 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is a Weird Darkness bonus bite. After more than 23 years, last Friday, an arrest was finally made in the Long Island serial killer case. Rex Hoyerman has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder. I'm going to tell you the story as it's written by our friends at the lineup who have been covering the case for more than a decade and I'll place a link to the original story in the show notes. The whole story began with a 911 call. A panicked woman inside a stranger's home, someone more than one person is after her, trying to kill her. Two men's voices can be heard in the background. The woman screams. She runs out of the house. Her cell phone, still in her hand, still connected to 911, records everything. The desperate pounding on neighbors' doors, the cries for help, the sound of flip-flops on pavement as she flees into the pre-dawn darkness of Oak Beach Long Island. After 23 minutes, the call cuts out. In the early morning of May 1, 2010, the last time anyone sees Shannon Gilbert alive. Seven months later, a Suffolk County police detective training his canine makes a grisly discovery. Skeletal remains wrapped in a burlap sack and buried in the sand next to Ocean Parkway, the road that leads to Ocean Beach. But it's not Shannon. The remains belong to someone else, so the police keep searching along a quarter-mile stretch between undeveloped Gilgo Beach and the gated community of Ocean Beach. They uncover three more burlap sacks, three more bodies. None of them, Shannon's. The search for one missing person would soon end the search for four others and start a desperate chase for the Long Island serial killer. Like Shannon, the young women discovered in December 2010 were escorts who had advertised their services on Craigslist and Backpage.com. They were in their 20s, petite and willing to go on outcalls to meet clients. Marine Brainerd Barnes went missing in July 2007. Melissa Barthelamy was last seen in July 2009. Megan Waterman disappeared in June 2010. Amber Lynn Costello left for a date in September 2010 and never came home. The police still looking for Shannon, continued to comb through the marshes and thick bramble alongside Ocean Parkway. By April 2011, they discovered six more sets of remains. Four women, the toddler daughter of one of the women and an Asian man dressed in women's clothing. Two sets of remains were eventually connected to female torsos that had been discovered years prior in the woods near Mannerville, a town 45 miles east of Gilgo Beach. Another was linked to a pair of severed legs that had been found in a garbage bag on Fire Island in 1996. Ten bodies, ten mysterious, violent deaths, evidence linking each of the nine adult victims five identified or unknown to the sex trade. It was a nightmare come true. A serial killer or killers have been using the remote barrier islands off the south shore of Long Island as his dumping grounds, but police still didn't know what happened to Shannon. In the end, she wasn't far from where she'd last been seen. On December 6, 2011, 19 agonizing months after she called 911, police discovered Shannon's purse, jeans, shoes and cell phone in a swamp on the eastern edge of Orchard Beach. A week later and a quarter mile deeper into the marsh, they found her. In perhaps the most bizarre development in a case full of them, Suffolk County detectives quickly determined that Shannon's death was not connected to the other ten. Their theory, supported by the testimony of the two men whose voices can be heard on the 911 call, Michael Pack, her bodyguard and driver and Joseph Brewer, the client who paid her to come to Orchard Beach was that Shannon had been suffering from a bipolar episode or in a drug induced panic when she ran through the neighborhood screaming for help. Disoriented, she entered the swamp and stumbled through it for more than half a mile before she collapsed and drowned or died of exposure. Death by misadventure, the police called it. In the definitive book about the early years of the investigation, Lost Girls and Unsolved American Mystery, which I will link to in the show notes, journalist Robert Kolker notes that the official explanation of Shannon's death was practically Victorian in its view of prostitutes, as if she had died of sorrow or fright or sadness or heartache. Police seemed to be saying that Shannon Gilbert had died because her soul had been wrecked asunder by a life in the streets. Shannon's mother, for one, wasn't buying it, and she had reason not to. Two days after Shannon disappeared, Marie Gilbert received a phone call from a man who identified himself as Dr. Peter Hackett. The former surgeon with the Suffolk County Police Department said that he lived in Orchard Beach where he ran a home for wayward girls. Shannon, he claimed, was recovering under his care. Three days later, Marie heard from Hackett again. This time, however, he said that not only had he never had any contact with Shannon, he'd never called Marie in the first place. Phone records proved the latter claim to be untrue and when Shannon's body was eventually recovered, Marie became convinced that Hackett was somehow involved. His property led directly to the swamp where her daughter was found. His former colleagues at the police department were equally certain that Hackett had nothing to do with Shannon's death or any of the others. His wife and children were home with him on the night Shannon went missing and besides, he had a history of making false claims about his involvement in police matters and other newsworthy events. Michael Pack and Joseph Brewer were also cleared of wrongdoing. Their accounts of Shannon's disappearance fit the official version of events and neither could be connected to any of the other victims. Suffolk County detectives were back to square one. So they put Shannon's death in a box labeled Cruel Twists of Fate and turned their attention to the four women found in December 2010, the Gilgo Four as they came to be known. These women had names, boyfriends who were with them in the days and nights before they disappeared, clients who found their ads on Craigslist and Backpage.com, families who filed missing persons reports when they never came home. But the women had secrets too. Melissa Barthelomy refused to let her on-again, off-again boyfriend drive her to Long Island the night she disappeared. Amberlynn Costello's roommate, Dave Shaler, knew that she spoke to the same man three or four times on the night she went missing and that she finally agreed to meet him for $1,500, a much higher amount than usual. But Dave didn't know the man's name or where he lived. And not all missing persons reports are treated the same way. A child disappears from the bus stop, it's national news. A prostitute doesn't come home the morning after a date, nobody cares. The fact is investigators didn't put much effort into finding Marine, Melissa, Megan and Amber when they were first reported missing. They were sex workers and drug users, women who willingly put their lives at risk for a few hundred dollars. It wasn't until they were found buried in the sand at Gilgo Beach that anybody thought to look for connections between them or conduct extensive interviews with their friends and acquaintances or carefully examine their phone and internet records. By then, the trail had gone cold. The most tantalizing piece of evidence was a series of phone calls made to Melissa Bartholomew's sister Amanda in the weeks after her disappearance. Seven calls made from Melissa's own cell phone, each lasting less than three minutes. The same voice every time. A man's voice described by Melissa's mother as calm and bland, taunting a teenage girl about her big sister's lifestyle. Quote, do you think you'll ever speak to her again? The man asked Amanda in his final call. A few seconds later, he answered his own question. He told Amanda that he had killed Melissa after having sex with her. Then he hung up. The calls were made from busy locations near Midtown Manhattan and Massapequa, New York. On more than one occasion, police pinpointed the cell phone's signal and used surveillance cameras to try to identify the caller. But it was fruitless. The locations were too crowded, too full of people on cell phones. The caller seemed to be taunting, not just Amanda but police as well. If he was indeed the killer, his awareness of criminal investigative techniques matched certain clues about the murders. Like the fact that on the nights they disappeared, each of the Gilgoth Four received calls from untraceable burner phones, and that some of the women had left their own cell phones behind when they went to meet their dates, as if they were doing so at someone's request. Investigators even surmised that the location of the dumping site, which straddles Suffolk and Nassau counties, might have been chosen to exploit the rivalries and miscommunications that often occur between police departments. But there wasn't much else to go on. Only six of the ten sets of remains were positively identified. The bodies were in various states of decomposition, making it difficult to pinpoint time and manner of death. DNA evidence appeared to be scarce or non-existent. Police initially suspected that multiple killers had used the Gilgoth Beach area as a dumping ground, before concluding that all ten corpses were likely the work of one man, a sophisticated and elusive serial murderer whose methods evolved over a 15-year period. Detectives wouldn't say it on the record, but they were beginning to suspect that they were hunting one of their own, a cop or ex-cop, someone with extensive knowledge of law enforcement techniques, a frightening possibility, although it helped to explain how he went undetected for so long and why he stopped when Shannon Gilbert called 911. Or did he stop? Several years passed since Shannon Gilbert's desperate night in Ocean Beach led to the discovery that a serial killer was terrorizing Long Island. After the initial media frenzy died down, Suffolk County police went silent. They told reporters and family members that the matter was still under investigation, but refused to say more. In the absence of official developments, amateur sleuths set out to solve the case. They poured over autopsy reports, phone records, police statements, psychological reports and maps, and posted comments on sites such as websleuths.com and Reddit. In some cases, their theories were so detailed and convincing that they informed the work of investigative journalists such as Joshua Zeman and Rachel Mills, whose A&E documentary series, The Killing Season, is a must-watch for anyone interested in the case. Other noteworthy reporting on LISC has been done by 48 Hours, People Magazine investigates, Rolling Stone and Vice. In recent years, a few tantalizing clues have emerged. The first involves disgraced former Suffolk County police chief James Burke, who led the department from 2011 until 2015 when he was arrested for beating a robbery suspect and interfering with the ensuing investigation. Burke had long been rumored to have blocked FBI efforts to aid in the Long Island Serial Killer Investigation, or LISC, investigation, and shortly before he went to prison in 2016, an online escort came forward to claim that she had had rough sex with the police chief at two cocaine-fueled parties held in an Oak Beach house in 2011. The FBI continued to investigate the tangled web of corruption that surrounded Burke at the Suffolk County Police Department, could it lead back to the Long Island Serial Killer, or to the truth about Shannon's death? The other even more promising avenue of investigation points to the direction of a Long Island man who is already serving two consecutive 25-year-to-life sentences for murder. In 2014, John Biltroff, a carpenter and married father of two, was linked by DNA to Rita Tengredi and Colleen McNamee, two sex workers whose bodies were found in Suffolk County in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Biltroff lived near Manorville, New York, a few miles from the spot where the torsos of two women found near Ocean Parkway in 2011 were initially discovered years prior. Biltroff's lawyer denied that his client was the Long Island Serial Killer, but Suffolk County prosecutor Robert Biencivilla said in 2017 that Biltroff was a suspect in at least one of the murders. The police have neither confirmed nor denied Biencivilla's statement, but reporters had amateur sleuths have helped to fill in some of the gaps. In 2017, Melissa Bartholomew's mother said that her daughter had a lot of calls to Manorville from her phone in the period before she went missing. And in what could be either an eerie coincidence or a circumstantial proof that Biltroff, an avid hunter, stalked his victims and has a higher body count than is currently known, Melissa's best friend at the time of her death was Rita Tengretti's grown daughter. In some ways, it felt as if the solution to the case of the Long Island Serial Killer was close at hand. The breakthrough in the Golden State Killer investigation, which relied on the latest DNA matching technologies, had given hope to cold case detectives all over America. After the Suffolk County police cleaned house in the wake of James Burke's arrest, the FBI officially joined the Long Island Serial Killer investigation, bringing new resources and the most advanced profiling techniques to bear. No one in the public knew how much evidence they'd gathered at that point, how close they were to declaring the case closed. Viewed from another angle, however, the mystery was more baffling than ever. Why, for instance, were law enforcement officials still refusing to release the tape of Shannon Gilbert's 911 call? If her death was indeed accidental and was not part of the larger Long Island Serial Killer investigation, what were detectives trying to hide? And what to make of the independent autopsy paid for by the Gilbert family, which concluded that Shannon did not drown but was likely strangled to death? Was it a red herring or proof that her death and the Long Island murders were connected after all? In January 2020, investigators shared a previously undisclosed piece of evidence in hopes of revealing new leads in the Long Dormant case. The photographic evidence depicted a black leather belt found at one of the crime scenes, a picture of which you can see by clicking the link to the story in the show notes. In Boston, the belt of the letters WH or HM depending on the angle you view it from. Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart declined to say just where investigators recovered the belt, which one of the victims it was linked to or even the belt's size. She did clarify, however, that investigators believed the belt was handled by the suspect and that it did not belong to any of the victims. Could this be the clue that finally breaks the case? Only one thing is for certain, someone perhaps more than one person spent 15 years killing people and dumping their bodies on a remote stretch of the Long Island coastline. When the killer or killers is finally identified, 10 families and maybe more will finally have answers, but they will never have their loved ones back. Then came Thursday, July 13, 2023, three years later. After years of searching for the elusive Gilgo Beach Killer slash Long Island serial killer, July 13, 2023 law enforcement arrested Rex Hoyerman in Manhattan in connection with the investigation. Rex Hoyerman has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Melissa Barthelamy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello. Investigators are still unsure whether all the murders are the work of one individual or multiple killers, but they are one step closer to bringing justice to the victims. Although there is not much currently known about the suspect, he is said to have been born and raised on Long Island and has lived in the Massapequa area his whole life. The suspect was arrested after the update about the belt was released, so it very well may have been the clue that broke the case. When Salem Roanoke took a job near his family's new home as a hired hand in the Texas Hill country, he anticipated learning the rancher's trade, but a series of strange events, shocking murders and unholy revelations divert him down another path. This terrifying trajectory puts him directly into the middle of a struggle between monsters, magic, and men. Armed and backed by a militia of ranchers, Salem attempts to combat the creeping tide of evil that threatens to engulf his new home and destroy the people most important to him. Will Salem manage to save his home or have his actions condemn everyone he hopes to save? So you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.