All three of the earlier victims were women. Each was found battered to death in a wooded area and posed with legs open, arms pulled back, and left shoe missing. Semen was recovered from two, 31-year-old Rita Tangredi and 20-year-old Colleen McNamee. DNA showed it was from the same man. Here is the profile that trained criminologists have compiled for the, thus far unknown, Long Island Serial Killer: white male in his mid twenties to mid forties. Well-spoken and college educated. Financially secure, has a job and a vehicle. Knowledge of police procedures and forensics. A forensic artist drew sketches of two of the Long Island victims based on their remains. Long Island Serial Killer. Suffolk County Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $25,000.
Authorities have linked an unidentified woman’s torso found 19 years ago in Rockville Centre with skeletal remains discovered on Ocean Parkway amid the Long Island Serial Killer investigation, the Press has learned.
Nassau County and New York State investigators reported that DNA evidence confirmed partial skeletal remains found in the brush near Zach’s Bay at Jones Beach State Park in 2011 belong to an unidentified woman whose torso was found in Hempstead Lake State Park in 1997. Investigators have said the Jones Beach remains, which authorities had dubbed Jane Doe No. 3, was determined via DNA evidence to be the mother of Baby Doe, a toddler whose skeletal remains were found east of Cedar Beach on April 4, 2011.
“They call her ‘Peaches,’ Eric Smith, a forensic medical investigator in the Nassau County Medical Examiner’s office, previously told the Press, referring to the torso that had a bitten heart-shaped tattoo of a peach with green leaves on top and droplets below it on her left breast. When asked Tuesday how the connection helps the case, Smith said: “Each additional piece of information helps in getting an identification.”
The revelation—which comes on the week of the sixth anniversary of police discovering the first of 10 sets of remains in the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK) case—means that Peaches is Baby Doe’s mother, although both remain unidentified. It’s also the biggest revelation in the case in years—indicating that the mother and child were either slain by the still-at-large serial killer responsible for the Gilgo Beach murders or died at the hands of another assailant that used the same dumping grounds as LISK.
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A hiker found Peaches’ remains stuffed in a black plastic bag inside a green Rubbermaid container in a wooded area of the park off Park Drive in Rockville Centre on June 28, 1997. A maroon towel and a dark-colored apparent pillow case adorned with flowers were found with the torso. Investigators said that Peaches was black, between 20 and 30 years old and had a surgical scar indicating that she had a Cesarean section, but her head and some of her limbs have yet to be recovered.
“Somewhere out there she has a child, and at this point, that child is at least 13 years old,” then-Nassau Homicide Squad Lt. William Brosnan, who has since retired, told the Press in 2010, a year before Peaches’ child was found dead on Ocean Parkway. A police spokesman declined to comment on the news, citing the ongoing investigation.
Since Peaches’ skull has yet to be found, investigators have not been able to put together a composite sketch of what she looked like. But her case had aired on America’s Most Wanted and her tattoo was published in a tattoo magazine, which prompted a tip from a Connecticut tattoo artist, the ex-detective had said. The artist recalled that Peaches was visiting from LI with her aunt and cousin and mentioned having boyfriend trouble, Brosnan had said.
Both the extremities discovered at Jones Beach and Baby Doe were found with similar gold jewelry. The skeletal remains of Baby Doe—estimated to be between 1 and 4 years old—were found wrapped in a blanket with a 16-inch gold-colored chain and two gold-colored hoop earrings. The Jones Beach extremities had two gold bracelets.
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Suffolk police and prosecutors said in 2011 that they were unsure of Baby Doe’s cause of death. This week, police told the Press that her death has been ruled a homicide. Suffolk authorities had also said that they believed the child was a girl, but records show county medical examiners listed Baby Doe’s gender as “unsure.”
Investigators revealed the link between Peaches and Baby Doe in a recently updated case file listed in NamUs, a federal database used to help identify Jane and John Does nationwide. The case file was updated following inquiries from Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills, filmmakers who produced The Killing Season, a docu-series about LISK and similar cases nationwide that recently aired on A&E. The duo, who produced a bonus video about Peaches in which they interviewed her tattoo artist, said they hope the new info will help both investigators and the Websleuths community crack the case.
“I think in so many ways this changes the case quite considerably,” said Zeman, who provided emails showing that he asked the Nassau medical examiners office to update NamUs with more information on Jane Doe No. 3 days before the case file was clarified. “While it provides some clarity, it also deepens the mystery of the Long Island Serial Killer case.”
Mills noted that Peaches is the only victim found on Ocean Parkway who’s identified in NamUs as African American. She also noted that while Peaches’ torso and extremities were found 15 miles apart, the mother and child were discovered nearly 10 miles apart on Ocean Parkway and the tot was dumped about 150 feet from another unidentified victim dubbed Jane Doe No. 6.
Mills and Zeman additionally share the Press‘ observation that the conditions of Peaches’ remains and the method in which she was dumped most closely resemble the plight of Jane Doe No. 6 and Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old sex worker. Taylor’s decapitated and handless torso was discovered in Manorville in ’03, three years after Jane Doe No. 6 was found in similar condition a quarter mile away. Both of their skulls and limbs were found on Ocean Parkway in ’11 during a massive search sparked by the May 2010 disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, another sex worker who was found dead in Oak Beach.
Authorities have said that two or more killers have used Ocean Parkway as a dumping ground. One killer is believed to be responsible for four female sex workers found dead in Gilgo Beach in December 2010 and another is suspected of killing Taylor and Jane Doe No. 6, according to Suffolk prosecutors. Whether another killer or killers are responsible for the other four victims—including Peaches and Baby Doe—remains to be seen.
The remaining two sets of remains found on Ocean Parkway in ’11 include an Asian man wearing women’s clothing dubbed John Doe No. 8—the only man among the group—and the skull of Fire Island Jane Doe, whose severed legs were found in Blue Point Beach, just west of Davis Park, in ’96. Police have said they suspect Gilbert drowned, although her family believes she was murdered.
No arrests have been made and police have not named a suspect in any of the cases.
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The Golden State Killer’s barrage of rapes and murders began in a gold mining area east of Sacramento in 1976. By 1986, it seemed to have stopped.
Why?
With the arrest Tuesday of Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who has been charged so far with eight counts of murder, more than 30 years had passed since the last episode in the series. That long period of quiescence seems to fly in the face of the popular belief that serial rapists and killers are incapable of stopping.
But forensic psychiatrists, criminal profilers and homicide detectives who pursue cold cases say that assumption is more myth than reality.
“These are not acts that a person is compelled to do,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. “They are intentional and predatory. There is choice, capacity and opportunity that is exercised.”
Any number of factors can contribute to a dormant stretch. An extensive 2008 study on serial murder for the F.B.I.’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime found that killers may quiet down when they find other outlets for their emotions. The study mentioned Dennis Rader, known as the BTK Killer, who murdered 10 people from 1974 to 1991, but had no other victims before being apprehended in 2005. “During interviews conducted by law enforcement, Rader admitted to engaging in autoerotic activities as a substitute for his killings,” the report said.
Other killers might have changed behavior after moving away from the original epicenter of activity. Ted Bundy mutilated and murdered perhaps more than 30 young women in the 1970s. Yet there were stretches along his peripatetic travels when he was not associated with murders in those areas.
In some cases, jobs and families might have stabilized and exacerbating sources of stress might have faded, some experts said.
Dr. Michael H. Stone, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Columbia University who has extensively studied serial killers, noted that Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, murdered prostitutes during his first two difficult marriages. He married a third time, more happily, and the killings dwindled.
Long Island Serial Killer Documentary
“Some of these men have little oases of compassion, within the vast desert of their contempt and hatred of women,” Dr. Stone said.
So far, the authorities have not offered any public explanation as to why the Golden State Killer spree, for which Mr. DeAngelo was arrested this week, began and continued, much less stopped. But some experts point to the most banal explanation: In 1986, when he was 40, Mr. DeAngelo may have aged out.
“The testosterone levels are down,” Dr. Stone said. “His capacity to perform is weakened,” he added, noting that he was merely speculating. The prey drive is lessened.
Mark Safarik, a retired F.B.I. criminal profiler and consultant to crime shows like “Bones” and “The Blacklist,” recently worked on a study with academic researchers about older sexual homicide offenders. “They are really rare over age 50,” he said. “We just don’t see them. Pedophiles over 50, yes. But not rape-murderers.”
There is little research on why spree killers desist for reasons other than getting caught. No one knows what has happened to a serial killer of young women on Long Island.
“There has never been a survey of serial killers asking them why they stopped,” said Eric Witzig, a retired homicide detective and chairman of the Murder Accountability Project, a database of unsolved murders. “All we have are anecdotal hunches,” he said.
Perhaps a victim struggled and spooked the attacker, he said. The killer “might think then, ‘Maybe I don’t want to do this anymore because I might get caught.’ Or, ‘I want to stop and reflect on the carnage I wreaked in the past.’”
Or, said Dr. Bruce E. Harry, a retired forensic psychiatrist with the University of Missouri medical school: “Maybe they get tired or bored and just don’t want to do it anymore.”
Mr. Safarik, the retired F.B.I. crime profiler, was a beat cop in the late 1970s in Davis, Calif. An introduction to solar radiation iq ball. and remembers being on stakeouts for the Golden State Killer, watching with night surveillance scopes for a man scrambling over rooftops or escaping into nearby fields.
Portable autocad 2010 64 bit download. Then as now, police believed that the suspect had military or law enforcement training, which helped him evade detection. One reason the rapist-murderer may have stopped in the late 80s, speculated Mr. Safarik, is that he was becoming aware of the ability to collect DNA evidence, left by the most meager material. The public was becoming familiar with it, he said, particularly through television dramas.
Several experts, underlining the notion that so little is yet known about Mr. DeAngelo — including most significantly whether he committed the crimes — wondered whether the criminal behavior did stop entirely in 1986.
“I would want to look at other rapes and murders in the areas where he lived over time,” Dr. Meloy said. “I would be skeptical that there was a complete shutdown at age 40.”