Peter,
I agree with Seaslug here. There are 7.5 Million year-round residents on Long Island. So there is enough year-round business to keep her on Long Island and not need to go into NYC.
And I do believe that it was said that ALC mostly did in-calls to the house they were renting in West Babylon / North Babylon.
Prostitution is probably not a seasonal business on Long Island. It's year round and probably never slows down.
First, I have to ask a general question: After Le tried to dig up LI stone by stone and ended empty handed, are you ready and willing to think a little outside the box or is that just a general "no" to any idea leading outside of the area, that has already proven as not very "findy"?
If the answer is "no, it's not a general dismissal of anything outside the box", lets explain from where I come, just to make that point clear. Originally, I came out of historic profiling. Only much later I came to offender profiling. My main interest is behavior.
So, what general knowledge about behavior tells me is, that wives normally react a little touchy if the hubby goes regularly to prostitutes. Since most of those permanent 7.5 million residents of LI are married and have families or kids out of the house but still married, the big mass of those 7.5 million (of which not even half are male adults), have no chance to bring a prostitute home. Exceptions like Brewer are rather rare. Subtract all children and females of those 7.5 millions and you end up rather with 2.5 million males. What would your guess, how many of them are married and haven't the financial possibilities to pay prostitutes and hotel rooms on a regular base? Half a million? Maybe less? And how many of them would really do it? It's not that every man who can goes regularly to prostitutes. And of those, how many use Craigslist instead of the street corners and underground scene of NYC which is so nice far away from home and family? So my bet is, the numbers are a lot lower than you expect.
But here is the next part of the story:
Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last time heard of from Port Authority Bus terminal, NYC. As I looked up, this is a few blocks away from Hell's Kitchen and the Carousel, right? Her Hotel was at 46th Street, which is also in walking distance to Hell's kitchen and the underground parties of Manhattan.
Melissa Barthelmy, last time seen in the Bronx, NYC. This is about 45-60 minutes by subway to Hell's Kitchen, right?
Megan Waterman, disappeared from Hauppauge, true, but had at least half of her business obviously in NYC because she traveled according to her mother, for a year between LI and Brooklyn, where her pimps apartment was. And Brooklyn is also about 60 minutes to Hell's Kitchen.
That leaves us with Amber Lynn Costello. I'm still digging. But as you wrote, she would have needed an hour to the area, where the regular prostitution business, the underground parties and also some part of the street prostitutes are basically concentrated.
Then we have the phone calls from Melissa's phone. As far as I can find, there were six of them. The first two were from Massepequa (or how this is spelled), which is away from the islands at the interstate to NYC. No articles told about the numbers 3 and 4, but the last two calls were pinged near Madison Square Garden and Times Square. We can note, that this places the killer only some blocks away from the area where three out of four victims were busy. Additionally, we have to notice, that Megan Waterman offered BDSM (opposite to the other victims). Which means, she had most likely contacts to that scene as well and the underground parties are, you guess it, in Manhattan, mostly also Hell's Kitchen and direction Times Square if I understand the map right.
So we have out of four victims and one SK one victim definitively pinned to Manhattan and two more highly likely and the SK was also there, in only some blocks distance. Well, we can ignore it and say, Massepequa is LI and so it's all LI, but in fact, it's a lot farer away from the dump site at Gilgo Beach than the pinged phone calls From the places where MBB had her last phone talk, where MW lived when she wasn't in Hauppauge and where Melissa Barthelmy lived.
The next reason, why I follow a New York City connection is, that the dump site on Gilgo Beach is exactly that, a mere dump site. It obviously isn't the kill site. We have no ME reports and I doubt, they can't find some conclusive evidence after all that time, the bodies were exposed to the weather, so we can't say, whether he keeps them for some days, or kills them the same day. But he has to bring them somewhere and that is probably always the same place. So, most communities around Oak Beach consist of about thirty homes. Oak Beach is a little bigger? So can you tell me, how an SK would have there a kill place without dragging attention of nosy neighbors? To garnish this with numbers: Ted Bundy transported his victims and parts of them up to more than two-hundred miles from the kill place. Ridgeway drove the bodies out to the Greenriver valley, which gave him his media nickname Greenriver Killer. Rifkin dropped his victims on LI, because he didn't live there. Albright brought his victims out to a field, outside of the city, killed them there and dropped the bodies then near the places, where he had them picked up in the first place. SKs normally don't drop bodies right in their backyard unless they have reasons which are usually connected to their fantasies. They drop them where they fall if they are mobile (that's pretty common for trucker-SKs in the US and Europe) or they drive them away form their comfort zone to protect the comfort zone. So the Gilgo Beach dump site makes it highly unlikely, that we look for someone living permanently at LI. You can call this "assumption" or compare to other cases.
The next point, why NYC is interesting is, that also Terry got phone calls. He was Barthelmy's boyfriend or, more likely, her pimp. You can say, this doesn't mean anything because the killer can call from anywhere (even we know, the last two calls to Melissa's sister were from Manhattan). But it means something on the behavioral level. If an SK calls the little sister of a victim, I can maybe assume, he is a sadist who adds just additional mental torture to the family of the victim to complete the fantasy. But he also called the pimp. He had even memorized what he only could have learned from Melissa, the sex practices of Terry and Melissa. Now here is the question to the subject: Could he assume, he can mentally torture a pimp with telling about the sex, the pimp had with the victim? No, he can't. But then, what would be the reason to call in the first place? This looks personal and that means, he knew Terry and Melissa at least from sight. Which would place him either to the Bronx where they lived or to Manhattan, where she most likely worked half of the time.
Next hint pointing to NY: The timeline. It is highly unlikely that those four are his only victims. He would have had a constant cool down time of a little over a year with a break in 2008. Now we can speculate, that he was maybe in jail in 2008 for an unrelated crime. But that would be pure speculation and the math would speak against it. SKs have a kill frequency according to their fantasy and the personality disorders which drive this fantasy. There is the type with a long first cool down, which goes then over time exponentially down. Dahmer was one of those. Seven years between the first and the second murder, but in the end, he hunted weekly. Irregular times, growing longer, shorter, longer again, and shorter again. This is typically for travelers, mostly truckers. They kill along a certain route when they are there and they are there if they have a freight. But those times are in general diminishing and the killing area grows over time. And we have SKs with short constant rythms. This earthquake guy in California, I forgot his name, had a constant rythm of a few weeks. Now, what we have here looks like a long constant cool down period. Which is unlikely. So he kills probably also in other places. But then we have to ask, why is he killing in the time between June and September and drops those victims at LI? The answer is, he must be in some way seasonal resident. Resident of NYC or LI? We know, he is physically fit (he carried the bodies from a vehicle in the bushes at Gilgo Beach), we know, he is pretty hands-on (strangulation). We know, he wrapped his victims in burlap. So, does that look like a regular businessman? Or more like some kind of craftsman? There are a lot of construction businesses around in the area who work nationwide and most of them have NYC area codes. Small enterprises, sometimes only one person as it looks, who travel as subcontractors. Snd by what I could find out about that business, it appears as if a lot of them works in the NY area till the weather gets colder and then take contracts down South over the winter. Kind of constructing snowbirds. Which, maybe by accident, fits the time frame of the four murders, we know off. But as I said, a lot of those phone numbers lead to NYC, not to LI.
And, after this is anyway already much too long, here are the questions, I'm still chewing on:
- Amber Lynn Costello. This is just going over all the articles again, but she was within an hour driving time to Manhattan's underground and sex scene, so she didn't need a place in NYC. It would be however interesting to see, from where she used her cell phone in the months before she was snatched, but I can't find anything and I have no contact to the SCPD which would allow me such questions. I hoped honestly, I would find on a forum like this maybe someone who has an idea or possibility.
- I try to figure out, how sharp patrolled the area and especially the expressway near to the dump site is at night. Someone mentioned, the police is patrolling there, but not how often. To drop bodies in a patrolled area that looks remote indicates only a casual knowledge of the area. However, that no patrols saw anything means either, they don't drive around there too often or the drop was quick. Technically, the unsub has to drive a car that drags no attention if something body-sized wrapped in burlap lays around in or on it. If the drop was quick, it would mean, he would drive an SUV or better a pickup. Something, that allows a quick grab of the wrapped body. But to estimate this, it would be interesting to know how often does the police patrol there.
- The sparse details of the ME reports I could find, report nothing of broken bones except for signs of strangulation. That means, the bodies were transported either before rigor mortis set fully in or after it disappeared again. But since it would be alone thirty minutes from this Massepequa thing to the beach and we talk about warm summer nights, rigor mortis would latest start on the way. So either he had to keep the bodies somewhere till they were "movable" again, which would have cause some problems (smell for example) or he had a possibility to transport them stretched out. Which makes me think again SUV or pickup.
- And my next to last problem is really speculation. The body dump is unceremonious. There is no sign of staging, no sign of remorse, just drop. That appears as if the victims didn't mean anything to him after they were dead. But in one case, Melissa Barthelmy, we have those phone calls and I still think, especially the calls at Terry had a personal note. So here is a contradiction. Which COULD mean, he has a little problem with his self-esteem (that fits also the theory of a quick drop). What, if he felt as if he couldn't invest more time? The image of being caught with a dead body on the arms is probably a little scary for any SK. So this is more under the thought of lets get over with it and fast. Most SKs who drop bodies do it outside their comfort zone. And those who do, like Hanson for example, have different dropping patterns. This one put together his own little graveyard and this is in it's basics inconsistent with the unpersonalized way of just dropping them in the bushes. Again, my area is behavior. And this indicates, there is a good chance, he was already nervous on the way to drop a body. If there are some traffic cams, the red light kind, there would be, if I'm right, a good chance, that either an SUV or a pickup not from LI drove occasionally over a red light somewhere along the way onto the peninsula and down to Gilgo. But I have no idea where those cameras would be, whether they were there already when the bodies were dropped and who to ask at SCPD.
- and finally, my last problem is a little of a male problem. I have not much ideas about makeup and changing hair colors and such. To me, all four appear quite different. But to make sure, I would like to ask the women on this board to do a little creative beauty work. Can you imagine, you could, with usual makeup and hair dye and hair cuts, make them look alike or at least similar? This little game has a serious background. Narcissists/Sadists react in the choice of their victims often to things, that are rather hidden behind the obvious. Nose shapes, bone structure, a high forehead, things like that. I learned it the hard way with the Alcala case, that females are totally changeable with those tricks and as man you don't see behind it anymore. I'm pretty sure they are different, but I want to make sure, I'm right about this victimology.
So, now you can ignore this and agree to let the case go cold or getting to a little work. Not every lead leads to something, but in a situation in which the inthe box thinking ran out of any lead, it's maybe worth a try.