Getting Away With Murder: Without a Serial Killer, Dead Prostitutes Just Don’t Matter

There are 23 miles and five parkways between the door of the Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge—the door Megan Waterman walked through for the last time before she disappeared from the view of surveillance cameras on June 6, 2010—to the orange arrows spray painted on Ocean Parkway where her body was found on a snowy, … Continue reading Getting Away With Murder: Without a Serial Killer, Dead Prostitutes Just Don’t Matter →

Girls Disappearing: Behind the Headlines of the Long Island Serial Killer Case

I don’t normally start my Fridays sweating it out, literally and figuratively, on New York City Department of Corrections’ private property, but I was working on a story about Long Island’s unidentified murder victims—men and women whose bodies had been found in suitcases, in plastic bags, cut in pieces and strewn about LI for years and, in some cases, decades. Many were prostitutes and likely never reported missing at all, like the woman Nassau detectives call “Peaches,” whose mutilated torso, with a peach tattoo on her left breast, was stuffed in a green Rubber Maid container found by a father and son hiking in Hempstead Lake State Park in the summer of 1997;

Long Island’s Other Serial Killer: Linking the Gilgo and Manorville Homicides

Halsey Manor Road stretches north and south, cutting straight through the western edge of Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens—more than 100,000 acres of protected wilderness running through the cozy hamlet of Manorville. There are a handful of houses, some farmhouses, others palatial three-story colonials carved out in tiny pockets along the road, with backyards stretching … Continue reading Long Island’s Other Serial Killer: Linking the Gilgo and Manorville Homicides →

Gilgo Victims’ Families: Shannan Gilbert Murdered

Family members of two murdered women found near Gilgo Beach last December held on to each other as Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer announced that human remains, most likely those of missing New Jersey woman Shannan Gilbert, were found Tuesday morning, exactly one year to the day the bodies of Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes … Continue reading Gilgo Victims’ Families: Shannan Gilbert Murdered →

Linking the Gilgo and Manorville Homicides

Eleven years after an unidentified woman was murdered and dismembered, her torso left in the Manorville Pine Barrens, the rest of her body—her hands, head, and leg—is found in the brush off Ocean Parkway. Seven years after Jessica Taylor was murdered and dismembered, her torso left in the Manorville Pine Barrens within miles of the … Continue reading Linking the Gilgo and Manorville Homicides →