The story of the Long Island Serial Killer, often referred to as LISK, is a chilling tale of mystery and unsolved crimes that have baffled investigators for over a decade. This narrative begins in a small, remote community in New York State called Oak Beach, located on Jones Beach Island. It was here, on May 1, 2010, that Shannon Gilbert, a 24-year-old escort from New Jersey, vanished under mysterious circumstances, setting off a chain of events that would uncover a series of gruesome discoveries.
In December 2010, during a search for Shannon Gilbert, police stumbled upon skeletal remains near Gilgo Beach. These remains belonged to Melissa Barthelemy, a 24-year-old woman who had disappeared in 2009. This discovery led to the uncovering of three more bodies in the same area, all within 500 feet of each other. These victims, later identified as Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and Amber Costello, shared a common background: they all worked as escorts and advertised their services on Craigslist.
As the investigation expanded, more bodies were discovered, including those of Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack, whose remains were found in different locations but linked to the same killer. The timeline of the murders stretched back to 1996, suggesting that the Long Island Serial Killer had been active for at least 15 years before being discovered.
The investigation revealed a disturbing pattern: the killer targeted young women, often escorts, and disposed of their bodies in remote areas along Long Island’s Ocean Parkway. However, the discovery of an Asian male and a baby among the victims challenged this pattern, leading to speculation that there might be multiple killers involved.
Despite extensive investigations, the identity of the Long Island Serial Killer remains unknown. A profile compiled by the New York Times suggests that LISK is likely a white male, well-educated, and financially secure. He may have access to burlap sacks and derives pleasure from the act of killing itself. Some experts speculate that he might have connections to law enforcement due to his knowledge of police procedures.
Among the suspects is John Bitroff, a convicted serial killer who lived near the area where several victims’ remains were found. Bitroff’s DNA was linked to other murders, and he is currently serving a life sentence. However, no definitive evidence has yet connected him to the Long Island Serial Killer cases.
The case of the Long Island Serial Killer remains an active investigation, with new developments emerging over time. In 2020, one of the victims, Valerie Mack, was identified through genetic genealogy, offering hope that more answers may be found in the future. The mystery of LISK continues to captivate and haunt those who seek justice for the victims.
Examine the timeline of events and the investigative techniques used in the LISK case. Identify key turning points and discuss how modern forensic methods could have altered the investigation. Present your findings in a group discussion.
Create a psychological and behavioral profile of the Long Island Serial Killer based on the information provided. Compare your profile with the one suggested by experts and discuss the similarities and differences in a class presentation.
Participate in a simulated crime scene investigation where you apply forensic techniques to uncover evidence. Use this experience to understand the challenges faced by investigators in the LISK case and propose innovative solutions.
Engage in a debate on the ethical implications of using genetic genealogy in solving cold cases like LISK. Consider privacy concerns, the potential for wrongful accusations, and the impact on victims’ families.
Conduct a research project on the role of media in shaping public perception of serial killers. Analyze how media coverage of the LISK case has influenced public opinion and the investigation itself. Present your findings in a detailed report.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript, removing any explicit language and sensitive content while maintaining the overall narrative:
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Just before we get started, I want to give a quick plug to my new podcast, “The Casual Criminalist.” We cover a lot of crimes and criminals on this channel because apparently, you all enjoy the darker stories. Well, get ready for more, because I have a long-form, about an hour-long weekly podcast covering some of the darkest topics I could find on the internet—from a UK doctor who was one of the worst serial killers in history to an American socialite who allegedly murdered her best friend and got away with it, and much more. It’s also pretty laid back, a bit more freeform, kind of like a podcast should be, with the occasional laugh thrown in. Weekly shows are available wherever you get your podcasts; links are below. Now, let’s get into it.
It would be understandable if you’ve never heard about our subject for today. After all, until 2010, nobody knew he even existed. But then, a routine police search uncovered his deeds to the entire world. Soon, it became apparent what investigators had stumbled upon: the dumping grounds of a serial killer who had been active for over a decade, completely unknown to the authorities, who casually discarded the remains of his victims in the same area and got away with it time and time again. He still eludes justice. Investigators might have a profile and a few solid suspects, but ultimately, the murderer’s identity remains a mystery. We know him simply as LISK, the Long Island Serial Killer.
This story starts on May 1, 2010, in a small remote community in New York State called Oak Beach, located on Jones Beach Island. That was where Shannon Gilbert, a 24-year-old escort from New Jersey, met up with a client in the early hours of the morning. Gilbert ran out into the neighborhood, screaming for help. A neighbor named Gus Coletti opened the door, but when he asked Gilbert what the matter was, she was clearly in a frenzied state, only saying, “Help me, help me,” over and over again. Coletti went inside and called the police, but Shannon Gilbert disappeared before they arrived.
Authorities kept searching for her over the following months. Officially, this was a missing person’s case, but the circumstances didn’t really anticipate a happy ending, and soon enough, police extended their search to areas where you might expect to find a body. This strategy paid off, but nobody was really expecting or prepared for the discovery they were about to make.
On December 11, 2010, about nine months after Shannon Gilbert’s disappearance, a canine unit was conducting a routine search through a weedy area on the side of the Ocean Parkway that traverses Jones Beach Island, close to a small community called Gilgo Beach. The dog and its handler stumbled upon skeletal remains coming out of a burlap sack, which had almost disintegrated. The bones turned out to belong to a 24-year-old woman, but they did not belong to Shannon Gilbert. In fact, the body was later identified as Melissa Barthelemy, who lived in the Bronx. She went missing outside her apartment on July 12, 2009, and in the weeks that immediately followed, her younger sister received multiple disturbing phone calls from a strange man who said Melissa was dead.
A couple of days after the discovery of Melissa’s body, police returned to the scene, this time with more manpower. They had a suspicion that there was still more to be found in the area. They were right, but again, it was not the remains of Shannon Gilbert. Instead, police found the bodies of three more victims, all located within 500 feet of each other. In an interview, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said what everybody else was thinking: “Four bodies found in the same location pretty much speaks for itself. It’s more than a coincidence; we could have a serial killer.”
A few days later, the FBI was brought in to help with the search. The medical examiner concluded that all the remains belonged to young women and used dental records, DNA comparisons, and facial reconstructions to try and identify them. Together, the victims were referred to as the Gilgo Beach Four, including the earlier discovery of Melissa Barthelemy, who had yet to be identified at this stage.
In January 2011, about a month after the gruesome find, the first identification was made: the victim was Megan Waterman, a 22-year-old woman who disappeared on June 6, 2010. The other three women were also identified later that same month. One was Melissa Barthelemy, the remaining two were Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old single mother from Norwich, Connecticut, who disappeared in July 2007, and Amber Costello, a 27-year-old woman who appeared to be the most recent victim, having gone missing on September 2, 2010.
A clear pattern began to emerge regarding the victims. Like Shannon Gilbert, all four women worked as escorts at least on occasion. Before her disappearance, Maureen Brainard-Barnes had temporarily relocated to a cheap motel in Manhattan where she met clients. Megan Waterman had a boyfriend who arranged dates for her, and even though police confiscated his laptop for information on his clients, they couldn’t find any leads for a murder. According to Amber Costello’s roommate, she was nervous about meeting her client the night of her disappearance but eventually relented after he offered a significantly higher rate than usual.
There was another link that connected the victims: all of them offered their escort services on Craigslist. Once the media found out, some began referring to the culprit as the “Craigslist Ripper,” although others still prefer the name originally assigned to him: the Gilgo Beach Killer. However, as you will see, his area of activity extended beyond Gilgo Beach, so the name that became most widely used for him was the Long Island Serial Killer.
Authorities were fairly convinced that Shannon Gilbert’s body was still out there; however, harsh weather conditions made the search difficult. So, the Suffolk County police waited until spring and went back in. In late March, about a mile east of the original site, they found a skull, a forearm, and a pair of hands. Once again, these did not belong to Shannon Gilbert but rather to a 20-year-old woman named Jessica Taylor. Like the others, Taylor worked as a prostitute, although it was never definitively established if she used Craigslist to find clients.
There was, however, a more disturbing implication regarding this most recent find: Jessica Taylor had been murdered in 2003. Police knew this because her torso had previously been found in July of that year. It had been discovered by a woman walking her dog off a utility road in Manorville, a hamlet in the middle of Long Island. This was almost five years earlier than any of the previous victims, raising concerns that the Long Island Serial Killer may have been active longer than everyone had expected and that there were probably more victims out there waiting to be found.
Investigators didn’t have to wait long. In early April, they went out again, slowly making their way along the Ocean Parkway, and found the remains of three more people. One of them was an Asian male in his late teens or early twenties, found dressed in women’s clothing. The second was a young woman, and the third, most disturbingly of all, was a baby believed to be a girl approximately two years old. This was a shocking revelation, not only due to the obvious reason of finding such a young victim but also because it contradicted everything the police thought they knew about the Long Island Serial Killer up until this point.
There appeared to be a pattern: the killer preyed on the same kind of victim and seemingly used Craigslist as a convenient method of finding new targets. He usually strangled them and then dumped their remains in remote areas along Long Island’s Ocean Parkway. That pattern now went out the window because not only did the killer target a man and an infant, but he also switched his killing method. The Asian male’s cause of death had been blunt force trauma to the head, while the baby showed no outward signs of trauma.
Because of this significant departure, some criminologists have speculated that the Long Island Serial Killer may not have been responsible for all of the murder victims found on the Ocean Parkway and that there were two or even three killers. To this day, the man and the child remain unidentified; they are simply referred to as “Asian Doe” and “Baby Doe.” The third victim, however, who was a woman, was only recently identified in May 2020 thanks to genetic genealogy, which allowed investigators to track down her biological relatives. She was 24-year-old Valerie Mack from Philadelphia, and her situation was very similar to that of Jessica Taylor, only her skull, hands, and part of one foot were found along the Ocean Parkway because the rest of her body had been discovered years earlier by hikers in the Long Island Pine Barrens, also located near Manorville. Like the other women, Mack worked as a prostitute and was last seen in the area of Port Republic, New Jersey, in 2000, thus pushing back the timeline by a few more years and showing that if he was indeed responsible for the Manorville killings, the Long Island Serial Killer had been active for over a decade before anyone knew he even existed.
Given that police kept finding new bodies every time they went out to search, they had no reason to assume that this problem would only be contained in Suffolk County. Therefore, the neighboring Nassau County Police Department began their own investigation just a week after the discovery of Valerie Mack’s remains. Nassau County investigators went out to search their stretch of the Ocean Parkway and made their own grim discoveries. They found the partial remains of two more women, one of them only a skull and some teeth. Like some of the previous victims, these two were later connected to body parts that had been found in other areas of Long Island years prior. One of them was a young Black woman whose dismembered torso had been recovered from Hampstead Lake State Park back in 1997. She still remains unidentified to this day but is informally known as “Peaches” based on a heart-shaped peach tattoo she had on her chest. Years later, the tattoo was recognized by the artist who made it, who remembered that his client was around 18 or 19 years old and that she had come from the Bronx or Long Island.
More significantly, DNA tests performed in 2016 revealed that Peaches was, in fact, the mother of Baby Doe, whose remains were found near Gilgo Beach, creating a definitive link between two of the crime areas. The other victim from Nassau County was only a skull, but police still managed to connect her to a pair of severed legs that were found in a garbage bag on Fire Island back in 1996. She is still only known as “Fire Island Jane Doe,” and it is unlikely she will ever be identified. As of this moment, she remains the oldest victim confidently attributed to the Long Island Serial Killer, showing that he has been active for at least 15 years between 1996 and 2010.
These are the ten victims most commonly ascribed to the Long Island Serial Killer, but this is far from a certainty. Originally, investigators worked under the belief that the area surrounding Gilgo Beach served as the dumping grounds for three or even four serial killers. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, in particular, was adamant that there was no evidence that all of these remains were the work of a single killer. This would not have been unprecedented; California’s Freeway Killer turned out to be three different murderers who acted independently from one another but were active at the same time in the same place and targeted the same victims. The Texas Killing Fields refers to a patch of land off Interstate 45 that was used as a dumping ground by several killers throughout the decades. Something similar could be possible with the Long Island Serial Killer, but police eventually moved on from this idea as their investigation progressed. They concluded that there were enough common denominators between the crimes to suggest one culprit due to the type of victim, the dismemberment, and the dumping grounds.
In December 2011, a year and a half after it started, police finished the search that launched this entire investigation. They found the body of Shannon Gilbert, the escort who was last seen fleeing a client’s home in Oak Beach. If they had never started looking for her, they might never have stumbled upon the remains in Gilgo Beach, and the world might still be blissfully unaware of the Long Island Serial Killer’s existence. But curiously, investigators concluded that Gilbert was not among the killer’s victims. Her remains were found in a swampy marshland about half a mile from where she was last seen, and police believe that she drowned accidentally while running away. Her family disagreed and organized an independent autopsy, where the pathologist found that Gilbert had sustained injuries consistent with strangulation but was unable to say with certainty that she was murdered. At the moment, Shannon Gilbert remains a possible connection to the case, but she is not the only one in this situation.
In 2013, a 31-year-old woman named Natasha Jugo disappeared while leaving her home in Queens. Her car was found abandoned on Ocean Parkway, and her body washed up on Gilgo Beach soon after. Also in 2013, the skeletal remains of an Asian woman were found in Nassau County in a garbage bag near Oyster Bay. She is still unidentified but was probably between 20 and 30 years old and was wearing a necklace with a 24-carat gold pig pendant. The dismembered remains of a woman named Tina Foglia were found in three separate garbage bags just a few miles from the Robert Moses Causeway that leads to Gilgo Beach. This could possibly be linked to the Long Island Serial Killer, but she was killed way back in 1982 in what is either an unrelated crime or perhaps the killer’s earliest murder.
There are more cases, as you can see. All of these cases have things in common with the Long Island Serial Killer, whether it is the location, the victim similarity, or the vicious dismemberment. However, it is almost impossible to prove a definitive connection, so unless we eventually identify the Long Island Serial Killer and get a confession, there will always be doubt over the true number of victims.
So now we arrive at the million-dollar question: who is the Long Island Serial Killer? Well, we can’t answer that—not at the moment, at least. LISK remains unidentified and at large, but that could change in the near future. Unlike other notorious and unnamed serial killers, this is very much an active investigation with new developments every year. Like we previously mentioned, it wasn’t until earlier in 2020 that one of the victims, Valerie Mack, was finally identified. Also, at the beginning of the year, police came forward and presented a key piece of evidence hoping that someone might recognize it: a black leather belt with the initials “WH” or “HM” embossed on it, depending on how you held it. A spokesman for the police also mentioned that they did not believe the belt belonged to any of the victims but would not specify if it had any DNA on it or if it had been used as a murder weapon.
Unfortunately for us, an active investigation also means that police can be very scarce with the details made available to the public. The leather belt, for example, was discovered at one of the original crime scenes back in 2010, and it wasn’t until a decade later that they finally went public with it. This is also why the most detailed profile on LISK that’s accessible to us has been compiled by the New York Times using only publicly available information. They said that LISK is most likely a white male in his mid-twenties to mid-forties. He is married or has a girlfriend, is well-educated and well-spoken, financially secure, has a job, and owns an expensive car or truck. He may have sought treatment at a hospital for a poison ivy infection as part of his job or interests. He has access to or stockpiles burlap sacks, and according to one of their expert consultants, LISK is a psychosexual sadist who derives pleasure from the murder itself, meaning that he kills for the sake of killing rather than having any additional motives. This also lends itself to other similar impulses, such as calling the victims’ families to taunt them. Lastly, the profile points out that there might be a seasonal component to the killer’s activity since most of his victims went missing in the summer or early autumn.
This profile was partially corroborated by an unlikely source: Joel Rifkin, probably New York City’s most prolific serial killer. For a while, people have speculated that some of the victims could have been killed by Rifkin because he used to live in Long Island for a time. He has denied this, saying that he has nothing to do with those bodies. Even so, he would only have been eligible for the earliest victims, like Tina Foglia, since he was apprehended back in 1993. Anyway, Rifkin might have no involvement in these killings, but he believes that the culprit is someone who would go unnoticed while walking around with big burlap sacks—someone like a fisherman or landscaper. He also thinks that LISK is a local since he appears to have a connection with the area around Gilgo Beach where he dumped the remains.
With no official profile released by the police or the FBI, other sources have given their opinions after consulting with a few experts. ABC News floated the possibility that LISK might have some sort of involvement with law enforcement because he seemed to display knowledge of police procedures whenever he called his victims’ families. He made sure to do it from a very crowded place, like New York’s Penn Station, and he never stayed on the line for more than three minutes.
Profiles aside, do investigators have any actual suspects in the killings? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, they do have a few, and their strongest candidate is a man named John Bitroff. He happens to be a convicted serial killer who also lived in Manorville, the place where the body parts of several victims were found soon after they had been killed. He also worked as a carpenter, meaning that he had plenty of cutting tools and burlap sacks.
Bitroff first appeared on the police’s radar in 2013 when his brother Timothy was arrested for a misdemeanor. As standard procedure, he submitted a DNA test, which was later flagged as a match to DNA found at two murder sites: those of Rita Tangredi in 1993 and Colleen McNamee in 1994, both beaten to death and strangled. The match was only a partial, which meant that Timothy Bitroff was not the culprit, but the two were related. That is how police eventually arrived at John Bitroff, who has since been convicted in 2017 and is serving two consecutive 25-to-life sentences. Ever since Bitroff was identified, he has also been suspected in a third unrelated murder, but after his conviction, the prosecutor specified that he was being investigated in at least some of the crimes attributed to LISK.
The killings do seem to have a lot in common; Bitroff’s victims were found in Suffolk County, where Gilgo Beach is located. They were also believed to work as escorts, and
Mystery – A historical event or phenomenon that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain – The disappearance of the Roanoke Colony remains one of the greatest mysteries in American history.
Investigation – A systematic and detailed examination of historical events or psychological phenomena to uncover facts or develop insights – The investigation into the causes of World War I has provided historians with a deeper understanding of the complex alliances and tensions of the time.
Victims – Individuals or groups who have suffered harm or injustice, often studied in historical or psychological contexts – The victims of the Salem witch trials were often marginalized individuals who were unfairly accused and persecuted.
Psychology – The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, particularly those affecting behavior in a given context – Understanding the psychology of leadership can provide insights into the decisions made by historical figures during times of crisis.
Patterns – Recurring themes or trends in historical events or psychological behaviors that provide insights into human nature or societal developments – Historians often analyze patterns of migration to understand the economic and social factors influencing population movements.
Escorts – Individuals or groups that accompany and protect others, often in historical contexts such as military or diplomatic missions – During the medieval period, royal escorts were essential for ensuring the safety of monarchs traveling through potentially hostile territories.
Remains – The physical remnants of past civilizations or individuals, often studied in archaeology and history to gain insights into past cultures – The remains of ancient Roman structures provide valuable information about the architectural advancements of the time.
Identity – The characteristics, history, and culture that define an individual or group, often explored in historical and psychological studies – The identity of a nation can be shaped by its historical experiences and collective memory.
Suspects – Individuals or groups believed to be involved in historical events or psychological phenomena, often requiring further investigation – In the study of historical crimes, identifying suspects can be challenging due to the lack of contemporary records.
Justice – The concept of fairness and moral rightness, often examined in historical contexts and psychological theories – The pursuit of justice has been a central theme in many historical movements, including the civil rights movement.
