When investigators found the bodies of a mother and toddler near a serial killer’s Long Island dumping ground in 2011, they began investigating the pair as part of the Gilgo Beach case.
They referred to the mother as Jane Doe No. 3, or “Peaches,” after a tattoo on her torso and for years sought to identify both bodies through DNA and other methods. They finally identified them as Tanya Denise Jackson, 26, and her daughter Tatiana Marie, 2.
The authorities now say the cases do not appear to be linked to the Gilgo killings, in which Rex Heuermann, a local architectural consultant, stands accused. Rather, Long Island prosecutors have accused a Florida man, Andrew Dykes, 66, of killing Ms. Jackson.
On Thursday, at Mr. Dykes’s arraignment on a charge of murdering Ms. Jackson, prosecutors described what they said were his gruesome methods.
They said Mr. Dykes, a surgical assistant in the military, apparently used his expertise to dismember Ms. Jackson’s body and dispose of the remains in separate locations on Long Island to hide their affair from his wife. His job left him with “the experience to dismember,” said Ania Pulaski, an assistant district attorney with Nassau County.
In court on Thursday morning, Mr. Dykes denied the charges.
“Not guilty,” he said in a husky voice, his gray-stubbled head hung low.
At a news conference after the arraignment, the Nassau County district attorney, Anne T. Donnelly, said a semen sample originally recovered by a vaginal swab of Ms. Jackson’s remains helped solve the case. Once Mr. Dykes became a suspect, investigators were able to gain his DNA sample from a discarded drinking straw that matched the semen sample, she said.
She said there was not currently enough evidence to charge Mr. Dykes with killing Tatiana.
Mr. Dykes’ court-appointed lawyer, Joseph A. Lo Piccolo, dismissed the prosecutor’s account of events.
Because “someone may have had sexual relations with someone doesn’t mean they’re responsible for their death,” he said after the arraignment. “People have consensual sex all the time.”
Mr. Lo Piccolo described Mr. Dykes as an honorable family man. After the military, he worked as a state trooper and a corrections officer in Florida and led “a life that many would respect.”
Mr. Dykes began his 30-year Army career in 1980 and rose to medical sergeant with expertise in anatomy and physiology, Ms. Donnelly said, adding that he was commended for his knowledge of “skeletal, musculature and circulatory systems.”
In 1995, Mr. Dykes, then married with two children, was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, when he began seeing Ms. Jackson.
After they had a child, Tatiana, Ms. Jackson began imploring Mr. Dykes for more time and fatherly attention, prosecutors said.
“She wanted a future with him and a life with him,” Ms. Pulaski said.
But Mr. Dykes wanted Ms. Jackson out of his life. “He distanced himself from her,” she said.
After a transfer around the time of Tatiana’s birth to Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, he moved to the borough with his wife and two children, the district attorney said. Ms. Jackson followed and got work in a doctor’s office, but she and the child both “simply vanished” in 1997, Ms. Donnelly said.
Ms. Jackson’s torso was discovered in 1997 at Hempstead Lake State Park, several miles from the New York City border.
Then as investigators began recovering bodies along Ocean Parkway as part of the Gilgo investigation beginning in late 2010, they discovered more of Ms. Jackson’s body.
The remote oceanfront location made for an apparently inadvertent intersection with the serial-killing case.
“Gilgo Beach can be described as a dumping ground,” Ms. Donnelly said. “It’s a wasteland out there. It’s probably a good place to dump a body.”
Tatiana’s remains, wrapped in a blanket and also found along the parkway, were linked to Ms. Jackson by DNA.
In 2023, advances in DNA technology helped investigators identify Ms. Jackson and Tatiana, Ms. Donnelly said. They found Mr. Dykes listed as the father on Tatiana’s birth certificate and also located relatives of Ms. Jackson, who described troubled dynamics of her relationship with Mr. Dykes.
The case came together after investigators in October 2024 tailed Mr. Dykes into a Charleys Cheesesteaks restaurant in Tampa and obtained his discarded straw to make the DNA match.
Investigators had already become suspicious, having interviewed Mr. Dykes in Florida in 2023, where he admitted his affair with Ms. Jackson and his fatherhood of Tatiana, Ms. Donnelly said.
He said he had known they had vanished but had no idea they were dead, Ms. Donnelly said. He said he tried periodically over the years to locate them.
“His story didn’t add up,” Ms. Donnelly said.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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