by RJ Parker
Peter Chapman was sentenced to life in prison. The judge made it clear that he would have to serve thirty-five years before he could get a chance for a parole. Ashleigh’s family, especially her mother, was deeply saddened by what happened. Her mother hoped that Facebook would take online security more seriously, and that what had happened to her daughter could be used as an example to eradicate online predators, especially pedophiles, from social media sites.
Chapter 19: Korena Roberts
Since its launch, Craigslist has made it so much easier to find items for sale and services at lower prices. Unfortunately, some people on Craigslist might also be looking for their next victim. One of these opportunists was Korena Roberts. She wanted a baby, and when she found a pregnant woman on Craigslist, she thought it was her chance to finally get what she wanted.
Korena Elaine Roberts was obsessed with everything related to babies. She already had two children from previous relationships, but in 2007, she gave birth to a stillborn. Since that time, she had been watching YouTube videos of births, sewing clothes for babies, and she even went as far as telling people that she was pregnant with twins. Korena lived with her boyfriend, Yan Shubin, in Portland, Oregon. She told him that she was pregnant in November 2008 and she was suffering from morning sickness. She was taking prenatal vitamins, scheduling ultrasound appointments, and even attending midwife classes.
Twenty-one-year-old Heather Megan Snively actually was pregnant. She was in her eighth month of pregnancy with a baby boy she planned to name John Stephen. Heather was originally from St. Albens, West Virginia, but she had recently moved to Tigard, Oregon to be with her fiancé, Christopher Popp. As any other expecting woman, Heather was very excited to have her first baby. Early in the month of June in 2009, she sent a postcard to her grandmother saying: “Can you believe Mom and Dave are going to be grandparents?” She did not know what awful fate was waiting for her. It all started with a few innocent clicks.
One day, Heather logged onto Craigslist to look for things she could purchase for her baby. She had used her phone number and her Yahoo email account to sign in. It was there she met Korena Roberts, the woman obsessed with babies. When Heather responded to an ad for baby items, Korena told Heather that she was also pregnant and they agreed to exchange baby clothes. After almost a week of exchanging emails, the date was set: they would meet on June 5, 2009.
When the day came, Heather went to Korena’s house in Washington County. Her neighbors later reported they spotted a pregnant woman at the house with Korena. Once inside, Korena brutally attacked Heather. The autopsy would later show that Heather was bitten (she had bite marks on her elbow), and viciously beaten. It was apparent that Heather put up a fight because she left a five-inch-long scratch on the left side of her attacker’s neck and injuries on her arms. Korena then used a sharp object to make an incision on Heather’s womb and ripped the baby boy from her body. Heather died from blood loss and Korena stuffed her body in a crawlspace at her home.
After hiding Heather’s body, Korena called her boyfriend. Earlier that day, Yan had arrived at work in the early morning around 6:00 a.m. Five hours later, he had returned home for lunch where Korena made him a sandwich. He did not notice anything out of the ordinary. At 2:30 p.m. Yan had left his work and was at the bank when he received a frantic call from Korena. She seemed as if she was in pain, and told him that she needed him. Yan hurried home. When he got there, he saw blood covering the floor. He rushed to the bathroom. There he saw Korena sitting in the bathtub with the water running, wearing only a bra. She was holding a lifeless little fragile body. Yan took the baby from her and started CPR in an attempt to save him, but he was not successful. When the paramedics arrived, they were alarmed by the amount of blood in the house and immediately took Korena and the baby to the Providence St. Vincent Medical Center. At the hospital, the doctors examined the baby and determined that he was dead. The police were called in. Korena told the police that she had been pregnant with twins and Yan thought there was a possibility the other baby might still be at the house. A team of officers went to the residence to search for another baby. At first, Korena refused to be examined, but the doctors were able to complete the exam and were stunned to realize she had not given birth any time recently. A psychological evaluation was ordered, and the psychologist later concluded she was not suffering from any mental disorders.
While the police went back to the house, Korena told Yan she “did a horrible thing.” It was then Yan called the police from the hospital. He suggested they look in the crawlspace of their home, where police discovered Heather’s corpse. They could see that her abdomen had been sliced open. The autopsy results revealed she had suffered blunt force trauma. The medical examiner determined that Korena had used a collapsible police baton to beat Heather to near death. Heather received between fifteen and thirty blows, most of them to the back of her head. The beating knocked her unconscious, but ultimately it was the loss of blood that killed her. It was not revealed what did Korena used to slice open Heather’s abdomen, but Yan told the police that he bought a pack razor blades a few days before the murder that had gone missing. There were cuts on Heather’s right breast and her abdomen. Her right arm was bitten, possibly during the struggle between the two. It was also determined that the baby boy did not take a single breath outside the womb.
Korena was arrested and charged with the murder of Heather Snively. However, since the baby did not survive the attack, Korena was only charged with one count of aggravated murder—meaning she was trying to steal the baby and killed Heather in the process. According to the laws in Oregon, a human being is “a person who has been born and was alive at the time of the criminal act.” Since the state could not prove baby John had “born alive,” he was not considered a person but rather as an item or a piece of property to be stolen. This is why Korena was not charged with the murder of John Stephen. During the investigation, it was discovered that Korena had previously contacted other pregnant women and had set up meetings with them, but none of the other women showed up; Heather was the unlucky victim.
In August 2009, Korena stood in court to hear the accusations and began sobbing. She was charged with one count of murder, four counts of aggravated murder, and two counts of first-degree robbery. She remained in jail without bail. At first Korena steadfastly denied killing Heather, but in 2010, she pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated murder. Korena said, “I am taking responsibility because I am guilty.” She was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. Her pleading guilty meant that there was no trial and that she would not face the death penalty. The guilty plea and final sentence were the result of the negotiations between the prosecution and the defense. The defense wanted to leave a chance for parole later, but the prosecution did not agree to this. They wanted to make sure Korena would never be released and would not have any chance for an appeal.
Heather Snively’s mother said that all that her daughter wanted was just to exchange clothes. She also added that Heather was a trusting person and that it was a mistake to meet Korena like that. Kevin Snively, Heather’s father, wished that he could get his daughter and his grandson back, but he insisted that justice should be served to the woman who took them from him. Christopher, Heather’s longtime boyfriend and fiancé, was devastated. In a statement, he had expressed his desire to see Korena receive the death penalty. The family wished that Korena would never forget what she had done and that it would haunt her for the rest of her life. It sure would haunt them.
Chapter 20: The Long Island Serial Killer
On May 1, 2010, twenty-four-year-old Shannan Gilbert placed a call to 911 at 4:51 a.m. While the call has never been released to the public, those who have heard it claim the terrified woman tells the operator that someone is after her and is trying to kill her. The operator asks Shannan where she is, but Shannan never reveals her exact location. Because of this, the call was transferred to the New York State Police, not the local Suffolk County department. Mal
e voices are allegedly heard on the recording trying to calm her down—a Long Island man who hired her on Craigslist as his escort for that night, Joseph Brewer, and the man who drove her to the job, Michael Pak.
Screaming, Shannan ran from Brewer’s house, ending up on the doorstep of neighbor Gus Colletti. While still on the phone with the 911 operator, Shannan banged on his door. When Gus asked her what was wrong, he said she simply stared at him and repeated, “Help me” over and over. Gus called 911 from his own phone and instructed Shannan to sit down while they waited for the police to arrive. Instead, Shannan darted out of his house, running towards another neighbor’s home.
At this point, Michael Pak was spotted chasing after her in his black SUV, trying to coax her back into his vehicle. Shannan banged frantically on the door of Barbara Brennan’s home, who also called police. By the time police arrived at the scene, it was already 5:40 a.m. and since Shannan’s call had been transferred to another department, the only information they had to go on were the two calls placed by Gus and Barbara. By that time, Shannan was nowhere to be seen and the black SUV was gone as well. Police concluded that she must have gotten into the vehicle at some point and left the area. There was nothing more to be done.
When Shannan’s family reported her missing, police finally began to connect the dots and located her twenty-three-minute call to 911. They began searching the remote areas near Long Island Beach in hopes of locating her. What they would find over the next year and a half during their search would rock the beach town community to its core. Remains of ten individuals, eight of them women, one male, and one female toddler, were discovered in marshy areas spread out along three counties along Gilgo Beach, Oak Beach, and Jones Beach State Park. None of those bodies belonged to Shannan. Suddenly, investigators had a much bigger case to solve.
In November 2011, police announced they believed that one individual was responsible for all ten murders. The identified victims included five young women in their twenties that had been reported missing between 2005 and 2010: Jessica Taylor, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello. Like Shannan Gilbert, who was still missing at that time, all five victims had been using Craigslist to advertise their escort and prostitution services.
Amber Costello’s roommate said that the night she went missing, a client had offered her $1,500 for her services, nearly six times her usual rate. He had also been persistent, pressuring her to meet him out even after she seemed wary of going. Many people involved in the case believe the killer uses Craigslist to find his victims and lure them into a deadly attack late at night. He then discards their bodies all in the same area. Police believe the other unidentified victims were also linked to prostitution, but a direct link to their identities or Craigslist has never been established. It is quite possible those victims were killed before Craigslist was founded in 1995.
The five unidentified remains include an Asian male wearing woman’s clothing, who likely worked as a prostitute at the time of his death. He was killed with violent blows to the head, unlike the other murder victims who were likely strangled. Also discovered were a mother and her toddler daughter, who may have accompanied her mother on a job. Another set of remains was connected to a pair of legs that had been discovered in a plastic bag nearly a decade earlier on Fire Island. A final unidentified female victim was also linked to the other victims, after her head, right foot, and hands were located. The rest of her body had been discovered in Manorville, New York in 2000, near the area where Jessica Taylor’s torso was later found in 2003.
Shannan Gilbert’s remains were eventually found in a marsh in 2011, nineteen months after the search for her began. Despite the fact that Shannan was an escort who advertised her services on Craigslist, just like the five identified victims, police don’t believe she was killed by the same person. They suggest that she may have stumbled into the thick marsh and drowned while she was running that night. Shannan’s family vehemently disagrees with this conclusion and insists that she is the killer’s eleventh victim.
Melissa Barthelemy’s teenage sister later told the media that the killer had used her sister’s cell phone to call her several times and taunt her. Melissa disappeared in July of 2009, but her sister, Amanda, received at least seven disturbing and vulgar phone calls from a man using Melissa’s phone after the disappearance. In the final call, he admitted that he had killed Melissa, crushing the family’s hopes of ever finding her alive. Melissa’s body was one of the first to be discovered in December of 2010. Police traced the calls from the victim’s cell phone and determined they were originating from the Manhattan Times Square area.
Police have released little information about what they know about the killer, dubbed by some as the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK) or the Gilgo Beach Killer (GBK), but what we do know is terrifying. The ten victims were murdered between the years 1996 and 2010. It is clear that the killer targets prostitutes in the Long Island area, likely soliciting their services from Craigslist. While it is difficult to pinpoint cause of death in most of the victims, police believe that the majority of the women were likely strangled or beaten and then dismembered. Several of the victims were disposed of in burlap sacks or plastic bags.
In April of 2011, The New York Times reported it is likely the serial killer is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. FBI profilers and serial killer experts believe he may even be married or have a stable girlfriend. He is probably an educated and well-spoken individual. He is employed, financially secure, and possibly works at a job that would give him access to burlap sacks, such as landscaping, contracting, or fishing.
Some believe that the killer may be an ex-cop who is familiar with investigative techniques. The taunting calls that were made to Melissa Barthelemy’s sister were all traced to crowded areas in the city where surveillance video would be useless. The killer also kept the calls under three minutes, indicating he may have known it takes between three and five minutes to trace a call. In addition, the killer took the time to dismember and dispose of his earliest victims in a scrupulous manner, perhaps indicating some knowledge that this course of action would hinder the investigation.
Other FBI profilers and serial killer experts suspect the killer may be a seasonal vacationer to the Long Island area. Since the five identified victims all went missing in the summer months, it is possible the killer has his own vacation home or visits his parents’ home in the area each year. Many believe the locations of the disposal sites indicate his familiarity with the area. It is possible the killer grew up in the Long Island area and returns each summer.
Are any of these assumptions about the killer true? We won’t know anything until the police solve the decades-old mystery and bring an end to his reign of terror. For years, many residents living in the Long Island community seemed to be holding their breath, waiting—would the killer strike again? Or would police be able to solve the mystery before more bodies turned up?
In July of 2014, police arrested a Manorville, New York resident named John Bittrolff for two decades-old cold case murders they say are unrelated to the LISK murders. In 1993, thirty-one-year-old Rita Tangredi’s body was discovered in a housing development in East Patchogue, New York. Three months later, the body of twenty-year-old Colleen McNamee was discovered near the William Floyd Parkway in Shirley, New York. Both had been known to work as prostitutes and both bodies were strangled, beaten, and discarded in a wooded area. In addition, each woman was missing a particular article of clothing (the type of which has not been disclosed to the public). Police were also investigating Bittrolff’s possible involvement with another 1993 murder in Suffolk County, that of Sandra Costilla, whose body was discovered in the small settlement of North Sea, New York. All three women were killed in a similar way and their bodies were left in similar positions, according to police.
Probably one of the most remarkable aspects of this particular arrest was not the length of time that had passed since the murd
ers, but how this arrest came to be. Bittrolff’s brother, Timothy, was arrested in 2013 and convicted of an unrelated assault. When investigators ran Timothy’s DNA through their systems, as is routine for convicted offenders, the analyst realized that his DNA was extremely close to the DNA collected from Tangredi’s and McNamee’s unsolved murders. So close, in fact, that the killer must have had the same parents as the man they already had in custody. From there, investigators were able to track down Timothy’s brother, John, whose DNA matched perfectly from the two crime scenes.
So what does all this have to do with the Long Island Serial Killer? Police are saying it’s too early to link him any of the murder victims discovered in the Gilgo Beach area and they stress it is likely the two are completely unrelated. Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota told the media that “the evidence recovered from Tangredi and McNamee, the manner in which their bodies were found, and the crime scenes are unique to them and distinctly different from the Gilgo crime scenes.”
But there are some experts who believe there is a chance all of these victims are connected, including retired NYPD Lt. Commander Vernon Geberth. In fact, there is a rather large connection that the police have failed to discuss with the media—mainly that torsos from two of the LISK victims were recovered in the Manorville pine barrens, a mere three miles from where John Bittrolff has lived for over a decade.
In November of 2000, a decomposing body of a woman was discovered in garbage bags in a wooded area off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville, NY. She was approximately 5’2” and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five years old. Her identity remains unknown. Her head and her hands were missing.
