Bodies were found along a quartermile stretch of gogo beach on the south shore of long island, new york. All four victims were young women in their 20s who advertised a work on craig list. Their bodies were found within a quartermile stretch of beach, all bound at the feet or ankles and covered with burlap to hide them. It was a shocking discovery, and it was just the beginning. For the next year, seven more set of Human Remains were found in the area, mostly women. Was this the work of a Serial Killer . That is the Question Investigators have been asking for more than a decade, with no answers until 2022, when a recent Dna Technology gave police a new lead. They now have a suspect, someone they say who is living a double life as a husband and father. Police fear he was targeting even more victims. Over the next hour, cnn will piece together exactly how police were able to identify the suspect and how the possible killer was able to get away with it for so long. State police . There is somebody after me. What is your name . Shannon gilbert. Where are you . I am in long island. And what is wrong . These people are following me. Reporter may 1st of 2010. She showed up at my door, banging on the door, screaming, help me, help me, help me reporter Shannon Gilbert, a 23yearold Woman Working as an escort has been brought to a house party near gogo beach. On the picturesque island an hour east of new york city. Something or someone prompted gilbert to call police. , she ran from the party and then toward the beach. That was the last i saw of her. Reporter Shannon Gilbert had disappeared. Months later, Missing Persons Unit called us out on saturday to follow up on an investigation on a missing person. Reporter during a search for gilbert, an officer and his cadaver dog made a startling discovery. At some point, the dog gave me an indication, which means his tail started waving, he started sampling the air. At that point, i saw the skeletal remains of a body. There is no indication that this is shannon from may 1st of this year. Reporter it was not Shannon Gilbert. And it was not just one body. We were quite surprised the second day, when we found a second body. It was approximately 500 feet west of the first body. Then, we conducted a more detailed search and we found a third body and a fourth body. They were all within about 500 feet of each other. Reporter can you give more details about how they were found . Most of the victims were bound, feet and hands. Their bodies were covered in a camouflaged type of burlap that is used to obscure Duck Hunting Blinds or a boat when you are hunting for ducks. It looks like a car pulled up, opened a door, and the bodies were dumped. Some of these bodies had been there more than a year or so. There was clothing missing and personal effects missing. So that tells us we have someone who is taking their lives and keeping parts of them, an article of clothing or personal effect. The term they use in the Serial Killer genres trophies from his killings. Reporter long island has a Serial Killer. A little more than a month later, the public would learn the identities of the victims. The victims are Maureen Brainardbarnes of connecticut, Amber Lynn Costello of north avalon, new york. Megan waterman of maine. Melissa bartolome of the bronx. We actually were watching the news and saw that there were four bodies found in long island. They actually showed the remains of one, a skeleton. We just started hollering, something called us. We knew it was her. Just the size of the remains. Reporter Melissa Bartolome was petite and in her 20s, like all the other victims. He was very selective about people under five feet. He wanted young women who appeared younger by their size. Reporter it was not the only similarity. All of them were self employed in the escort business. They were soliciting their services on craigslist and other websites on the internet. No matter what she did, she was our daughter and a friend of people. I would just like to put it out there that she was the light of my life. [ crying ] i would like to set the record straight that she was not a mean person, she was not a bad person. I bought into all the horrible stereotypes about victims in crimes like this. I assume they lived off the grid, that nobody was looking for them. In fact, their families have been looking for their lost loved ones, some of them for months, one of them for 3 1 2 years, one for two years. That was the bartholomew family, whose daughter melissas initial disappearance in 2009 was followed by multiple phone calls to her 15yearold sister, amanda. The calls were made by someone who claims to be her killer. The calls came in from melissas phone. This was quite jarring, because she had been missing. We saw her caller i. D. Come up, and her 15yearold sister answers. He was taunting her, basically torturing her. She kept asking where her sister was, and he just would not tell her. She would ask if she was alive, he would not answer. I mean, we always had hope until that last call, when he told amanda that he had killed her. It was singularly the most chilling, disturbing, but also cruel thing you could do to a victims family, especially a teenage sister who was searching for answers and trying to cling to hope. Reporter hope that was fueled when police began tracing those calls, but that lead nowhere. The caller made sure he called from very busy areas, like Madison Square garden and times square, so that the cameras that are out there would look down into a crowded field, and at any given time there were at least dozens of people talking on cell phones. Reporter at the time, the gilbert family was holding out hope, too. After those first four women were found, police announced they would keep looking for Shannon Gilbert. And in the months after those women were discovered, they did find more Human Remains. In the last hours, another body believed to be that of a fifth woman, turns up on the same stretch. And then they found more. Reporter eight bodies discovered on gilgo beach, on long island, three found just yesterday. Then they found more, then they found more, Something Like 11 people that were found who may or may not be connected to one another, may or may not have been connected to those first four women. Reporter all of them in the area around gilgo beach, and none of them Shannon Gilbert. And as the bodies piled up, so did the concerns. Can you talk about gilgo beach, the tension that i imagine was arising after the discoveries . When you start to have several Murder Victims, and those bodies have been there for quite some time, it brought tremendous fear to the community. Reporter which was usually a tranquil place. These are communities of individuals that love to be around the beach, they like to enjoy the better parts of life, peace and quiet. And if you think along that long strip of highway along gilgo beach, it is a peaceful drive, a peaceful walk. Reporter and it is something else, too. An ideal spot for the end of a violent spree. It is a nearperfect burial ground, not far off the road, in a wooded area, a few feet more you are in marshes with water and tallgrass. When you get to the road, you can look for miles in One Direction or the other and see any vehicles or people coming. It gives you a real chance to work on observed, particularly at night in the dark. Reporter by the end of 2011, police would finally find Shannon Gilberts body, three miles from the socalled gilgo beach floor. Then, another surprise in a case full of them. Police let it be known that they did not believe gilberts debt was connected to the hunt for a Serial Killer, the one that her disappearance helped launch. 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We are leaning toward one Serial Killer scenario. Reporter one year after the remains of the four missing women were found here, found in burlap and dumped in the marshland of long island great south bay, the quiet town of gilgo beach had plunged into a fog of fear. And the investigation into the murders showed little sign of progress. I think that the fact that have been disclosed so far do not bear out a single killer theory at all. An investigation like this, you would think every agency would want to collaborate to try to get the killer. But here, in Suffolk County, you had a police force that was kind of at odds with the district attorney. The collaboration was really compromised from the beginning. You had a very dedicated team of investigators, but you also had a Police Department that was going through dysfunction, corruption, and investigations into itself. You had the chief of the county Police Department under investigation by the fbi, who were also investigating the district into attorney. Outside agencies like the fbi, who might be inclined to investigate this corrupt official, were being kept away from the case. Reporter another problem, some say, was that investigators lack the motivation to solve these murders from the start. From the beginning, it was abundantly clear that if these Murder Victims have been College Students or corporate workers that the case would have been taken much more seriously. It was very clear that there was a victimblaming going on. It could not help but impact the case. I dont want anybody to think we have a Jack The Ripper running around Suffolk County with Blood Dripping from a knife. I think it was very comforting when we found out he was targeting a specific group of women, that made it something that was removed from us. Reporter between the scandalwritten the Police Department, nearly a dozen sets of remains, and a marginalized group of victims, the Gilgo Murder Case officially went cold, frozen, it seemed, for years until a gradual shift in leadership opened the door to a fresh start. One of the great things about Geraldine Hart becoming commissioner in Suffolk County is that she has better career at the fbi. So, this was an amazing moment where not only was she able to get people from the fbi and people from the Suffolk CountyPolice Department to Work Together on a regular basis on this case, she also was able to talk to folks in the fbi about dna analysis, and other scientific techniques that a Police Department like suffolk was not able to do. Good afternoon. Reporter to no surprise in 2020, put the mission her heart held an unexpected Press Conference on the case, revealing a new clue for the first time in years. A black leather belt in boston with the letters hm or wh was recovered during the initial stages during this investigation. We believe that the belt was handled by the suspect and did not belong to any of the victims. A short time after that Press Conference, Geraldine Hart had another Press Conference, announcing they had successfully identified another victim. Today, we are announcing that jane doe number six has been positively identified as valerie mack. That, to me, was a sign they were rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. Reporter the work continued into the next administration. In 2022, and my pity veteran Rodney Harrison replaced hart as the new Suffolk County police commissioner. One of his first move was to launch an Interagency Task force dedicated to solving the gilgo murders. When you took office, why was it so important for you to start the task force . I wanted to make sure we were working with all our Law Enforcement partners. The objective is to put a dragon out there, see what we could do to get as many people as possible to participate, reach out to their networks, and see if we could get closer to identifying a subject. It paid off. Reporter one of the first important bleed that caught the attention of the new task force came from a witness who told investigators that the night before the victim Amber Costello s disappearance, a client arrived at her home, and they described him. 64, 250 pounds, a big mop of hair, giant 1970sstyle glasses. The witness said he was huge, looks like an ogre. Reporter investigators also obtained costello Cell Phone Records, which revealed that a Burner Phone Number contacted her that night, just before the client entered her home. The following night on september 2nd, the same burner cell phone contacted costello again. Shortly after, costello left her house and a witness spotted a dark green colored vehicle nearby. So, the state Police Investigators started to work on the car. She says, i am going to enter the search as a green pickup truck, and it comes back to a Chevy Avalanche in south carolina, registered to a guy, but it uses to be registered right here. Who wasnt registered to . Rex your men. Okay, who is rex . They run him. No criminal record. What does rex look like . He is 64 and 250 pounds. He wears big, round glasses, he has a mop of hair, he has a green truck. I am not sure exactly when i said that is our guy, but i will say this. When we were able to track back that Green Avalanche was when i thought we were getting close. The car, exactly. Reporter investigators kept digging, and they discovered that, just like costello, Cell Phone Records from Victims Melissa but felony and Megan Waterman were contacted by Burner Phones in the hours before they disappeared, but it was the locations where those burner forms pink that was most interesting. What they were able to do was narrow down the area where the phones were pinging to an area in Midtown Manhattan, around fifth avenue and 35th street, thereabouts, and another area in massapequa. Massapequa park, on long island. Reporter both are locations key to rex huberman, his office in Midtown Manhattan at his home in Massapequa Park, just across the bay from the Ocean Parkway where the bodies of the gilgo four were discovered. I think the big breakthrough with the task force was the use of Cell Phone Records. Reporter nathan lands is a professor at John Jay College of criminal justice in new york city. That allow them to Identity Location in manhattan and the location on long island, and they were able to connect it to his cell phone as well. He was using a burner phone, but in his pocket was his regular cell phone, which was also making things. They were able to connect those two, so even the use of a burner phone did not conceal his identity as well as he hoped it would. Reporter further investigating confirmed that over the years, huberman frequently used Burner Phones to contact workers, and as recently as may 2023, investigators spotted him purchasing additional minutes linked to a burner cell phone. He is growing into the suspect, because we now have a car, we had a face, we have the geographic connection. But that is all circumstantial. They need that thin hair of evidence that will go from circumstantial to certainty. And the thin hair of evidence turns out to be a literal hair. Two of his hairs, apparently, according to the document that we have read, can be connected to his wife,