The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer
By Robert Kolker, Oct. 19, 2023, NY Times
[ . . . ] In the 1970s, to take one notable example, the Suffolk County Police Dept’s homicide unit was known for an impossibly high confession rate of 97 percent, which almost certainly meant they engaged in coercion.. When that statistic made the news, officers in that unit proudly took to wearing T-shirts with the insignia “97%.” Prosecutors have, at times, ignored and even enabled those excesses. In 1988, a teenager named Martin Tankleff was driven to confess falsely to the murder of his father; it would take almost 18 years for him to be exonerated and released. And a year later, in 1989, New York’s Commission of Investigation issued a report lambasting the Suffolk Police and the district attorney’s office and citing evidence of more coerced confessions, plus illegal wiretaps, preferential treatment for people close to public officials and “the practice of sweeping law enforcement misconduct under the rug.”

The police often went unchecked because in Suffolk County, their union is a powerful source of campaign contributions with its own super PAC. The union’s political clout helps explain why the Suffolk Police Department is one of the nation’s largest, with about 2,500 sworn officers, and their salaries are among the highest. A politician who supports the police can earn the union’s backing and ensure a swift rise to the top. And for many decades, any district attorney with ambition would not look too closely at police indiscretions and even indulge them or, better still, use them to consolidate political power.

When Thomas Spota first became district attorney in 2002, he was perceived as a white knight, largely expected to clean house after an era of corruption. But Spota, it became clear later, found ways to install his own allies in police leadership positions, which, in turn, would secure the union’s support. When the Gilgo case emerged eight years into Spota’s tenure, he was actively reshaping the Police Department — even as the body count around Gilgo Beach rose, the media took up residence on the South Shore and investigators struggled to handle an unprecedented case involving at least one serial killer.

The Suffolk detectives had more than enough to deal with in those first few months. Ten possible victims meant 10 different sets of evidence — not just bodies, but also physical evidence and phone records. The police knew the killer targeted women who posted ads on Craigslist. They knew he used camouflaged burlap straps to bind them, the kind a hunter uses. They knew he used hard-to-trace burner phones to contact each woman, a different phone for each victim: 16 calls or texts to Maureen Brainard-Barnes before she vanished in 2009, and four before Melissa Barthelemy disappeared. At the time, the burner phones made him seem clever — a loyal watcher of certain police procedurals, perhaps.

But the killer made mistakes, too. Police knew he used tape to wrap the victims and found at least a few hairs. With the right technology, furnished by the F.B.I. or an outside lab with expertise, they might be able to extract DNA and find a match, provided they had a suspect’s DNA to compare it with. They also recovered a belt on the scene with initials, either “HM” or “WH.”

The police started to understand where this killer might operate — where he lived and maybe where he worked. They learned how in the summer of 2009, the killer made taunting phone calls from Midtown Manhattan to Melissa Barthelemy’s younger sister, using Melissa’s phone. Brainard-Barnes’s phone also connected to a cell tower in Midtown Manhattan, near the Queensboro Bridge — the bridge a person might take if they were heading to Long Island — before she vanished in 2007. Waterman’s phone last registered at a cell tower in central Long Island, near Massapequa Park. So did Barthelemy’s. Here was a pattern: a killer who potentially commuted between central Long Island and Midtown Manhattan.

These were densely populated areas, where it might seem impossible that he could ever be traced. And yet during the first year of the Gilgo case, in 2011, the F.B.I. started to provide help on that front: technology that might track those burner phones by seeing if their numbers appeared in the records of certain cell towers on Long Island. Cell-tower data is voluminous, a haystack full of needles: Think of all the signals from all the phones that ping at various cell towers every second. But if any of the killer’s burner phones pinged at the same towers, they would have a sense of where, perhaps, he spent most of his time.

If this seemed promising, Suffolk’s investigation for most of 2011 was essentially at a standstill, in part because the district attorney, Spota, was stepping up his efforts to orchestrate a soft takeover of the police. He went public with his fury at the existing police leadership in May after senior officials suggested that a single killer might be responsible for all the murders. Spota “was so incensed by the one-killer theory,” a former senior police officer told me recently, because he believed it encouraged panic. “That heightens the alarm to everyone that we have an active killer — that it could happen again.”

Days later, Spota held a news conference of his own. He made sure Richard Dormer, the police commissioner, was standing there as he spoke — a public defenestration. “Dormer has no idea what Spota is going to say,” the former senior officer recalled. “And Spota runs the whole show. He’s got the clipboards up, and he shows where all the bodies are laid out. It’s very telling.” Spota announced that there could be as many as three killers at work on Long Island — that the South Shore might have been a dumping ground. “It is clear that the area in and around Gilgo Beach has been used to discard human remains for some period of time,” Spota declared. “As distasteful and disturbing as that is, there is no evidence that all of these remains are the work of a single killer.”

Among the police and the media, those watching the case were baffled. Isn’t an open disagreement between the police commissioner and the district attorney a gift to any future defense lawyer handling the case at trial? But insiders understood that this wasn’t so much about solving this case as it was about Spota’s larger ambitions. They knew that Dormer was an appointee of Steve Levy, the county executive and Spota’s political foe, and that Spota was going after them both. Publicly, he excoriated Dormer, while privately, he had Levy investigated for campaign-finance improprieties. In March, two months before this news conference, Spota pressured Levy to drop his bid for re-election in return for not being prosecuted. Dormer was out as commissioner before the end of the year.

The public would never learn exactly what Levy supposedly did — a classic Suffolk County back-room deal. And his successor, Steve Bellone, was happy to sign off on a new chief of the Police Department, who happened to be a longtime protégé of Spota’s — and who, to the eternal detriment of the Gilgo investigation, would go on to become widely known as the most corrupt police official in modern Suffolk history.

Shortly after the bodies were identified by DNA in early 2011, the police visited the home of Amber Costello, the most recent victim, in a rented house in Babylon. All summer before her disappearance in September, she shared the home with her boyfriend, Bjorn Brodsky, and a friend, Dave Schaller. The place was a drug pit, well known to neighbors, who had been watching cars coming and going for months. All three housemates spent most of their days doing heroin, with Costello’s sister popping by for visits. The money for the heroin came from Costello’s escort work, starting at $250 a call.

Schaller at the time said that during Costello’s last night at the house, she was on the phone with a potential client and arrived at an unusually high fee: $1,500 for the whole night. She asked to meet him outside the house. Schaller walked Costello out the door, but he didn’t see Costello’s client. He wrote in a 2012 Facebook post that he was too high to remember him. But the police had access to Costello’s phone records, and they saw that the same man she was talking with had also been texting her the night before. They even saw a text message suggesting he had met with her in person that first night: The client seemed mad that something had gone wrong, and he wanted to see her again.

The police learned that on the first night, the client wanted to hire Costello, but as soon as he paid, Schaller jumped out of the shadows and chased him away. This was a scam Schaller and Brodsky pulled whenever they could that summer — accosting Costello’s clients and taking their money before she had to follow through with the job. But this time, the client seemed to want another chance.

Police started looking for anyone who could remember seeing the client on that first night. They found a witness who saw a large, white male, 6-foot-4 or taller — resembling an “ogre” — in his mid-40s, with “dark bushy hair” and big glasses. The witness also spotted the car this man drove: a green Chevrolet Avalanche with a distinctive rear door, like a truck’s. At that moment, with the description of a man and a make, model and color of a car, the police were closer to targeting a suspect than they had ever been.

And then the lead withered away. The initial database search for the car went nowhere. A source close to the Gilgo investigators told me that the detectives were using a program known as Lawman — a product of 1990s database technology, accessing millions of New York State’s paper D.M..V. records. When it first became available, the Lawman search seemed like a godsend. Pretty much everything that sat in the D.M.V. archives was instantly searchable. But over the years, as databases age, their data becomes harder to navigate. New cars like Avalanches, which are a blend of a truck and a car, could be misfiled by the D.M.V. — and what gets mangled by the D.M.V. can disappear entirely in the Lawman searches. In retrospect, the source told me, the car must have been miscategorized.

Dave P. wrote:
> The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer
> By Robert Kolker, Oct. 19, 2023, NY Times
To understand what went wrong with the Gilgo case, it helps to have a
passing familiarity with the dark, contradictory nature of Suffolk County —
encompassing some of the most rarefied communities in the world, including
the Hamptons and Fire Island, as well as struggling towns like Brentwood,
Wyandanch and Central Islip. It’s a place full of sophisticated, powerful people,
where time and again, law-enforcement has closed ranks and done things their way,
often with little oversight.
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