COLD CASES 1960 - 1980 IN NEW YORK STATE
CASE TIMELINES
CASE MAP
NEW YORK CITY NYPD DATA PORTAL
NEW JERSEY COLD CASES 1960 - 1980
The Sunrise Highway Killer Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact on any of these listed cases or on
any cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here.
All sources of information will be treated confidentially.
New York State Cold Cases 1966 - 1980
Long Island Sunrise Highway (LiSHK) Murders
This is a case list and online map of similar unsolved cold cases sexual murders or suspicious disappearances of female victims in the Hudson Valley, Long Island and New York City region between 1966 and 1980. The cases occurred in Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Nassau, Suffolk, Queens and Manhattan counties, on a geographic axis along the Sunrise Highway (NY 27) corridor and up along the Springfield Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue in Queens Village, New York. The bodies of some of the victims abducted in Queens were left in Nassau County as were some victims from Manhattan.
A primary suspect in some of these murders is an incarcerated serial killer convicted in eight murders in New Jersey and three in Manhattan, New York. Suspected related unsolved New Jersey murders are listed and mapped here.
There are two ways of viewing the cases on this website. A
Case Timeline offers a narrative description of the
cases based on contemporary media
reports. The
Geo-Forensic Murder Map features a Google Map with an
overlay of where victims were murdered or found and the associated secondary locations
("geo-forensic markers") such as where
the victims were last seen, resided, their destination if known, etc.
The body/murder location points are color coded chronologically:
Green=1960-1969;
Red= 1970-1974;
Orange=1975-1980
Black= Case Closed
The M.O. (modus operandi - method of operation) of the perpetrator or perpetrators varies across the range of these cases from victims being attacked in their home or place of work in the daytime to being abducted on the street at night or ambushed and killed while walking in the vicinity of their home, school or local business. Some of the bodies were concealed or thrown into bodies of water, while others were abandoned by a roadside unconcealed. Some of the victims were mutilated or decapitated and dismembered. Causes of death ranged from manual and ligature strangulation, stabbing, battery to asphyxiation and forcible drowning. While not all the victims were subjected to forcible penetrative rape, some form of identifiable sexual assault was a key feature of most of the homicides listed here, with the exception of victims found in a state of decomposition too advanced to ascertain a cause of death, or victims who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances suggestive of foul play.
It is entirely plausible that some of these homicides
were committed by a single serial perpetrator, or that groupings of the
homicides were committed by several serial perpetrators working
independently of each other. Several solved serial homicides are included in
the case histories and on the geo-forensic map as reference points for
scale and scope and are identified as closed cases on a separate layer.
The Long Island Sunrise Highway Murders Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact through Contact Us on any of these listed cases or on cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here. Information will be treated confidentially.