3. Pelham Bay Park, NY, 65 Bodies Discovered to Date
Most mob movies would have us believe that there are certain places in and around New York City that are prime locations to dump a body: Sadly, these movies are correct.
One such place, with a more recent history, is Pelham Bay Park, which extends from the upper Bronx into Westchester County.
In the early 1990s, a young police officer saw two men exit the woods late at night, and when he stopped to question them, he noticed their blood-stained hands. Thinking that the men may have been shooting animals in the woods, he questioned them. They insisted that the officer would not find any dead animals in the woods, and he allowed them to go on their way.
They weren’t lying. The officer didn’t find any dead animals. But he did find a dead human.
The reason the officer first asked about animals was that this area of the park had become a prime location for, of all things, ritualistic animal sacrifices. New York City law enforcement kept an eye on these killings but didn’t pursue them, feeling that they didn’t pose an immediate threat to the public.
A dead body, however, most certainly did. And it wasn’t the first body to crop up in those woods. Since the late 1980s, bodies were discovered quite regularly, and police investigators understood why: The remote location, shrouded in darkness, made for a quick and easy body dump, despite the fact that bodies have been found just 100 feet from a very busy highway.
One police officer assigned to the case wondered if the haunted history of the land, which was once a favored burial ground of the Lenape Indians, attracts both the satanic worshippers and the killers.
Over time, some of the killings have been linked to mob activity, but many remain unsolved with no leads. Pelham Bay Park is the largest park in New York City, much of it untouched by the industrialization that defines the city. It’s a mishmash of overgrowth and untended pucker brush and trash that goes back decades. There’s a simple reason why this land calls back mobsters and serial killers again and again—it works.
