LONG ISLAND SUNRISE HIGHWAY KILLER (LishK)
CASE TIMELINES
GEO-FORENSIC MURDER MAP
The Sunrise Highway Killer Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact on any of these listed cases or on
any cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here.
All sources of information will be treated confidentially.
VISIT US ON FACEBOOK
Long Island Sunrise Highway Murders 1966-1980
Cold Case Project
Between 1966-1980 an unknown subject(s) perpetrated a serious of abductions, rapes and murders in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, New York, along the Sunrise Highway (NY 27) corridor and up into the Springfield Boulevard corridor in Queens, New York. The bodies of some of the victims from Queens were left in Nassau and Suffolk Counties as were perhaps some victims from Manhattan.
This is a listing of case summaries and an online map of XXX unsolved cold case sexual murders or suspicious disappearances of female victims in the New York region between 1966 and 1980.
There are two ways of viewing the cases on this website. A
Case Timeline offers a narrative description of the
cases based on contemporary media
reports. The
Geo-Forensic Murder Map features a Google Map with an
overlay of where victims were murdered or found and the associated secondary locations
("geo-forensic markers") such as where
the victims were last seen, resided, their destination if known, etc.
The body/murder location points are color coded chronologically:
Green=1960-1969;
Red= 1970-1974;
Orange=1975-1980
Black= Case Closed
The password protected Suspect Map Overlay includes geo-forensic data on suspects and is restricted to members of law enforcement and approved investigative researchers. It is password protected by security protocols hosted by russianbooks.org on US-based servers.
The M.O. (modus operandi - method of operation) of the perpetrator or perpetrators varies across the range of these cases from victims being attacked in their home or place of work in the daytime to being abducted on the street at night or ambushed and killed while walking in the vicinity of their home, school or local business. Some of the bodies were concealed or thrown into bodies of water, while others were abandoned by a roadside unconcealed. Some of the victims were mutilated or decapitated and dismembered. Causes of death ranged from manual and ligature strangulation, stabbing, battery to asphyxiation and forcible drowning. In four cases victims were killed together as a pair, including a mother and her daughter. While not all the victims were subjected to forcible penetrative rape, some form of identifiable sexual assault was a key feature of most of the homicides listed here, with the exception of victims found in a state of decomposition too advanced to ascertain a cause of death, or victims who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances suggestive of foul play.
It is entirely plausible that some of these homicides were committed by a single serial perpetrator, or that groupings of the homicides were committed by several serial perpetrators working independently of each other. Several solved serial homicides are included in the case histories and on the geo-forensic map as reference points for scale and scope and are identified as closed cases on a separate layer.
Between 1960 and 1980 at least eight serial killers or
suspected serial killers were identified in New Jersey:
Raymond
Alves,
Richard Biegenwald,
Richard
Cottingham,
William Doss,
Joseph Kallinger,
Richard Kuklinski,
Robert Reldan,
and Robert Zarinsky.
Some of their known murders are similar to some of the cold cases
from the time periods these perpetrators were
killing or occurred in the geographic proximity of their known
murders. However, because sexual homicide is a pathological offense,
different individual perpetrators can often commit murders with very similar
characteristics common to the psychopathology of sexual offenders, both
serial and single.
The Long Island Sunrise Highway Murders Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact through Contact Us on any of these listed cases or on cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here. Information will be treated confidentially.