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Tag: Serial murder

  • Notorious New York City-area ‘Torso Killer’ confesses to 1965 killing

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    FAIR LAWN, N.J. — One of the New York City area’s most notorious serial killers has confessed to another killing.

    Police in New Jersey announced Tuesday that Richard Cottingham, known as the “Torso Killer,” admitted killing Alys Eberhardt in 1965.

    The 18-year-old was found dead in her family’s home in Fair Lawn, a suburb about 12 miles (19 kilometers) northwest of Manhattan.

    Investigators reopened the cold case in 2021, and “through countless interviews” over several years, extracted a full confession from Cottingham, “including details that were never publicly known,” the department said in a statement.

    Fair Lawn Police Chief Joseph Dawicki said Cottingham will not face additional charges as the department closes the case.

    The 79-year-old has been imprisoned since his arrest in 1980. He is serving three life sentences at the South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

    “Alys was a vibrant young nursing student who was taken from our community far too soon,” Dawicki said in a statement. “While we can never bring her back, I am hopeful that her family can find some peace knowing the person responsible has confessed and can no longer harm anyone else.”

    Lawyers in New York and New Jersey who have represented Cottingham over the years didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday.

    Cottingham has claimed responsibility for up to 100 homicides going back to the 1960s, though authorities in New York and New Jersey have officially linked him to about a dozen.

    In 2022, he admitting killing five women in the New York City suburbs of Long Island in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

    He was sentenced to 25 years to life for the 1968 slaying of 23-year-old Diane Cusick but received immunity from prosecution for the four other killings as part of the plea deal.

    Cottingham was previously convicted of killing five other women — three in New York City and two in northern New Jersey. He has since admitted to killing several others while behind bars.

    He is known as the “Torso Killer” because he dismembered some of his victims.

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  • Gilgo Beach murders: A key test in use of advanced DNA techniques in criminal trials

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    RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — When Maureen Brainard-Barnes’ skeletal remains were found hidden in the roadside scrub near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in the winter of 2010, there was hardly any physical evidence that might help investigators find her killer, save for a single stray hair.

    But at the time, extracting DNA evidence from the degraded strand was beyond the capabilities of crime labs. Investigators kept looking for other clues that might help them identify a suspected serial killer who had scattered women’s bodies along a coastal parkway.

    Then, about seven years ago, investigators turned to Astrea Forensics, a California lab using new techniques to analyze old, highly degraded DNA samples — including rootless hairs like the one discovered with Brainard-Barnes’ body.

    Now, that lab’s work is the focus of a pivotal decision in the closely watched case. A state judge is weighing whether to allow the DNA evidence generated through Astrea Forensics’ whole genome sequencing into the trial of Rex Heuermann, who is accused of killing 25-year-old Brainard-Barnes and six other women.

    If allowed, it would mark the first time such techniques could be admitted in a New York court, and one of just a handful of such instances nationwide, according to prosecutors, defense lawyers and experts.

    Prosecutors say Astrea’s findings, combined with other evidence, overwhelmingly implicate Heuermann, 61, as the killer.

    But lawyers for the Manhattan architect argue the company’s calculations exaggerate the likelihood that the hairs recovered from the burial sites match their client.

    “You can imagine the pressure that’s on this judge because he’s probably more than likely making a ruling that will set the stage for all the cases that come after,” said April Stonehouse, a DNA forensics expert at Arizona State University who is not involved in the case.

    DNA analysis is no longer new, but the tests typically used by criminal labs across the country have limitations.

    Astrea is one of a small but growing number of private labs that say they are capable of taking extremely short DNA fragments found in very old bones and hair and using them to reconstruct a person’s entire genetic sequence, or genome.

    During court testimony, experts called by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office highlighted how scientists use similar techniques in a wide range of scientific and medical work, such as mapping the genome of the Neanderthal — an effort awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

    Astrea Forensics’ co-founder, Dr. Richard Green, described in court how his lab’s whole genome sequencing results were allowed as evidence in last year’s trial and conviction of David Allen Dalrymple in the cold-case murder of 9-year-old Daralyn Johnson in Idaho.

    Heuermann’s lawyers argue that Astrea’s DNA methods haven’t been subjected to enough scrutiny yet, and warned they needed more evaluation because they had the potential to “dramatically reshape” how forensics is used in criminal trials.

    They zeroed in on the statistical analysis Green’s lab conducted on the DNA profiles it generated from the hairs recovered from the victims’ remains, saying it was potentially overstating the likelihood that a mapped genome was a match with any particular person.

    For its calculations, Astrea Forensics uses reference data from an open-source database containing the full DNA sequence of some 2,500 people worldwide, called the 1,000 Genomes Project.

    Dr. Dan Krane, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio, testified for the defense that Astrea Forensics’ methods were “wildly and unfairly prejudicial.”

    Prosecutors countered that Krane’s critique was “misguided” and revealed a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the lab’s methods.

    William Thompson, a professor emeritus of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, who is not involved in the case, agreed with the defense that Astrea Forensics’ statistical analysis was “unvalidated” and lacked wide acceptance in the scientific community.

    “This new technique may eventually be proven to live up to the claims of its promoters, but that hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

    But Nathan Lents, a biology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, who is also not involved in the case, disagreed, suggesting the “mathematical quibble” didn’t warrant dismissing the evidence outright.

    “The bottom line is that there are genuine scientific concerns with the way that the statistics are computed, but not with the laboratory techniques,” he said. “The concerns are real, but the likelihood ratios still look very damning for the defense, no matter how they are computed.”

    Prosecutors have amassed other evidence against Heuermann, who is accused of killing women as early as 1993.

    In court filings, they say cellphone call information and tracking data show that Heuermann arranged meetings with some of the victims shortly before their disappearances.

    Last year, prosecutors revealed they had recovered from Heuermann’s computer files what they describe as a “blueprint” for the killings, including a series of checklists with reminders to limit noise, clean the bodies and destroy evidence.

    They also have a second DNA analysis completed by a separate crime lab that used more traditional methods long accepted in New York courts. They say those findings, from Mitotyping Technologies, also convincingly link hairs found on some victims to either Heuermann or members of his family.

    Investigators say that as he disposed of his victims, Heuermann used items from his house — including tape, belts, bags and a surgical drape — that had traces of hair from his wife and daughter.

    In Brainard-Barnes’ case, though, only the advanced DNA tests performed by Astrea identified a match, finding the hair found with her remains belonged to Heuermann’s wife.

    New York State Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei is expected to announce whether he’ll allow Astrea’s DNA work into the trial during a Wednesday hearing in Riverhead.

    ___

    Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

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  • DNA investigation links California serial killer to 1986 killing of young woman near Los Angeles

    DNA investigation links California serial killer to 1986 killing of young woman near Los Angeles

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    LOS ANGELES — The long-unsolved 1986 killing of a young Southern California woman has been linked to a convicted serial killer who admitted the crime, authorities said Tuesday.

    DNA from the killing of Cathy Small, 19, matched William Suff, who was sentenced to death after being convicted in 1995 of 12 murders that occurred in Riverside County from 1989 to 1991, said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Patricia Thomas.

    Suff was known as the Riverside prostitute killer or the Lake Elsinore killer, Thomas told a news conference. He was also convicted in 1974 in the death of his 2-month-old daughter in Tarrant County, Texas, and despite being sentenced to 70 years in prison he was paroled to California in 1984.

    Small’s body was found on a street in South Pasadena, a small Los Angeles suburb, at 7 a.m. on Feb. 22, 1986. Clad in a nightgown, Small was found to have been stabbed and strangled.

    She was a Jane Doe until a resident of Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of South Pasadena, called detectives and said that after reading a news story about the killing he was concerned that it could a local prostitute who lived with him for several months.

    The resident identified Small and told investigators that the night before she was found dead she had told him a man named Bill was picking her up and giving her $50 to drive with him to Los Angeles, Thomas said.

    The case nonetheless remained unsolved for years.

    In 2019, an LA county medical examiner’s investigator contacted homicide detectives after responding to the natural death of a 63-year-old man found on a couch in a South Pasadena house across the street from where Small’s body was left.

    “The coroner’s investigator observed several disturbing items in the house, numerous photos of women who appeared to have been assaulted and held against their will, possibly by the decedent,” Thomas said.

    In his bedroom there was a newspaper article about the identification of Small as the victim of the 1986 killing, she said.

    Detectives went through the Small killing file and discovered that the evidence was never subjected to DNA testing. Subsequent testing matched Suff and another unknown man, but not the man found on the couch, who was not linked to any crimes, Thomas said.

    In 2022, detectives interviewed Suff over two days at a Los Angeles County jail.

    “He confessed and discussed in detail the murder of Cathy Small,” Thomas said. “He also discussed and admitted to some of the previous murders in Riverside County.”

    Investigators are not expected to seek to try Suff in the Small killing because of his prior convictions and pending death sentence. There has been a moratorium on the death penalty in California since 2019.

    Small had two small children and a younger sister, authorities said. Thomas read a letter from the sister, who was not able to travel to the news conference.

    “My sister, Cathy Small, was not a statistic,” the letter said. “She was a protective big sister, a loving mother, and a good daughter. Kathy was funny, smart, and caring. She had a big heart and would do anything for anyone.”

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  • Mexican police investigate man as possible serial killer after finding bones and saw

    Mexican police investigate man as possible serial killer after finding bones and saw

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexico City police said late Friday they are investigating a murder suspect as a possible serial killer after bones, a saw, blood and the ID cards of missing women were found at rooms he rented.

    Mexico City prosecutors did not identify the suspect by name, but said that he was being held over for trial on charges of murder and attempted murder of two women.

    Those charges stemmed from a brazen attack Tuesday in which the suspect apparently waited for a woman to briefly leave her apartment. He then rushed in and sexually abused and strangled her 17-year-old daughter.

    The mother returned and saw him leaving, but he slashed her in the neck and fled. The mother survived but her daughter did not.

    Because the suspect lived near the scene of the crime, he was quickly identified and caught. In keeping with Mexican law, police identified him only by his first name, Miguel.

    When investigators carried out a search of an apartment he rented nearby, they found shocking evidence “that clearly indicate we are looking at a possible serial killer of women,” according to city prosecutor Ulises Lara.

    Lara said that during the search of the apartment, detectives found “biological material” — he did not specify whether that was flesh — blood stains, bones, a saw, cell phones and missing women’s ID cards.

    Most chilling, they found “a series of notebooks that may well be narrations of the acts that Miguel carried out against his victims,” Lara said.

    Lara did not say how many sets of bones or ID cards had been found, but local media reported figures ranging from seven to as many as 20 possible victims.

    Whatever the number, Mexico City authorities have been plagued by questions about why they do so little to investigate the cases of missing women — until their bodies turn up.

    Without proper funding, training or professionalism, prosecutors in Mexico have routinely failed to stop killers until the bodies pile up so high they are almost unavoidable.

    In 2021, a serial killer in a Mexico City suburb was only caught after years of alleged crimes — 19 bodies were found hacked up and buried at his house — because of the identity of the final dismembered victim: the wife of a police commander.

    In 2018, a serial killer in Mexico City responsible for the deaths of at least 10 women was caught only after he was found pushing a dismembered body down the street in a baby carriage. He dumped most of the bodies of his victims in vacant lots.

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  • Idaho is set to execute a long-time death row inmate, a serial killer with a penchant for poetry

    Idaho is set to execute a long-time death row inmate, a serial killer with a penchant for poetry

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    BOISE, Idaho — For nearly 50 years, Idaho’s prison staffers have been serving Thomas Eugene Creech three meals a day, checking on him during rounds and taking him to medical appointments.

    This Wednesday, some of Idaho’s prison staffers will be asked to kill him. Barring any last-minute stay, the 73-year-old, one of the nation’s longest-serving death row inmates, will be executed by lethal injection for killing a fellow prisoner with a battery-filled sock in 1981.

    Creech’s killing of David Jensen, a young, disabled man who was serving time for car theft, was his last in a broad path of destruction that saw Creech convicted of five murders in three states. He is also suspected of at least a half-dozen others.

    But now, decades later, Creech is mostly known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as just “Tom,” a generally well-behaved old-timer with a penchant for poetry. His unsuccessful bid for clemency even found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.

    “Some of our correctional officers have grown up with Tom Creech,” Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt said Friday. “Our warden has a long-standing relationship with him. … There’s a familiarity and a rapport that has been built over time.”

    Creech’s attorneys have filed a flurry of last-minute appeals in four different courts in recent months trying to halt the execution, which would be Idaho’s first in 12 years. They have argued Idaho’s refusal to say where its execution drug was obtained violates his rights and that he received ineffective assistance of counsel.

    A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected an argument that Creech should not be executed because he was sentenced by a judge rather than a jury.

    It’s not clear how many people Creech, an Ohio native, killed before he was imprisoned in Idaho in 1974. At one point he claimed to have killed as many as 50 people, but many of the confessions were made under the influence of now discredited “truth serum” drugs and filled with outlandish tales of occult-driven human sacrifice and contract killings for a powerful motorcycle gang.

    Official estimates vary, but authorities tend to focus on 11 deaths. Creech’s attorneys did not immediately return phone calls from The Associated Press.

    In 1973, Creech was tried for the murder of 70-year-old Paul Schrader, a retiree who was stabbed to death in the Tucson, Arizona, motel where Creech was living. Creech used Schrader’s credit cards and vehicle to leave Tucson for Portland, Oregon. A jury acquitted him, but authorities say they have no doubt he was responsible.

    The next year, Creech was committed to Oregon State Hospital for a few months. He earned a weekend pass and traveled to Sacramento, California, where he killed Vivian Grant Robinson at her home. Creech then used Robinson’s phone to let the hospital know he would return a day late. That crime went unsolved until Creech later confessed while in custody in Idaho; he wasn’t convicted until 1980.

    After he was released from the Oregon State Hospital, Creech got a job at a church in Portland doing maintenance work. He had living quarters at the church, and it was there he shot and killed 22-year-old William Joseph Dean in 1974. Authorities believe he then fatally shot Sandra Jane Ramsamooj at the Salem grocery store where she worked.

    Creech was finally arrested in November 1974. He and a girlfriend were hitchhiking in Idaho when they were picked up by two painters, Thomas Arnold and John Bradford. Creech shot both men to death and the girlfriend cooperated with authorities.

    While in custody, Creech confessed to a number of other killings. Some appeared to be fabricated, but he provided information that led police to the bodies of Gordon Lee Stanton and Charles Thomas Miller near Las Vegas, and of Rick Stewart McKenzie, 22, near Baggs, Wyoming.

    Creech initially was sentenced to death for killing the painters. But after the U.S. Supreme Court barred automatic death sentences in 1976, his sentence was converted to life in prison.

    That changed after he killed Jensen, who was serving time for car theft. Jensen’s life hadn’t been easy: He suffered a nearly fatal gun injury as a teen that left him with serious disabilities including partial paralysis.

    Jensen’s relatives opposed Creech’s bid for clemency. They described Jensen as a gentle soul and a prankster who loved hunting and spending time outdoors, who was “the peanut butter” to his sister’s jelly. His daughter, who was 4 when he was killed, spoke of how she never got to know him, and how unfair it was that Creech is still around when her father isn’t.

    Creech’s supporters, meanwhile, say decades spent in a prison cell have left him changed. One death row prison staffer told the parole board last month that while she cannot begin to understand the suffering Creech dealt to others, he is now a person who makes positive contributions to his community. His execution date will be difficult for everyone at the prison, she said, especially those who have known him for years.

    “I don’t want to be dismissive of what he did and the countless people who were impacted by that in real significant ways,” said Tewalt, the corrections director. “At the same time, you also can’t be dismissive of the effect it’s going to have on people who have established a relationship with him. On Thursday, Tom’s not going to be there. You know he’s not coming back to that unit — that’s real. It would be really difficult to not feel some sort of emotion about that.”

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  • Gilgo Beach serial killing suspect returning to court as prosecutors plan major announcement

    Gilgo Beach serial killing suspect returning to court as prosecutors plan major announcement

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    RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — Prosecutors say they are planning a major announcement in their investigation of the suspected serial murders of a group of women whose bodies were found strewn along a coastal highway near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach.

    The prime suspect in some of those killings, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday, months after he was charged in the deaths of three women. Prosecutors had also said they were working to charge him with a fourth slaying.

    Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney is set to make the announcement after a court hearing in the case in Riverhead, New York.

    Heuermann was charged in July with the killings of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, whose bodies were found buried along a remote beach parkway. Prosecutors said Heuermann is also suspected in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who vanished in 2007.

    He has pleaded not guilty and has been held without bail at Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead.

    The arrest of Heuermann, a 60-year-old architect, came more than a decade after police searching for a missing woman found 10 sets of human remains hidden in the thick underbrush near Gilgo Beach.

    The deaths had long stumped investigators and fueled immense public attention on Long Island and beyond, with the killings leading to the 2020 Netflix film “Lost Girls.” Authorities suspected that a serial killer committed some of the slayings but have said they don’t believe all the victims were killed by the same person. The majority of the killings are still unsolved.

    Heuermann was first identified as a suspect in 2022 when detectives linked him to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared.

    The following year, detectives tailing Heuermann recovered his DNA from pizza crust in a box that he discarded in a Manhattan trash can and matched it to a hair found on a restraint used in the killings, authorities said.

    Heuermann had worked as a licensed architect with a Manhattan-based firm and lived in Massapequa Park, a suburb close to the spot where the bodies were found.

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  • Jamaica police charge man suspected of being a serial killer with 4 counts of murder

    Jamaica police charge man suspected of being a serial killer with 4 counts of murder

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    Police in Jamaica have charged a man they suspect is a serial killer involved in the deaths of at least four people with murder

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 11, 2023, 9:38 AM

    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Police in Jamaica have charged a man they suspect is a serial killer involved in the deaths of at least four people with murder.

    The 25-year-old man from Montego Bay is accused of fatally stabbing at least two homeless men, an older woman and a young man in July and August, police said in a statement Sunday.

    All the victims were found stabbed in the parish of St. James, where the popular tourist destination of Montego Bay is located.

    The investigation is ongoing.

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  • Oklahoma authorities name the BTK killer as the ‘prime suspect’ in at least two unsolved cases

    Oklahoma authorities name the BTK killer as the ‘prime suspect’ in at least two unsolved cases

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    The BTK serial killer has been named the “prime suspect” in two unsolved killings — one in Oklahoma and another in Missouri — leading authorities to dig this week near his former Kansas property in Park City, authorities announced Wednesday.

    Osage County, Oklahoma, Undersheriff Gary Upton told The Associated Press that the investigation into whether Dennis Rader was responsible for additional crimes started with the re-examination last year of the 1976 disappearance of Cynthia Kinney, a 16-year-old cheerleader in Pawhuska. The case, which was investigated on and off over the years, was reopened in December.

    Sheriff Eddie Virden told KAKE-TV that a bank was having new alarms installed across the street from the laundromat where Kinney was last seen. Radar was a regional installer for ADT at the time, although the sheriff wasn’t able to confirm that Rader installed the systems. He also was involved in Boy Scouts in the area.

    Virden said he decided to investigate when he learned that Rader had included the phrase “bad laundry day” in his writings.

    Upton, the undersheriff, said the investigation “spiraled out from there” into other unsolved murders and missing persons cases.”

    “We sit just on the other side of the state line from Kansas and Wichita, which is his stomping grounds. And so yeah, we were following leads based off of our investigations and just unpacked other missing persons and murders, unsolved homicides that possibly point towards BTK,” he said.

    Upton said Rader is also the prime suspect in the death of 22-year-old Shawna Beth Garber, whose body was discovered in December 1990 in McDonald County, Missouri. An autopsy revealed she had been raped, strangled and restrained with different bindings about two months before her body was found. Her remains weren’t identified until 2021.

    Rader’s taunting killing spree started in 1974 and ended in 1991.

    A city code inspector in Kansas, he was arrested in February 2005 — a year after resuming communications with police and the media after going silent years earlier. In earlier communications, he gave himself the nickname BTK — for “bind, torture and kill.”

    BTK resurfaced in 2004 with a letter to The Wichita Eagle that included photos of a 1986 strangling victim and a photocopy of her missing driver’s license. That letter was followed by several other cryptic messages and packages. The break in the case came after a computer diskette the killer had sent was traced to Rader’s church, where he once served as president.

    Rader, now 78, ultimately confessed to 10 killings in the Wichita area, which is about 90 miles (144.84 kilometers) north of Pawhuska. The crimes occurred between 1974 and 1991.

    He was sentenced in August 2005 to 10 consecutive life prison terms. Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the murders. His earliest possible release date is listed for the year 2180.

    An Associated Press phone message seeking comment from the McDonald County Sheriff’s Office was not immediately returned Wednesday.

    Upton declined to say how many other missing person and homicide cases are being re-examined, but told the AP that Rader could be a suspect in more cases.

    No information has been released yet about what the search Tuesday in Park City uncovered. Upton described the discoveries only as “items of interest,” in a news release. The release said the items would undergo a thorough examination to determine their potential relevance.

    Upton said his department is working with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The KBI didn’t immediately respond to an email message from the AP seeking comment.

    Phil Bostian, the police chief in the Wichita suburb of Park City, told KAKE-TV that Osage County called them as a courtesy and said they asked public works to move some cement and do a little digging.

    Police there didn’t immediately return a phone message from the AP seeking comment.

    The Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense didn’t immediately return a phone message inquiring about Rader still has an attorney representing him.

    Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, told the Wichita Eagle that she worked with investigators this summer by meeting with her father in person and communicating with him for the first time in years. Rawson told Fox News that she believes investigators were looking for items related to the unsolved cases that Rader may have kept and buried on his property under a metal shed he built. The shed and Rader’s former home have been leveled.

    Rawson said she also told investigators to check where Rader buried the family dog. She said she hopes investigators can determine if her father is linked to any of these other cases. “I’m still not 100% sure my dad did commit any more at this point,” she said to the newspaper, adding: “If my dad has harmed somebody else, we need answers.”

    ___

    This story has been corrected to show that undersheriffs last name is Upton, not Upston.

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  • Breakthrough in Long Island serial killings shines light on the many unsolved murders of sex workers

    Breakthrough in Long Island serial killings shines light on the many unsolved murders of sex workers

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    ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The discovery of four dead women in a drainage ditch just outside Atlantic City was shocking news in 2006.

    International media flocked to the seaside gambling resort. More than 100 detectives and prosecutors were assigned to investigate. Casino guests worried about safety, and the victims’ fellow sex workers began carrying hidden knives.

    But as the years passed, the public’s attention and fear faded, and the case of the “Eastbound Strangler” – so named for the direction the victims’ heads were facing – remained unsolved.

    The arrest earlier this month of a man charged with killing three women whose remains were found on a Long Island beach in 2010 has breathed fresh life into another long-dormant case with obvious parallels; the Gilgo Beach serial killings involve a total of 11 victims, most of whom were young, female sex workers. Yet the recent breakthrough, and the rekindling of public interest, only highlights a painful truth: Many similar cases – like the one in Atlantic City — remain open.

    The FBI would not say how many killings of sex workers in the U.S. remain unsolved. Media accounts and statements from local authorities show a long trail of open cases, from nine women whose bodies were found along highways in Massachusetts, to 11 found dead in New Mexico, and eight more found amid the crawfish farms and swamps of southern Louisiana. The killings of other sex workers in Chicago, New Haven, Connecticut and Ohio, among other places, also remain mysteries.

    From the days of London’s Jack The Ripper in the 1880s, serial killers, particularly those preying on sex workers, have often gotten away with it, in part because their victims were easy targets living on the margins of society.

    Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River killer convicted of 49 killings in Washington state, said at during a 2003 court hearing in which he pleaded guilty that he chose sex workers as victims because he knew they would not be missed quickly, if at all.

    “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught,” he said.

    Two women were out for an afternoon walk near Atlantic City in November 2006 when they found a body in a ditch. They called police, who quickly found three others nearby.

    The $15-a-night motel in Egg Harbor Township behind which the four bodies were found is long gone. It was torn down in an attempt to clear a seedy area known for crime, drugs and disturbances – and the murders of Barbara Breidor, 42, Molly Jean Dilts, 20, Kim Raffo, 35, and Tracy Ann Roberts, 23.

    Because it is near the ocean, like Gilgo Beach, the location has prompted much speculation by amateur detectives about a single killer, but some other online sleuths have pointed out that oceanside areas are often the remotest locations after hours on the densely packed East Coast. Gilgo Beach is about 3.5 hours drive from Atlantic City.

    Gone in New Jersey are the four small wooden crosses someone erected on the site, along with the folded-up paper note bearing a Biblical quote promising justice that someone left there on one of the anniversaries of the discovery of the bodies.

    For families left behind, each new day without word in the case of their loved one brings fresh pain.

    “I kind of lost hope that anyone was even searching for the killer anymore,” said Joyce Roberts, whose daughter Tracy Ann was one of the four Atlantic City-area victims. “The first six months, the prosecutor did get on the phone with me and told me they were working on it.

    “Then it just fell off the radar,” she said. “It was like nobody cared anymore.”

    That is a sentiment echoed by Phoenix Calida, a former sex worker from Chicago who now advocates for them through the Sex Workers Outreach Project.

    “Police departments often refer to it as an ‘NHI’ case: No humans involved,” she said. ”You feel like the only way you’ll be remembered is when they catch the serial killer who killed you, and then they’ll make five movies about him and no one will remember your name.”

    Massachusetts State Police are investigating “nine unsolved homicides possibly committed by the same person,” said David Procopio, a spokesperson for the agency. He said two additional missing persons cases may be homicides related to the other nine.

    Gilbert Gallegos, a spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department, said the New Mexico cases remain actively investigated, with “multiple detectives” working them. The 11 victims were all involved in drugs and prostitution, police said.

    A reward of $100,000 has been offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case, which involved two victims who were just 15 years old.

    Despite the decade-long efforts of a local, state and federal task force, Louisiana has at least eight unsolved apparent homicide cases involving sex workers between the ages of 17 and 30. Their bodies were found in marshy areas in Jennings, a small town in the area known as Cajun Country, between 2005 and 2009.

    Prosecutors in New York’s Suffolk County investigating the Gilgo Beach cases have been in touch with multiple law enforcement agencies, but District Attorney Ray Tierney would not say which ones.

    “Everything is being examined and looked at, and this is an active investigation,” said Anthony Carter, Suffolk County’s deputy police commissioner. He would not say if his agency was investigating any connection between Heuermann and the Atlantic City murders.

    Atlantic County Prosecutor William Reynolds said the four cases from the drainage ditch outside Atlantic City remain active, with detectives assigned to them, but would not say how many. He declined comment on the Long Island case “as we are not involved.”

    Joyce Roberts, the victim’s mother, said no one from law enforcement has called her since the arrest was made in the Long Island cases.

    Police in Las Vegas, where Heuermann owns a time share, said they are investigating whether Heuermann may be involved in cases involving the killings of sex workers there.

    In the months immediately after the bodies’ discovery near Atlantic City, the local prosecutor’s office and a dozen other law enforcement agencies had 140 people assigned to the cases, Ted Housel, who was prosecutor at the time, said in 2008. By the first anniversary, the total had fallen to 85, and those investigators were also working other cases.

    Calida, the former sex worker from Chicago, said women involved the sex trade are frequently robbed by people who know they’re carrying cash, and are sometimes coerced into sexual activity by police in return for not being arrested.

    She said an attacker “knows you can’t or won’t report it. You’re an easy target and they know it.”

    Three of her friends who were also sex workers in Chicago also turned up dead.

    “You see someone, you become friends with them and then one day they’re suddenly just not there,” she said. “We’d all go out asking around and looking for them, and then a few days later a body would be found. There’s always this specific fear that it’s a serial killer. Sometimes we never even get a body back to bury. And we wonder: Will law enforcement take it seriously because it’s ‘just another sex worker?’”

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    AP writers Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque; Steve LeBlanc in Boston; Julie Walker and Robert Bumsted in Suffolk County, New York; Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this story.

    Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

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  • Suspect taken into custody in Long Island serial killings, AP source says

    Suspect taken into custody in Long Island serial killings, AP source says

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    NEW YORK — A suspect has been taken into custody on New York’s Long Island in connection with a long-unsolved string of killings, known as the Gilgo Beach murders, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Friday.

    The case has long drawn immense public attention after human remains were along a New York beach highway more than a decade ago. The mystery attracted national headlines for many years and the unsolved killings were the subject of the 2020 Netflix film “Lost Girls.”

    The suspect was taken into custody in Massapequa late Thursday and investigators were at a home connected to the case on Friday, the official said. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

    The suspect’s name was not immediately released.

    The deaths of 11 people whose remains were found in 2010 and 2011 have long stumped investigators. Most of the victims were young women who had been sex workers. Several of the bodies were found near the town of Gilgo Beach.

    Determining who killed them, and why, has vexed a slew of seasoned homicide detectives through several changes in leadership in the police department. Last year, an interagency task force was formed with investigators from the FBI, as well as state and local police departments, aimed at solving the case.

    The formation of the Gilgo Beach task force represents a renewed commitment to investigating the unsolved killings of mostly young women whose skeletal remains were found along a highway on Long Island, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said.

    The disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in 2010 triggered the hunt that exposed the larger mystery.

    Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the marsh.

    Months later, a police officer and his cadaver dog were looking for her body in the thicket along nearby Ocean Parkway when they happened upon the remains of a different woman. Within days, three other bodies were found, all within a short walk of one another.

    By spring 2011, that number had climbed to 10 sets of human remains — those of eight women, one man and one toddler. Some were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, making for a puzzling crime scene that stretched from a park near the New York City limits to a resort community on Fire Island and out to far eastern Long Island.

    Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) east of where the other 10 sets were discovered.

    In talking about the bodies near Gilgo Beach, investigators have said several times over the years it is unlikely one person killed all the victims.

    News of a suspect being taken into custody comes a day after state police responded to a report of skeletal remains found in a wooded area off the Southern State Parkway in Islip. Police planned a briefing near the site on Friday afternoon. It wasn’t immediately clear if those remains were linked to the Gilgo Beach case.

    __

    Balsamo reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Sarah Brumfield contributed to this report.

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