Tanya Jackson ("Peaches")

Case background and investigation

On June 28, 1997, a man attending a fishing clinic with his daughter at Hempstead Lake State Park in Lakeview, Nassau County, came across a Rubbermaid container, according to Newsday. Inside was the dismembered torso of a woman. The forensic company Othram states that the head, arms and legs had been removed and that a towel and a floral pillowcase were with the remains. A tattoo on her chest of a heart-shaped peach with a bite taken out of it led investigators to call her "Peaches."

In 2011, during the searches along Ocean Parkway connected with the Gilgo Beach investigation, more of the woman's remains were found near Jones Beach, and the remains of a small child were found some miles away near Cedar Beach. News reports say DNA testing later established that the two were mother and daughter. Both remained unnamed for years.

According to Othram, earlier attempts to identify the woman failed until 2020, when the company reworked existing genetic data into a profile suitable for genealogy research, and the FBI's genetic genealogy team developed leads from it. On April 23, 2025, Nassau County police announced that she was Tanya Denise Jackson, 26, an Army veteran born in Alabama, and that the child was her daughter, Tatiana Marie Dykes, born in Texas in March 1995. ABC7 New York reported that Jackson served from 1993 to 1995, was living in Brooklyn, may have worked as a medical assistant, and had never been reported missing.

In early December 2025, Andrew Dykes, 66, of the Tampa, Florida area, who is named as Tatiana's father on her birth certificate, was arrested after a Nassau County grand jury indicted him on one count of second-degree murder in Jackson's death. He waived extradition, was arraigned on December 18, 2025, pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. He has not been charged in Tatiana's death; the district attorney has said publicly that she believes he is responsible, which remains an allegation.

Prosecutors say DNA recovered from Jackson's remains matched a sample taken from a drinking straw Dykes discarded in Florida in October 2024, and they point to his Army work as an anatomy instructor. His attorney, Joseph Lo Piccolo, has said the evidence shows at most a relationship and does not connect his client to her death. CBS New York reported there is no apparent link between Dykes and Rex Heuermann, the defendant in the Gilgo Beach killings.

The case was still in pretrial proceedings in 2026. Newsday reported that in May a judge ordered Dykes to give a new DNA sample, and that in August his lawyers asked the court to dismiss the indictment, arguing that detectives recorded an interview with him in Florida without his consent and that the grand jury presentation was deficient. No ruling on that motion or trial date was found. Dykes is presumed innocent unless convicted.