Authorities’ long-awaited identification of the unsolved murder victim known for decades as Peaches — and her child — unleashed a flood of questions about the case and its ties to the Gilgo Beach murders.
Now that investigators have identified Peaches as 26-year-old Tanya Jackson, a U.S. Army veteran who was believed to be working as a medical assistant and living in Brooklyn before her death, police want to know who killed her and why. The same goes for her daughter, who was believed to be about 2 years old at the time, who was identified as Tatiana Dykes, authorities added. But officials could not answer the biggest question that the revelation conjured.
“Although Tanya and Tatiana have commonly been linked to the Gilgo Beach serial killings because of the timing and locations of their recovered remains, we’re not discounting the possibility that their cases are unrelated from that investigation,” Nassau County Police Det. Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick, commander of the homicide squad, told reporters during a news conference at police headquarters in Mineola on April 23. “Speculation and theories by people on the internet should not be brought into this.”
Tanya’s partial remains were first found in a black plastic bag inside a green Rubbermaid container in a wooded area of Hempstead Lake State Park off Park Drive in Lakeview on June 28, 1997. A photo of her tattoo — a bitten peach — was released to the public to help authorities identify her, to no avail.
Then, in April of 2011, some of her skeletal remains were found near Jones Beach State Park — one of 10 sets of remains authorities unearthed during a massive search following the discovery of four bodies near Gilgo Beach in December 2010.
Medical examiners initially linked the remains found at Jones Beach — dubbed Jane Doe No. 3 at the time — as being the mother of Baby Doe, found at the opposite end of the Gilgo Beach area dumping ground.
In 2016, the Press exclusively reported that Peaches and Jane Doe 3 were the same individual. The revelation was sparked by the work of filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Rachel Mills, who produced A&E’s The Killing Season investigating the Gilgo case and other cold case murders, as well as the work of Websleuths, an online community of citizen investigators.
“Is there another dumping ground?” Zeman asked, noting that some of Jackson’s remains have yet to be recovered.
In 2020, the FBI was tapped to use genetic genealogy to help identify Jackson and Dykes and now that she has been publicly identified, investigators are asking for the public’s help in piecing together her final days.
Two years after that, the Mobile Police Department in Alabama released Peaches’s tattoo on its Facebook page, seeking relatives of an Elijah “Lige” Howell, who died in 1964 and whose relatives may have been able to assist in identifying Peaches. Howell had multiple siblings but no known children at the time of his death. Jackson was estranged from her family and Dykes’ father, police said.
One other piece of evidence that police revealed is that at the time of her death, Jackson drove a 1991 black Geo Storm.
“Does law enforcement know what happened to that car?” asked Joe Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and former cold case homicide investigator.
Rex Heuermann, a 61-year-old architect from Massapequa Park, was arrested in 2023 and charged with the murders of six victims found near Gilgo Beach, plus a woman found dead in the Hamptons community of North Sea in 1993.
Heuermann’s attorney declined to comment during an uneventful Suffolk County court conference on the case. He is due back in court June 17 for the next update in an ongoing hearing to determine if the court should allow the use of advanced DNA technology prosecutors used to make their case. Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney referred questions on the Peaches development to Nassau authorities.
Zeman added that with the identification of Jackson and Dykes, there is only one unidentified victim left who was found in the Gilgo Beach area.
“Asian Doe,” he said. “Are we finally gonna get an answer there?”
Nassau County police homicide squad detectives ask anyone with information about this case to call them at 1-800-244-TIPS.
