Suspect in Long Island serial killings arrested

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A 59-year-old man is under arrest on Long Island in connection with the Gilgo Beach murders, a cold-case investigation that dates back to 2010.

Rex Heuermann of Massapequa Park was arrested around 8:30 p.m. Thursday at West 35th Street and Fifth Avenue, near his Midtown office.

He is connected to the "Gilgo Four," the four bodies found wrapped in burlap along Ocean Parkway, three miles from where sex worker Shannan Gilbert was last seen alive. Her death was deemed not connected to the serial killer, a fact her family disputes.

A large police operation was occurring in Massapequa Park on Friday, led by Suffolk County Police, NY State Police, and other law enforcement partners.

Heuermann, a married father of two who works as an architect in Manhattan, is being eyed in the deaths of four women, who were found within days of each other in late 2010, the group referred to as the "Gilgo Four."

The suspect was caught by utilizing the type of communication analytics only available to federal law enforcement.

Bringing in the FBI became a key moment in this investigation, as only federal law enforcement has the technology and resources to crunch the amount of telephone records that zeroed in on the suspect and his Massapequa Park address. Assistance from outside law enforcement was initially resisted by the previous leadership of the Suffolk Police Department.

"I do have to thank everyone, the members of the task force to get to this point today," Suffolk County Police Chief Rodney Harrison said.

The suspect has been on law enforcement's radar for months and has recently been under surveillance.

The "Gilgo Four" were identified by DNA as Maureen Brainard Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello. All were in their 20s and working as escorts, and were all located within a quarter mile of one another near Gilgo Beach in December 2010.

"It's my 12th year as county executive. I've lived with the Gilgo Beach investigation for my entire tenure as county executive," said Steve Bellone, Suffolk County Executive.

The suspect is not connected to the other deaths, indicating law enforcement now favor the theory of multiple killers.

The remains of 10 people were found in 2010 and 2011 in the weedy sections off Ocean Parkway near Jones Beach. At the time, police said half of the identified victims worked as prostitutes.

Heuermann lived at 105 1st Avenue in Massapequa Park and is a married father of two. His wife was spotted arriving at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead just before noon on Friday.

He had been taken into custody Thursday night near his office in Midtown Manhattan, brought to Yaphank, and will be indicted Friday afternoon.

The suspect is apparently the president and owner of an architecture firm in Manhattan.

Heuermann was featured in a February 2022 interview talking about his work and thoughts about what it takes to deal with NYC DOB rules and regulations. Antoine Amira from BONJOUR REALTY, a NYC channel, posted the video on YouTube.

“I don't know him, but I got a text this morning at 6:15 that they found the suspect for the murders," said Richard Harmon, a neighbor.

Harmon said his daughter said the man had a troubled past in school. She said, "I went to school with him, we rode the bus together, if it was that person he was a drug addict in high school," Harmon went on to say, "It's a shocker, it's a real eye-opener. 21 years, this is the worst case I've ever seen."


Also a former classmate is actor Billy Baldwin who tweeted about the arrest.
“Woke up this morning to learn that the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect was my high school classmate Rex Heuermann.”

The bodies were found more than a decade ago on a windswept spit of Long Island sand near Gilgo Beach, where the only sounds during the off-season are the screeching of seagulls and waves pounding the shore.

There were 11 victims, all but two young women who had been working as sex workers when they vanished.

But the mystery of what might have happened to at least four of the women would not be revealed until Friday when a 59-year-old architect named Rex Heuermann, who had been living quietly in the Nassau County town of Massapequa Park and commuting regularly to his office in Manhattan, appeared before a Long Island judge to face murder charges in the deaths of three of the women.

Through his attorney, Heuermann pleaded not guilty. He remains a suspect in the disappearance and death of the fourth woman.

Until last year, investigators had been wrestling with the seemingly unsolvable crimes as they searched for a predator with a predilection for petite female sex workers with hazel or green eyes.

The fact that a 2-year-old girl and a young Asian man were also found at Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011 only deepened the mystery and widened the investigation.

But last year, Suffolk County’s new police commissioner, a former high-ranking New York Police Department veteran named Rodney Harris, took over the dormant search and formed what The New York Daily News called a “dream team of detectives” to track down the killer.

“I believe this case is solvable and identifying the person or people responsible for these murders is a top priority,” Harris declared in February 2022.

The Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force marked the first time local, state and federal officials combined forces to track down a suspected serial killer, Suffolk County officials said.

But the case was marked from the start by apparent missteps and accusations that investigators were dragging their feet because of a cultural bias against sex workers.

Melissa Cann, whose 20-year-old sister, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, vanished in July 2007, described in a New York Magazine interview what happened when she told a police officer her sister was missing and that she was a sex worker.

“Soon as I told him what she was doing up in Manhattan, it was like he didn’t care,” Cann said.

The struggle to get the wheels of justice moving inspired a Netflix movie in 2020 called “Lost Girls” about Mari Gilbert’s effort to find her 24-year-old daughter, Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker from New Jersey who vanished in May 2010 and whose body was later found on Gilgo Beach.

Mari Gilbert was stabbed to death in July 2016 by one of her other daughters, Sarra, who suffered from schizophrenia.

Suffolk County investigators “dropped the ball from the beginning,” Shannan Gilbert’s sister, Sherre, said in a May 2022 interview with NBC News.

Brainard-Barnes was the first woman to be reported missing, but the investigation did not pick up steam until December 2010, when a team of Suffolk County investigators spurred by Mari Gilbert went out to Gilgo Beach to search for her daughter.

A veteran Suffolk County Police Department officer named John Mallia and his search dog, Blue, came across “a set of human remains,” according to a document released Friday in which investigators laid out their arguments for why Heuermann should be denied bail.

The remains were later identified as those of 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy, who was last seen alive in July 2009.

The remains of Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Lynn Costello, 27, were found days later wrapped in burlap sacks as were Barthelemy's.

Prosecutors also said in the document that Heuermann used burner phones and multiple email accounts to search for sites depicting sexual violence, to reach sex workers and to keep up with the investigation of the murders.

He used fictitious names for email accounts and phones “to conduct thousands of searches related to sex workers, sadistic, torture-related pornography and child pornography,” according to the document.

Search terms often focused on violent sexual acts involving underage girls.

Barthelemy’s burner phone was used to make "taunting phone calls" to her family members in the days after her disappearance in which a male voice admitted to killing and sexually assaulting Barthelemy, according to the bail document.

The calls were later traced to a location near Heuermann's office.

Heuermann was in part identified as a suspect by DNA left on pizza crust he threw out in a Manhattan trash can when a hair found on Waterman's body was matched with DNA found on the crust.
Thanks to the persistence of her sister, Shannan Gilbert's terrifying last words would become her epitaph.

On May 1, 2010, at 4:51 a.m., Gilbert made a 22-minute 911 call shortly after a date with a customer named John Brewer in Oak Beach on Long Island that was followed by two more shorter calls to the dispatcher for help, police said.

Brewer has admitted seeing Shannan Gilbert that night but has not been implicated in her death, police said.

While Shannan Gilbert’s calls were hard to follow at times and some words sounded slurred, the message police said she repeated was, “Somebody’s after me! There’s somebody after me! There’s somebody after me!”

Those 911 recordings were not released by investigators until May 2020 when Suffolk County officials continued to insist Shannan Gilbert was the victim of a “tragic accident” and may have been using drugs or succumbed to the elements after she reached the beach and got disoriented.

They continued to maintain Shannan Gilbert was not the victim of a crime even after Michael Baden, the world-famous pathologist who reported that George Floyd died as a result of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck, did an autopsy and concluded the young woman could have been strangled.

“I don’t care if anybody thinks she was on drugs, that’s fine,” Sherre Gilbert said in May 2022. “But I just don’t believe she would run in a drug-induced paranoia and just strip her clothes all the way off, throw her phone down with her clothes and then just keep running naked into the marsh. I just don’t believe that.”

A "massive amount" of evidence was recovered at the "cluttered" home of Gilgo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann, authorities said Tuesday in announcing their nearly two-week-long search through the house was over.

“We have reached an end to the search of the Gilgo house. We’re going to be pulling out shortly,” Suffolk County, New York, District Attorney Ray Tierney told reporters outside Heuermann’s home.

He stopped short of saying whether he believes any murders were committed in the property in the New York City suburb of Massapequa Park.

"We have obtained a massive amount of material, all of which has to be cataloged and analyzed, and it's going to take some time," Tierney said.

Asked whether anyone might have been killed at Heuermann's home, he would not say.

I don't believe at this time that we can say one way or the other," he said. "The evidence does not point either way."

A woman who says she went on a date with Giglo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann shared her story with CNN.
Former escort Nikkie Brass said Heuermann talked about the Gilgo killings during their meeting at a Port Jefferson restaurant in 2015.

"It didn't seem like a true crime fan who just knows information they've seen on TV and read it – seemed like somebody who was reliving it," says Brass.

Gawkers beware: Nassau County cops don’t want you taking selfies in front of the accused Gilgo Beach serial killer’s house for your Instagram account.

Police warn that anyone blocking traffic or clogging the street rubbernecking at accused murderer Rex Heuermann’s ramshackle red house will be slapped with a $150 summons.

“Basically you can’t stop and impede traffic,” Nassau County police spokesman Lt. Richard LeBrun told the Daily News on Tuesday. “You’re supposed to know that when you get your learner’s permit. They’re goning be erecting signs all around the block [that say] no stopping, no standing, no parking.”

He also warned reporters not to take any more photos of the Massapequa Park home on First Ave., though it’s unclear what authority cops would have to block journalists’ First Amendment rights.

Neighbors have been walking their dogs an extra block to catch a glimpse of the property, according to The New York Times. Others traveled 30 miles to cast their eyes on the home of the man accused of one of the most gripping recent serial killer cases.

“I feel horrible for the neighbors,” Michael Iavarone, of Huntington, told the paper. “It’s become a tourist spot.”

Authorities in at least three other states — Nevada, New Jersey, and South Carolina — are checking their cold case files for possible connections to the suspect.