© James Carbone / PoolPolice search for human remains
The remains of the missing woman, Shannan Gilbert, a prostitute who advertised on Craigslist, were discovered in December in a marshy area of Long Island near Oak Beach, where she was last seen alive. Police eventually concluded she probably was not murdered but drowned after falling into a swamp, perhaps while fleeing in the dark from her last customer.
The months of searching for her remains, however, uncovered several other bodies or parts of bodies, and police speculate that one or more serial killers-- have for years used the woods, dunes and other isolated areas of eastern Long Island to dump victims.
The skull found Friday by a man walking his dog was about 40 miles from the area where Gilbert was found and from where most of the other remains have turned up. But two full corpses, and the remains of two headless women, have turned up in the same forested area within a few miles of the skull. The women's heads were found in an area close to where Gilbert vanished.
Police said it was too early to say if the skull belonged to a man or a woman, or whether it had any ties to the other apparent murder victims.
Matt Samuel, who found the skull, said he initially thought the white object lying some 300 feet off the road in Manorville was a rock. When he looked more closely, he said he saw that it was a skull.
"I probably walked by it a hundred times before, and I saw it kind of sticking out of the ground, and it looked unusual," Samuel told The Associated Press. "I looked a little closer and from there discovered that it was human remains," he said. "It was wrapped in bedsheets and a plastic bag, It was a whole body, but just the bones, there was trees growing up through it, so it has been there a long time."
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