Howard Beach is no stranger to murder, but this latest slaying — on Aug. 2 — has the whole town talking. The victim was Karina Vetrano, 30, a self-described "thrillseeker" who wrote about her sex life and self-destructive tendencies in candid online journals.
Vetrano was beaten, strangled and raped with a foreign object during her late-afternoon run in the spooky, remote marshland — "the Weeds," locals call it — that abuts Jamaica Bay. A surveillance video shows a few minutes of her running in the street before she entered the desolate parkland.