© Kevin C. Downs for NY PostKaren Vergata was identified as Jane Doe No. 7 in the Gilgo Beach killings.
Karen Vergata is believed to have disappeared around Feb. 14, 1996, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said Friday morning.
Two months later, on April 20, her legs were found in a plastic bag at Davis Park on the bayside of Fire Island's Blue Point Beach.
At the time of her disappearance, Vergata was living on West 45th Street and is believed to have been working as an escort.
She was not reported missing, Tierney said.
At the time of the discovery of the Fire Island remains, investigators were only able to determine that the victim was a white woman with several distinctive scars, including evidence of surgery on her left ankle, according to the Doe Network.
Who were the Gilgo Beach victims?
© Fox NewsRex Heuermann is seen leaving a Long Island prison.
The years-long investigation that led to the arrest revolved around the discovery of more than 10 sets of human remains along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County between December 2010 and April 2011.
Most victims were petite female sex workers with green or hazel eyes. But there were also two exceptions: a 2-year-old girl and a young Asian man.
Melissa Barthelemy, 24Her skull was found on April 11, 2011, near the partial, dismembered remains of Jane Doe No. 3, also known as "Peaches," off Ocean Parkway, west of Tobay Beach in Nassau County.Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25
- Barthelemy was a sex worker who lived in the Unionport section of the Bronx and dreamed of one day opening her own beauty salon. She was last seen alive in her basement apartment on Underhill Avenue on July 12, 2009.
Amber Lynn Costello, 27
- Brainard-Barnes was living in Norwich, Connecticut. She went missing after taking an Amtrak train from New London, Connecticut, to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on July 6, 2007.
Megan Waterman, 22
- Costello, 27, was a sex worker and heroin addict who lived in West Babylon, New York, at a home with a woman and two men. She advertised on Craigslist and Backpage to support her and her roommates' drug habits. Costello was found in December 2010 after having been last seen leaving her home that September.
- Waterman, a 22-year-old mom of one, was last seen on June 6, 2010. She lived in Scarborough, Maine, and earned a living as an escort. She was last seen by her family boarding a New York-bound Concord Trailways bus in Maine. Her body was found on December 13, 2010, on the north side of Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach.
Jessica Taylor, 20© The New York PostValerie Mack, 24
- Remains belonging to Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old woman working as an escort in New York City, were found in a wooded area in Manorville on July 26, 2003. Her additional remains — initially labeled "Jane Doe No. 5" — were discovered on March 29, 2011, along Ocean Parkway.
Unidentified Asian man
- Valerie Mack was 24 years old and living in Philadelphia when she went missing. She worked as an escort, using the alias "Melissa Taylor." Relatives last saw Mack in the spring or summer of 2000 in Port Republic, New Jersey, but she was never reported as missing to the police. Her partial skeletal remains were found in Manorville in September 2000 but were initially known as "Jane Doe No. 6."
'Peaches' and her daughter
- The skeletal remains of a yet-to-be-identified Asian man were found along Ocean Parkway on April 4, 2011. It is estimated that the man was between 17 and 23 years old at the time of his death. He was approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall with bad teeth.
Karen Vergata
- An African American woman's partial remains were discovered in Hempstead Lake State Park back in 1997, and she had become known as "Peaches" because of a bitten tattoo of a peach on her left breast. On April 4, 2011, police uncovered the remains of a toddler, who was about 2 years old at the time of her death. DNA testing confirmed that one of the skeletons was that of the 2-year-old girl's mother, "Peaches."
Shannan Gilbert, 23
- A victim previously referred to as Jane Doe No. 7 has been identified as 34-year-old Manhattan woman Karen Vergata. Vergata is believed to have disappeared around Feb. 14, 1996, two months later her legs were found in a plastic bag at a park near Fire Island's Blue Point Beach. At the time of her disappearance, Vergata was believed to have been working as an escort.
- Gilbert was a Craigslist escort who lived in Jersey City, traveled with her driver Michael Pak from Manhattan to meet a client, Joseph Brewer, at his home in the Oak Beach Association on the morning of May 1, 2010. She spoke with two neighbors before disappearing. Her body was discovered in a marsh near Oak Beach — about half a mile from where she was last seen alive — on December 13, 2011.
Vergata's two sets of remains were linked by DNA analysis in July 2011, and were subsequently identified definitively thanks to genetic genealogy and a relative buccal swab in October 2022, Tierney said.
While Tierney insisted that immediate relatives had been notified of her death before the press conference, her biological sons allegedly did not receive word of the discovery ahead of time. Son Eric Doherty, 32, was distraught when reached by phone Friday afternoon after authorities confirmed his mother, Vergata, was the previously-unidentified woman.
"He just thought [Vergata] was missing," his girlfriend Michelle Nolan, exclusively told The Post.
Eric and his older brother, Gary, are the biological sons of Vergata and a man named Gunther Lind, but were adopted as young children by Edward and Diane Doherty in 1992, Nolan explained.
Nolan said they had received scant details about the break in the case.
"We just...we didn't have any information," Nolan said. "Their [adoptive mother] just called to let them know."
The young mother was struck by a truck when she was pregnant with Gary in the late 1980s, according to Nolan.
Gary, now 34, was born with cerebral palsy as a result of the accident. He now lives in a care home for adults with special needs, and is not yet aware of his mother's death, she said.
Vergata's step-sister, Brenda, told The Post on Friday that the news of her body being identified was "kind of a shock."
"I'm glad that she's found, at least most of her," she said.
"It was, 'okay, now we know what happened.'"
She said they had long assumed that she was dead.
"We wondered what happened to her. But she had a habit of just not being in contact," she said.
"We just assumed [she was dead]. No one heard from her in 20 years."
© Suffok County Police/Dennis A. Clark for NY PostJane Doe No. 7’s remains were found separately in 1996 and 2011.
"I didn't really know her," she explained, noting that her mother married Vergata's father, Dominic, in 1983.
"By the time her dad and my mom got married, we were all grown and out of the house," she recalled.
"I saw her on the day of the wedding. That was it.
"She'd [come] home for dinner or something, holidays, whatever."
Brenda said she was not sure how investigators made the DNA match to remains, but said it was possible they either tested it against Vergata's brother, Victor, or Dominic, who died last December.
"He didn't really talk about it," she said of Dominic Vergata's reaction to his daughter's disappearance.
"I know years ago her dad donated DNA, when they had a private investigator."
The elder Vergata filed to have his daughter declared legally dead in 2017, online records show.
Earlier on Friday, reporter Tara Rosenblum claimed that Vergata's stepmother, Virginia Breen Vergata, had not been informed of the police press conference identifying her stepdaughter as Jane Doe No. 7 and was "deeply upset" by the update.
During the press conference, however, Tierney maintained that the task force remained committed to investigating Vergata's death, even after so many years.
"We are going to continue to work this particular case, as we did the Gilgo Four investigation. We are going to have no comment on what if any suspect we have developed at this time," he said.
Whores, in other words.