LISK: The Long Island Serial Killer

just before we get started i do want to give a quick plug to my new podcast the casual criminalist we cover a lot of crimes and criminals and bad things on this channel because apparently you guys love the darker stuff well eat your dark heart out because i have a long form about an hour weekly podcast covering some of the darkest things that i could find on the internet from the uk doctor who was the worst serial killer in history to that time an american socialite murdered her best friend with her car allegedly and totally got away with it and much more it's also pretty laid back it's a bit more freeform kind of like a podcast would be with the occasional laugh thrown in because isn't that hilarious weekly shows wherever you get your podcasts links below and let's get into it it'd be understandable if you've never heard about our subject for today after all until 2010 nobody knew even existed but then a routine police search uncovered his evil deeds to the entire world soon it became apparent what investigators had stumbled upon it was the dumping grounds of a serial killer one who had been active for over a decade completely unknown to the authorities who casually discarded the dismembered remains of his victims in the same area and got away with it time and time again and 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 [Music] this story starts somewhere in the middle on may 1 2010 in a small remote community in new york state called oak beach it is located on jones beach island which is one of the barrier islands that make up the southern coast of long 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 colletti 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 except that nobody was really expecting or prepared for the discovery they were about to make it was december the 11th 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 barthelmi who lived in the bronx she went missing outside of her apartment on july 12 2009 and in the weeks that immediately followed her younger sister received multiple vulgar taunting phone calls from a strange man who said the 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 a 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 iv also including the earlier discovery of melissa bartheley who had yet to be identified at this stage it was in january 2011 about a month after the gruesome find that the first identification was made the victim was megan waterman a 22 year old woman who disappeared on june 6 2010 last seen leaving the holiday inn express in hoppage new york the other three women were also identified later that same month one was the aforementioned melissa barcelona the remaining two were maureen braynard 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 the 2nd 2010. already 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 she did this as a last resort before getting evicted from her home megan waterman had a boyfriend slash pimp named akeem cruz who arranged dates of her and even though police confiscated his laptop for info on his client they couldn't find any leads for a murder and according to amber costello's roommate she was nervous about meeting her client the night of her disappearance but eventually relented after he offered 1 500 almost six times her normal rate there was another link that connected the victims all of them offered their escort services on craigslist once the media found out some of them started referring to the culprit as the craigslist ripper although others still prefer the name which was originally assigned to him the gilgo beach killer as you are about to see however his area of activity extended beyond gilgo beach so the name that became the most widely used for him was the long island serial killer or lisk 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 the 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 it immediately raised concern that lisk had likely been active longer than everybody 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 they found the remains of three more people one of them was an asian male in his late teens early twenties who was 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 it 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 lisk up until this point there appeared to be a pattern the killer preyed on the same kind of victim and he 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 of the window because not only did the killer target a man and an infant but he also switched his killing method as the asian male's cause of death had been a blunt-forced impact to the head while the baby showed no outward signs of trauma because of this significant departure some criminologists have speculated that lisk 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 dough and baby dough 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 this happened in 2000 thus pushing back the timeline by a few more years and showing that lisk if he was indeed responsible for the mandeville killings had been active for over a decade before anyone knew 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 the remains of valerie mack and the two does nasal 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 though 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 still is 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 lisk showing us that he has been active for at least 15 years between 1996 and 2010. [Music] these are the 10 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 lisk 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 lisk'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 homicidal 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 google beach this could possibly be linked to lisk but she was killed way back in 1982 in what is either an unrelated crime or perhaps the killer's earliest murder and there are more as you can see all of these cases have things in common with the lisk 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 less 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 like the zodiac or the mad butcher of kingsbury run 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 it was 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 had 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 he is well educated and well-spoken he is financially secure and has a job and owns an expensive car or truck he may have sought treatment at a hospital for poison ivy infection as part of his job or interests he has access to or stockpile of 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 rivkin 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 gave their two cents 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 victim's 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 [Music] 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 and he also worked as a carpenter meaning that he had plenty of cutting tools and burlap sacks petrol 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 tankridi in 1993 and colleen mcnamee in 1994 both beaten to death and strangled the match was only a partial which meant that timothy bitrolf was not the culprit but the two were related that is how police eventually arrived john biteroff who has since been convicted in 2017 and is serving two consecutive 25 to life sentences ever since bitter off was identified he was also 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 there is even a personal connection between rita tangridi and one of lisk's victims melissa barthelme she was allegedly best friends with tancredi's daughter betrov's murders lacked the horrendous mutilations of lisk but since his work committed in the early 90s it would not be unheard of for a killer to escalate the level of violence as time went on the investigation into bitrolf is ongoing but what if someone else is the culprit after all it's highly unlikely that john biderov will ever be released from prison whether or not he is lisk but if he is not the gilgo beach killer then focusing solely on him would allow the real culprit to evade justice admittedly there are a few more named suspects but none of them make as good a case as bitter off one would be joseph brewer the man who hired shannon gilbert off craigslist the night of her disappearance he would make a pretty obvious candidate but police said he cooperated fully with the investigation and was dismissed as a suspect years ago just late last year a man from long island named andrew frey was arrested on multiple counts of attempted kidnapping and sex trafficking two prostitutes came forward claiming that he allegedly tried to take them to a secluded area by force both having escaped by jumping out of his moving car afterwards several other escorts claimed that they had violent encounters with frey one even saying that she was forced to take out an order of protection against him which he violated by calling her and leaving her threatening voicemails new york authorities said that frey had a propensity to commit violence against female sex workers but since the case is ongoing he has yet to be convicted of anything and there haven't been any connections established to the gilgo beach murders unlike most of the other killing sprees that involve unidentified murderers this one is an active investigation with a genuine chance of reaching a conclusion who knows maybe a year or two from now the identity of the killer will be discovered we can do a follow-up video on this but until then thanks for watching you

Channel: Biographics

Views: 504,652

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler

Id: 3eI4M2NALXw

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020