What Did The Planning Document Say About How Rex Heuermann Treated Jessica Taylor?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers, Half Year in Review. A look back at some of the most compelling cases of 2026 so far.
This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:15)
For 20 years, she had no name. Hunter's dog found her in the woods of Marionville, Long Island on November 19th of 2000 Torso and plastic bags dismembered, discarded in a place so remote that it would take a random encounter with an animal to bring her into the light. No head, no hands, no right foot, no identification, no jewelry, no clothing, no personal effects, just a body that someone had taken with a hand-powered saw and left in the brush like it was nothing. She was 24 years old. She had a son. She had an adoptive family that chose her when no one else would, and for two decades in case files and crime databases, and on the lips of detectives who couldn't solve her murder, she was called Jane Doe Number Six because she was the sixth set of unidentified remains connected to a stretch of Long Island that would eventually become the most notorious serial killer dumping ground in modern American history. Her name was Valerie Mack, but nobody would know that until 2020 Valerie's life started with loss. She was born Valerie Kin Fulton in Atlantic City, two days before the country's bicentennial in the summer of 1976 She had four older biological siblings, but somewhere early in her childhood, the family structure collapsed. Valerie was placed into foster care. She moved between homes. Eventually, the Mack family adopted her, giving her a surname and a stability that her early years hadn't provided. But stability didn't mean easy. By her teenage years, Valerie was running with a very difficult crowd. Substance abuse, truancy, the kind of trouble that tends to accelerate when a kid already feels like the world decided she was disposable before she was old enough to push back. She had a son when she was around 18, but by the time she reached her early twenties, she was estranged from both her son and his father. She was living between New Jersey and Philadelphia, working as an escort under the alias Melissa Taylor. She had been arrested at least three times by Philadelphia police, prostitution, drugs, loitering. Her last known address was in Philadelphia. Her family last saw her in the spring or summer of 2000 in Port Republic, New Jersey, a small town just outside Atlantic City. She was living with a boyfriend there, and then she was gone.
Nobody reported Valerie Mack missing. Not her boyfriend, not her family, not a friend or a social worker or a police officer who might have noticed a 24-year-old woman simply wasn't around anymore. She just stopped existing in the places she'd been, and no one raised the alarm. That fact is as much a part of the story as the DNA evidence, or the planning documents, or the man prosecutors say was responsible. Because Valerie disappeared into a gap that the system had already built for her. The gap between people who get looked for and people who don't. The foster care system had already taught Valerie what it felt like to be invisible. The move between homes as a small child adopted into a family that gave her stability but couldn't erase the damage already done. Estranged from her own son by her early twenties, Valerie's life was shaped by disconnection. Not by choice, but by circumstance. The people who should have been her safety net were either gone, distant or unaware. And by 2000, when she was living between Fort Republic and Philadelphia, the distance between Valerie and anyone who could have noticed her absence were had gone grown wide enough really for a predator to exploit.
When her torso was found that November in Marionville, investigators said no leads and no identity. The medical examiner's office determined she'd been dead between two and eight weeks. Her lower right leg had been amputated at the mid calf, but the examination also revealed post-mortem mutilation injuries to her left breast, described in court filings as two contiguous raged defects caused by a sharp object, something, someone had had killed this woman and then taken her apart.
And driven her remains to a wooded area on Long Island, more than 180 miles from Port Republic. That's in New Jersey. And without a name, there was nowhere for investigators to go.
More than a decade passed. Then, in April of 2011, during a massive search that followed the Gilgo Beach discoveries, investigators found more of her remains along Ocean Parkway, a head, hands, a right foot, sealed in a plastic bag and the thick brush off the same stretch of highway where the Gilgo Four had been found months earlier. The same road, the same method of concealment, and now her remains were spread across two locations more than 40 miles apart. Marionville in 2000 and Ocean Parkway in 2011 The killer had either transported parts of her body to two separate sites or had come back to the same corridor years later to deposit what was left. Either way, it pointed to someone who knew these remote areas, who was comfortable moving through them, who had reason to return.