To those who loved them, the four prostitutes were daughters, sisters, friends. To the person or persons who killed them and dumped their bodies in the desolate brush off Ocean Parkway on Long Island, they were disposable.
Each disappearance drew little or no notice. It took the prospect of a serial killer, and the subsequent discovery of four more bodies, for that to change. The investigation was set off by the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in May.
Gilbert, 24, of Jersey City, was last seen in a seaside residential community a few miles from the first four bodies, and she is still missing. Living in the margins of society, often trading sex for money with anonymous clients in anonymous places, struggling with drug addiction and estrangement from their families, prostitutes have long been invisible, vulnerable prey for the wicked and the depraved.
Few notice them when they are alive, fewer still when they are missing or found dead. The quarter-mile stretch where the four women were found is 23 miles from where another prostitute, Tiffany Bresciani, 22, was found wrapped in a blue tarp in the back of a pickup truck in Mineola in , and about 30 miles from where yet another prostitute, Kelly Sue Bunting, 28, was discovered in a trash bin in Melville in Bresciani was strangled by Joel Rifkin, an unemployed landscaper who confessed to killing 17 prostitutes.
Bunting was one of the victims of Robert Shulman, a former postal worker convicted of killing and dismembering five prostitutes. In Poughkeepsie, N. Francois admitted strangling and murdering eight prostitutes from to , and storing their bodies in the home he shared with his family. In a courtroom in Seattle in , Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River Killer, who admitted to killing 48 women, seemed, when a prosecutor read his statement of guilt, to be speaking for all serial killers throughout the decades and centuries who have victimized prostitutes.
