…and this is just the beginning.
Before an expectedly packed press turnout at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in Yaphank, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney announced amonumental arrest shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Friday.
The previous day, a grand jury-indicted, 13-years-long elusive suspect, whom the 2021-elected prosecutor extraordinaire is confident he can convict, had finally been detained. Rex Heuermann, 59, was detained and charged as the perpetrating murderer in the long-stalled, now-promptly intensified Gilgo Beach serial killer investigation.
Authorities converged on the lifelong native of Massapequa Park — which sits just across the bay from the aforementioned South Shore, Long Island site that produced upwards of 10 dead bodies of disappeared individuals, including eight woman (predominantly sex workers), one male dressed as a woman, and one child across 2010 and 2011 — nearby his place of work, RH Consultants & Associates, on the busy streets of midtown Manhattan.
The new household name of the most heinous order faces life in prison without parole for the slaughtering of (at least) a trio of twentysomething sex workers — Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello and Megan Waterman — if convicted. Per the District Attorney’s office, the “married architect, father of two” is also the prime suspect in the death of Maurine Brainard-Barnes as well— thereby making up the entirety of what’s been referred to as the found bound-by-burlap “Gilgo Four.”
Waterman was last seen at the Holiday Inn Express off of Hauppauge’s Exit 56 Expressway service road before placing an ad for her escort services via Craiglist on June 5, 2010. Waterman is the same victim upon whom, according to a focal reveal of the many unveiled during the Tierney-led presser, multiple hairs were found that matched DNA extracted from pizza Heurermann had discarded in the trash outside his Manhattan office in January of this year.
In the months before and after this stealthily operated sting, additional investigatory practices and methods were executed to the finest precision. Per DA Tierney, a “confluence of cell phone tower”-provided records, or “pings,” tied Heuermann as reliant on burner phones to compulsively:
• Monitor the current state of the investigation
• Search and view torture pornography, including footage depicting the abuse, rape, and murder of young women
• Harass victims’ surviving family members
• Patronize women currently employed as sex workers
Technological advances of the digital-tracing persuasion provided by the FBI helped rule out any arguments that Heuermann could have been anywhere but the target zone determined.
Meanwhile, advancements in the field of “mitochondrial DNA” detection were simply unavailable in the early 2010s, but paid dividends this go-around, regarding the ever-clutch smoking gun by way of pizza crust.
The DA also announced that, per the investigation’s findings, the three murders Heueurmann is currently charged with all took place while his family was out of town.
A Commack-raised, current Holtsville resident, Tierney came across as tireless in his duty to the greater community he represents despite noting he and those alongside him had been operating on no more than “three hours of sleep in the past 48 hours” leading up to the Friday news dump of the century.
His office would come to forgive him for his delayed appreciation of their efforts, while the FBI received further credit for theirs as Tierney roll-call recognized departments en masse from the podium.
The FBI helped seize the first-generation Black Chevy Avalanche in question that added another palpable piece of evidence that positively set this ice-cold case forwardly ablaze. Google Image archives confirm the vehicle had been regularly parked outside Heuermann’s Massapequa Park estate in 2011. Amber Costello’s pimp had long-ago connected its usage to an “ogre of a man” — Heuermann’s beastly 6’6, 275-lb. frame and unsettling/greasy/creepy disposition doing himself no favors here.
Such a description mirrored then-FBI profiler and current Criminal Minds writer-producer-technical advisor Jim Clemente’s 2011 profile of the Gilgo Killer/“Craigslist Ripper.”
Outlets in agreement from Fox News on through to The Messenger, and every diligent communication hub in between, have retroactively classified Clemente’s assessment of the unsub — “an educated, intelligent and mild-mannered ‘sexual sadist’ who enjoys watching people suffer” — as “spot-on,” especially when weighing the looks and make-up of the primarily accused.
Nevertheless, Heuermann’s arrest comes just 14 months after he was first identified in March 2022. Heuermann’s introduction to the stringed yard board was a mere month after Tierney and Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison first met in February to usher in their special joint taskforce pertaining to the case in conjunction with the FBI, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department and New York’s State Troopers, amongst other contributing bureaus.
“Ladies and gentlemen: Heuermann is a demon that walks among us– a predator that has ruined families,” Commissioner Harrison bluntly spoke at Friday’s press conference. “If not for the members of this task force, he’d still be on the streets today.”
Many can recall Tierney’s famous rebuttals to then-incumbent Tim Sini whilst both were last on the campaign trail, pitted against one another for the coveted DA seat. Having quickly commanded a reputation for taking matters into his own hands, Tierney has picked up an enormity of the slack left behind by his predecessor on the fighting fentanyl front.
Tierney and his Gilgo taskforce takeover is another instance in which he’s managed to do much of the same. The joint effort “emblematic of a great collaboration” expects to bring forth swift and total justice.
If this case moves ahead in ways he’s unafraid to televise on the record in the wake of “phase one’s” explosive conclusion, then Tierney and company will do right by the victims, their families and the fearful public— thereby succeeding in ways Sini failed, and could only dream to.
What took so long?
For the bulk of last decade, the Gilgo Beach investigation took a backseat to an ego show. Former Police Commissioner Sini, who assumed the District Attorney position when elected in 2018 and vacated it after Tierney defeated him in the 2021 election, once vowed to renew the investigation. However, those tasked to make the ample headway direly needed ultimately became distracted.
The now-disgraced former Suffolk County Police Department Chief James Burke was sentenced to prison for corruption. Former District Attorney Thomas Spota was subsequently convicted for covering up his pal’s crimes. When even more surrendered their high ranks in ill-advised lockstep, it proved the age-old, iron-clad logic: when most of the repertory players in your production catch a colossal case of the “yips” and start forgetting their lines, then it’s high time to book a new show entirely.
And book one, the voting public sure did.
“I made Gilgo a priority before I took office,” Tierney said at the top of his press conference, the details of which left the DA’s few remaining naysayers with an affinity for crime procedurals and a belief that a serial killer case could be wrapped within an hour timeframe (plus commercials) stood corrected.
Even with the best team consisting of the best lawmen for the job, timely undertakings are essential. Only when Tierney and his taskforce deduced Heuermann’s unending badgering of sex workers via burner phone had them nervous he’d kill again or fly the coop did the right swoop in to destabilize the wrong.
“I met with the victims [victims’ families] and told them we were going to handle this case differently. We were going to do it differently,” said Tierney. “We knew that when we’re investigating this case… we were playing before a party of one, because we knew the person responsible for these murders would be looking.”
The so-called party of one (Heuermann) thus far has been the gift of overwhelming evidence that keeps on giving. In 14 months of 300 subpoenas filed, 200-plus searches — and counting — have been conducted — including properties and storage caches in not just New York, but South Carolina and now as far as Las Vegas. They had the camouflage burlap prior. They had hair samples prior. They had one-hell-of-a working profile to predict successive behavior off of. But with the suspect reprimanded, and surreptitious stakeouts no longer providing unideal limitations, the greater picture — perhaps behind the eyes of the “haunting” portrait found in the Las Vegas property seizure? — could begin to reveal itself even quicker.
Ninety permitted guns, and over 200 total, have also been removed and secured for evidence from Heuermann’s dilapidated, “ram-shackle” childhood home- turned-permanent residence. Currently, his daily-dissected domicile in Massapequa Park flaunts a viewing audience looking on that most definitely won’t dissipate anytime soon.
“As a Massapequa resident— someone who has lived here my entire life and is now raising my own child here, I am completely shocked to hear that this monster was living among us the entire time,” said Dawn Lynch, an English teacher at Hauppauge High School, told The Messenger. The Plainedge High School Class of 1992 alum and her teenage son reside just three blocks away from the Heuermann household.
“This is a small, quiet community,” she added, “and it is terrifying to think that on any given day, community members had interactions with him without having any idea who he really was. Our children played and rode their bikes past his house and trick-or-treated at his door, and all this time he was hiding from law enforcement right in front of our eyes.”
A married father of twosurely can’t be both your regular-day, showtune-singin’ “Average Joe” and the Brobdingnagian (giant), shanty-wailing representation of Beelzebub on Earth…
…or can they be?
“It’s not unusual for the wives and families of serial killers to be completely unaware about their darker compulsions,” criminology expert Scott Bonn notes.
In a later interview, Tierney said Heuermann was well-versed in “bifurcating” his life. He could be both a married man, the mask, and the monster stalking his prey, the alpha, with those populating his two respective worlds never the wiser. [Though now she appears to be, as Heurermann’s wife actually filed for divorce on Wednesday after our print edition was already sent]
In an interview with The Daily News and on her Tik Tok profile, Nicole Brass, 34, now of New England and a former Long Islander, says she met up for a date “sometime “between 2014 and 2016” with Heuermann at the Steamroom seafood restaurant in Port Jefferson— some 50 miles from his family’s Massapequa Park home. Brass claims Heuermann waxed disturbingly enthusiastic about the Gilgo Beach murders over dinner. “It didn’t seem like somebody who feels bad… it seemed like somebody who really wanted to brag about what they did, but couldn’t,” she said.
A felon with an active opioid addiction at the time, Brass was skittish about reporting Heuermann to police, and believes this is why he targeted those who would be just as equally reluctant to report him for reportable offenses.
Fox News reports that many of Heuermann’s “stunned” work colleagues previously nicknamed him “Peter Griffin,” due to his striking resemblance to the bumbling drunk with undiagnosed “Peter Pan Syndrome” that leads the adult-animated comedy series, Family Guy.
Clemente responded by saying the parallels between the two run deeper, though. Per Clemente, the juvenile Griffin patriarch is “quite strange” and “does a lot of what I would consider nasty things.”
With events that take place during our childhood shaping how we mature, and how we don’t, what could have transpired during the Gilgo Killer’s boyhood that would lead to this?
Notably, just 2.9 miles away from Heuermann’s First Avenue-located home in the next town over of Amityville, where one of his storage units was located and seized this past week, stands the notorious “Amityville Horror” house where 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo slaughtered his entire family.
The crime that inspired a multiple generations- spanning multimedia storm occurred inside this home in 1974, when a nearby Rex Heuermann was no older than 11 years old.
Per CNN, after being booked and processed, Heuermann asked just one question:
“Is it in the news?”
If Amityville’s, and Gilgo’s own legacy prior to its face – Heuermann’s – being placed to it are any indication, it won’t vacate the news rundown, nor the true crime- obsessed zeitgeist in general, anytime soon.
Meanwhile, as the wicked, Internet users, and wicked Internet users begin to iconize Rex Heuermann, it is imperative we don’t forget the victims.
Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney certainly won’t.
“I want to thank the victims [victims’ families] in this case… I’ve gotten to know the families; I am inspired by them. I’m impressed by their patience and by their persistence, and not only supporting their lost sisters, or mother, or daughter, but also by really standing for victims everywhere.”
While the investigation continues, and those heading it advising all to contact the crime stoppers hotline with any pertinent information they may possess, in a mosaic of “alleged’s,” two truths are simply undeniable:
Tierney called his shot, and an architect letting his house run rampantly amuck is akin to a killer getting himself caught.
