It seems the closest that anyone has gotten to catching the Long Island Serial Killer may be a phone call. Little is known about whoever is responsible for the 10-plus bodies uncovered in recent years on Gilgo Beach in Long Island, New York. No suspects have ever been identified. But the victims’ friends and family do know this: The killer or killers like to taunt them. A friend of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, the first of the victims to disappear, says she got an odd call a few days after the 25-year-old vanished in 2007. “ said she was at a whorehouse in Queens,” Sara Karnes tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, on newsstands now. “I told him she would never go for that, because she was independent. He goes, ‘Well, that’s where I saw her.’ And he described her to a T to me.” Karnes, who passed her information on to the police, says the man she spoke to didn’t have an accent. “He definitely isn’t from New York, Boston or Maine, because those are …show more content…
Melissa’s younger sister, Amanda, answered. She thought it was Melissa, but she heard a man’s voice instead. “He was tormenting her,” Melissa’s mom, Lynn, tells PEOPLE. “He was very calm. The last call he said he had killed her.” Lynn says the man made the calls from Madison Square Garden and Times Square in New York City. “Most of the calls were in the evening,” she says, adding, “We thought maybe he lived somewhere else and works in the city and commutes.” The last call was on Aug. 27. • Watch our new 10-part true crime show, People Magazine Investigates, which debuts with the two-hour season premiere “The Long Island Serial Killer” on Monday, Nov. 7, at 9 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery “When you start looking at taunting behavior attached to a serial murder case, it ratchets it up — you don’t see that with a lot of cases,” former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole tells PEOPLE. “It puts you at much higher risk of