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This story started back in 2010 when four bodies wrapped in burlap were discovered buried along a stretch of beach off Long Island. Because of the proximity and the similarities, authorities immediately suspected a serial killer.
Remains of the first body, that of a woman, were discovered on Saturday in an overgrown knot of sea grass and pitch scrub near Ocean Parkway, where the Atlantic Ocean pounds the island’s barrier beaches. A police dog led its handler there after the remote area, in Suffolk County, was chosen for K-9 training because of its proximity to where a young prostitute disappeared in May.
That discovery touched off another search, and on Monday, the remains of three more people, at least one of them a woman, were found in the brush near Ocean Parkway, separated by hundreds of feet and spread over a quarter mile. The parkway runs from Jones Beach, which is about 14 miles west, past Oak Beach, to Captree State Park.
On Tuesday, as the authorities sought to illuminate possible connections among the corpses, Richard Dormer, the commissioner of the Suffolk County Police Department, said it seemed clear that the grouping of the victims had not been happenstance.
“It’s not a coincidence that four bodies turned up in the same location,” Commissioner Dormer said at a news conference at the department’s headquarters, in Yaphank. “It appears as though somebody targeted these individuals and dumped them.”
Eventually, it became clear that all of the bodies were those of women who had been working as escorts on Craigslist. The search expanded and more bodies were found but the case seemed to stall after that.
Within months, the remains of as many as 16 victims had been found, from Gilgo Beach stretching out east to the pine barrens of Manorville. And yet for a decade, the police have announced not a single suspect or person of interest. Months passed, then years, with no comment from the department about the case.
