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New York authorities on Wednesday announced the identification of a woman previously only known as “Peaches” and her toddler, whose deaths have been looked at in connection to the Gilgo Beach serial killings case on Long Island.
Authorities identified the mother as Tanya Denise Jackson — previously only known as “Peaches” because of her distinctive peach tattoo — and the baby as Tatiana Marie Dykes. Police located Jackson’s torso in Hempstead Lake State Park in Lakeview, New York, in 1997. Authorities later located her 2-year-old toddler’s remains in April 2011 near Ocean Parkway in Babylon, New York.
“The reality is, our work has just begun. Knowing the identities of the mom and the little baby is just a first step to help us get to solving these murders,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly said during a Wednesday press conference. “Having their identities helps us say to the public, ‘Please, if you knew Tanya, if you worked with her, if you met her at the grocery store…please, contact us and let us know.’ Everything we can find out about her leading up to her death can help us solve this horrific, horrific crime.”
The Gilgo Beach case, launched nearly 15 years ago, led to the discovery of 10 human remains, mostly women, one man, and a child along Ocean Parkway. One unidentified murder victim, an African American female known as Jane Doe #3, was nicknamed “Peaches” for the tattoo on her left breast.
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Rex Heuermann, a 61-year-old Manhattan architect from Massapequa, Long Island, has been charged in connection with the murders of seven women whose remains were located in the area. Several victims have been identified as sex workers whose remains were dismembered, stuffed into bags and strewn throughout Gilgo Beach.
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“We are not discounting the possibility that these cases are unrelated [to] that investigation,” Nassau County PD homicide Det. Sean Fitzpatrick said Wednesday.
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Jackson, a U.S. Army veteran from Alabama, and Dykes were linked as mother and daughter in 2015 after preliminary DNA analysis, though their identities were still unknown at the time.
Jackson was living in Brooklyn and possibly working as an assistant in a medical office in the 1990s. She served in the Army between 1993 and 1995 in Fort Sam Houston in Texas, Fort Gordon in Georgia, and Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.
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“By inviting the FBI to contribute to this case, we were able to contribute new and innovative resources to the table in the form of our immensely skilled Investigative Genetic Genealogy or IGG team,” FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raya said Wednesday. “The IGG team combines crime scene DNA with traditional genealogy research and historical records to generate leads to identify unknown DNA, which is what happened in this particular case.”
The DNA evidence in Jackson’s and her daughter’s cases was submitted to Othram in 2020. Scientists with the forensic genetic genealogy lab based in Texas were able to build a comprehensive genetic profile using existing data for the then-unknown woman and ultimately found her identity.
“The circumstances surrounding the loss of Tanya and Tatiana are both horrific and heartbreaking, but finding answers and the truth about who they were is the next step in getting justice for them,” Kristen Mittelman, chief development officer at Othram, a forensic laboratory specializing in difficult DNA cases, said in a Wednesday statement. “We can’t bring back the victims who were lost, but our hope is that we can help bring resolution.”
The Gilgo Beach serial killings investigation is ongoing.
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Prosecutors have said Heuermann’s alleged motive was to “identify and ‘hunt’ women for the purpose of committing murder” and that the job patrolling sandy stretches of Jones Beach at night made him intimately familiar with the area.
Heuermann is a South Shore native who bought the Massapequa Park house he grew up in from his mother in the early 1990s. That neighborhood is near both beaches.
Jones Beach is less than 7 miles from Gilgo down Ocean Parkway. Six of the seven victims’ remains were recovered in whole or in part east of Gilgo Beach, and prosecutors call the area the “central disposal site.”
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