The skull and torso found on a desolate Nassau County beachfront are too old to be connected to the serial killings of four Craigslist call girls — and could belong to long-lost victims of notorious Long Island butcher Joel Rifkin, a source said yesterday.
“These are so old that roots were growing around the vertebrae and the skull,” the source told The Post.
“These could be one or two of Joel Rifkin’s victims who were never found,” or the work of another killer, the source said.
Investigators also say more than one murderous psycho may be dumping the more recent bodies found on a remote stretch of Long Island beach.
“There are at least two persons of interest,” the source said, declining to say if cops think the suspected killers acted independently or as a deadly team.
Rifkin, 52, confessed to cops in 1993 to killing 17 prostitutes, and was convicted a year later in nine of the deaths. Three of his victims were never found.
The bloodthirsty former East Meadow resident told cops he strangled and dismembered the hookers after picking them up off the streets in New York City, and dumped their bodies as far away as upstate and on Long Island’s East End.
Rifkin was busted after cops pulled him over for a missing license plate and found a woman’s body in his trunk. He’s serving a life sentence in an upstate prison.
The age of the skull found Monday means that troubled New Jersey call girl Shannan Gilbert, 24, remains unaccounted for.
Gilbert’s 911 call and mysterious disappearance near Oak Beach last May sparked a grim search that in December unearthed the burial ground that could belong to a serial killer — or killers.
Nine, possibly 10, decomposed bodies have been found so far — including that of a child that may have been a fetus belonging to one of the victims.
“One of the theories is that one of the women [victims] was pregnant,” the source said.
The skull and torso — which may not be from the same body — were discovered roughly two miles apart in Nassau, and more than five miles from where the eight remains were found in Suffolk.
Four bodies found near Gilgo Beach in December have been identified as petite women in their 20s who worked as escorts and used Craigslist to meet clients. They had all been strangled.
No cause of death has been determined for four more unidentified remains, including the child’s, found in recent weeks.
Those four have been sent to the New York City medical examiner for an anthropological exam, which will include a computerized facial reconstruction.
The skull and torso were taken to the Nassau County Medical Examiner’s Office for autopsy, and will be transferred to the New York City ME today.
State cops and scuba divers, meanwhile, completed searches of Jones Beach and shallow waters yesterday as Nassau County police in a low-flying helicopter continued their gruesome hunt for bodies in marshland difficult to reach on foot.