I’ve been pretty quiet the past few months. I haven’t been writing or blogging at all. But I’ve been paying close attention to the news. In May, a Suffolk county jury found John Bittrolff guilty of the decades-old murders of Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee. If you’ve ever kept up with my blog, you know Bittrolff caught my attention when he was arrested for those murders in 2014. I’ve been blogging about him for several years now, wondering if he could be responsible for some of the remains found on Gilgo Beach in 2010, the handiwork of what many call the Long Island Serial Killer, or LISK. Click here to read the full blog post!
Long Island Serial Killer
A Closer Look at the Long Island Serial Killer and John Bittrolff
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the timelines and potential victims of the serial killer(s) that have been plaguing the Long Island and Manorville areas over the past few decades and I wanted to get it all down in writing and plot the locations on a map. In one of my recent posts, I promised to do this. I am a visual learner and really wanted to see everything plotted out in entirety. Please note, all locations on the map are approximate and by grouping them together here, I am not insinuating that one killer is responsible for all these murders. I am just looking for a pattern and think it is important to view all these cases as a whole for now before you can begin to group certain ones together and make assumptions.
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Is former Suffolk Police Chief James Burke connected to LISK?
Could it be true? That’s what John Ray, attorney for Shannan Gilbert’s family, is suggesting. In an explosive news conference on Thursday, Ray brought forth a Long Island escort named “Leanne” who claims about a year after Gilbert went missing, she was roughed up in a sexual encounter with former Suffolk Police Chief James Burke in an Oak Beach house party where alcohol and cocaine were prevalent. Leanne claims Burke choked her and forced her into oral sex after calling her a “not a good whore” and paying her for her services in 2011, just months before he assumed the role of police chief. Leanne also claims to have had several other Suffolk County police officers as clients and offered to take a lie detector test to back up her story.
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Previously unidentified victim now positively linked to the Gilgo Beach murders
I’ve been following the Long Island Serial Killer case for years, and I think this might be the biggest reveal we’ve seen yet. In 1997, nineteen years ago, a woman’s torso was discovered in Hempstead Lake State Park. Her identity is still unknown, but investigators have been calling her “Peaches” since the discovery, referring to a heart-shaped peach that was tattooed onto her left breast. Her torso was found wrapped in a black plastic bag and placed inside a green Rubbermaid bin that was left in a wooded area in Rockville Centre. Police know that Peaches was a black woman between 20 and 30 years old. Her torso showed signs of a surgical Cesarean section scar.
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Should familial DNA searching be legal in all 50 states?
You know the drill: a murder is committed and investigators gather evidence from the crime scene–fingerprints, strands of hair, and, if they’re lucky, DNA. Once a DNA profile is obtained, police enter it into the national CODIS database, searching for a match. CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System, a program supported and run by the FBI. One part of CODIS is the NDIS, or the National DNA Index System, which contains DNA profiles contributed by the federal, state, and local law enforcement. Whenever law enforcement enters a new DNA profile into CODIS, it is in hopes that the computer program will return a match. Sometimes that match comes in the form of another crime scene that has been entered into the system that maybe police did not think were linked. Sometimes that match comes in the form of a direct hit on an individual whose DNA has already been submitted into the system after a prior conviction. Sometimes there is no match at all and the case turns cold. In the rarest of occasions, however, there is another kind of hit–a familial match.
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Did Shannan Gilbert fall victim to the Long Island Serial Killer?
Years after her body was discovered in an Oak Beach marsh, Shannan Gilbert’s family has released the results of an independent autopsy, raising new questions about how she may have died. For years, police have insisted that Gilbert drowned after becoming disoriented in a drug-induced panic on that fateful May morning in 2010. But a new autopsy conducted by Dr. Michael Badan released yesterday reveals it’s possible she was murdered, just as her family has always suspected.
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Establishing a link between John Bittrolff and the Long Island Serial Killer
It bothers me that police have been so quick to dismiss any connections between John Bittrolff, the man arrested earlier this week for two cold case murders in the 90s, and the Long Island Serial Killer. Maybe they are just taking their time to piece together a strong case against him. Or maybe they do have some sort of evidence that clearly proves he’s not the killer and they are keeping it from the public so as not to compromise the case. In my last post, I noted that Suffolk County DA Thomas Spota told the media this week, “There is no evidentiary or investigative link between these two murders and any of the Gilgo victims. The evidence recovered from Tangredi and McNamee, the manner in which their bodies were found and the crime scenes are unique to them and distinctly different from the Gilgo crime scenes.” This may be true, but there is a rather large connection that the police are failing to bring up, mainly that torsos from two of the LISK victims were recovered in the Manorville pine barrens, a mere three miles from where Bittrolff lived. UPDATE: Check out an interactive map I put together of the victims’ locations in relation to Bittrolff’s known residences here.
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John Bittrolff charged with Long Island murders in 90s… Is there a connection to the LISK?
This is a pretty incredible story. In 1993, thirty-one-year-old Rita Tangredi’s body was discovered in a Long Island wooded area. Three months later, the body of twenty-year-old Colleen McNamee was also found. Both had been known to work as prostitutes and both bodies were strangled, beaten, and discarded in a wooded area. This week, twenty years later, a forty-eight-year-old local from Manorville, New York named John Bittrolff has been charged in their murders and police are investigating his involvement with another 1993 murder in Suffolk County, that of Sandra Costilla.
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Partially dismembered remains found…Has the Long Island Killer struck again?
On Tuesday, July 8, a couple on Long Island made a gruesome discovery in some tall grass near a municipal parking lot as they were walking towards the ferry: the partially dismembered remains of a female. The area is located in Bay Shore, NY, near Maple and Main Streets, less than 30 miles away from the area in Gilgo State Park, where eight sets of remains were discovered between 2010 and 2011. Has the Long Island Serial Killer (also known as the Gilgo Beach Killer) struck again? Authorities aren’t releasing much information yet, only to say that the female has not yet been identified and they have released cadaver dogs into the area, as well as Gilgo Beach, apparently in an attempt to make sure other bodies have not been dumped in that area as well. Between 2010 and 2011, investigators discovered a total of ten individuals along Gilgo Beach, Oak Beach, and Jones Beach State Park. They announced in November of 2011 that one individual was responsible for all ten murders. Only five of the victims have been identified. Police believe the majority of the victims were strangled and dismembered.
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JJ Slate 