Newly installed Suffolk County Police Department Commissioner Rodney Harrison took a tour of the Gilgo Beach murder site and then made a pledge to Suffolk County residents and the victims families: We will not rest until we bring those accountable to justice.
On Friday, December 31, Commissioner Harrison held a press conference to comment to the public about the ongoing investigation, saying that the SCPD will bring a fresh set of eyes to the case. He said solving the Gilgo Beach homicide investigation case remains a top priority for the department after touring the scene where some of the victims’ bodies were hidden.
Watch a video of Commissioner Harrison’s statements below:
Video: SCPD.
“This is one of the things as an investigator in the NYPD that we have always done,” Commissioner Harrison said. “We look at the incidents, we look at the location at the crime scene to get a better idea as to exactly what may need to be done within the investigation. And I thought it was very important that I did that here today.”
Commissioner Harrison also spoke with the Suffolk County Homicide investigators leading the investigation, saying that “a lot of great work was done.”
“I stated this when I was nominated as a Commissioner for Suffolk County—solving this serial case is going to be very, very important to me,” he said.
Two years ago, Netflix released a movie about the murders called Lost Girls, which garnered mixed reviews.
According to an SCPD website dedicated to the Gilgo Beach investigation, Shannan Gilbert, a Craigslist escort, went missing from a client’s house in Oak Beach on the south shore of Long Island on May 1, 2010. During the months that followed her disappearance, canine officers incorporated training exercises into searches of the area surrounding Gilbert’s last known location. During one exercise, on December 11, 2010, a set of skeletal remains was discovered in an area near Gilgo Beach off Ocean Parkway. The remains located would later be identified as Melissa Barthelemy.
Two days after the first discovery, the remains of three other Craigslist escorts were located in close proximity to Barthelemy’s remains. The three sets of remains would later be identified as Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello. All four women were reported missing between July 2007 and September 2010.
While continuing the search for Shannan Gilbert several miles east of where the four Craigslist escorts were found, a set of partial skeletal remains was found on March 29, 2011. The remains were later identified as those of Jessica Taylor, another known escort. Taylor’s partial remains were previously discovered on July 26, 2003 off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville.
Less than a week later, as part of the continuing search for Shannan Gilbert, three additional sets of remains were discovered on April 4, 2011. The first set was later determined to be those of a female whose partial remains were discovered by hunters in a wooded area off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville on November 19, 2000. Those remains remain unidentified and are known as Jane Doe #6. A second set of skeletal remains discovered near Jane Doe #6 were those of an unidentified female toddler. West of Jane Doe #6 and the infant female toddler were the skeletal remains of an unidentified Asian male. One week later, while searching further west along Ocean Parkway in Nassau County, two additional sets of skeletonized remains were found approximately seven miles away from the discovery on April 4. One set is believed to be the mother of the toddler found a week earlier. The other set of partial remains was linked through DNA analysis to remains found in Davis Park on Fire Island in 1996.