HAUPPAUGE (AP) – A woman whose remains were among discoveries that became known as the Gilgo Beach killings has been identified after 27 years, authorities said on Friday, disclosing the latest in a series of recent revelations about the long-cold case.
Known until now to the public only as ‘Jane Doe No 7,’ she was Karen Vergata, 34, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney told a news conference.
Her family last heard from her on Valentine’s Day in 1996, when she called her father on his birthday, according to court papers he filed in 2015 seeking to have her declared presumptively dead.
The filing lays out years of relatives’ and attorneys’ efforts to find her and said Suffolk County police contacted the family as far back as 1997 about an unidentified woman’s death.
It was not immediately clear whether that woman was indeed Vergata, whose then-unidentified remains had been found the prior year.
Tierney credited a recent reinvestigation and new DNA sampling with finally establishing who she was.
Yet much remains unclear about the investigative turns of a case that bedeviled detectives for over a decade and was beset by clashes among law enforcement agencies and changes in their leadership.
Friday’s development was part of a reinvestigation that, last month, spurred the first arrest in connection with the long-unsolved string of killings of 10 people whose remains were found over a decade ago along a coastal parkway in Gilgo Beach on New York’s Long Island.
