The alleged serial killer of Gilgo Beach was arrested Thursday night, the beach on Long Island just an hour from Manhattan where – between 2010 and 2011 – the remains of eleven bodies were found: nine young women, mostly prostitutes , but also a man and a little girl. Architect Rex Heuermann, 59, a nearby Manhattan resident and employee, has been indicted in the deaths of at least three of the women, possibly a fourth, but authorities believe it unlikely he was responsible for all the murders. .
The mystery had emerged in 2010, together with the body of one of the victims found in that strip of sand overlooking the Atlantic and bordered by the Ocean Parkway: here, in December 2010, during a patrol with his police dog, an agent had found the body of Melissa Barthelemy, a prostitute who disappeared the year before. Two days later, authorities found the remains of three more women, and later that year, the same beach returned the body of Valerie Mack, a 24-year-old New Jersey mother who supported herself by working as an escort and who had disappeared twenty ‘years ago.
In the following months, six other bodies were then found: four women, a man and a two-year-old girl killed along with her mother, all still unsolved mysteries. The case had terrified residents and generated enormous media attention, culminating in 2020 with a Netflix film, Lost Girl, which had rekindled the light on a case that the police had never abandoned: for a decade numerous local police detectives, State and federal governments had taken turns tracking the serial killer, without success.
Until in March 2022 investigators discovered that the architect Rex Heuermann – who had already come under observation together with some men who lived in an area of Massapequa Park from which several phone calls to the murdered women had gone – had a Chevrolet Avalanche pickup like the one that a witness had seen in the driveway of one of the victims shortly before she disappeared. From that moment the agents have further narrowed the circle, knotted the threads, tried to put together all the clues that could lead back to that man who – according to his schoolmates – had always lived a private life, far from the radar.
To frame Heuermann, according to the indictment, would have been a belt with the initials found around one of the victims, but also the traces left by the disposable cell phones he used to contact the women shortly before their disappearance, often calling from a area near his home or his office on 36th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan: from here he had also called Barthelemy’s sister, Amanda, in July 2009, asking her if she thought she would ever see her again. And then there was his DNA, taken from the crust of a pizza and which would match that found on one of the bodies, and the DNA taken from some bottles found in the garbage which would match that of hair found on one of the bodies: the hair, apparently, belonged to his wife who, at the time of the three murders, was abroad.
In recent months Heuermann had begun to feel breathing down his neck and “obsessively” searched the Internet for news of the Gilgo Beach murders and the names of some of the women, listened to podcasts about the case and watched documentaries. That’s how detectives finally framed him, indicting him on Friday for the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Lynn Costello and Megan Waterman, who disappeared between 2009 and 2020 and whose bodies were found in the sand of Gilgo Beach a few hundred meters from each other, wrapped in camouflage hunting bags.
All three were twenty years old and worked as an escort, as was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old who disappeared in 2007 and was found not far away, buried in a similar way: Heuermann has not yet been charged for her death, but – given the modus operandi, wrote Suffolk County assistant district attorney Allen Bode — is considered the prime suspect. “Rex Heuermann is a demon who walks among us, a predator who ruins families,” said county commissioner Rodney Harrison, specifying that investigators have always been convinced they could solve the case.
At his home, a rundown red house in Massapequa Park, just twenty minutes away from Gilgo Beach, where he had lived since he was a child, the agents found licenses for 92 guns, child pornography images, sadistic internet searches. On Friday Heuermann appeared in the courtroom in handcuffs, spoke in a low voice, identified himself, but his lawyer denied any responsibility. Given the “extreme depravity of the charges,” Judge Richard Ambro explained, he was not granted bail.
“I didn’t think they would ever find this person,” commented Barthelemy’s cousin Amy Brotz after the authorities’ announcement, feeling something very close to a sense of closure for this painful story. “We are happy to see that the case progresses,” said John Ray, attorney for the families of two other identified victims, Shannan Gilbert and Jessica Taylor. Just the disappearance of Gilbert, a prostitute who vanished into thin air in 2010, had triggered the search that led to the discovery of Barthelemy’s body, and then of the other ten victims of Gilgo Beach.
2023-07-15 11:29:58
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