Prosecutors Detail Arrest of Suspected Gilgo Serial Killer

A 13-year search for the Gilgo Serial Killer appears to have ended this week with the arrest of Rex Heuermann of Massapequa Park.

Heuermann, 59, a married-with-children architect, was taken into custody at his home on Thursday and charged with six counts of first- and second-degree murder by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office.

The suspect is alleged to have killed Megan Waterman, Amber Costello and Melissa Barthelemy between 2007 and 2010. Their bound remains were recovered along the South Shore’s outer beach in Babylon in 2010, prompting a years-long manhunt into the sadistic killings of the three sex workers. The women were described in court filings as being “petite” in stature and each of the young women was bound with camouflage burlap typically used to conceal duck blinds.

Thirteen painful years later, Heuermann was charged in each of those deaths with one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder.

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney led a multi-agency press conference at the Suffolk County Police Headquarters in Yaphank late Friday afternoon to announce the arrest.

Surrounded by family members of the victims and a slew of other law enforcement officials from various agencies, Tierney detailed efforts he undertook to reinvigorate an investigation that he said had lagged by the time he was elected to his post in 2021.

In February 2022, Tierney created a Gilgo Task Force dedicated to tracking down the killer. The task force included members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Suffolk County Police Department, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, the New York State Police, and investigators from his office.

Only six weeks after it was created, the Task Force got a huge break last March 13 when a state investigator was able to tie Heuermann to a Chevrolet Avalanche in South Carolina that he had previously owned, and that was connected to his alleged involvement in the death of Amber Costello.

That breakthrough helped investigators to pinpoint an address in Massapequa Park, where Heuermann lived, and where, using cell towers to ping a general location, the FBI had previously scoped out an area where burner cell phone calls had been made to his sex-worker victims.

The suspect also is alleged to have made calls from an area in Midtown Manhattan where Heuermann’s architecture firm was located.

That investigative coup prompted Tierney’s office to impanel a grand jury. Working in secrecy, the grand jury went on to issue 300 subpoenas and search warrants targeting Heuermann, Tierney said.

And, thanks to advances in DNA testing technology between 2010 and 2022, investigators were able to tie the suspect to body hairs recovered from each of the three victims back in 2010.

Secrecy was the key to bringing Heuermann into custody late this week, said Tierney, along with the “sweeping powers” of the grand jury to issue those subpoenas without tipping off the suspect.

“We knew the person responsible would be looking at us,” Tierney said.

And indeed, the suspect’s internet searches indicated that he clearly was tracking the Task Force’s activities, or trying to: One of Heuermann’s Google searches plainly asked, “How is Task Force using cell phones.”

Tierney said that even as there is now some closure at hand for the families of the victims, the investigation into Heuermann is ongoing.

He is also a suspect in the “disappearance and murder” of Maureen Brainard-Barnes in 2007, according to court documents.

Tierney highlighted that the Task Force moved to arrest Heuermann this week out of a growing concern that he might try to solicit and kill another victim. Even as investigators closed in on their prime suspect, Heuermann continued to patronize sex workers, using his standard practice of contacting them via fictitious email accounts and the burner phones.

“Eventually,” said Tierney, “the balance tips in favor of public safety.”

Tierney demurred when asked by a reporter at Friday’s press conference to describe Heuermann in personal terms, but Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison had no such qualms when he addressed reporters.

A “demon walks among us,” Harrison said.

Following his arrest, Heuermann was locked up in the maximum security wing of the county’s Riverside jail facility.