Serial killer nation: how so many American murderers have evaded justice for so long

The US has had more known serial killers than any other country.

- Katie McQue

As Rex Heuermann joins their infamous roll call, demands are growing to know why.Katie McQue reports from New York.

In the early hours of 1 May 2010, a 23-year-old woman placed a frantic call to 911. “There’s somebody after me,” Shannan Gilbert screamed as she ran along a road in Oak Beach on Long Island, New York. She was never seen again.

In the months that followed, Gilbert's disappearance drew little urgency from police. Her mother repeatedly pressed authorities to search for her daughter, but it was not until December that officers began combing the area. In thick brush along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach, they found a body — but it wasn’t Gilbert’s.

Two days later, three more bodies were found. All were petite young women, all bound in hessian fabric; it was clear they had been murdered. Further searches revealed the remains of another six victims, including a mother and toddler, and an Asian male. Some of these remains had been dismembered. Shannan Gilbert’s body was finally found in December 2011.

Law enforcement declared the murders were the work of at least one serial killer, dubbed by the press the “Long Island serial killer”, or “Lisk.”

In the days after some of the women went missing, friends and families had received phone calls from their loved ones’ phones. An unidentified man was on the other end of the line, tormenting them. “I'm watching your sister's body rot,” he told the sister of Melissa Barthelemy, who went missing in July 2009.