Gilgo

James Dowling

When the world takes notice of us, it has to do with some sort of public blow up, and it is glorious and, like a trainwreck, you can’t turn away: Joey Buttafouco, an out-of-shape body shop owner with a mullet, sleeps with minor Amy Fisher, dubbed “Long Island Lolita” by the media. Fisher, in an outburst of rage stemming from being born in Merrick, shoots and nearly kills Joey’s wife. Nine-year-old Katie Beers is kidnapped by her neighbor and held in a dank basement by the Great South Bay (really a brackish lagoon) for 17 days. A Long Island township sends out a barge full of household waste into the ocean, a barge that becomes an orphan when no one would take its offal, drifting from port to port and stinking up the place with used sanitary napkins from Sayville. Even our murders have something fantastic about them. When Ronald DeFeo Jr. of the small bayside (lagoonside) town of Amityville snapped and killed his family, it wasn’t that he lost it because he couldn’t stand their chicken parm—that would be too normal. No, it had to be because of demonic possession because this is Long Island, and our

murders can’t be simple domestic calls relegated to the back page of Newsday. They have to be big and loud, with nebulous perpetrators and set-piece victims because Ronnie was a good boy; he was always so kind; how much for a book deal? This is all to say, we are loud and do not pronounce our r’s and we love to watch a good show.

This is why when the Gilgo Beach serial killer drama hit the papers, everyone and their grandma had a theory as to whodunit. This was true crime in our backyard, murdered sex workers disposed of on Long Island beaches, and since everyone here is the star of their own stage play, we had to participate. Some of the theories I heard about were out there—my favorite was that horny space aliens were killing the hotel sex workers. Then came the conspiracy theories. Obama killed these girls in a Satanic ceremony; a diabetic had lashed out because of Mayor Bloomberg’s war on large soda cups; Tom Suozzi because that guy looks like the type. Another one I heard making the rounds on boomer Facebook was that the killer was a guy named James Bisset.

Bisset was a Long Island rich guy who lived in Mattituck. He owned a large commercial nursery and an aquarium. Bisset came from the class of the local landed gentry—whose main occupations are contracting concerns and car dealerships and jet ski sales floors—and, like others in his class, rumor had it he had a penchant for cocaine and sex. He liked sex workers, too. Rumors circulated that Bissett bought extra-cut powder and snorted mountains of the stuff and brought a sex worker with tomato-red eyes to a fundraiser for a local politician, who, incidentally, did not win. Then, soon after, a hiker found one of the Gilgo girl’s bodies dumped in an isolated salt marsh, and Bisset’s Mercedes S-550 was found idling overnight in a Mattituck Park. Bisset was in the driver’s seat, slouched over the steering wheel, dead by suicide. In the end, after all the rumors and salacious hearsay, it matters little if these things are true or false

because fabricated drama makes a better spectacle; no messy things like facts getting in the way of a good story.

Bisset, too, sounds like the type: unstable, yacked out of his mind on coke, knew his way around sex workers, unstable enough to kill them and dump their bodies on a barrier island ten minutes from Jones Beach. Things in life, however, are never so neat. It’s too convenient. There’s no evidence he had anything to do with this. Outside of a burlap sack potentially bought at Bisset’s nursery, no DNA evidence was found at the scene implicating him, no witnesses, nothing David Caruso could take back to the lab and say, “I have found the solution.” Of course, this does not stop old men with tangential connections to the local political scene from saying their theory is correct because a stupid burlap sack found at the scene was purchased at a fairly popular commercial nursery. Bisset lived a wild life that resembled Los Angeles during fire season, and it ended like an LA fire: it ran out of kindling to burn. He was a tragic figure, yes, but he was not a serial killer.

While Bisset was not a serial killer, there are other people on Long Island who most definitely could be a serial killer if given the right tools. Take James Burke, former commissioner of the Suffolk County Police Department, a suburban police force. He was a career cop who blurred the line between law enforcement and career criminal. Back in the 80s, he had a long and sordid affair with a sex worker. There were whispers that she stole his service pistol and held it hostage for money or something else, which was hard to pin down since Internal Affairs resolved the matter quickly and quietly (the police always take care of their own). A former cop who knew Burke described him to me as “unstable” and a “douchebag.” In a normal corporate setting, Burke would have been let go before he left training. This is no corporate setting; this is Long Island politics, and if you make a sizable enough donation to the

party, the world is your oyster, and a one-way ticket to the middle class is printed and placed in your greedy palm. Multiple instances of drunk driving, bar fights, sordid affairs, domestic abuse, and workplace harassment happened over the years, and they were all ignored and covered up. A political consultant I know once told me, “Burke was one of us.” Burke most definitely showed himself to be “one of us.” He ingratiated himself well enough with the local ruling class. He stuck around. He kissed the right asses—including of Democratic Chairman Richard Schaeffer—and poof…Burke, you are now the Police Commissioner. Usually, positions of authority humble people. They realize that everything that came before is petty and they are not bigger than the job. Not James Burke. Think of every gross violation of employment law, basic human decency, and abuse of authority—he did it.

The problem with a guy like Burke is that his whole career is built on a shaky foundation, and when it all falls apart, it falls apart fast. It started with an unlocked car and a homeless heroin addict, Christopher Loeb, roaming Burke’s neighborhood, looking for unlocked car doors and items he could sell and use that cash to fuel his heroin habit. He found Burke’s car, opened the door, and in the backseat was a black duffel bag. Inside was a laptop and department paperwork, boring, because a low-life fence won’t take those things. What else our drug-fiend friend found, though, makes this a compelling story. At the bottom of this disorganized mess were porno magazines, lingerie, and sex toys. From anecdotal chatter I have heard, the sex toys were “dildos and pocket pussies” and that “they were just for Burke.” Loeb also took Burke’s gun belt from the car. The next morning, Burke saw that his car was broken into, and, conveniently, the dash cam saw the robbery and got our drug-fiend’s face in HD. He was taken into custody that day, and Burke got his five minutes alone. Again, a normal person would just press charges, and that would be that. Court-mandated rehab and some probation, and you’re on

your way, let’s forget about the whole thing. Nothing could be so simple in the life of James Burke. He beat Loeb within an inch of his life, horrifying the normal cops in the building and facilitating a lawsuit that turned Loeb into a multi-millionaire. This kicked off a chain of events; Burke’s criminality was apparent, the Feds swooped in, and he spent time in a federal pen (with a reduced sentence because he was also a snitch and turned state’s evidence). He is out of jail now and currently on trial for soliciting an undercover park ranger for sex at a veteran’s memorial.

How does he connect to the Gilgo case? Simple. He was the police commissioner during the bulk of the investigation. While every law enforcement agency was being mustered to find bodies, Burke was under federal investigation for beating up our Loeb and, since he didn’t need any modern-day Elliot Ness rooting around headquarters in Yaphank, he blocked the FBI from assisting in the case, most likely drawing the investigation out for years. Some of the chatter is that he was either the killer or in cahoots. This feels even more likely than the Bisset case. Burke certainly seemed like the kind of guy who would go on a sex worker killing spree. From what we’ve seen of him, he is unstable, taken to drink, and most definitely wouldn’t feel bad about choking a sex worker to death if he could get away with it. His actions while commissioner of the Suffolk Police Department were, to be charitable, obstructionist. Yet again, this theory doesn’t feel right. Burke was much too chaotic to pull something like this off. To be a serial killer, especially one who doesn’t get caught for ten years, takes a cold mind capable of long-term planning. Like a mid-90s Chevy Silverado, you have to be like a rock. Burke does not have these attributes. He is the living embodiment of chaos; I doubt he even plans breakfast in the morning. No. He would have been picked up after the first girl’s murder. He had too big of a mouth; he was too flippant with sordid details, and he most likely would have panicked and not

removed physical evidence implicating his ass. He was a Long Island politician, and he had the competence of one.

Like all conspiracy theories and folk tales we tell ourselves at night, the truth is nowhere near as sexy. There is no intersection of local politics. There are no coke-fueled binges by a wannabe jet-ski salesman. There is only a very horny architect named Rex Heuerman, who resembles a high-fantasy rock troll. He would call these girls from a rotating set of burner phones, have a “date”, and then kill them. He’d dump their bodies in the vicinity of Gilgo Beach. While the ancillary details are certainly fascinating—and he might not have been responsible for every corpse—this is a straightforward narrative with paper-thin layers. The writer in me is sad. Where are the political conspiracies, social commentary, and high drama? We want Shakespeare. We want Eugene O’Neill. We don’t want a white trash soap opera!

Yet, that term “white trash soap opera,” it sings to me. It is very apropos of Long Island. Rex Heuerman is, himself, representative of Long Island—he even comes from Mass-ah-peak qua. Frankly, the Gilgo Beach Murders could have only happened here. They are everything that we are. They are loud and flashy, with brash proclamations and hints of depth beneath the surface. Like the Great South Bay (lagoon), where there seems to be depth, there is only shallow water. The sand is kicked up by the currents and clumps into sandbars that can rip the bottom of your boat open like a tin can. You think there is a grand conspiracy and a complex narrative like an NYPD Blue re-run, but in the end, there’s nothing. A killer that looks like a troll, a normal family shamed by their father’s proclivities. Yet, no one thinks of the victims. We are Long Islanders, and we are worried about our school’s blue ribbons and our property values. We see sex workers as messy, poor. They remind us too much of what we could be or where we came from. We do not view them as humans. They are props on the set of our lives. Even this narrative

treats them as nothing more than women in refrigerators, born to die. Yet, we can only work with the information at hand. We can only be products of our environment. Maybe one day, someone more skilled than I will come along and tell the actual story. Show the human toll of these murders because these women were friends, sisters, daughters, mothers, people. They lived and they loved. They did not die with dignity; they did not die surrounded by loved ones. The last thing they ever saw on this Earth was the half-erect penis of a grotesque monstrosity getting off on seeing the blood flow from their wounds and the death rattle coming from their throats. And when he was done? He threw their bodies in the woods like a mattress the garbage men wouldn’t take.

These girls will never get to live again. They only exist in our minds, symbols of decadence and narrative devices in the drama that is our lives. Long Island is set apart from the world. It operates according to its own rules and its own set of logic. Long Island is also the world. It is meaningless, and true expression is no longer possible, for the real thing and the real word have been replaced by the sign. The sign: rising property value. The sign: a new kitchen. The sign: the Denali upgrade. The sign: my kid is going to Yale. Maybe this is why our homegrown serial killer caught the world’s attention: it saw itself in the mirror. A being made out of flesh and blood but no longer human. In the end, we are the cause of the death which saddens us. We are the authors of the destruction of all we know and all we love.

And sometimes, you’ve got to buy a new jet ski to numb the pain.

EVERYONE thinks they are the stars of their own personal TV show. For the more realistic and modest among us, there is always the role of character actor—but we marginalize wimps like these “on” Long Island, where everything, like our pickup trucks and palatial saltwater pools, has to be big; we live in the shadow of the biggest city in the world (our words) and our dreams need to be bigger so we can outshine that damn shadow. This is a land of paradoxes. Sky high taxes, but crumbling infrastructure; tons of money spent on quality public education, but Republicans occupy every Congressional seat; a population bigger than many states—yet our outlook is provincial. We are loud and distinct, and many of us come from here, but when we move out, we choose to forget the dulcet sounds the throat makes when pronouncing our alma mater as Mass-a-pee-qua High School.