People watch Friday in in Massapequa Park, N.Y., as law enforcement officials investigate the home of a suspect arrested in the unsolved Gilgo Beach killings.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Suffolk County authorities in New York have arrested a man in connection with a series of unsolved murders more than a decade ago that made national headlines and inspired the 2020 Netflix film Lost Girls.
The suspect, Rex Heuermann, was arrested in midtown Manhattan in New York City on Thursday night. The arrest was made by the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force, named after the area near several of the victims’ remains.
Heuermann from Massapequa Park appeared in court Friday afternoon where he was charged with murder in the deaths of Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman and Melissa Barthelemy. He is also a prime suspect in the killing of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, according to court records.
“The message to the public is that we never stopped working in this case,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said in a news conference Friday.
A news conference about the case is scheduled for 4 p.m. ET, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office told NPR.
The victims
Between 2010 and 2011, police uncovered a series of remains that belonged to 11 people but the killings likely began as early as 1996, according to Suffolk County Police.
The dead also included Jessica Taylor, Valerie Mack and Shannan Gilbert. All seven women were believed to be in their 20s, police said.
The identities of remains belonging to four others — a female toddler, the toddler’s mother, an Asian man and one women whose remains were partly also found on Fire Island — are still unknown.
All of the victims except Gilbert was discovered along Ocean Parkway between Nassau and Suffolk counties — six were less than a mile apart from each other. The remains of Gilbert were uncovered in Oak Beach, where she first went missing and which is about three miles east of where many of the other victims were found.
The suspect
Several pieces of evidences tied Heuermann to several victims, according to court documents released on Friday.
For starters, Heuermann lived in Massapequa Park, where a few of the victims were last seen.
One witness also described seeing a victim, Costello, driven by a man in a Chevrolet Avalanche. Later, it was discovered that a Chevrolet Avalanche belonged to Heuermann.
Subpoenas and search warrants later linked Heuermann to multiple burner cellphones used to contact three victims. An email associated with Heuermann’s suspected burner cellphones was repeatedly used to conduct “thousands of searches” related to “sex workers, sadistic, torture-related pornography and child pornography,” court records said.
There were also searches for several victims and updates on the Gilgo Beach murders, including “why hasn’t the long island serial killer been caught.”
Dispute over Gilbert’s death
Although Gilbert’s disappearance led to the discovery of the serial killings, Suffolk County Police has called her death unrelated to the murders.
According to a 911 call made by Gilbert in May 2010, Gilbert appeared to be in an argument with two men, a client and her driver, in Oak Beach. At one point, she told dispatchers that she was lost and believed her life was in danger. Moments later, Gilbert ran off, according to Suffolk County Police.
Her personal items and later, her remains, were found in a nearby marshland, which officials described as impossible to navigate.
“These reeds can grow over 12 feet tall. They can disorient someone inside them, causing them to lose a sense of direction,” Detective Lt. Kevin Beyrer, with the Suffolk County Police, said in 2022.
The cause of Gilbert’s death was ultimately ruled as undetermined due to insufficient evidence, but Beyrer has called it “most likely an accident.”
Sherre Gilbert, her sister, has firmly refuted that claim, arguing that it’s difficult to imagine that their loved one would get rid of her clothes and phone and run wild into the marsh, she told ABC 7 last year.
Gilbert’s family has demanded for another investigation to be done, this time by the state attorney general rather the local police.