Suffolk County officials announced Friday that they’d learned the identity of another victim in their investigation of 11 bodies found on or near Gilgo Beach in New York.
Speaking at a press conference, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney said that authorities could now identify Karen Vergata, 34, as the person whose remains were discovered on Fire Island in 1996. Authorities did not say if they believe her death is connected to the killings of four women known as the “Gilgo Four.”
According to Tierney, Vergata’s feet and legs were found on April 20, 1996, on the beaches of Fire Island. Vergata’s skull was discovered 15 years later, on April 11, 2011.
Vergata’s family members were contacted ahead of the press conference, the district attorney said. At the time of her disappearance, she was a sex worker living in midtown Manhattan, he added.
Last month, Rex Heuermann, 59, was charged with murder in the killings of three women amid the Gilgo Beach probe. No charges have been filed against against him or anyone else in Vergata’s case, which remains under investigation, Tierney said.
Heuermann faces three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder over the deaths of Megan Waterman, 22, Melissa Barthelemy, 24, and Amber Costello, 27. Together with 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes — who authorities say was possibly killed by Heuermann, though he hasn’t yet been charged in her death — these women came to be known as the Gilgo Four.
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Vergata and the Gilgo Four were among the 11 people whose remains were found near the Long Island beach between December 2010 and April 2011. Most, but not all, of the victims were identified as a sex workers; others whose bodies were discovered included an Asian man and a 2-year-old girl.
Following Heuermann’s arrest — a surprising development in the long-running Gilgo Beach investigation — his wife filed for divorce, telling the New York Post that her family was still in shock.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, shivering,” she told the outlet. “My children cry themselves to sleep. I mean, they’re not children. They’re grown adults but they’re my children, and my son has developmental disabilities and he cried himself to sleep.”