Suspect taken into custody in long-unsolved string of killings on Long Island

A suspect has been taken into custody on New York’s Long Island in connection with a long-unsolved string of killings, known as the Gilgo Beach murders, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Friday.

The case has long drawn immense public attention after human remains were found along a New York beach highway more than a decade ago. The mystery attracted national headlines for many years, and the unsolved killings were the subject of the 2020 Netflix film “Lost Girls.”

The suspect was taken into custody in Massapequa late Thursday, and investigators were at a home connected to the case Friday, the official said. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The suspect’s name was not immediately released.

The deaths of 11 people whose remains were found in 2010 and 2011 have long stumped investigators. Most of the victims were young women who had been sex workers. Several of the bodies were found near the town of Gilgo Beach.

Determining who killed them, and why, has vexed a host of seasoned homicide detectives through several changes in leadership in the police department. Last year, an interagency task force to try to solve the case was formed with investigators from the FBI and state and local police departments.

The disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in 2010 triggered the hunt that exposed the larger mystery.

Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the marsh.

Months later, a police officer and his cadaver-hunting dog were looking for her body in the thicket along nearby Ocean Parkway when they happened upon the remains of a different woman. Within days, three other bodies were found, all within a short walk of one another.

By spring of 2011, that number had climbed to 10 sets of human remains — those of eight women, one man and one toddler. Some were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, making for a puzzling crime scene that stretched from a park near the New York City limits to a resort community on Fire Island and out to far eastern Long Island.

Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about three miles east of where the other 10 sets of remains were discovered.

In talking about the bodies near Gilgo Beach, investigators have said several times over the years that it was unlikely one person killed all the victims.

News of a suspect being taken into custody comes a day after state police responded to a report of skeletal remains found in a wooded area off the Southern State Parkway in Islip, N.Y. Police planned a briefing near the site Friday afternoon. It wasn’t immediately clear if those remains were linked to the Gilgo Beach case.