Child's body discovered among Adult female victims on Long Island Beach

One of the latest four sets of remains found on a Long Island beach linked to the Craigslist Ripper
belongs to a baby or child - and not a grown woman, it was revealed today.
The remains were found last week among four sets of bodies several miles away from where
the bodies of four prostitutes were located in December.But
the victim may not be related to the other New York murders as a young
person’s body ‘would not fit a serial killer’s pattern’, according to
law enforcement sources. ‘One doesn't match the others. It's a
young person, possibly as young as an infant, or a child,’ an
investigation source told the New York Post.The
remains are among eight sets found so far in Oak and Gilgo beaches,
with four identified as Craigslist prostitutes who disappeared after
meeting someone for sex.The discovery of the other four,
located within less than a mile of each other, was revealed last week
but they have yet to be identified.Cash-strapped
officials are concerned police overtime issues have hampered beach
patrols in the areas where the bodies were dumped and this is affecting
the probe, the source suggested. Patrolling jurisdiction over the
beach was taken away from the local Marine Bureau in early 2009 and
given to the First Precinct in West Babylon, up to 40 minutes away by car.
The Marine Bureau only got the duty back in late 2010 when the first bodies were
discovered and no more searches have been scheduled on weekends since
the corpses were found, the source said.A
search from last week in Nassau County is to be restarted today, as
police scour the waterfront west of where the other bodies were found.Investigators
say the Long Island killings are linked to the murders of four
prostitutes in Atlantic City in 2006, with victims in both cases
strangled and dumped near water.Suffolk County police have denied they have identified a suspect.The
news comes after it was revealed the Craigslist Ripper stalked the
teenage sister of one of his victims, taunting her in six telephone
calls.He even revealed to 16-year-old Amanda Barthelemy that her
sister Melissa was a prostitute - a secret she had kept from her family.The
sadistic serial killer, who police fear may have stalked and strangled
to death at least eight prostitutes over the past five years, would only
talk to the teen.The four bodies dug up in Long Island last
December were of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Megan
Waterman, 22, and Maureen Brainer-Barnes, 25.Police have yet to
link their deaths with four other victims in New Jersey - Kim Raffo,
Molly Jean Dilts, Barbara Breidor and Tracy Ann Roberts.
The woman who sparked the body hunt, Shannan Gilbert, 24, who used Craigslist to
book clients, is still missing and was last seen in May.
Investigators believe the killer has a sophisticated understanding of police investigation techniques and 'may be a cop'.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375707/Its-child-Craigslist-Ripper-distanced-new-bodies-found.html#ixzz1JDi0UGKc

Includes photos.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375707/Its-child-Craigslist-Ripper-distanced-new-bodies-found.html#ixzz1JDi0UGKc

The little girl had lived, at most, 730 days or so. Someone had hidden
her body in the thicket of branches and poison ivy off Ocean Parkway on
the South Shore of Long Island. By the time the police discovered her on
April 4, the remains had turned skeletal. About 250 feet from the toddler’s body, the head, right foot and hands
of a woman yet to be identified were found. More than a mile away, the
head, hands and forearm of another woman, a 20-year-old missing
prostitute, were discovered in the brush. And farther down Ocean
Parkway, even more bodies were found, including those of four prostitutes who had advertised for clients on Craigslist. Investigators have long been searching for the serial killer, or
killers, responsible for the murders of the prostitutes. But a mystery
of a different kind shrouds the death of the toddler, who was found on the same scrubby and desolate stretch of land, a tragic, nameless footnote in the case. While the other victims had clearly been murdered, Suffolk County
officials said, the toddler’s body showed no sign of injury or trauma,
and her death has not been classified as a homicide. The other bodies were found stuffed into burlap sacks or dismembered,
but the toddler was found intact, wrapped in a blanket. The cause and
date of her death have not been established, and investigators believe
that her death was most likely unconnected to any of the other bodies.
“For all its beauty though, the parkway and Jones Beach can hold many
secrets I guess, and this is another,” said Kristine Enfield, 40, whose
home in Wantagh is perpendicular to the parkway. “I’m surprised, but in
this day and age, I’m not shocked.” A spokesman for the Suffolk County Police Department said that DNA tests
had not yet been completed, and that if the tests did not lead to an
identification, officials might seek the public’s help. The girl was between 18 months and 24 months old at the time of her
death, older than in typical abandoned-infant situations, in which
mothers with unwanted pregnancies discard or kill their newborns in the
minutes or days following the births. Criminologists and other experts said that it was unlikely that the
toddler had been abducted by a stranger, and that the details about the
case suggested that the girl’s parent or caretaker placed her in the
brush to conceal her death for reasons that are still unknown. “It is not simply that it is a toddler’s death,” said Franklin E. Zimring,
a criminologist and law professor at the University of California,
Berkeley. “It is that it’s a toddler’s unreported death. Whether it is
accidental, intentional or something in between, when the death of
somebody that young goes unreported to the authorities, the lack of
reporting suggests that this is intimately linked to events involving
the custodial parent. Sometimes it’s abuse. Sometimes it’s neglect.
Sometimes it’s an accident.” One clue suggesting that the toddler’s parent or guardian was involved
is the blanket. Cheryl Meyer, a psychology professor at Wright State
University in Dayton, Ohio, and a co-author of “When Mothers Kill: Interviews From Prison,”
said wrapping the toddler in a blanket suggested an emotional
connection between the child and the person disposing of the body. The
gesture itself was something a mother might do. Often, mothers who kill their children dispose of the body close by,
like in their backyard or even in their house, unlike in many cases
involving fathers or stepfathers, who often discard the body far from
home, Professor Meyer said. She recalled an Ohio case where a child died
of a fever because the mother and stepfather did not take the child to a
hospital. The mother agreed not to report the death, but wanted the
body nearby, so they hid it in a crawlspace of the house. “It would just be odd for a mom to bury a child at some place that she
had no connection to,” Professor Meyer said of the toddler on Long
Island, adding: “Transporting the body somewhere else for a burial —
that doesn’t sound to me like a mom. But wrapping the body in a blanket
does. So maybe you have a couple.” It is not clear if the little girl was ever reported missing. A vast
majority of missing-children cases in New York State involve not
toddlers but suspected runaways age 13 or older. Of the 20,309 reports of children missing last year
throughout the state, only 190 were of children 5 or younger, according
to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Most of those 190
cases involved children abducted by relatives. Out of the thousands of
missing-children reports, many were resolved either by the child’s
voluntarily returning home or by the work of law enforcement agencies.
Last year, only five children who had been reported missing in the state
were later found dead, and all but one of them were teenagers. Marc Bookal,
4, was the exception. His body was found a few blocks from his
apartment in Newburgh, N.Y., in early 2010. His mother’s boyfriend, who
had been watching him and who said he had vanished from their apartment,
was charged with second-degree murder. “Many of us who worked on that case, we all had young kids,” said
Charles Broe, a retired Newburgh police lieutenant who is now chief of
police in Hyde Park, N.Y. “You know certainly at that age that these
kids didn’t have a choice in it. They didn’t have a say in how things
go, and that’s what makes it so hard.” Marc’s body was discovered by police dogs in a bag in a small wooded
area near a factory. Though the girl on Long Island was found on Jones
Beach Island, she too was essentially discarded in the woods. At the site where she was found, the tangled and thorny branches stretch
so high and thick that they form a kind of impenetrable wall. There is
neither surf nor sand nor the sound of waves. It is one of those forlorn
places on the side of the road where bits of trash and car parts and
license plates end up. The police cut a path into the brush and made a small clearing where the
body was found: She appeared to have been laid on a patch of dirt about
50 steps from the edge of Ocean Parkway, at the foot of a thin tree,
leafless and largely branchless.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/nyregion/among-bodies-discarded-on-a-beach-one-that-doesnt-fit.html