Sometime during the weekend of July 6, 2007, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old mother, made a call from Manhattan’s Port Authority bus station to a friend asking to be picked up. She was never heard from again. Melissa Barthelemy went missing two years later, in July 2009. Megan Waterman went missing almost a year after that, in June 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello went missing in September 2010. The bodies of these women were found on December 11 and 13, 2010, in New York's Gilgo Beach, on Jones Beach Island, off Long Island’s South Shore. Thirteen years later, a suspect, Rex Heuermann, has finally been arrested for their murders.
Multiple women gone missing under similar circumstances should have raised a red flag; instead, the threat to these women was downplayed by police, likely because they were all sex workers who used Craigslist ads, or similar websites, to meet clients. Violence against sex workers is high, and this group is particularly at risk of being targeted by serial killers. Still, their murders are rarely taken seriously — and are too often used for entertainment.
Women are overrepresented among serial killer homicide victims; sex workers are even more disproportionately affected. One study cited in a 2011 Homicide Studies article, which tracked victims in the early 1990s, found that 65% of victims of serial killers were women, and 78% of these female victims were sex workers. Another larger study of international serial killers, covering over two centuries, pointed to 73% of victims being women, and 23% of all victims being sex workers.
There is a narrative that says men kill sex workers because they specifically hate them, but criminologists say many serial killers who have targeted sex workers did so because they had easier access to them and police don’t really care.
In 1836, the murder of Helen Jewett, and the subsequent trial that acquitted her murderer, Richard P. Robinson, helped ignite a penny press obsession with true crime. As Patricia Cline Cohen detailed in a 1990 essay, “The Helen Jewett Murder,” the victim was a well-known prostitute in New York City with many prominent clients. Robinson murdered her and lit her bed on fire. He was apprehended fairly quickly and put on trial, but many in the city defended him, with some blaming Jewett for seducing a young man into the world of illicit sex.
Despite the mountain of evidence against Robinson, he was acquitted, and many men in the courtroom cheered the verdict. Interest in the case was so high that the editor of The New York Herald dramatically increased circulation of the newspaper and published intimate details about Jewett’s body and lurid descriptions of the murder. For years after the trial, published articles kept promising new information, and a wax exhibit was built in Boston.
Ten years later, in 1846, Mary Ann Bickford was found dead after her throat was cut and she was lit on fire in a Boston boarding house. Bickford had begun an affair with Albert Tirrell, after leaving her husband years earlier, and was working as a prostitute in Boston. Tirrell was the obvious suspect with a decent amount of evidence against him. But he was acquitted, despite a flimsy defense that barely gave the jury an excuse to do so: The defense suggested that Bickford had killed herself — though witnesses heard someone flee her room — and put forward a theory that Tirrell was a sleepwalker and somehow killed her in his sleep.
In what is arguably the most famous serial killer case in history, at least five women were murdered in the fall of 1888 around the Whitechapel neighborhood of London by an unidentified man dubbed “Jack the Ripper.” All five women, murdered in particularly brutal ways, were assumed to be sex workers. The murder spree captivated the city of London, and raised significant interest in the United States as well.
After London's Jack the Ripper case made the news, there were a number of murders in the US that led the press to gleefully write headlines about a possible American “Ripper,” especially when a sex worker was the victim.
The London case garnered significant police attention and concern from the public, but the murders were also used to excite prurient interest; the case still looms large in the public's imagination not with fear as much as sensationalism. In her 1989 article “The Sexual Politics of Murder,” Jane Caputi argued that violence against sex workers was seen then, as it is now, as a hazard of the job and an almost understandable response to women who behave in what are perceived as sexually illicit ways.
According to Caputi’s article, amid the frenzy over the Jack the Ripper case, the London police chief at the time told the press: "The police can do nothing as long as the victims unwittingly connive at their own destruction. They take the murderer to some retired spot, and place themselves in such a position that they can be slaughtered without a sound being heard.”
The belief that sex workers make themselves targets for serial killers and are therefore responsible for their own murder has allowed violence against them to continue, hampering police investigations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Richard Cottingham, also known as “The Torso Killer,” admitted to killing at least 17 victims between 1967 and 1980, several of whom were sex workers. Robert Hansen, “The Butcher Baker,” killed 17 women, many of whom were sex workers, in Alaska in the 1970s and '80s. Gary Ridgeway, “The Green River Killer,” was convicted of killing 49 women and teenage girls in the 1980s and ’90s, many of whom were sex workers.
According to Caputi's article, in 1984, a member of the task force to catch the Green River Killer remarked, “There was wide public attention in the Ted [Bundy] case… because the victims resembled everyone's [sic] daughter.... But not everybody relates to prostitution on the Pacific Highway.”
In the 1980s and '90s, there was a wave of murders of mostly Black women sex workers in the Los Angeles area. Originally dubbed the work of the “Southside Slayer,” police eventually realized at least three serial killers were operating in the area. Per Caputi’s research, it took the murder of 10 women for police to notify the public and another four victims for a task force to be formed. Margaret Prescod, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, said at the time, “There'd be more response from the police if these were San Marino housewives. …If you're Black and living on the fringe, your life isn't worth much.”
Samuel Little, possibly America’s deadliest serial killer, murdered up to 93 people in multiple states over the course of 40 years. Most of his victims were women, many of whom were Black, some of whom were sex workers. The police don’t seem to care much if you kill sex workers, but they apparently care even less if the murdered women are Black sex workers.
Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, told investigators he targeted sex workers because they wouldn’t be missed. When testifying about Little’s victims, Lieutenant Darren Versiga of the Pascagoula Police said, "If you were [an] African American female and you were in the process of any kind of prostitution or illegal stuff, we just did not treat those crimes as crimes, to be perfectly honest with you.”
The lack of police response to the murder of sex workers allows serial killers to keep killing. Rachel West, a representative of US PROStitutes Collective, as cited in Caputi’s article, pointed out that serial killers might begin with sex workers and move on to other women. In England, Peter Sutcliffe killed at least 13 women between 1975 and 1980, known as the “Yorkshire Ripper” case. In response to this, Caputi detailed, Constable Jim Hobson said, “He has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes …But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls.”
When sex workers are victims of serial killers, often the public reaction is to assume the women were likely to be victims of violence anyway, given their chosen profession, shifting the responsibility of the crime onto the victim. Victims are separated into “good” women and “bad,” with the insinuation that women will inevitably be harmed if they fall into the “bad” camp. This helps insulate police who don't fulfill their responsibility in catching predators and hampers their investigations, because they probably don’t consider that the same man would want to kill sex workers and women who are not sex workers.
On July 14, Rex Heuermann was arrested for the murders of Melissa Berthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello in Gilgo Beach. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. Heuermann has also been identified as the primary suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, according to the New York Daily News.
Since 1996, the bodies of seven other people have been found near Gilgo Beach. Unfortunately, the investigation into these murders was hampered by incompetence and a police chief who, a victim's family attorney has claimed, spurned FBI help and was eventually indicted on charges related to the assault of a criminal suspect.
It took a new police chief to start a task force to finally arrest a suspect in this tragic case. Serial killers target sex workers because we as a society don’t value them enough as humans. Heuermann stands accused of murdering mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends. Violence against them is violence against all women.
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