New episodes are released weekly absolutely free, but you can binge the entire season now with iHeart True Crime Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

You'll also get ad free listening and exclusive bonus episodes.

So head to Apple Podcasts, search Iheartrue Crime Plus and subscribe.

Today you're listening to monster Hunting the Long Island serial Killer.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not reflect those of Tenderfoot TV or iHeartMedia.

This podcast contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone.

Listener discretion is advised.

In this episode, we'll be talking about these victims in very graphic terms.

These details are crucial for proving the mistakes and missed opportunities that could have led to the perpetrators capture sooner.

These individuals deserved to be remembered not by the details of their deaths, but by the fullness of their lives.

They are Shannon Gilbert, Rain, Brainer Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Bartholemy, and Amberlyn Costello.

In December of twenty fifteen, federal agians arrested Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke, this stunning downfall being just the latest black eye in the county's long history of police corruption.

Investigators say that Chief Burke tortured a prisoner for stealing a Duffel bag.

Out of the chief's suv.

Federal prosecutors accusing the fifty one year olds of using his power to assault prisoner Christopher Lobe.

I got chold, I got paunch, I got slapped, I got kicked.

Burke had beaten an addict and petty thief named Christopher Loeb in a Suffolk County station house had the misfortune of breaking into the Chief's suv and stealing his gym bag.

Unfortunately for Burke, the gym bag contained his gun belt, sex toys, and nasty porn, which sparked a new wave of lurd speculation, including claims that the porn was a snuff tape and rumors that maybe Burke, the Chief of Police, was actually the Long Island serial killer.

One of the allegations is that in the duffel bag that was stolen from James Burke was a snuff film film like that not somethingly going to go buy on the local porn.

Shop without question.

Jimmy Burke is a criminal or.

So, let me ask you something.

Do you think that Burke is lisk?

Well?

The contents of the gym bag seemed trivial in retrospect.

What wasn't trivial was the fact that Burke, as well as the Suffolk County District Attorney and even the head of their anti corruption unit, had all orchestrated a massive cover up.

And while none of this had anything to do with the List case, it revealed at least one truth behind all those rumors that yes, Suffolk County was willing.

To obstruct justice to protect its own.

Once at the height of power in Suffolk County, he is now heading to prison.

Under the Plea deal, Burke will serve up to fifty one months, a fraction of.

The thirty years he faced.

His crashing fall from grace has county wide implications.

The damage and the cost of this corruption and abuse of power is incalculable.

But that's as far as we'd gotten in twenty sixteen when the Killing Season was released.

But now that Rex Human, the alleged killer, has been caught, we can finally get to the questions we've been waiting so long to ask exactly how did this corruption affect the list case?

And did it prevent the Suffo County PD from catching Lisk sooner?

But what's so surprising and downright shocking is when you learn, as we did, just how close they actually came to catching Lisk a decade ago, far closer than what law enforcement has publicly stated.

So close and you might even call it criminal.

I'm Josh Deemon, and this is monster hunting the Long Island serial killer.

While many questions still remain in the death of Shannon Gilbert, her disappearance set off a chain of events that I covered something far more terrifying than anyone could imagined.

One of the most gruesome and baffling serial killer cases in decades, the case that will be remembered alongside the Green River Killer, the Grim Sleeper, or the Golden State Killer.

Breaking news out of New York the arrest of US suspected serial killer.

This was an infamous case from over a decade ago that really captured the nation's attention.

The most notorious predator in New York since the Son of SAMD.

But what makes this case so unique is how Lisk bridges two worlds, that being the Golden Age of cerial murder from the nineteen seventies to the nineteen nineties in the world of today.

And that's because Rex Huerman has been walking the streets for more than thirty two years since his first allege killing, and like so many of us, he seems to be a product of this perverse fascination we all have with serial murder that some say was reignited with the release of Silence of the Lambs ninety one.

What does he do this man?

You see he kills me?

No, that is incidental.

What needs does he serve by killing?

Anger, social acceptance, sexual frustrations.

No, he cuts Rex was just twenty seven back then and just two years shy of that alleged first murder.

But since then Rex has become far more calculating because we know he studied and he planned, absorbing decades worth of serial killer books in true crime shows, fine tuning his methods but also adapting incorporating technology to become a predator of the modern age.

This killer went shopping on the internet for the perfect victim, and he found it.

In his seminal book Lost Girls, author Robert Kolker wrote about how the internet has played a dark hand in the list case.

The women who are targeted by this killer were representing something new out there in the world of prostitution.

They were using the Internet, and that might have given them a false sense of security.

But the Internet has made life different for John's as well.

They can remain more or less anonymous on the Internet, and they can maintain this hobby even you know, and hide it from their nearest and dearest.

As Kolker explained, it wasn't just the anonymity of the Johns that made this case so difficult to solve.

It was also the anonymity of the victims.

Of the ten bodies discovered along Ocean Parkway, the police quickly identified the first four found in December of twenty ten, but if the six bodies found months later, they can only id one, that being Jessica Taylor, aged twenty, and for years, the rest would remain nameless, including the baffling case of an Asian male found dressed in women's clothing, and maybe the most troubling victim of them all, a toddler.

Known only as baby Dough.

Now, each victim has their own story thrown rabbit hole, but first we'll start where the investigators started and.

We're following more breaking news.

Suffoc County Police releasing new info about the women known as the Gilgo four, all.

Victims in the Long Island serial killer case.

The first women were found along Long Island South short women known as the Gilgo.

For discarded in a similar fashion.

They were placed roughly five hundred feet apart, each wrapped in burlap.

The press had dubbed them the Gilgo four and the nickname Stuck.

Four women each wrapped in burlap, their arms and legs bound in tape, were in one case leather belts, presumably so they could be carried from a vehicle pulled off on the side of the highway.

They had all been placed between twenty to thirty feet into the bramble.

It's assume the killer did this with the intention of returning to baskin whatever horrors he had committed.

It's also believed in choosing this stretch of road, the killer was intimately familiar with Ocean Parkway.

We're all creatures of habit and he knew the area.

He knew where to put these bodies.

He felt comfortable where there's no cars coming back and forth.

This is really the perfect place.

To disguise something.

No one's going to see you doing it, and no one's going to see what you've done.

Is this somebody local that happens to know that's a very deserted area at a certain time of night, So it makes you a little concerned that this predator could possibly be living amongst us in one of the beach communities.

But what no one knew back then was that one of these four women would be the key to catching Lisk.

It's a story that unfolds over a decade later, but first the stories of these women who were more than just a nickname.

They were Melissa bartholemy Megan Waterman, Amberlyn Costello, and finally Maureen Brainerd Barnes, the first of these four women to disappear.

Maureen had vanished from Penn Station on July ninth, two thousand and seven, which is why my partner Rachel and I were there filming for the Killing season at that exact same time, eleven thirty pm on a Monday night in July.

All right, let's take a look around.

Is there a smoking section around here?

I got that later?

And what about the exits?

She could have gone out here to smoke?

Probably, right, this is where I would go.

So this is Penn Station where Maureen brainer Barnes was last seen on July ninth, two thousand and seven.

Maureene needed money, and she needed it quick.

If she could just make eleven hundred by the end of her stay and keep her from getting evicted and keep her ex from gaining custody of her child.

Maureen had taken the trained down from her home in Groton, Connecticut, and spent the next four days taking in calls with clients at a hotel in Midtown.

On Monday night, July night, she checked out of that hotel and walked to Penn Station, where she called her sister, Melissa.

She called me from her cell phone at Penn Station.

Okay, so Monday.

Night, Yes, she was taking a train home.

In twenty fifteen, as part of the Killing season, we interviewed Melissa about what she thought happened to her sister that night.

She said she had to walk out to go have.

A cigarette, and do we know what happened after that?

I think she was stocked by someone that she knew before as a client.

So anywhere from eleven thirty to twelve, I'm assuming she got taken.

That's the security camera.

There, there's police cars everywhere.

In returning to Penn Station, Rachel and I wanted to understand whether Maureen had been abducted by Lisk or was it more likely that she went with him willingly.

As you can see, it'd be pretty difficult to snatch somebody this area.

I don't think someone could be taken that easily.

Maybe he made some offer she couldn't refuse.

If he was using his own phone, they would know, But if he was using a burner phone that could have worked.

We now know there were in fact, sixteen quote interactions between a burner phone and Marine's cell all made within the four days before she vanished.

Another clue comes from a two thousand and seven police report that only recently came to light, revealing a witness who swore that Marine called her just after her sister to say that she was going to meet a client out of Long Island and that she would call her after.

This station is Penn Station.

We had always believed that Maureen had taken the train from Penn Station to some unknown stop out on the island, but we now know her cell phone registered its final ping in Manhattan near the fifty ninth Street Bridge, Yet there's no way her cell phone could get a signal while it was traveling underground, which means it's far more likely that she did go out to smoke before either getting into a taxi or possibly a vehicle driven by Lisk.

But maybe most chilling were the calls that came three days later on Sunday, July twelfth, two calls from Marine's cell phone to her voicemail, But detectives don't think the caller was Marine.

They think it was Lisk, listening to her messages to see if anyone was worried as to why she hadn't called after meeting her client.

But the only thing detectives knew for sure was that cell phone tower data put the caller somewhere near the Long Island Expressway, in an area known as Islandia, less than thirty one from Kilgo Beach.

The mailbox is full.

I cannot accept any messages at this time.

Goodbye.

Nearly two years after the disappearance of Maureen Brainerd, Barnes list would strike again when Melissa Bartholow, me, a Buffalo native, disappeared in the summer of twenty ten while filming The Killing Season.

Rachel and I went to Buffalo to speak with Melissa's family, but most importantly with Amanda, her sister.

My name is Amanda.

I'm Melissa's little sister.

All right, we're going to do that again.

I'm Amanda, and I'm Melissa's little sister.

With the age difference between you two nine years.

By the time Melissa was twenty four, she had already spent three years on the mean streets of New York, but now she was finally leaving her pimp behind.

Using craigslisten Backpage, Melissa now had her own clients and her own apartment in the Bronx.

On July tenth, two thousand and nine, the neighbors saw Melissa outside that apartment waiting for a cab to take her to the city.

According to her friend, she had just booked a thousand dollars out call on Long Island.

The night before.

She texted with Amanda, who was about to fly down from Buffalo.

But then Melissa vanished, no calls, no texts.

As her mother, Lynne told us, she and her husband Jeff started calling hospitals and police.

Then one week later, their phone rang.

Melissa had been missing a while, her phone rang and came up on the call, her idea that it was melissawhere like, oh my god.

So Amanda answers it and she's expected to hear her sister's voice, and it was a guy.

It's believed that Lisk, using Melissa's cell phone, called Amanda five times over a six week period, with each call becoming increasingly more graphic, as he described to the fifteen year old in detail how he sexually assaulted her sister.

Yet the calls always ended before they could be traced.

Sitting with Amanda, it was obvious the emotional scars from these calls ran deep.

Something I have to hear in my head.

I don't like saying it out loud.

Later, her stepfather, Jeff, revealed to us what the caller had said.

The first call, he said to her, are you a horror like your sister?

I heard you're a half breed.

The last one he.

Said, he finally murdered her, and he's going to watch your body rot and he might come and show her someday personally.

So why Amanda was there some clue as to why he called this sister?

More so, how did he know such specific details about Amanda?

For example, that she was biracial, A chilling thought when you consider that Amanda was about to visit her sister New York in less than a week.

Any reason why he didn't call anybody else and only called you.

You're asking me the same questions I asked myself every day.

You know, you may be the key I know.

Unfortunately, while police were unable to trace the exact location of the calls to Amanda, they knew that they had all pinged off towers in neither Times Square or more importantly, Madison Square Garden, a clue that we discussed with Lynn because of a strange connection to the previous victim, Maureene Brainerd Barnes.

Okay, so Marine calls her.

Sister, right, which is interesting because the calls they came into Amanda, one of them came from a cell phone tower at Madison Square Garden and in the basement a Madison Square Garden is Penn Station.

Investigators theorized the multiple connections to Penn Station meant that this location was somehow significant in the killer's life.

But the most important clue was in the timing of the calls made to Amanda.

The first set of calls made between eleven twenty nine am and twelve forty pm suggested the killer.

Had a job, an office job, and.

These terrifying calls were made during his lunch hour.

The second set of calls, from six forty two pm to seven twenty three pm, were all made at the tail end of the evening rush hour, leading police to believe they were hunting a commuter, one who made that daily trek from somewhere on Long Island to an office in midtown.

A commuter who probably went back and forth every day on the Long Island Railroad, whose main hub was in Penn Station.

As you leave the train, please step over the gap between the train and the platform.

The biggest question was where on Long Island.

From Melissa's cell phone.

Records, she made two calls to her voicemail from two motels in Massapequa.

Can you tell me about those?

Just that they were access That's all we knew.

There was a lot of calls in and out from Massapequa.

We now know there were actually three calls to Melissa's voicemail, but they didn't come from a motel like Maureen.

There wasn't Melissa calling.

We also know there are at least five interactions between a burner phone and Melissa's phone, all from Massapequa, but maybe the most telling clue coming on the early morning of July twelfth, at exactly one forty three am, just after Melissa leff Manhattan, when her cell phone ping to a tower in Massapequa.

What was obvious is that the numerous mentions of Massapequa suggested an important clue, a possible location connected to this killer, a theory further corroborated by his next victim, Megan Waterman, is head station.

This is the train two Masapequa.

Meghan Waterman was similar to so many stories we'd heard, young women hardened by dysfunction who were desperate to believe the promises of a Romeo pimp.

In Meghan's case, this was Aquen Cruz, a Brooklyn nite who lured her into a world of drugs and sex work.

Cruse often brought.

Megan down to Long Island, where she took in calls at the hotels that thought of the Expressway.

While there, she would often call to check in with her daughter, until those calls stopped.

On June fifth, twenty ten, the last image we have of Megan was captured by a lobby surveillance camera at one thirty one am walking out of the hap Hog Holiday in Express and down an access road before disappearing into the darkness.

I went to the holiday and Express only went to I couldn't handle it.

In twenty fifteen, we interviewed the rain Ella, Meghan's mother, who revealed an interesting detail about her daughter's Deay disappearance.

Where she went missing.

It's pitch black.

Megan comes across as a tough person, but Megan's afraid of the duck.

She would sleep with her bedroom lighter on and her TV gone at night.

There's no way she would go down there.

Megan is petrified of the dock.

Rachel and I went to that holiday and to walk down that same access road where Megan disappeared.

One of the biggest mysteries is was she just walking because she was just going down to this convenience store or did.

She actually have a call that night.

Well, some reports suggested that Megan was going to a store to grab cigarettes or candy.

We can now safely assume she was going to meet Lisk.

I think he called her up and said, Hey, I want to see you tonight and TN I'll pick you up.

Just the access road just walked up.

The thing that we do know is she wasn't picked up in the parking lot close to that front door.

She was not picked up at the front door.

The security camera probably sees that area, right, Yeah.

So there was at least the intention to disguise himself from being seen.

But what's important about all these details is that we're reaching that critical moment when the victim is getting into the killer's car, the contact point.

That's when his chances of getting caught skyrocket, usually from an eyewitness account or from a video camera.

Obviously, that's why Rex allegedly picked up Meghan away from the motel.

But what he didn't know is that the camera's outside the holiday and didn't even work.

But we also learned something else from Megan's mother.

She had to have seen him before this.

I heard a let a god down.

Why do you think that because she doesn't go aside just meet it anybody.

She had to have met this person to let her guard down enough to walk out of the hotel at one fifteen in the morning.

We now know detectives learned early in the investigation that Megan was going out and out call with the same white male she had met the day prior, one who had paid her a lord sum of money.

They also knew that Megan's cell phone had pinged at three eleven AM to a disturbingly familiar location, Massapequa Park.

In twenty eleven, the FBI began mapping areas where the victim's cell phones and the killer's burner phones had both pinged, creating two geographical boxes.

One so called box was in midtown Manhattan, where they believed the killer worked, but the other was in an area of Long Island where they believed the killer might live.

And they looked at an area of a confluence of four cell towers, and they realized that this had significant because the perpetrator of these crimes was probably located within this area, and that was mapped out.

That was called the box, and it was an area in Massapequa Park.

Back in twenty twelve, investigators were already honing in on Lisks location, somewhere it seemed within the Massapequa Park area, But in truth, there were thousands, if not tens of thousands of men who lived within their box.

What they needed was just one more piece of the puzzle, one more clue that could lead them to their killer, a clue that the Gilgo Beach Task Force would later find buried in the case files of Lisk's final victim, Amberlin Costello.

Amber craved family more than anything.

After a difficult childhood in North Carolina, one riddled with family separation and sexual abuse, Amber turned to drugs to numb the pain.

Amber's older sister, Kim, was the first to move to Long Island, but Amber quickly followed.

In less than a year, she was sharing a house with Bijorn Boardski aka Bear, whom she met in rehab, and Dave Shaller.

With Kim as a constant fixture, Amber had found her family, and together they bonded over heroin.

As Kim tells us, Amber's return to sex work was to be expected, but what wasn't expected was how easy to become.

With Craigslist and a new site, Backpage.

She posted her ad and I swear to God.

Within thirty five minutes that phone was ringing off the hook.

I couldn't believe it, and I started posting two.

We had a sister's you know a We made a lot of money this summer, made a lot.

Of money using sex work as a means to get their fix.

The sisters asked Dave to keep them safe.

I protected her.

You know.

Most of times I would leave and go take a drive of something, and then if something happened, they would call me and I come back to the house.

I let her do things at my house, which I regret, I really do.

It was Amber who did most of the work, operating out of their house in North Babylon, with Dave always close by.

His constant presence was one reason why Amber almost exclusively did in calls, except for that night on September second, twenty ten, when she received an unusual request for an eight hour out call.

More So, the caller asked Amber to leave behind our belongings all in exchange for fifteen hundred dollars.

He was going to drive her into the city that night to get dope.

And I never told her about the whole story.

I don't really go into that much, but that was part of the deal, was that this guy was going to travel to the city though, and that's why I thought she was comfortable with him.

Amber left the house with nothing but the clothes on her back, no cell phone, no overnight bag.

Dave walked her to the edge of the property gave her a hug and said call me later.

She said she would, then disappeared around the corner.

It was the last time Dave ever saw Amber alive.

All I had to do was walk like a fucking ten feet and I would have seen this guy's car like ten more feet.

That's the thing that foks me up.

Ten feet.

That's I could have seen a license play something.

You know.

Ten feet fucking killed that girl.

Dave never saw the car that night, but later he discussed a number of clues he'd never discussed with anyone before, at least publicly.

And remember this was back in twenty fifteen, eight years before Rex was arrested, and based upon more recent interviews that he's done clues he's never mentioned since.

You know, honestly, I think that there's like two or three guys that I think that could be the one that did it.

I think about it for years.

There was one guy who was stalking her, Like we'd get in the car to go somewhere and her phone ring and it would be this fucking freak following us around and shit, and he was cool and telling her.

He's like yeah, He's like I see you.

You're wearing pink got pink shirt, blue shorts.

This guy was doing the shit for like for a while.

The stalker line definitely peaked our attention, as did the taunting calls, which sounded similar to the calls made to Amanda, Melissa's little sister.

There was another one guy pulled up saying that he was going to skin her alive.

There was one guy who came there.

He was a monster.

He was like sixty eight sixty nine fucking monster of the dude, and I wound up fighting with him and went through my front door all over the friggin stairs onunted the lawn.

The fight with this angry John broke out after Dave and Amber had tried to trick him in an age old scam when they ran on numerous clients that summer, Dave, pretending to be Amber's angry boyfriend, would threaten and chase to John out of the house so that Amber wouldn't have to have sex while still keeping the Johns money.

He was just this beast of a man and he was driving a green h what town was I think called green Avalanche, a Chevy Avalanche truck.

White white dude, old though like probably like you know, like fifty years old monster.

I mean literally like six foot nine, three hundred fucking pounds.

There was only like a couple of weeks before, right before she disapeared, that that guy was there.

I told the cops about everybody.

You know.

It was either like there was like three guys that were like you know that she's seen a bunch of times, the one dude that was stalking her, the one dude who came back and said he was going to skin her alive.

And then that guy, that monster an avalanche.

Yeah, quick question.

Do you ever hear his voice?

Yeah?

I can hear his voice.

Yeah, yeah, I can.

I can.

He's flipping the funk out.

And that guy I remember, I can hear his voice.

I can hear all their voices.

Those guys, I can see their faces, you know, if they if they have a catches Kayan and it's I say it though I've said it a thousand times, I'm gonna be like, you know, I'm gonna know, I know I am, I know I am.

What we didn't know back then was buried in Dave Shaller's interview was the clue that broke the list case, the clue that led police to finally identify after more than a decade, Rex Hureman, the alleged Long Island serial killer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Thank you all for coming.

I'm standing here with Miguilbo Task Force to announce the indictment of Rex Yereman.

The murders of these young women went unsolved until today.

The significant break in the case was that Chevy Avalanche that was used during the Amber Costello crime.

This case is over.

We're going to convict him and we're going to hold him responsible for what he did.

He had a green Chevrolet Avalanche, a Chevy Avalanche.

It was a tip about this Chevy Avalanche that led to the arrest of Rex uwer.

Miners, the witness who says that the killer drove a first generation Chevy Avalanche.

Investigators had a description of a Chevrolet Avalanche in their case files since twenty ten.

David Shalard spoke with homicide detectives more than a decade ago.

The Green Avalanche.

The clue we now knowe Dave Shalard gave to Suffolk County detectives over ten years ago, the same clue he gave.

Us a Chevy Avalanche.

How many of those are out in master Pequa.

The clue that could have solved one of the most notorious serial killer cases in decades, and I'm sitting right there in front of me.

Many red flags were missed.

If I call it evidence.

The clue that had been there all long.

It was my chick's moment and I missed it.

That's a hot lead.

How do you get burned?

What was going on?

Out of Long Island?

Ready to keep listening?

Remember you can binge the rest of the season right now with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts Plus.

You get exclusive bonuses and ad free listening.

So head to Apple Podcasts search iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Hunting the Long Island serial Killer is a production of tenor Foot TV and iHeart, hosted, written and executive produced by me Josh Zemon, produced and written by Caitlin Colford, Donald Albrighton Payne Lindsay Or executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV.

Matt Frederick and Trevor Young are executive producers on behalf of iHeart Podcasts.

Original music by Alex Lasorenko, David Little and makeup and Vanity set Our Supervising producer is John Street, Editing and writing by Daniel Lonsberry.

Additional voiceover provided by Rachel Mills.

Additional production provided by Ghost Robot, Sound design, mix and master by Daydon Cole.

Cover design by Byron McCoy.

Interns Arnetta Fontinat, Shelby Hanson, Alec Walker and Fox Williams.

A and A Television Networks LLC.

Audio from the Killing season used under license Copyright twenty twenty five.

A and E Television Networks LLC, All rights reserved.

Special thanks to the team at United Talent Agency, the Nord Group, Brad Abramson, Todd Leebowitz, Rich Perrillo and Jigsaw Productions, Rachel Mills, Zachary Mortensen, Jen Beegle, David Baker, Joe jack Alone and Evan Krause, as well as the teams at iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV.

Find us on social media at Monster Underscore pod.

For more podcasts like Monster Hunting the Long Island serial Killer, search Tenderfoot TV in your podcast app, or visit Tenderfoot dot tv and if you want to keep following my Hunt for the Long Island serial Killer or a deeper dive into my other true crime content.

Join me on YouTube at Sinister with Josh Zeman