Official: Nature of grisly finds delays ID

DNA analysis and potential identification of human remains found this spring on a South Shore island have been delayed as officials are forced to do multiple tests on the widely scattered bones, a police official said Thursday.

Forensic experts had to take extra samples from the dispersed remains because some were incomplete and feared combined with others, said Suffolk police Chief of Detectives Dominick Varrone. It was also unclear if bones found in separate locations came from the same people, Varrone said at a hastily scheduled presentation before the county legislature's Public Safety Committee.

Preparation for a potential genetic match "became very time-consuming because the manner in which these remains were disposed, it could have been one or more people combined," he said. "So rather than just take one sample from each find, they have to take multiple samples."

The most recent four finds in Suffolk, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation, include a head in a plastic bag, and a young child wrapped in a blanket.

The remains in Nassau recovered between the Jones Beach tower and the county line were a bag of human bones recovered just off the parkway; and a skull located in the deep brush of a wildlife sanctuary.

Those finds, all made in March and April, follow Suffolk police's December discovery of four burlap-wrapped skeletons north of the road through Gilgo Beach.

The four December remains proved to be women in their 20s who police believe are the victims of a serial killer targeting prostitutes. All had been asphyxiated and dumped near one another.

It still is unclear how many victims all the remains represent, but Varrone acknowledged Thursday that some of the incomplete remains may prove to be from the same person or people.

Varrone said "there is some consolation" in the fact that the more recent finds likely predate the four women's deaths.

"There is a serial killer among us and that's something that bothers us," Varrone said. "We're hoping that . . . discovering the area he utilizes may have him in enough of a panic to perhaps stop, or at least stop for a while, but we have no reason to believe he will."

Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, of Norwich, Conn., the first of the four women to go missing, was last known to be alive in Manhattan in July 2007.

The most recent one -- Amber Lynn Costello, 27 -- was last known alive near her North Babylon home on Sept 2. All the women worked as prostitutes.

The woman whose disappearance triggered the investigation, Shannan Gilbert, 24, of Jersey City, was not one of the Suffolk remains and has never been found.

Varrone said later he did not know if city medical examiners had completed uploading DNA information to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, a database of genetic profiles gathered by law enforcement agencies and forensic labs.

"We absolutely do not have tentative IDs," Varrone said. "We would hope the submitted DNA will produce matches, but right now we don't know if it will or it won't."