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 in 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 girl who worked as a prostitute and whom she had last seen in July 2009, when she was going 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 weeks that followed, six more bodies were discovered in the area: four other 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 after me," she said as she left a house in Oak Beach, Long Island, where she had been hired for sex work.
The police case remained stuck for more than ten years. The media reported different types of obstacles beyond the initial lack of clues, including some cases of corruption; The New York Times noted the refusal of one of those responsible for the inquiries, the Suffolk Police Commissioner, to collaborate with the FBI, and it later emerged that the feds were investigating him for an obstruction of justice case in another matter.
Under pressure from the families of the disappeared, in February 2022 authorities created the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigative Task Force, with local, state and federal agents. It was worth it. Last 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 of Brainard-Barnes, disappeared in 2007.
From the outset, the investigations focused on the telephone calls received not only by the victims but also by some of the families that a man called after the crimes and who assured that he was the murderer. At least three of the girls had been contacted on disposable cell phones, as well as by email from changing addresses. The specialists managed to find out that a large part of the communications originated from two specific points. Shortly after, in March 2022, the agents identified the owner of a Chevrolet Avalanche pickup truck, previously marked by one of the witnesses in the case after having seen it in the driveway of the house of one of the victims shortly before the disappearance of one of the victims. she. The owner was, precisely, the man who lived and worked at two points from where the disposable cell phone calls to the victims had been located: First Avenue, in Massapequa Park, a 20-minute drive from Gilgo Beach, and an office of Fifth Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan, in the city of New York.
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 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The remains of the pizza were analyzed and, in the months that followed, the DNA found on them was compared to a patch of male hair found next to Megan Waterman's body. “The DNA profiles are the same,” the test determined.
With all this material, police on Thursday arrested Heuermann, described by police as "a demon who walks among us" and whose crimes have given rise to books, documentaries and the Netflix film Lost Girls. But the case is by no means closed. “This is just the beginning,” a prosecutor said on Friday. And just yesterday police found a whopping 200 firearms in a boarded-up vault behind a locked metal door in the basement of his house.
Heuermann, however, pleaded not guilty. His attorney, Michael J. Brown, said he is a good husband and a dedicated father to his two children, noting that police are ignoring stronger leads outside of him. It's his job.
