Attorney John Ray, speaking at a news conference with a woman who claims ex-Suffolk County Police Commissioner James Burke engaged her in rough sex, pointed the finger at the former top cop.
“Jimmy Burke is now moved into the circle of suspects,” said Ray, admitting that he lacked a smoking gun in the killings of 11 victims.
But the lawyer insisted there was “very strong circumstantial evidence” linking Burke to the killings.
Burke, 52, became police chief two years after the disappearance of New Jersey prostitute Shannan Gilbert led to the eventual discovery of 11 bodies.
He was criticized for rejecting the help of the FBI after they initially assisted with the investigation. The feds returned to the cold case last year after Burke’s arrest.
The woman with Burke, who identified herself only as “Leeanne,” said she encountered Burke at a spring 2011 house party near the area where several of the victims’ bodies were found.
“We took it to a bathroom and he could not consummate actual intercourse and he became really angry,” she recounted. “Then he forced me into really aggressive oral sex. It was so aggressive that my ears teared.”
The party near the burial site featured booze and cocaine, with Burke allegedly indulging in both. Leeanne said the high-ranking cop “seemed to like to choke me. Aggressive, arrogant, untouchable.”
John Meringolo, the attorney for Burke, issued a terse and dismissive response: "These allegations do not warrant a comment."
Burke was sentenced in November to 46 months in prison for beating a heroin junkie who robbed the commissioner’s SUV of sex toys, a porn video and a box of cigars back in 2012.
He then leaned on detectives who witnessed the attack on the handcuffed man to cover up the beating.
Ray said the story told by Leeanne, a one-time college student turned prostitute, “brings a direct connection between Burke and those poor, dead victims lying along Ocean Parkway.
The charge by Ray came after another revelation this week in the case: DNA indicated a woman’s torso found in 1997 matched up with body parts discovered 14 years later and several miles apart on Long Island.
The unidentified torso, known to police as “Peaches” because of a tattoo on her chest, was located in Hempstead Lake State Park in 1997. Her other parts turned up in April 2011 in Jones Beach State Park.
Investigators eventually located the remains of eight women, a man and a small child in the area around Gilgo Beach.
read more
No comments:
Post a Comment