The mystery of the bodies found around Gilgo Beach in 2010
continues to haunt Long Island. What's the real reason the Long Island serial
killer murders remain unsolved? Here’s a round-up of the key facts of the case.
The mystery of the Long Island serial killer first came to light in an unexpected fashion.
On May 1, 2010, a 24-year-old sex worker named Shannan Gilbert went missing in Long Island,
New York. Her disappearance was preceded by a call to 911, during which she said:
"They are trying to kill me."
Some say the call was frantic, and she sounded
extremely frightened. Regardless of Gilbert's tone, the call's intentions remain a mystery.
An official who's heard the call has alleged that Gilbert,
who was reportedly bipolar, sounded irrational on the phone.
Prior to the 911 call, Gilbert was at the house of a client.
At some point, the client is said to have decided that he wanted her out of the house.
Gilbert called 911, ran from the house and pounded on neighbors' doors.
Some people were alerted by her strange behavior and called the police,
but at that point, she'd already disappeared.
The police searched for Gilbert, but didn't find a body until December 10th of that year,
at which point a whole new problem surfaced: the body wasn't Gilbert's.
This grisly discovery led to others, and the creepy story of the suspected Long Island serial
killer started to come to light. Unfortunately, things didn't end much better for Gilbert,
either. Her remains were found in December 2011 in a nearby marshland.
The police believed that she'd drowned ... though it's worth
mentioning that when she was found, her body was also missing two neck bones.
When the search for Shannan Gilbert started
turning up bodies that weren't her, things got all sorts of confusing.
The first four victims — called the Gilgo Four because they were
found near a remote stretch known as Gilgo Beach — were all young,
slender sex workers. All of the bodies were reportedly discovered shrouded in burlap. The
area is roughly three miles away from where Gilbert's remains would eventually be found.
By the time Gilbert's skeleton was discovered, a total of ten victims had been found.
According to The New York Times, the total number recovered in the area between Gilgo Beach
and Manorville is as high as 16. However, it's hard to say just how many of them are connected.
A common cause of death was strangling or some other method of oxygen deprivation,
but some of the bodies had also been dismembered and wrapped in plastic.
Likewise, it's unclear whether all of these deaths are the work of one person or several.
If there are more than one, do they just happen to
use the same remote area to dump their victims? Or are they working together?
The two men who'd been present when Shannan Gilbert ran off into the night, her client Joseph
Brewer and Michael Pak, the man who drove her to Brewer's house, were soon cleared as suspects.
However, another man who supposedly encountered Gilbert on that fateful night was a stranger case.
Mere days after Gilbert went missing, area resident Dr. Peter Hackett called
Shannan's mother, Mari Gilbert, and claimed that he'd taken her into his halfway house.
When the missing woman's sisters went to visit him, they say he denied the whole thing.
It's been verified that Hackett indeed made a call, but he still denies meeting Shannan,
let alone telling Mari Gilbert about such an encounter.
Authorities have stated that they're aware of Hackett but don't consider him a suspect.
As former Chief of Detectives Dominick Varrone described him to CBS News,
"He's an individual who likes to get involved. Some call him a storyteller
and an exaggerator. We certainly believe that he may have called to offer his assistance."
Gilbert's family, on the other hand, remained more suspicious. Mari Gilbert even slapped
him with a wrongful death lawsuit, based on Hackett supposedly telling her on the phone
that he'd medicated her while she was in his custody. The lawsuit theorized that his actions
had led to her death. The lawsuit was later dismissed after Hackett denied the claims.
More recently, Hackett has seemed to do his best to avoid the case.
In one incident, a Crime Watch Daily camera crew confronted him, and he dodged the situation by
collapsing on the ground and insinuating that his defibrillator was giving him chest pains.
"What about all the other girls?"
"...ahhh! Jeez! (bleep)"
"...What was that?"
As a mysterious, unsolved, relatively timely case, it's no surprise that the
Long Island serial killer mystery has become popular among amateur Sherlocks.
Many of them are convinced that the curious Dr. Peter Hackett is either
a murderer or a handy patsy that has been used to draw blame from the real murderer.
However, that's just the beginning of a long line of increasingly inspired
theories about conspiracy and mayhem that have been making rounds online.
Some are convinced that an incredibly efficient killer is haunting beach areas of the East Coast.
Others go with the outlandish angle of "a satanic sex cult did it."
The case is so mysterious that a single Reddit thread can yield theories that
range from a BTK type serial killer who varies his methods to a deadly drug addict
whose efficiency as a killer depends on what he happens to have in his system.
The media, of course, has occasionally gotten in on the action. At one point, Newsday suspected an
already convicted serial killer named Joel Rifkin of some of the Long Island serial killer murders.
Rifkin adamantly denied these claims ... and offered some theories of his own.
Speculating about people who might be able to dump bodies in the area unnoticed, he told Newsday,
"My guess is it would be someone like a landscaper, contractor or a fisherman."
A very peculiar aspect of the Long Island serial killer mystery has
been the detached way the Suffolk police reportedly handled the volatile case.
Shannan Gilbert's family had serious trouble getting the authorities to treat her as a
missing person, and although several bodies had already turned up by the time her remains
were discovered in December 2011, they seemed to actually wind the investigation down after that.
They went as far as calling off all collaboration with the FBI and other potentially helpful
institutions, seeming to let the case linger in a strange investigative limbo for years.
It's been reported that local police higher-ups have avoided bringing up the case, and that
the police in general have seemed to drag their feet and even show contempt toward the victims.
One detective has even stated that the fact that
the victims were "only" sex workers is a "consolation."
"We're celebrating the lives of the girls and just want everybody to know that, you know,
they were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins."
As the Long Island Press tells us, this attitude did not go unnoticed,
and it was largely caused by a desire to avoid drawing too much attention to
the shady dealings within the police department's own ranks.
Investigative journalist Billy Jensen, who spearheaded the Unraveled: Long Island Serial
Killer podcast and TV special with producer Alexis Linkletter in 2021, told the Long Island Press
that the goal of their project was to investigate the police investigation. As he put it:
"I've never worked a story where the law enforcement and the people
in power were as cagey as the potential suspects."
Suffolk County's former police chief, James Burke, was in hot water in 2015.
According to the New York Post, he had long fielded accusations of keeping the
FBI at arm's length from the Long Island serial killer investigation.
When he was brought to justice himself for allegedly assaulting
a handcuffed suspect and trying to cover it up,
his behavior during the Long Island serial killer investigation promptly returned to haunt him.
According to PIX11, an attorney for Shannan Gilbert's family, John Ray,
came forward with a sworn statement from a sex worker who said that she'd witnessed
Burke use drugs and party with sex workers on two occasions, at least one of which took
place in 2011 — which means he was doing this while the Long Island serial killer
investigation was taking place, in the Oak Beach neighborhood where Gilbert was found.
Burke ended up resigning from his position over the scandal. He pleaded guilty for the
assault in 2016 and was released from prison in 2019. However, the exposure of his impropriety
revealed a network of corruption and scandal that took down some of the county's top officials.
According to reporting by the Long Island Press,
there's still plenty of interest in Burke's role in the Long Island serial killer investigation,
too. True crime documentary maker Alexis Linkletter told the outlet,
"The very best case scenario is that he sabotaged the investigation to cover up
his own illicit behavior, whether that's indulging in sex workers
or drug use. That's really the best case scenario, which is not good."
In 2017, prosecutor Robert Biancavilla stirred up the stagnant Long Island
serial killer investigation by introducing a potential suspect.
The person under scrutiny was John Bittrolff, a carpenter who's currently
serving a prison sentence of at least fifty years for strangling two sex workers to death
in Long Island. The crimes happened in the 1990s, but he didn't get caught until 2014.
Due to the fact that Bittrolff lived in the area, targeted sex workers, and murdered them in a way
that was quite similar to many Long Island serial killer victims, he became a noteworthy person
of interest in the eyes of the authorities. Biancavilla told the Associated Press in 2017,
"There are remains of the victims at Gilgo that may be attributed to
the handiwork of Mr. Bittrolff, and that investigation is continuing."
As an interesting note about Bittrolff's potential involvement in the Long Island serial killer case:
One of the victims, Melissa Barthelemy, went missing in 2009. Her case is notorious for the
number of nasty calls her little sister received from Melissa's phone — presumably from the killer.
"The unknown killer used her cell phone to make a taunting call from Penn Station."
"'Is this Melissa's little sister?'"
When Bittrolff was named as a potential Long Island serial killer suspect,
the family revealed that Melissa's job and his Long Island hamlet community of
Manorville were connected. The victim's mother told People,
"I don't know what to think, because Melissa had a lot of calls to Manorville from her phone,
and that is where this guy is from."
The year 2018 reported saw a dramatic change in the way the investigation
of the Long Island serial killer case was handled.
This is largely because the Suffolk County Police Department got a new commissioner,
Geraldine Hart. Where some of her predecessors had cut the federal authorities out of the
investigation, she was a former FBI agent herself, with 15 years in their organized
crime division under her belt. While other commissioners had largely tiptoed around the
subject of the Long Island serial killer, she's proven relatively open to discussing it — and,
having been on the FBI side of things during the discovery of the Gilgo Four,
she presumably knows full well just how badly the police's handling of the case has been perceived.
Hart has already brought the FBI back in the mix and made progress in the proceedings.
In 2020, she announced that her investigators had uncovered the identity of "Jane Doe No. 6,"
one of the dismembered victims: a woman named Valerie Mack.
Though the Long Island serial killer case is still open, the future isn't hopeless.
As The New York Times reports, Commissioner Geraldine Hart has proved eager to grab this
particular bull by the horns. She told the Times in September 2020,
"There's a lot of work left to do, but there is momentum. And I'm going
to continue to use that momentum to move forward."
One enticing possibility for bringing the investigation forward is DNA evidence.
Valerie Mack was positively identified thanks to her aunt's DNA, found on a genealogy site. And
in a similar "cold case to case closed" story, California's infamous Golden State Killer was
finally caught in 2018, using new DNA technology that uncovered previously unavailable information.
The Long Island investigation seems to be focusing their DNA efforts on identifying
the remaining Jane Does, since they have no DNA samples of the killer — or do they?
In 2020, Hart introduced to the public a very peculiar belt,
which is believed to be connected to the killer, the initials on which read either "HM"
or "WH." It's not much, but it's more than the world knew a few years ago.
"We do believe that this item was handled by the suspect and did not belong to any of the victims."
For the many victims of the Long Island serial killer,
there's still hope that one day the killer may still be exposed.
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