Victim: Amber Lynn Costello, 27, missing Sept 2010, found Gilgo Beach Dec 2010 *Rex Heuermann charged*

Agree, but cell towers cast a wide net. I think the recommendation is a 3mile separation from any personal in-pattern behavior.
Your follow-on point is also exactly right. This process (nowadays) would be pretty quick and produce a very small pool of likely suspects in a few minutes, given the right software. Four or five calls and a co-located number would be staring you right in the face. It really all depends on what sort of historical data LE is in possession of.
Laying this Amber data over top of the suspicious calls to Melissa’s sister (ie. same analytical process) and you have your perp.
 
You can also do similar type analysis for when the burners were purchased and/or how they were activated and registered. A comparison of the Amber burner and the Megan burner might be revealing in this regard.
 
You can also do similar type analysis for when the burners were purchased and/or how they were activated and registered. A comparison of the Amber burner and the Megan burner might be revealing in this regard.


Back in the early 2,000's & even up to 2010, there were still payphones around....if you wanted to register & set up a burner phone without anyone knowing who you were, you did it through a pay phone, its anonymous & you could provide fake info.

Now a days I dont know how someone could do it without leaving a trace.....there arent many payphones around like there use to be, if any. Also, there are cameras everywhere. Im sure if someone wanted a burner phone with no connections to themselves, they could find one, I just dont know of those angles now a days.
 
It’s quite honestly a lot easier these days. Many more burner options and activation is a lot less complicated and can be done from the burner itself (all easily anonymous). Things start to get tricky when you try downloading & installing chat-apps through the Android or Apple app stores, which is somewhat necessary if you want your comms encrypted. Still possible, just more steps involved. Cameras are the much bigger problem and can only be mitigated if you know where they are ahead of time.
I was thinking more about when, where & how the phone was purchased and then when & where it was first turned on. These are mundane steps and even the most committed criminals will shave corners.
For example, the suspicious “Mickey Mouse” phone discovered on MBBs phone logs was reported to have been purchased in Manhattan - which seems to correlate to the suspicious phone calls placed to Melissa B’s sister several years later. This supports the theory that the killer may have worked in/near Midtown in the mid-2000s. He does these things after work or something - he doesn’t go out of his way to drive into the city to accomplish these ‘less scrutinized’ tasks, etc. IF the killer needed more than 75min or so to get out to Amber, this might suggest he was coming from the city. If he needed less time, we could place him closer to Jones Beach, etc.
 
It’s quite honestly a lot easier these days. Many more burner options and activation is a lot less complicated and can be done from the burner itself (all easily anonymous). Things start to get tricky when you try downloading & installing chat-apps through the Android or Apple app stores, which is somewhat necessary if you want your comms encrypted. Still possible, just more steps involved. Cameras are the much bigger problem and can only be mitigated if you know where they are ahead of time.
I was thinking more about when, where & how the phone was purchased and then when & where it was first turned on. These are mundane steps and even the most committed criminals will shave corners.
For example, the suspicious “Mickey Mouse” phone discovered on MBBs phone logs was reported to have been purchased in Manhattan - which seems to correlate to the suspicious phone calls placed to Melissa B’s sister several years later. This supports the theory that the killer may have worked in/near Midtown in the mid-2000s. He does these things after work or something - he doesn’t go out of his way to drive into the city to accomplish these ‘less scrutinized’ tasks, etc. IF the killer needed more than 75min or so to get out to Amber, this might suggest he was coming from the city. If he needed less time, we could place him closer to Jones Beach, etc.

I don’t think someone like LISK would have taken the risk of at least 4 times driving more than an hour from Manhattan to Gilgo Beach with a body in his car. He’s obviously not stupid and it would be too risky. NYC is busy all the time and something as mundane as his car being rear ended could have busted him.

Plus there’s the question of WHERE it was happening. Real estate in Manhattan is at a megs premium, he called from some of THE most expensive places. Unless he’s a multimillionaire it’s unlikely LISK could have afforded a place where the noise, smells, tools, movement of bodies, entries of women could be concealed.

Seems pretty certain he’s local. Especially because of his knowledge of the Long Island area.
 
Look, some of these women have been dead for close to twenty years - and all with varying degrees of focus and scrutiny on the surrounding LI community. Sometimes it helps to open the aperture a bit - if nothing more than to clear the cobwebs.
All facts considered, do believe it is helpful to better scrutinize the city aspect to this case. It is an important piece that gets lost in all the Oak Beach hoopla.
 
Look, some of these women have been dead for close to twenty years - and all with varying degrees of focus and scrutiny on the surrounding LI community. Sometimes it helps to open the aperture a bit - if nothing more than to clear the cobwebs.
All facts considered, do believe it is helpful to better scrutinize the city aspect to this case. It is an important piece that gets lost in all the Oak Beach hoopla.
I don’t think someone like LISK would have taken the risk of at least 4 times driving more than an hour from Manhattan to Gilgo Beach with a body in his car. He’s obviously not stupid and it would be too risky. NYC is busy all the time and something as mundane as his car being rear ended could have busted him.

Plus there’s the question of WHERE it was happening. Real estate in Manhattan is at a megs premium, he called from some of THE most expensive places. Unless he’s a multimillionaire it’s unlikely LISK could have afforded a place where the noise, smells, tools, movement of bodies, entries of women could be concealed.

Seems pretty certain he’s local. Especially because of his knowledge of the Long Island area.
I think he lives in the Hamptons. I think he has a large, secure and private property where his has a workshop and he killed, dismembered and stored the bodies prior to dumping. He is smart enough to buy burner phones and make calls from the most crowded places in the world, NYC. He has money and these girls generally have good instincts, their lives literally depend on it. But this guy groomed his victims with his "wouldn't hurt a fly/pussycat/has money/big house" MO and I think he gave these girls $$ in the past without sex, which, they fell for and that's why they went outside their normal security measures. I also think he will be arrested very soon
 
Must be 35 years
I doubt he was calling Amber from his house. He was using a burner phone & probably driving around or parked somewhere while talking to her. Back then, which is over 10 years ago, no one knew about the new technologies that could possibly find someone using a burner phone by overlapping that signal with the persons regular cell phone that sitting right next to them.

For instance, if LISK had his regular cellphone on while using his burner phone to contact Amber & any other victim, theres a good chance he used his regular cellphone to contact his wife to tell her he might be late coming home, etc.....the new technology will be looking at the signals from the burner phones locations & what other signals were right there by that burner phone.
More than 30 years ago I was tasked with finding a suspect in a murder. At the time we had a great relationship with NYNEX Investigators. I was tracking a number in Miami. I called NYNEX and the investigator asked me do I want to know all the phone numbers in the Greater NY area that called that # in the past year? YOU CAN DO THAT??? Phone in NY came from down the block from home of perps brother . Another call came from a payphone at Cornell Medical Center where perp's mother worked.

All this was a closely guarded secret because no one really wanted to get involved in good police work. A very simple task that could solve how many murders no one seems to know about AND I doubt much has changed in the past 30 years.
 
Hi, new here. I watched a show on a&e the other day with Alexis Linkletter going back to LI to investigste lisk. I came to this thread bc I knew Amber. I’m an ex heroin addict and I used to hang out in Tompkins square park everyday (from 2008-2013) for those of you who don’t know, that’s a park in nyc les where lots of transients and drugs addicts hang out. I met amber through bear (Bjorn) , he used to bring her around. She was super sweet and always bummed me Newport’s . Bear would come around with out her and say she wasn’t his girl. I remember hearing about her death from him in the park and originally it was said by him that some trucker killed her & dumped her body. It wasn’t until a few years later that I really saw her on the news and realized omg… the horror of what happens to this poor girl. I started at the beginning of this thread and I’m sad to see that most links and articles are gone. I pray they find out who did this. None of these girls deserved what happened to them. I have hope they will find something.
 
per various reports, DS claims that the last call Amber received was at 1030. She left the house very shortly thereafter to get in the car parked around the corner. DS also claims that Amber received a number of calls from the killer - 4 or 5 in total throughout that day. Do we know when the calls started? It would also be nice to know when the second-to-last call was made as this might give us an indication of how long the killer needed to drive to Amber's location.
Given Amber was discovered only three months after she went missing, I am hopeful that LE has those phone logs, is able to identify the number the killer used and what cell towers that number was attached to. If more than one call came from the same tower, or there is a noticeable geographical progression (ie. calls moving east, etc) they would have probably started focusing on these trend lines. And then perhaps scrutinize the very fist call to get an overlapping radius of where the killer was located.

I could be wrong but I think in the book "Lost Girls by Robert Kolker" he wrote about the conversation that Amber and DS had prior to her being picked up.

I believe Amber said to DS regarding being picked up by LISK, "he will be here soon? or in 15 mins?"or something to that effect.
Do not quote me on this as I do not recall the exact words and unfortunately I do not have the book handy.

Perhaps someone else may have knowledge or access to the book.
 
This pertains to my above reply-I found via WS someone else quoting info re: how much time it took prior to reportedly, LISK's arrival and picking up Amber. See copy below in quotes.

"I just listened to that part of the LISK Podcast. I was interested to hear Dave Schaller confirm my belief that Amber Lynn Costello knew the killer as more than just a client. I also noted that Amber told Dave that the person would be there in 20 to 30 minutes. If we draw a circle on the map with Amber’s address being the center point of the circle, we can estimate the radius of the circle as 20 to 30 minutes, and that the killer lived somewhere on the circumference of the circle in September 2010."
 
Detectives wanted a subpoena for a tower dump.
DA Spota said no.
He cited privacy issues.
Privacy was not an issue for other cases..
I guess he was afraid of Pandora's box.
I think it is indicative of how this case was handled.
Possible real evidence was kept out of the investigation.
It's like putting a puzzle together without all the pieces.
 
This pertains to my above reply-I found via WS someone else quoting info re: how much time it took prior to reportedly, LISK's arrival and picking up Amber. See copy below in quotes.

"I just listened to that part of the LISK Podcast. I was interested to hear Dave Schaller confirm my belief that Amber Lynn Costello knew the killer as more than just a client. I also noted that Amber told Dave that the person would be there in 20 to 30 minutes. If we draw a circle on the map with Amber’s address being the center point of the circle, we can estimate the radius of the circle as 20 to 30 minutes, and that the killer lived somewhere on the circumference of the circle in September 2010."
We don't know how far the killer traveled.
He might of been on a highway.
It's possible he knew where she lived.
Asking for directions might of been a red herring.
Either way, DS might have overheard the conversation. He might know where the killer claimed he was traveling from.
 
Following Schaller’s appearance on the first 48 Hours report on this case, he was on another program where spoke about a strange encounter that he had in Brooklyn.

Per Schaller, someone he recognized from his days with Amber drove past him, recognized him, and tried to speak with him. Schaller was so unnerved, he ran down a subway entrance to avoid him. The impression I got was that the man in the car was a previous client of Amber’s and Schaller feared he was related to Amber’s disappearance. Unfortunately I can’t recall the name of the show though it may have been an A&E or European documentary.
 
Pretty sad that I come here to basically just see what’s happening in the case , and to tell you all that I knew Amber and I get attacked by some psycho saying that I’m a news person (bc I had mentioned in my first post that I had watched something on tv that had got me thinking of the whole thing again). Before they attacked me they sent me a message lying about them running a private Facebook page for Amber “a safe space” for ex addicts and ex sex workers …. So I give the person my Facebook and then they say I’m the news person lol. I’m a recovered heroin addict from nyc, I met amber through a mutual friend In 2010 and thats it. And I’m leaving the forum now bc I don’t want to get attacked again by anyone . Like I said, I have hope they’ll find something. R.I.P. Amber Lynn Costello.
 
Pretty sad that I come here to basically just see what’s happening in the case , and to tell you all that I knew Amber and I get attacked by some psycho saying that I’m a news person (bc I had mentioned in my first post that I had watched something on tv that had got me thinking of the whole thing again). Before they attacked me they sent me a message lying about them running a private Facebook page for Amber “a safe space” for ex addicts and ex sex workers …. So I give the person my Facebook and then they say I’m the news person lol. I’m a recovered heroin addict from nyc, I met amber through a mutual friend In 2010 and thats it. And I’m leaving the forum now bc I don’t want to get attacked again by anyone . Like I said, I have hope they’ll find something. R.I.P. Amber Lynn Costello.

I am sorry you were treated like this @Madmont24. I appreciate and thank you for sharing your memories of Amber with us!
 

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