49. Shannan Gilbert

Shannan Gilbert isn’t from Long Island, but police think she is here now, somewhere. She isn’t a billionaire. She isn’t a CEO. She doesn’t have a Ph.D. But in the few hours before she disappeared from Oak Beach, she spurred a chain of events that would lead cops to uncover one of the most shocking crime scenes in LI’s history—10 bodies, some mutilated, tossed in the brush in the shadows of million-dollar homes and beautiful beaches along Ocean Parkway. Because Gilbert disappeared on LI, four families were given back their missing daughters, the bodies of a young man and a child hidden for years were found, new evidence was discovered and new life breathed into multiple brutal homicide cases that had been cold for years. And police are closer to finding a madman—or two or three—who for nearly a decade has gone unnoticed.