Welcome to Unsolved, your guide to the most riveting unsolved serial killing cases in each US state. This week we’re starting off in New York, a state with no shortage of horrible cases to pick from.

The typically picturesque neighborhoods of beach houses lining the Long Island shore were discovered to also be home to a mass grave, containing at least ten different sets of human remains left behind by a still unidentified killer. The Long Island Serial Killer, also called the Gilgo Beach Killer, was suspected to have murdered anywhere between ten and 15 women, one child, and one young man.

This story starts with the luckily yet accidentally discovered bodies of four of the killer’s victims by an officer and his police dog, Blue. It was winter in 2010, presumably about 15 years after the first of the killings, and in the middle of a search for a missing person, they team stumbled upon the remains of a young woman in a burlap sack, and after a deeper search they were able to find three more of the bodies, all of them women. Given that they were all found in the same location, it was clear that this was not a coincidence and that they were dumped by the same person, meaning they had a serial killer to find. Later this was only solidified by the autopsy results proving that a majority of the victims were killed by strangulation. It took another three months for the last six victims to be discovered after the police widened their search to cover a wider area of the county, and even then it is thought that there are more bodies to be found possibly outside of that county.

Six of the victims who were positively identified were either proven to be or assumed to be escorts who had placed ads for their services on Craigslist. This information provided some insight into the means the killer used to acquire his victims. There were also several missing persons and bodies found in the area that are suspected to have been victims of this same killer, but nothing was proven officially.

Nearly every quality of these killings, including this means of acquiring them, remained consistent for all but one victim, a toddler between the ages of one and two years old. They had been wrapped in a blanket rather than a sack, and they had no signs of any personal injury. It is unknown whether this death was related to these killings at all because of how little it fit in with every other victim, but it was found with a set of four other bodies, making this difficult to prove or disprove. It was shocking, though, that this victim was present in the first place, and needless to say the remorse shown in burying the child in a blanket was even more of a surprise.

One of the elements that set this case apart was that each body was found in its own burlap sack, which was a unique and outdated method for hiding bodies at that point, making the access to this type of item an important factor in determining the original suspects. For example, the suspect James Bisset was an arborist who owned a nursery, giving him easy access to burlap sacks, and the only other probable cause against him was that he took his wife out of town after remains were found involving the killings.

Possibly the most disturbing element of this case, though, is that it is presumed that the killer had law enforcement experience, maybe even ties to the police department, making him much more difficult to detect and track even with the evidence they had available to them. This is mainly assumed due to the efforts taken to hide the identities of his victims, such as severing their heads and hands to eliminate then possibility of using fingerprints or dental records to confirm an identity. He was also likely to be involved in calls to one victim’s mother, but the calls were all too short to be tracked by the police even when they were prepared, so he must have known exactly how long he had before needing to hang up.  It is possible that the investigation was compromised by the killer or one of his contacts in the department, which would explain why he was never found.

About a year and a half after the first body was found, there was still very little progress that had been made, causing the Suffolk County Police to offer the largest reward in their history, $25,000, for any information leading to arrests for the case. Then, four years later, the FBI was brought in to bring assistance of their own. They then unofficially conducted searches and investigation of their own for several years, possibly up to the present, but still no progress has been made.

Given the relatively recent time frame of these killings, it is very possible that the Long Island Serial Killer is still active today, unfortunately giving law enforcement the opportunity to discover more evidence and get closer to a conviction. Only time will tell if they will ever be brought to justice.