Remains found near NY beach identified
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. – A woman whose remains were among discoveries that became known as the Gilgo Beach killings has been identified after 27 years, authorities said Friday, disclosing the latest in a series of recent revelations about the long-cold case.
Known until now to the public only as “Jane Doe No. 7,” she was Karen Vergata, 34, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said at a news conference.
Her family last heard from her on Valentine’s Day in 1996, when she called her father on his birthday, according to court papers he filed in 2015 seeking to have her declared presumptively dead.
The filing lays out years of relatives’ and attorneys’ efforts to find her and says Suffolk County police contacted the family as far back as 1997 about an unidentified woman’s death. It was not immediately clear whether that woman was indeed Vergata, whose then-unidentified remains had been found the previous year.
Tierney credited a recent reinvestigation and new DNA sampling with finally establishing who she was. Yet much remains unclear about the investigative turns of a case that bedeviled detectives for over a decade and was beset by clashes among law enforcement agencies and changes in their leadership.
Friday’s development was part of a reinvestigation that, last month, spurred the first arrest in connection with the long-unsolved string of killings of 10 people whose remains were found over a decade ago along a coastal parkway in Gilgo Beach on New York’s Long Island.
But it is unclear whether Vergata’s death might ever be tied to the ongoing case against Rex Heuermann, an architect who has been charged with three of the killings and named the prime suspect in a fourth. Tierney declined to comment on “what, if any, suspects” were developed in Vergata’s death.
Some of Vergata’s remains were discovered in 1996 on Fire Island. More of her bones were found in 2011 near Gilgo Beach, more than 20 miles west of the original location.
A woman with a “troubled lifestyle,” in the words of father Dominic Vergata, she was living in a rented room in Manhattan’s then-gritty Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.
Child-welfare officials had taken her two sons from her, and they had been adopted by a foster mother. She had not seen the young boys since 1992, but she visited her father and brother frequently, her father said in sworn statements in the court proceeding that sought to have her declared legally dead.
Tierney said Friday that no missing persons report was filed when Vergata disappeared. But her father had said he tried to file a missing persons report with the New York Police Department in 1996 but was told he could not. A message seeking comment was left with the NYPD.
Vergata’s father died in December, according to an obituary.
Tierney said authorities held off releasing Vergata’s name while contacting her relatives and furthering their investigation, which led last month to Heuermann’s arrest in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello. Prosecutors say they also are working to charge him with the death of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, but they have not yet done so.
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer says the 59-year-old denies killing anyone.