It was a bitterly cold afternoon four years ago when a Suffolk County cop’s German shepherd sniffed out the skeletal corpse of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, a Bronx prostitute who had vanished a year and a half earlier.
The cop had been looking for a different woman, but the dog’s discovery of Barthelemy’s body in a crumbling burlap sack amid the thorny underbrush off Ocean Parkway in Gilgo Beach, Long Island, exposed something unexpected.
It was the sickening work of one of New York’s most prolific serial killers ever — with a body count of at least 10 victims and as many as 17
Dubbed the Gilgo Beach Killer, he’s been stalking and slaughtering his prey for two decades, some believe, with a methodical efficiency that has detectives no closer to catching him today than they were on that frigid day of Dec. 11, 2010.
The search for the elusive predator has, in fact, stalled, according to a police source.
Detectives have not advanced the case in recent months and are in need of a tip from the public or lucky break, says the source, who has access to information about the probe.
“It’s been four years, and they’ve not got too much to show for it,” said the State Police officer, who is not involved in the investigation but is familiar with the work of those who are.
Suffolk County cops will say nothing. They’ve refused to speak with the media and won’t tell families of victims what they’re doing or if any progress has been made.
‘All they say is that when they find the killer, I’ll be the first to know. They’re lying.’
- Mother of victim
The department is “not commenting further at this time on the Gilgo investigation until or unless we have some additional information pertaining to the investigation that serves the investigation or the public by its release,” a spokesman said.
Being left in the dark has infuriated some of the families.
“All they say is that when they find the killer, I’ll be the first to know,” said Marie Ducharme, the mother of victim Maureen Brainard-Barnes. “They’re lying. They’re saying that just to keep me satisfied.”
Ducharme slammed police for how they’ve conducted their probe, which has been plagued by unfounded rumors, misinformation, public spats among officials and flip-flopping theories — with probers vacillating between there being one or two murderers. (It’s one, police say now.)
“If they had [done a good job], they would have found the killer already,” she said
The Gilgo Girls
Within days of unearthing Barthelemy’s remains, police found the bodies of three more young call girls who booked appointments on Craigslist and went missing between 2007 and 2010: Brainard-Barnes, 25; Megan Waterman, 22; and Amber Lynn Costello, 27.
Each had been strangled elsewhere, wedged into burlap and dumped amid thick scrub just off the sand-swept causeway on the inlet side of Gilgo in the town of Babylon.
Six more bodies, or parts of bodies, were discovered over the next year in different areas of Suffolk and Nassau counties. Some victims had been hacked up, their limbs scattered across remote sections of Gilgo, Oak Beach and elsewhere.