Twelve and a half years have passed since a police officer and his dog found the first of what would be a dozen bodies buried on Gilgo Beach, a strip of sand on the south shore of Long Island, New York. That first day, the remains of Melissa Barthelemy, a petite 24-year-old who worked as a prostitute and who had last been seen in July 2009, when she was on her way to meet a client, appeared. Just 48 hours later, the police found the lifeless bodies of Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, also prostitutes, in their twenties and equally petite. All four had been wrapped in cloth and had their feet tied. In the following weeks, six more bodies were discovered in the area: four more women, a man who was never identified, and a two-year-old girl.
The investigation had started in May 2010, when Shannan Gilbert, 24, disappeared after making a distress call to the emergency services. “There’s someone behind me,” she said as she left a house in Oak Beach, Long Island, where she had been hired for sex work.
The police case was stuck for more than ten years. The media reported different types of obstacles beyond the initial lack of leads, including some cases of corruption; The New York Times reported on the refusal of one of the investigators, Suffolk’s police commissioner, to cooperate with the FBI, and it was later learned that he was being investigated by the feds for a case of obstruction of justice in another matter.
Under pressure from the families of the missing, in February 2022 the authorities created the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force, with local, state and federal agents. It was worth it. On Friday, police announced the arrest of a suspect: architect Rex Heuermann, 59, charged with first- and second-degree murder in the deaths of Costello, Waterman and Barthelemy, and highly suspected in the Brainard- Barnes, missing in 2007.
Initially, the investigations focused on the calls received not only by the victims but by some of the families that a man made after the crimes in which he claimed to be the killer. At least three of the girls had been contacted from disposable mobile phones, as well as by email from changing addresses. The specialists managed to find out that a large part of the communications had their origin in two specific points. Shortly after, in March 2022, the agents identified the owner of a pick-up truck, model Chevrolet Avalanche, previously marked by one of the witnesses of the case after having seen it at the entrance of the house of one of the victims shortly before their disappearance. The owner happened to be the man who lived and worked at both points from where the victims’ disposable cell phone calls had been traced: First Avenue in Massapequa Park, a 20-minute drive away of Gilgo Beach, and an office on Fifth Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan, New York City.
But the irrefutable proof in principle came in January of this year, when a surveillance team recovered a pizza box thrown by Heuermann into a trash can on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The remains of the pizza were analyzed and, in the following months, the DNA found on it was compared to a section of male hair found next to Megan Waterman’s body. “The DNA profiles are the same”, determined the examination. With all this material, the police arrested Heuermann on Thursday, described by the police as “a demon that walks among us” and whose crimes have given rise to books, documentaries and the Netflix series Chicas perdidas. But the case is far from closed. “This is just the beginning,” said a prosecutor on Friday. And just yesterday the police found a whopping 200 firearms in a walled up vault behind a locked metal door in the basement of his home.
Heuermann, however, pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Michael J. Brown, assured that he is a good husband and devoted father of their two children, and pointed out that the police are ignoring stronger leads unrelated to him. It’s his job.
