parents, she was an adult and was allowed to come and go as she pleased. The police said they would work on the case but suggested the family give her some more time. She was probably fine and would come home on her own.
Rebecca’s family and friends were in no mood to wait. She was a responsible girl and there was no way she was fine if she hadn’t contacted them. Something was undeniably wrong and they were all panic-stricken. Their home became a makeshift command center. Rebecca’s friends and family gathered at the house, printed flyers, and went door to door in the area, hoping for any clue at all.
Rebecca and her family each had a smartphone app installed that tracked their location. Each time the app showed that her phone hit a cell phone tower, they could tell the approximate area of the phone. In 2009, the technology didn’t give pinpoint accuracy, but it gave them at least some idea of where her phone was.
Each time there was a new ping from a cell tower, several members of her friends and family alerted the police and went to search the area. They knocked on doors and talked to anyone they could, but there was just no sign of her.
Her family and friends couldn’t help but wonder if Dan Mayor had something to do with Rebecca’s disappearance. After all, he was the last one to see her and none of them really knew him very well. They had only been dating for two months. He could have easily come back to the house after she had messaged her mother. Perhaps he was jealous of all the attention that Rebecca was getting at the bar that night. Some of the family members were becoming convinced that he was keeping her somewhere against her will.
* * *
After three days, Rebecca’s family was losing hope when suddenly Barbara’s cell phone chimed. At last, it was a text message from Rebecca. However, any sign of hopefulness quickly turned to terror when she read the message.
“Dan has me tied up in the basement. I think I’m in Commack.”
Barbara immediately tried to call her but there was no answer. Then she messaged her back, “If you’re able to message me… just call 911!”
Panicked, they notified the police and the entire group of family and friends rushed to Dan’s house. When they arrived, the police were already there with grim looks on their faces. There was no sign of Rebecca. What’s more, after questioning Dan, detectives didn’t believe he was involved. He freely opened his house for them to search and was just as upset as Rebecca’s family and friends. But some of the family members were still convinced that Dan was somehow involved.
When the text had come in, Rebecca’s cell phone had pinged from Commack, twenty miles from their home. But when family members rushed over there, they found an industrial area strewn with warehouses and no sign of Rebecca. Then, just three hours after the first message, Barbara received another message:
“Don’t tell Dan about my text message or he will kill me.”
Again, Barbara messaged back telling her to call 911, but she was beginning to realize that the messages weren’t coming from Rebecca at all. The messages didn’t sound like her. They didn’t seem as though they were written by someone who was in a panic. And if she could take the time to send a text message, why wouldn’t she have just called 911? Barbara was beginning to realize it was all a cruel hoax.
Six days had passed since anyone had seen Rebecca. For a moment there was a glimmer of hope, but it was now clear that the text messages hadn’t come from Rebecca at all. Someone had her phone and was toying with the family, putting them through unnecessary agony.
The agony was amplified with dread when police arrived at the family home asking for DNA and hair samples from Rebecca’s hairbrush and toothbrush. The truth was, Rebecca had died before they even knew she was missing.
* * *
One day after Rebecca had gone missing, a brush fire was reported on the side of a road in North Sonnington, Connecticut, more than ninety miles from where Rebecca was last seen. When the fire department arrived, they realized that it wasn’t a brush fire at all. It was a burning body.
For the next five days, the body had been listed as a Jane Doe. Her body had been wrapped in a blanket. A plastic bag was over her head and sealed at the neck with duct tape. She had been dumped on the side of the road, doused in a flammable liquid, and set on fire.
When medical examiners assessed what was left of the body, they found that all fingers and toes had been cut off and her face had been mutilated. Someone had cut off her ears and nose in an attempt to hide piercings. Large areas of skin on her back and one ankle were also cut away to remove tattoos. The missing pieces were not found at the scene. She had been stabbed in the liver and her throat had been cut, which were the wounds that eventually killed her.
It took five days to identify the body of Rebecca Koster. Five days of hell that the family had been put through. The hoax text messages that Rebecca’s mother had received were sent two days after her death.
* * *
Rebecca Koster’s family and friends were beyond shocked by the news of her death. They had held out hope that she would miraculously return but it wasn’t to be. Not only had she died a horrible death, but the killer was still out there and had been playing a cruel, unnecessary joke on all of them. Most of them believed that horrible person to be Dan Mayor.
Investigators, however, were still collecting evidence and had their doubts that Dan had anything to do with the murder. If Dan was the killer, why would he have implicated himself in the text messages? It just didn’t make sense.
Investigators sifted through hours of video footage from Butcher Boys Bar and Grill surveillance footage. On the night Rebecca went missing, many men were seen approaching her and speaking briefly to her, but the one who grabbed her phone stood out. He was aggressive and Rebecca seemed annoyed at the altercation. The video footage, however, wasn’t enough to identify who he actually was. All they could tell was that he was a large African-American male.
Detectives pulled Rebecca’s cell phone records and found that just after she arrived home at 3:30 that morning, she received a phone call from a phone number with a Boston prefix. She didn’t answer the first time it rang, but when the person called back at 4:15 A.M., she answered and spoke to the person for twenty minutes. The clue, however, was a dead end. The phone was a pre-paid burner phone and there was no record of who had purchased it. Police believed the call was from the mysterious man that had grabbed Rebecca’s phone at the bar on the night she went missing. He had likely texted himself from her phone so he could get her phone number. Rebecca’s friends, however, had no idea who the man was. They had never seen him before.
One piece of evidence from the crime scene, however, proved to be useful. The duct tape that held the plastic bag around her head. Investigators were able to pull a fingerprint from the duct tape: it belonged to thirty-year-old Evans Ganthier from Central Islip, just seven miles from the Butcher Boys Bar and Grill.
Evans Ganthier was an unemployed graduate of Dowling College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Although he had no prior police record, a New York State business registration under the name Secrets Adult Entertainment Services suggested he may have been involved in some sort of escort agency. Perhaps he was trying to recruit Rebecca.
Ganthier matched the video footage from the bar surveillance video. Another security video from the early morning ferry from Long Island to Connecticut showed Evans Ganthier in his mother’s SUV on the morning of December 4. It turned out Rebecca’s dismembered body had been in the back of the SUV as he took that ferry to Connecticut. When the body had been found later that day, Ganthier had been checked into a hotel just around the corner.
When Ganthier was arrested on February 8, 2010, he freely admitted that he put his phone number into Rebecca Koster’s cell phone that night and called her at 4:15 A.M. It’s unknown how he lured her out of her house, but Ganthier claimed that Rebecca got into his car willingly. As they drove, he claimed that Rebecca began gagging and foaming at the mouth. Not knowing what to do, he told detectives that he took her to his house rather than taking her to a hospital.
Ganthier explained that he opened the garage door of his house and had planned to enter the house through the garage, but Rebecca tripped over barbells on his garage floor and hit her head on the floor. Ganthier claimed that she was bleeding profusely from the head and he put her back into his car to take her to the hospital, but she died on the way. The autopsy, however, showed he was lying. Rebecca had died from knife wounds to her neck and liver. There had been no sign of blunt force trauma to her head.
When detectives asked why he cut off her fingers, toes, ears, and nose and ripped the tattoos from her back and ankle, he replied, “I had the knife in my hand. I made a mistake. I can’t take it back.” Ganthier claimed her death was an accident and he only cut her up to hide her identity. He admitted that he then put her in the back of his mother’s SUV and took a ferry to Connecticut, dumped her body, and set it on fire. Ganthier had no excuse for why he had taunted the family by texting them after her death. Detectives believed it was a feeble an attempt to throw off the investigation with no consideration of the family’s emotions.
Four and a half years after her death, Rebecca Koster’s killer, Evans Ganthier, was tried and convicted of second-degree murder. He received the maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life in prison. Rebecca’s family will be waiting to protest when Ganthier is up for parole in 2023.
