Through The Woods

No matter where you go once you’re in Manorville, there will be trees. There’s only one fast-food joint in the entire town of 11,000—a McDonald’s—located in the only shopping center in town. Word travels fast here.

Well aware that talking to the media about the bodies in the woods may not go over well with his neighbors, one local retiree who has lived here through the discovery of all four bodies only introduces himself as “Danny.”

“Manorville has gotten somewhat of a reputation,” says Danny. “The place you go to get rid of a body.”

America’s Most Wanted featured one of the Manorville cases, dubbing it “The Butcher of Manorville” in 2007. Four years later there have been no new developments.

“We’re a dumping ground,” says Danny. “Some nut coming in from the city, maybe a guy who grew up on Long Island, knows the area enough to say, ‘Hey, there’s a spot no one will look,’ and then comes in off the Expressway.”

The Long Island Central Pine Barrens just off Halsey Manor Road in Manorville down in the area where 20-year-old Jessica Taylor’s mutilated body was found on July 26, 2003.

A woman shopping at the local King Kullen, who won’t give her name because she has a young child, agrees there most likely isn’t a murderer living in her small town, but she is still afraid.

“The fact of the matter is, someone who is deranged enough to kill a human being, then cut her into pieces and throw her off the side of the road like trash, was within a mile of my home at some point,” she says. “It’s unsettling.”

She says she never allowed her kids to play in the woods, but now it’s forbidden ground—partly because the area is so desolate, and partly because of what they might find.