I'm Jasmine Anderson.

Newsday investigates The Forgotten.

More than 100 women found dead outside on Long Island since 1976.

Since our investigation launched late last year, officials have made changes in how they are investigating these deaths.

Newsday TV's Sherri Einhorn and Newsday investigative reporter Sandra Peddie explain.

[Music] I'm the only one left of my family.

I'm the last one.

Even if we did find out who did it, I would still have that emptiness because I don't have her.

She had so much love and life to live and to give, and it's unfortunate that it was cut short.

At least 128 dead women have been found outside on Long Island since 1976.

One person is alarming, but hearing a number over 100 is something that is unacceptable.

Who's looking to see who killed these women?

It seems as if a lot of these women have been forgotten.

The families haven't forgotten them, but I think many other people have.

We have this map that shows some of the cases.

What stands out to you?

I think the array of dots is really staggering.

There are so many cases.

And the thing is, the map isn't complete.

We don't have all of them because at least 35 of the women are unidentified.

So there's no way to pinpoint where they were found.

And it's significant that they were outside.

It's just abnormal.

It's abnormal to have bodies outdoors.

Most people want to hide their crimes.

So they'll typically tend to keep the body indoors, try to fight, figure out a way to dispose of it.

The question that I'm concerned about is, are they connected?

Is it something where a lot of these women that have been discovered, are they from one individual, which is bad in itself.

Or is it from several individuals, which is also concerning, which means there is a comfort level to do this.

There's a lot of dots, but they're not just dots.

Each one of these dots represents a person, a housewife, a mother, a sister, a daughter.

We have these bodies.

Now we have to figure out what happened to those people.

These families are waiting years to find out what happened to their loved one.

Do I expect resolution?

I don't.

Would I be happy to hear some accountability in some way?

Of course.

Do I anticipate that happening after 40 years?

Probably not.

This is Lindenhurst where the body of Laura Parker was found 40 years ago.

Laura Parker, 14, found in a hole.

This was all trees you said, right?

It was trees and there was a lumber yard nearby.

And it's where a lot of teenagers hung out.

So this is the intersection Monroe Avenue and Frank Street, but it didn't look like this.

It was very different then, and on that day some teenage boys had come here to build a fort, because it was a popular teenage hangout, and instead they found Laura under a rug in some trash.

Laura disappeared when I was six.

The day that she was found, I was playing at a friend's house down the block, and the mother got a phone call saying for me to come home.

They put me on the phone with my mom, and I said, "Mom, I just want to stay."

And she said, "You need to come home now."

And I knew something was wrong.

I remember coming in through the back door, seeing my parents sitting at the kitchen table and the two detectives.

And as soon as I saw my parents' faces, I knew.

And then I just lost it.

We received many prank calls.

Someone called late at night.

My mom answered the phone and it was a young girl's voice and she said, "Mommy, Mommy, I want to come home."

My mom just started, you know, yelling, "Laura," and then she heard young kids laughing and then it just hung up the phone.

Even the last detective was pretty frank with us and said, "Listen, most of the guys that are cold case detectives are near the end, near their retirement.

We'd love to help you, but unless someone comes out of the woodwork and says, "I did this," there's no way this is getting solved.

She was just a ball of life.

Life has no light anymore.

A body is left here in a suitcase.

How many cars, how many people passed her without knowing?

It's so dehumanizing.

Over there, the body of Tanya Rush was found in 2008.

She was found in a suitcase.

And her daughter said they haven't been back here.

No.

It's too painful.

They didn't know exactly where, right?

Right.

They believe her body was found here.

I just couldn't comprehend really what was going on.

For a while I just knew like I would not be able to call mommy.

Like I can't call her, I can't talk to her.

But I didn't understand what was going on.

One of the things that struck me was when Blesson, who is her youngest daughter, said she couldn't believe she was told that her mother died, but she didn't know how.

She didn't know how her mother died until she was 12 years old.

And she learned about it on the internet.

They made a point of saying they don't often do internet searches for that reason.

My mom died when I was pretty young.

A lot of my memories are non-existent.

I have things here and there, like I'll hear stories and I'll be able to kind of reminisce on the stories, but that's other people's perception of my mom.

I don't have a lot of memories of my own.

So my grieving is like grieving what it could have been.

And I have to sit with that a lot.

My mom had been missing for a week and I was the one that went to go file the missing persons report.

I knew that because I was underage I needed an adult to come and do the report for me.

On the very day that I went to file the police report is the day that I found out that the night I found out that she had passed away.

And when my father told me I just passed out, I blacked out.

I'm only about to be 16 years old and I have to navigate and maneuver through life without my mom.

The one who gave me life, the one who taught me everything I knew thus far, I just could not understand.

Like, my life as I knew it was completely changed.

It's hard.

I would be lying if I said I don't have hard days.

But we have to keep hope.

We have to remain hopeful and we have to know that justice is coming.

In 1000 feet, your destination will be on the right.

So this is Fairchild Avenue in Plainview.

This is where the body of Tynesha Brewster was found.

Her charred body was found in a smoking cargo container.

And it was found behind a building on this street.

We don't know nothing, but somebody knows something.

They believe that she fought.

She fought for her life.

It was a struggle, yeah.

She was dead before they burnt her body.

But that's the reason they burnt her body, because To cover the evidence.

We didn't get the right closure because she was burned beyond recognition.

So we weren't even able to have an open casket and mourn, you know, and to be able to feel like we had some type of closure.

She has come to me in my dreams and she's just smiling at me.

We're still, like, not trying to give up hope of, like, she's still going to, we're going to get that call.

Like, hey, I'm here, I'm sorry I didn't call you on two days, but we didn't get that call.

You know, like, you're still thinking like that.

Many of these are considered cold cases.

Some have been solved, many were murdered, some they don't know.

The point is, there are all these dead women out there, and we don't know what happened to them.

Why don't we?

Some are 40 years old.

Well, when I started my reporting, neither the Nassau nor Suffolk Police Departments had cold case units, and they still don't.

But, both District Attorney's Offices have created them.

We're working primarily with the Suffolk County PD.

We're dedicating staff and resources to that.

We've just started that, and that's really kind of an offshoot of the Gilgo investigation.

We have ADAs in the Homicide Bureau who are working on cold cases constantly.

They carry a cold case along with their active cases.

Unfortunately, both police departments are shorthanded.

We have seven active homicide detectives.

We used to have double that number.

Who is looking at cases that are over 10 years old?

If you take a cold case and just say you give it to a homicide investigator and a homicide investigator has a homicide he has to investigate, now it's taken away from the cold case.

The homicide team in Suffolk County Police Department were absolutely phenomenal.

But unfortunately they were undermanned.

Outside of New York City, Long Island cops are the highest paid in the state.

So you're in some ways you're getting less for spending more because you're paying the cops more in order to stand up whole new units.

That's a big expenditure.

And if I had to guess I'd say the reason they don't do that is because they know that the taxpayers won't stand for it.

So I don't think the beginning of this conversation is about cutting services.

I think it's about being more efficient so that you can provide more services.

They're in touch with the families.

They're telling them, "Yes, we're still looking at this.

We're reevaluating the evidence.

We found something.

We're going to speak to a witness."

Whatever is going on.

But you have to balance that with giving them false hope that it's going to be solved, you know, tomorrow.

Or ever.

Or ever.

And I think that's a difficult balance, but one that we try to make very clear to them.

There still are families out there, and I've talked to a lot of them.

It's very difficult because it's the worst moment of their lives, and the last thing they want to do is relive it.

But when you talk to them, the pain is still so fresh and raw, even years later.

I think the challenges are just the age.

Something that happens in, say, 1980, where are the witnesses now?

Are they still around?

What is their recollection?

What is the condition of the evidence?

Has the evidence been properly maintained?

So those are the disadvantages.

Obviously the advantages are now we get to use the advancements in forensics and investigative techniques that have occurred over the last 20, 30, 40 years and apply it back.

And hopefully using these new investigative techniques, we could develop further evidence which would lead to an arrest.

The majority of murderers try to conceal their crimes.

But if you're saying that these are very kind of public places, then yeah, then you're not talking about the norm or the typical kind of killer.

It's for the family.

It's for the people left behind.

We're never going to bring their loved one back, but they need closure.

They need to know what happened.

And I can't imagine going through so many years without ever getting answers to those questions.

It matters.

You know, it matters.

Every person, you know, every body that's found in Suffolk County, every person that is murdered, you know, that's a life that matters.

And we owe it to the victims.

We owe it to their families to do everything we can to find the person or persons who committed the crime, you know, regardless of when the crime happened.

-And when you can tell them, it gives your heart a little pump of, "Okay, we did something good today."

And then, of course, you say, "Yeah, but there's so many more we need to do, to work on."

Justice will never bring my mom back.

It will never take away the pain of losing her, but it will give us a little chip off our shoulder to see that the person responsible for this is held accountable.

(dramatic music) - After our investigation launched, one family reached out to us about a loved one killed more than 30 years ago.

Here's her story.

- We think that a murder case would have been taken more seriously.

Literally her throat was cut.

- New hope for justice, a mother was killed on Long Island.

- You know, you find a body dead on the street, you want to know what the hell happened.

- She's one of at least 128 women who have been found dead outside on Long Island since 1976.

- It seems as if a lot of these women have been forgotten.

The families haven't forgotten them, but I think many other people have.

I can understand why you named the article "The Forgotten" because things just kept moving on as if it didn't even happen.

And there were large groups of people that couldn't forget and still just don't forget.

After a Newsday investigation sheds light on dozens of cold cases, relatives emerge looking for answers to what happened to Teresa Cerny.

The documentary has about 300,000 views on YouTube and about 2000 comments.

And out of those 2000 comments one was from the family member of a victim and it really stood out to me.

"My aunt Teresa Kay Cerny was murdered in North Amityville on Thanksgiving 1988.

Her body was left outside near a shortcut path.

Her case is still unsolved."

That comment came from Jewel Singletary, who is the niece of Teresa Cerny.

I saw the Newsday feature on YouTube regarding the over 100 women that have been murdered in Long Island and their bodies left outside.

And I knew that my Aunt Terri was a part of this number and I wanted to give her a face and a name to be included in this.

It was very humbling just to know that my voice meant something to be able to speak up for another woman who no longer has a voice.

Jewel put me in touch with Teresa's daughter, Rhonda Singletary I'm Sandra Peddie.

Rhonda told us she's never spoken publicly about her mother's killing but felt compelled to after seeing our story.

So I'm nervous.

Yeah, when I watched the special I feel like, I said, "I had to."

So when do you think the last time anyone in the family had heard from a detective?

Probably back in the eighties.

You wake up in the morning and you think of your loved one and you think of what happened and you just cry.

You're driving along at night on your way home and the tears just come.

You try to move on as if everything was okay but sometimes it's just not okay.

What happened was Theresa was walking to her mother's house in Amityville for Thanksgiving dinner in 1988 and she never arrived.

A couple of teenagers who were taking a shortcut behind a factory in Amityville found her body.

As we were cutting through the factories, we saw a body kind of laying kind of off behind one of the buildings, like near one of the buildings, but outside.

When we saw the body, it didn't look right.

It was just kind of laying there.

Kirk Carter is a science teacher in Bayshore now and remembers what it was like telling his friends he had found their mother's body.

I had to kind of explain to her what my recollection of everything was to not only Rhonda but her brother as well.

And so that was-- probably the hardest part to them what I had seen and what the condition of their mother was.

I was 16 years old I was going to turn 17 in three days and we were having Thanksgiving dinner and the police came to the house because they had found her and one of the EMTs recognized her so they came and let us know what happened.

it's just actually speaking about it brings up the feelings it's not easy.

It's not easy mainly because we just don't know what happened.

We met the family in HopHog before they met with the Suffolk DA's newly formed cold case unit, something that didn't exist when our reporting on this story first began.

You just took a deep breath.

How are you doing?

Yeah, we're keeping our nerves together, coming together as a family and getting through it.

hopefully we'll have some news that haven't heard before and we're just glad that they're looking into it.

We never had any closure.

We never had any explanation it's just been an open case.

You know, nobody really cared enough to find out what really went on.

I'm feeling hopeful.

So thank you.

Thank you for shedding light on this.

The meeting was quick, lasting under 20 minutes.

It was just hi, who they are, who we are, and that we'll look into things and talk further at another time.

Teresa Cerny's family, when they came in for a 15-20 minute meet and greet, their description, they said they feel hopeful finally.

How do you temper that?

I'm glad they feel hopeful and I just you know what we want to do is you know it's not like a TV show and obviously when things do make the media it's the best case scenario it's the successful cases so for every successful case you have you have other cases that are not successful with our cold cases we want to have the investigators go out do their jobs and then come back to us and then we'll figure out what are the next steps.

Can you say whether that process has started in Teresa Cerny's case?

Oh it definitely started absolutely we're working through it.

When Terry was killed did the detectives talk to you or your parents?

No never there was never an investigation it was like he was this he was this drug addict in the street let's just ditch her you know send her to the morgue and get it over with that's the way it was handled.

So you felt as if they didn't care?

Yeah oh yeah definitely the whole family did.

She was the most loving mother and she would go out of her way for her children My aunt was the type of person that she came around for every holiday and she let you know that you were loved.

So this was hard.

You know, it was brutal.

It was brutal.

Nobody deserves that.

Even if it didn't mean answers for my family, maybe it could mean some for some of the other women.

I'm optimistic.

I feel like at least somebody's looking into it and that makes me feel good.

Joining me now to talk about this investigation, Newsday investigative reporter Sandra Peddie and Newsday TV's Sherri Einhorn.

Sandra, let's start with you.

What prompted you to start this investigation?

The Gilgo Beach story prompted me to do this because these poor women were found dead outside and it made me wonder how many other women are there out there?

And there are a lot.

And it's not so easy to find them because there's no master list.

So I had to look at an FBI database and match up dates and places to Newsday archives to find these families.

And it turns out there have been more than a hundred women dumped outside on Long Island since 1976.

It's absolutely horrifying.

Sherri, what was the biggest takeaway for you?

Sandra and I discuss this frequently and I think what's really striking is for each of these families how they're able to strike a balance, for lack of a better description, between being stuck in the past, mourning the loss of their loved one, and not knowing what happened, not having any sort of closure, but at the same time finding a way forward to live their lives.

They work jobs, they've gotten married, several of them have children, and sort of being able to find a balance between the two is really, I don't know how they do it.

It's very clear that when a person is murdered, it's not just that person who's the victim.

Everyone who ever cared about that person is, a piece of them is destroyed in some way.

And as Sherri and I have talked about, it's absolutely haunting.

And your work, you've been working on this obviously for years.

Sandra, how has your work, this investigation in general, helped shape how we cover these cases or how they investigate the cases?

Well, one big development is that both district attorney's offices have started cold case units.

The police departments are so short-staffed they can't afford to field cold case units.

And that's really critical because these units, which are in virtually every major police department in the country, have the most experienced detectives who have the time to look into these cases.

When you think about how long it took to even get any kind of positive direction in the Gilgo case, it took years.

And these families, it's wrong to make them wait for years.

And so both DAs are committed to really committing resources to this.

Well, we'll just have to see what happens next.

Ladies, thank you so much for your time and dedication and work into this investigation.

You can read more about "The Forgotten" on Newsday.com.

I'm Jasmine Anderson for Newsday TV.

Thank you so much for watching.

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