Novel. Hey listener. In this episode, we'll be talking a lot about acts of violence and murder, including serial killers. We'll be talking about grave exhumation too. We're also going to meet some of the people who freely give up their time to help bring closure to the families of missing, murdered, and unidentified people. This is the kind of work our charity partner, DNA Doe Project does. I'd encourage you to check them out if you're affected by the themes of
this episode. They work with law enforcement to identify Jane and John does using genetic genealogy in the hopes of reuniting the bodies of unidentified people with their families. You can find them at DNADO project dot org. And as usual, you're probably going to hear me swearing. It's the habit of a lifetime, so there's no stopping it. Now. I want to tell you a story about an island, and unassuming mile long island in New York with the complicated
buried history. Today, Heart Island is the final resting place for over one million people. It's the USA's largest public cemetery, the place where locals are buried if they're unclaimed, unidentified, or sometimes because their families just can't afford to bury them closer to home. Back in the early sixteen hundreds, this land belonged to the Soinoy nation. They were indigenous to the coastal areas of the Long Island Sound in modern day New York and Connecticut. But then the Europeans
arrived and massacred the local native communities. Eventually, the Cihinoi were left with no choice. They sold Hart Island and fifty thousand acres of other land to a British physician named Thomas Pell. Since then, it's played host to a prisoner of war camp, workhouses, a yellow fever quarantine site, and a psychiatric hospital. That is until it became the public cemetery it is today, which brings us to our story,
our Jane Doe, our lost sister. When you start out an investigation like ours, trying to find someone who seemingly dropped off the map decades ago, it's hard to know where to begin. You find there's a lot more stumbling around in the dark than you expected. But occasionally the stumbles will they turn up something worthwhile, Like a few months ago when my producer Anna came across a charity
called the Heart Island Project. They make it their mission to tell the stories of the people who are buried there. On their website, there's currently seventy five thousand, seven hundred and eighty three profiles which include everyone's basic burial information. Friends and loved ones can add anecdotes and photos to the profiles so that even in death, their loved ones can be brought to life. And that well, that's something
that the girlfriends can get behind. So Anna called the charity and asked if they knew where our Jane Doe's remains could have gone after the medical examiners confirmed that she was not Gaale CAATs.
If they didn't know who the torso belonged to, then it would automatically be buried on hard At because all human remains that are not released to a private funeral director are buried on Harde.
Okay, so, without a doubt at some point that torso was buried on Heart Island.
Yes, dear listener, I think we just found our first real lead. I'm Carol Fisher and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the girlfriend our Last Sister Episode three, Lost and Found. After Melinda, the founder of the Heart Island Project told us that our Jane Doe is more than likely on Heart Island. We asked her for some help.
What I could do is go back and do a manual search for that time period in the ledgers to see if there's a torso listed.
By ledgers Melinda means Heart Islands burial records.
What is the time frame for the search?
Literally, all we know is that it was in September ninety eight that she was identified as not Gail.
It was during the lead up to Bob Berenbaum's trial for the murder of Gail Cats that the torso was confirmed not to be Gail, and so the official status was returned to Jane Doe.
I would search starting September ninety eight through August two thousand and a female torso wright or black.
White and watch the edge around thirty okay, obviously unknown.
Melinda agreed to look into it for us. To be honest, we weren't that hopeful, but she assured Anna that if our girl was there, she'd find her.
It's not that common to see it too. Are so listed?
Is it?
No?
Now, it's not common at all.
With that, Melinda starts diving into the Hart Island paperwork to see what she can uncover. It's going to take a lot of painstaking work, individually examining page after page of handwritten ledgers. It could take weeks, maybe more. So once again we're left waiting for an email to come through that could change everything. In the meantime, Anna spends night after night in the glow of her laptop screen trawling the missing person's databases for anything that could lead us to our girl.
Torso New New York City nineteen eighteen nine and Identified Bodies Database me case number R eight nine five six y three. Okay, so nothing comes up on that medical examining number. Okay, fucking hell, they all look like such serial killers.
Seven horrible.
I'm gonna Wikipedia the State of New York nineteen eighty and female Missing Persons report.
Oh this is interesting.
Oh wow, one of them was found on Staten Island unidentified monitorso isn't working.
And then an email from Melinda and it gets the gang together on an emergency call.
Oh what.
She's clearly excited, but frankly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. Tell me what it fucking says? Oh my god.
Wait.
Page two, Rowe twelve. Is everyone that, oh wait, I'm on the wrong page. My attached to the email or some hazy photo copies of the handwritten Heart Island ledgers. It's pages and pages of names, dates, locations of death, and burial permit numbers. And there's one entry in particular
that's standing out even to me. Oh, oh my god, wait, oh my god, wait wait what Here's what it says, unknown female, age twenty, date of permit August twenty fourth, two thousand, date of death May twenty first, nineteen eighty
nine on Front Street. That's exactly when and where the torso of our Jane Doe first appeared, down to the specific street and the date of permit basically when the torso was buried on Hart Island was August twenty four to two thousand, which is the same year that a certain fuckhead named Bob Berenbaum was convicted for the murder of Gailcats. Holy shit. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, Anna phones Melinda to see what she thinks.
A match is a match. The date of death is correct, and the location is correct, and you know this person was unidentified. That's a match.
Dare we say it that it's really our girl. After over a year's worth of investigation, it looks like we finally caught up with her. And now that we found her, we don't want to waste any more time, so we're going to pay her a visit. It's time to go to Hart Island.
They only allow visitors to Heart Island once a fortnight, so after finding an entry for our lost sister and the ledgers, we booked the next available slot to visit.
But while we found her gravesite, our job isn't done yet. She's listed as an unknown and what we really want to know is who she is. So we call some experts to ask how we can go about identifying her. It's a simple process to do an exhumation of a dough and.
Then we just somebody just takes a sample and we go.
This is Bob and Tracy from our friends. DNA DOE, the volunteer run organization that uses genetic genealogy to identify unknown people. In other words, they test DNA against other people that they have in their systems to build potential family trees and connect unidentify fight people with their loved ones. Now we should be able to get this kind of DNA information from the medical examiners, but as we heard
in our last episode, they're not being very forthcoming. Luckily, DNA dough are the next best thing.
Basically, if you're looking to draw the genealogy route, you would need to have the sample sent to a lab. They would create a profile. That profile would then be uploaded to gen match and or family Tree DNA and then try to make the identification of who that tour still belonged to.
Finding our Jane Doe's family would be a dream come true. But as always, there's a catch, and.
It's not really expensive.
It varies with the DNA DOO project.
We tend to offer some funding options for all volunteers, so we'd volunteer our services. There's also grants sometimes so there's money available. There are options where it's less expensive, but typically around five thousand.
Okay, we'll go find some DNA.
It's easy, right, Just go go get it.
It's not that hard, right, just go get it.
Shortly after the call with DNA Doe, Anna finds herself on the edge of the Bronx, standing in the freezing rain, waiting to board a ferry. Hi, Hi, how do you feeling next to her bundled up in a hat and gloves is Gail Kat's's sister, Elaine.
Here's the people.
Elaine spent nine years grieving beside Gail's grave when she believed the torso inside the coffin belonged to her sister. Elaine has never had the closure she deserves. Gail's body was never found and it might never be. Even all these years after our Jane Doe's torso was removed from Gail's grave, Elaine still feels a connection to this woman. It's why she's come today so she can pay her respects.
Good morning to everybody, first and formal, even if this is your first, second, third trip.
We would like to welcome everyone to Hart Island.
We would like this worst our deepest.
Condolers to you and your family, and we hope there's geperation, some sort of comfort.
Or clothing together along with the clusters of families holding flowers, soft toys, and photos. Elaine and Anna board.
The ferry a second submarine.
On a nice summer's day. The outside deck is probably filled with people, but today, with the rough waves and biting wind, everyone is squeezed inside like sardines. The island is only a short distance away, but it's obscured from view by a thick, eerie fog. It feels sort of fitting. After a fifteen minute ride, the boat suddenly jumps as it makes contact with the dock on the other side.
The weather isn't much better off the boat. It's gray and could probably be described as miserable, but luckily a lane doesn't mind.
I want this to have the gloom be fitting and the cemetery. Yeah, you can probably be a little cold.
You're not allowed to just walk around Hart Island even if you were. It's so big and the graves are so many that you'd probably never find what you were looking for. So everyone is funneled onto a bus and dropped off at their pre book destination. The bus itself is small and crowded. Mourners sit next to each other, sharing stories of their loved ones. I think they called it Anna and Eline get off the bus. Waiting for
them is Melinda Hunt from the Hart Island Project. She's agreed to show them around.
You know the Transuans.
They put a little yellow steak in a little shot. What's amazing.
And there, just a few meters away from the bus is a small wooden marker in the ground, no tombstones, no names, no flowers. I'm not sure what we are expecting. After all this time, she really does feel like a sister to us, so finding her grave is such a significant moment. But here she's just another body stacked three deep in a plot of one hundred and fifty. It's not the ending we imagined or hoped for. It's honestly just sad. Standing at the graveside, all three women fall into silence.
I am ashamed to admit that I closed the door on this woman in two thousand. I didn't want to take on a new challenge, but having no closure it kills you. It is a unbearable burden. When the girlfriends, he said to me, let's identify the torso, let's identify who is she. Let's bring closure to another family. Let's open this door. I thought that was just something that I wanted to be a part of.
And after a short while, the bus reappears and a guard gestures for the ladies to get back on board. And then, after all this lead up and barely a few words, it's time to go. Everyone else here knows who they're visiting, but we still have no idea whose grave that was. We don't even know her name. Anna's thoughts returned to disinturing the torso for DNA testing. There's something about having stood in front of her grave that makes the thought of exhumation no longer abstract but very real.
And this reality, it's not a comfortable one, because our lost sister has already been through so much, dug up and reburied over and over. And while our intentions are genuine and good, maybe she's fine, only at peace here on this island.
But can we.
Really walk away, never knowing her story, never knowing her name. Just as we think we're left with no option but to disturb her once again, we get another email. It's from the New York City Department of Social Services, which manages Heart Island. They found some updated ledgers. There's been a development. They don't understand what it means.
If you look at cause of death, They've put a new little entry in there which says disinterred for OCME. On August sixteenth of twenty thirteen.
It says our Jane Doe's torso was disinterred once again, but this time from Heart Island. In twenty and thirteen eleven years ago. She wasn't even there when Anna and Elaine visited her grave. There's nothing on the ledger to suggest that she was ever reburied on Heart Island, So where.
The fuck did she go?
After learning the bombshell news that our lost sister was disinterred from Hart Island in twenty thirteen, we're back to square one again. It says on the ledger that the torso was disinterred by our old friends, the office of the Chief Medical Examiner. So we reach out once more and ask them why. But we do have a theory. When our lost sister was exhumed from Gail Katz's grave in nineteen ninety eight, they kept her DNA profile on record.
This is a common practice at the medical examiners, as it means Jane and John Does can still be identified years after their cases have gone cold. So if our girl, an unknown woman, was disinterred on Hart Island, a place where unidentified bodies are buried, you have to ask yourself why you wouldn't just disinter a body unless you knew who it belonged to, or at the very least had
a strong suspicion. This suggests to us that not only could she have been identified, but she could be part of a criminal investigation, which also means there could be a suspect in her murder. We've always been inclined not to center any perpetrator on this show, and we stand by that decision. But maybe if we figure out who killed our loss sister, it might lead us to her identity, which is why Anna finds herself in Brooklyn.
Hi, Hi, he saw me looking lost?
I was right outside a million things real quick.
Anne is meeting a man called Raoul Montero, who, by the way, can put together a wonderful fruit clatter.
Add a little spread. So make yourself at home whatever you need. Nice to meet you, though, it's.
Nice to Raoul's part citizen sleuth, part victim's advocate. He's best known online as catch Lisk. Lisk stands for the Long Island serial killer. That name first appeared in the media in twenty eleven after the discovery of multiple sets of remains on Gilgo Beach in Long Island. Tens of murders in New York and Long Island have been connected, both officially and unofficially, to this unknown killer. When we asked our listeners to write in with your tips on
how we could identify our Jane Doe. The Long Island serial Killer came up several times as a suspect worth considering, and that's why Anna has come to see Raoul, someone who's obsessed with trying to identify lisk and, as his name says, catch them. Raoul started collecting data of missing and murdered people and entering it onto a map. His investigation soon outgrew the Long Island serial Killer, though he has now logged practically every case in New York since
nineteen fourteen. He even has a marker for our lost sister. It's the only database we've ever seen her list it on.
I am breaking seven thousand locations that represent a person, and it's just never going to be finished.
For our losses and for the nearly seven thousand other people on this map, Raoul has outlined what little is known about them.
A dark red heart or a dark blue heart represent an adult male or female that their body has been found remains have been found. A dark red or a dark blue icon represent a male or a female adult that's gone missing.
It's pretty impressive visually. If you want to check it out, we put a link in the episode.
Description, there's also a light color blue and a light color red on both of those icons that represent miners.
Raoul would be the first to admit that this has become more of an obsession one did. He finds it difficult to step away from.
It's like more people on the map, more information. I can see it, I can match it, and I can feel some sort of closure.
Well, I mean, maybe this is the perfect segue for me to show you some stuff that we have.
About the Anna pulls out a folder of all the information we have on our Jane Dough, so the tools.
I washed up.
Nineteen eighty nine.
We know from the.
Autopsy report that they believe that the Dough had been murdered a few months prior, so that would be the time of death, with it being about February nineteen eighty nine.
Anna starts listing out facts about our lost sister, like her predicted age and the condition of her body. But they zero in on where she ended up on the shore of Staten Island front Street Pier number three. This gets Roul thinking about where she came from.
You know, where's that water flow at that time?
If you follow the title path, it suggests that a body that washes up on that side of Staten Island could very likely have been dumped upstream towards Manhattan.
These river will actually open up into the Long Island Sound, which it's the ties that really predicate where a torso might go.
There are two rivers in particular running through Manhattan that naturally funnel out into Staten Island, the East River and the Hudson, So that's one lead on to the other one. The Long Island serial killer. Though his potential killings go back decades, they only garnered attention in late twenty ten.
Shannon Gilbert, an escort, was out on Long Island in Oak Beach to see a client. Within a matter of hours of being in that house, she ran from there screaming. She was never seen alive again. During the ultimate search for Shannon Gilbert, the remains of ten bodies were found.
Most of the bodies found along that stretch of land near Gilgo Beach and Long Island were female sex workers Jane.
Those that find themselves tossed aside on some highway on Long Island, like so many other victims, were ignored for so many years because you're a minority, because you're a drug addict because you're a sex worker, and in that mix, serial killers prow.
To this day, some of the victims found on the beach have never been identified, and until recently, there was no perpetrator identified either. For years, the police struggled to nail a key suspect, but that changed in twenty twenty two.
Going back over.
The evidence, the police zeroed in on a witness statement that describes seeing one of the victims getting into a Chevrolet Avalanche on the night of her murder. This ultimately led the authorities to one local man, Rex Hureman. Human's phone records were examined and he was found to have used burner phones to arrange meetings with some of the women whose bodies were found near Gilgo Beach. Finally, police found an old pizza box thrown away by Hereman and
tested the DNA left on the crust. It matched a hare found near one of the bodies. Huerman is currently a waiting trial for four of the murders, although some suspect that he could be responsible for many more, dating all the way back to the nineteen eighties.
Do you think that there's a chance that all Jane Doe could be a lift spectrum.
I think there's always a chance. You look at early Liz victims who were dismembered and scattered. We look at Rex's building permits from the nineties and two thousands, and he's on Staten Island.
So the Long Island serial killer sounds like a significant lead. But he's not the only one. There's another infamous serial killer that Anna wants to run by Raoul as a possible suspect when that she came across in one of her nighttime sleuthing sessions.
Joel Rifkin, American serial killer who was sentenced to two one hundred and three years My god in prison for the murders of nine women.
Oh my god.
When it comes to New York serial killers, Rifkin rings a few alarm bells for us. He admitted to killing and dismembering his first victim in March of nineteen eighty nine. That's not the only coincidence.
The head and the legs were found around the time of the murder, but nobody knew what happened to the.
Toulso, as Anna lays out the similarities between our Jane Doe's case and rifkins first victim, she can see Raoul's cogs turning.
Do you mind if I send a text? Yeah? I might get something right away. What who do you know?
Raoul won't give Anna a name, but he knows a detective who was involved in Joel Rifkins's case. He fires off the text, and not long after a reply comes through.
She did answer.
The detective asks for more information, so they sent her everything we have on our Jane Doe, including the Hart Island ledger. When Anna leaves, Raoul promises to update her as soon as anything comes through, which thankfully doesn't take very long. Later that evening, there's a text from Raul. He forwarded Anna a message from the detective responding to all the evidence we gave them and our suspicions about Joel Rifkin. They simply say, there is your answer coming
up next. On the girlfriends our lost sister, he said that he could only remember her name as Susie.
To his horror, Susie suddenly popped up on the couch in a last stitch effort to salvage her life.
Dear Anne, I've been searching for you.
For over a year.
Is this going to be the person that we're looking for?
Is this the Answer. The Girlfriends Are Sister is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is hosted by me Carol Fisher, and our chief investigator is Mindy Shapiro. To find me on social media, search Carol A. Fisher, That's Carol with an E. The season is written and produced by Anna Sinfield and Lee Meyer. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Max O'Brien is our executive producer.
Our fact checker is Dania Suleiman. Production management from Shrei Houston and Charlotte woolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander, Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Anna Sinfield and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed and performed by Luisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gristin and Nicholas Alexander. The series artwork was designed by Christina Linkol. Story of the development by Anna Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development. Our executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Katrina Norvel and Nikki Etour special thanks to Ali Canter, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME and especial shout out to Vince Hayward, who's my life partner in True Crime, for taking on the role of girlfriend's confidante and lead tech support novel