The Long Island Serial Killer

This picture accompanies The Long Island News article "Long Island Serial Killer: Beach Bodies" (4-14-11).

FBI agents are working with the Long Island police to capture a serial killer who used the cell phone of one of his victims to taunt her teenaged sister. A blog called Long Island Serial Killer is posting all the latest scuttlebutt.

According to The Long Island Press (4-12-11):

For now, police are keeping quiet on the specifics of these crimes, but information has been unofficially leaked that the first four victims—Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Amber Lynn Costello—were strangled to death and wrapped in burlap.

The Associated Press (accessed 4-16-11) reports:

With police saying next to nothing about the discovery of 10 sets of human remains dumped off a highway near Jones Beach, amateurs and experts alike are offering a multiplicity of theories — some outlandish, some entirely plausible.

Many of the theories have been compiled on the Web site LongIslandserialkiller.com or offered up in the daily papers.

"It's mostly fodder for laughter by the investigators," said attorney Bruce Barket, a former prosecutor in the Nassau County district attorney's office. "Because the investigators know much more than they have revealed publicly, they're sitting there chuckling at this theory and that theory. Because it really is irrelevant to what they are doing."