Karen Vergata, an escort who disappeared on Valentine’s Day in 1996, has been identified by Suffolk County investigators as the fourth Gilgo Beach murder victim known as “Fire Island Jane Doe”.
The discovery was made about 30 years after some bones were found on a Long Island beach, and 12 years after the woman’s skull was discovered off Ocean Parkway, next to the bones of another victim who was also unidentified.
Vergata was a resident of West 45th Street in Manhattan and is thought to have been employed as an escort at the time of her abduction.
Suspected “Gilgo Beach killer” Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect and father of two, was detained and charged last month with the killings of three women, whose bodies were found in December 2010 a few miles farther east along Ocean Parkway.
Heuermann’s involvement in the deaths of a number of other people whose remains were discovered nearby, such as those of Jane Doe No. 7, Peaches, Jessica Taylor, and Valerie Mack, has not yet been confirmed by investigators.
