A suspect has been taken into custody on New York’s Long Island in connection with a long-unsolved string of killings known as the Gilgo Beach murders, a law enforcement official has said.
The case has long drawn public attention after skeletal human remains were found along a New York state beach highway more than a decade ago.
The mystery attracted national headlines for years and the unsolved killings were the subject of the 2020 Netflix film Lost Girls.
The suspect was taken into custody in Massapequa late on Thursday and investigators were at a home connected to the case on Friday, the official told the Associated Press.
Neighbour Barry Auslander said the man who lived in the house commuted by train to New York City each morning, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.
“It was weird. He looked like a businessman,” said Mr Auslander. “But his house is a dump.”
The suspect’s name has not been released.
The deaths of 11 people whose remains were found in 2010 and 2011 have long stumped investigators. Most of the victims were young women who had been sex workers, and several of the bodies were found near the town of Gilgo Beach.
Determining who killed them and why has vexed a series of homicide detectives through several changes in leadership in the police department.
Last year, an inter-agency taskforce was formed with investigators from the FBI as well as state and local police departments, representing a renewed commitment to investigating the killings.
The disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in 2010 triggered the hunt that exposed the larger mystery.
Ms Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the marsh.
Months later, a police officer and his dog were looking for her body in undergrowth along nearby Ocean Parkway when they happened on the remains of a different woman.
Within days, three other bodies had been found within a short walk of one another.
By spring 2011, that number had climbed to 10 sets of human remains: eight women, one man and one toddler.
Some were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, making for a puzzling crime scene that stretched from a park near the New York City limits to a resort community on Fire Island and out to far eastern Long Island.
Ms Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about three miles east of where the other 10 sets were discovered.
Investigators have said several times over the years it is unlikely one person killed all the victims.
News of a suspect being taken into custody comes a day after state police responded to a report of skeletal remains found in a wooded area off the Southern State Parkway in Islip.
It was not immediately clear if those remains were linked to the Gilgo Beach case.
