News: Killers in the Gilgo Beach Case
(Long Island, N.Y.) Police and authorities handling the investigation of a serial killer at Gilgo Beach announced the identity of one of the victims. Two of the sets of human remains belonged to women who were found dumped along the Long Island Expressway in Manorville in 2000 and 2003. This brings a turn in the case, leading officials to believe that at least three killers have used the Gilgo dunes as dumping grounds.
While one of the Manorville women is still unknown and referred to as Jane Doe No. 6, the other belongs to a twenty-year-old prostitute named Jessica Taylor. Both women had been dismembered, and only their torsos had been initially discovered in plastic bags near the woods of Halsey Manor Road. Their heads, arms, hands, and other body parts were found in plastic bags forty-five miles away at Gilgo.
The vast distance between the Manorville findings and the discoveries of the body parts that would potentially identify the women suggests that their killer went through lengths to keep their identities concealed. Taylor’s tattoo, by which she was later identified, had been partially mutilated with what authorities believe was a razor blade. They also believe that her torso, which was found among shrubs and sticks underneath a plastic sheet, was dumped out of the side of a car.
This new information about the Gilgo Beach victims tells authorities and police handling the investigation that they are dealing with at least one killer who prefers to dismember and decapitate his victims, conceals their identities, and uses plastic bags as a mode of disposal. The killer responsible for the deaths of the first four identified women had a different style. No additional attempts were made to hide their identities; they were strangled and found intact while wrapped in burlap.
One theory suggests that a single killer is responsible for the Manorville and Gilgo Beach victims. Followers of the case who support this theory believe that the identifying body parts were dumped at Gilgo because of the remoteness of the location. However, once the killer got confident in his ability to evade authorities and in the security of the location, he cared less about taking measures to conceal his victims’ identities. The Gilgo Beach victims were murdered years after the women found in Manorville, suggesting that time may have promoted carelessness in the killer.
The other sets of remains, now believed to be a one or two-year-old baby girl and a young Asian man, suffered deaths that were considered distinctly dissimilar to those of the women. The toddler’s death has not been ruled a homicide, and reports say that she was found wrapped intact within a blanket and showed no signs of trauma. However, the young Asian male, believed to be in his late teens or early twenties, suffered from a violent death that has been ruled a homicide.
The two sets of remains found in Nassau County have not been identified, but are also believed to have suffered at the hand of a different killer. In a case such as this, when so many sets of remains have been found, many attribute the amount of discoveries to a lack of searches conducted in the area. Perhaps if more of Long Island’s remote areas had been investigated more often, police would have discovered the remains of these missing persons before some of their cases grew cold.
Taylor’s remains were found seven years after her initial body parts were discovered in Manorville by a woman walking her dog. Even more time has passed since the remains of Jane Doe No. 6 were first discovered by hunters in the woods on the morning of November 19th, 2000.
