‘An evil person a few blocks over’: Long Island town reels after arrest of serial killer suspect

The arrest of the 59-year-old Long Island architect Rex Heuermann, accused of the murder of three women, has brought relief to residents of Massapequa Park, a suburban town seven miles from Gilgo Beach where the remains of 10 adults and a child were found more than a decade ago.

“Everybody stopped going to the beach at night. It was an intense vibe that someone was committing serial crimes on the island,” recalled Alexandra Calabro, 26, on Friday, standing steps away the small single-story home in the commuter town where Heuermann lived.

Related: Burner phones and search history led police to Long Island killings suspect

On Friday, when news began to spread that members of a taskforce re-energized by a new police chief just two years ago to solve the Gilgo Beach crimes had arrested Heuermann outside his Manhattan office, relief was also tinged with fear.

“They thought it was a cop doing the murders at first, and that was repeated and repeated until it became a truth,” Calabro said, as dozens of neighbors and sightseers milled around the blocked-off street. “It’s unsettling, and weird, that there was an evil person a few blocks over.”

Others said they’d always noticed that the house – 105 1st Avenue – was small and unkempt compared to the suburban perfection of the surrounding homes.

“You couldn’t help but notice it,” said another resident. “It’s a dump, and hasn’t been updated in 30 years.”

The house, they said, was destined to become as notorious as the home just 10 miles away that became the basis for the film The Amityville Horror.

Some said it was strange too that they’d never noticed Heuermann, an imposing man at 6ft 4in, on the daily commute into the city. Nor was he known in the local bars and restaurants. It was as if, one said, he was a ghost. But he wasn’t. The New York Post spoke to a woman who claimed she’d been stalked by Heuermann in a local park earlier this month and filed a police report.

“Rex Heuermann is a demon that walks among us, a predator that ruined families,” said the Suffolk county police commissioner, Rodney Harrison, at a news conference on Friday.

Heuermann was charged on Friday with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27. They are three of the “Gilgo Four” – the first of the victims, most of whom were young, female sex workers, whose remains were found in scrubby marshland near the beach in 2010.

A married father of two, Heuermann pleaded not guilty to the charges. Judge Richard Ambro ordered Heuermann held without bail due to “the extreme depravity of the allegations”. Outside the courthouse in Riverhead, Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup said she would not comment. “Please leave me alone. I will not be saying anything,” she told Newsday.

Each of the three young women had been bound in a similar way, their bodies obscured with camouflaged burlap sack of the kind used by hunters, prosecutors said. Each had met their alleged killer on Craigslist. Hauermann has not been charged with the murder of the fourth Gilgo victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, though court documents said he is the prime suspect.

In an exhaustive description of the investigation on Friday, the Suffolk county district attorney, Ray Tierney, said investigators had Heuermann in their sights since March 2022 and decided to make the arrest in the interest of “public safety”.

He declined to say if they believed the suspect, who owns houses in South Carolina and Las Vegas, could have been preparing for another assault – he continued to use the services of sex workers – or to flee. Heuermann had been under close, intense surveillance by state and federal authorities since he was identified in a database.

“We knew we were playing before a party of one because we knew the person responsible for these murders would be looking at us,” Tierney said. “We were very careful how we handled the investigation and that we maintained its secrecy.”

Prosecutors said the evidence against Heuermann included DNA lifted from a pizza box he allegedly discarded outside his office that linked him to one of the victims, and cellular phone site data from burner phones that investigators said also linked his whereabouts to the victims.

“For each of the murders, he got an individual burner phone, prepaid and anonymous, and he used that to communicate with the victims and shortly after got rid of the burner phone,” Tierney said. As far back as 2012, he said, the FBI had noticed similarities that linked the calls to Massapequa Park and midtown Manhattan cell towers. It was later found that Heuermann’s personal phone and the burner or “target” phones were always pinging off the same towers.

Also recovered from the victims were hairs that were later identified by DNA as belonging to Heuermann or his wife.

Through information gathered from witnesses and their murder investigations, investigators learned the suspect was “large and thickly-built” with glasses and dark hair. They noted he drove a dark, first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche with a unique cab. A database search identified Heuermann as the owner of similar vehicle. The vehicle was later recovered by the FBI from South Carolina.

Investigators then set about recovering abandoned DNA from Heuermann and his family. They checked the family members’ travel records and learned that during the three charged murders, Heuermann’s wife and children were out of state.

After discovering the fake names or email addresses he allegedly used online, Tierney said, investigators found that Heuermann made 200 searches pertaining to the Gilgo investigation, looking at pictures of victims and trying to locate their relatives.

“We knew this person was watching and we didn’t want to give him any insight into how close we were getting,” he added. Also among the searches were “sex workers, sadistic, torture-related pornography”.

Tierney paid tribute to the victims and their families: “While sometimes defendants embody the very worst of humanity, it seems that victims often embody the very best of what it means to be human.” He said he was impressed by the victims families “persistence and patience”.

Lynn Barthelemy, the mother of the Gilgo Beach murder victim Melissa Barthelemy, told NBC News that “death is too good” for her daughter’s alleged killer.

“Our family has suffered every day,” she said. “I’d like him to suffer at the hands of other inmates.”

Following Barthelemy’s murder, someone made taunting phone calls to the family. “Do you think you’ll ever speak to her again?” the caller told Barthelemy’s sister, according to reports.

The case of the Gilgo Four has come under intense criticism, with some claiming that police were not interested in solving the case in part because of incompetence, or worse, institutional disregard for the victims given their line of work.

For years, the investigation went cold. The four victims were only discovered as part of a search for Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker who had gone missing from a house near the beach, whose remains were later discovered in a nearby swamp. Authorities have said they think Gilbert’s death was an “unfortunate accident”.

But Gilbert’s death at times overshadowed the Gilgo Four investigation, and particularly the media attention, including a 2020 Netflix film, Lost Girls, given to it.

“There was a lot of outside influence, a lot of people who had nothing to do with the investigation asserted pressure,” Tierney said. “But that did not happen with our taskforce.”

On Friday, the attorney John Ray, who represents the families of Shannan Gilbert and another woman, Jessica Taylor, said he had been tipped off that investigators were closing in on arrest and he had been given two names. He declined to say who the second person was but said he suspected a woman may have been involved.

Ray said he hoped the arrest means “the dam has broken” and the perpetrator or perpetrators of the other murders would be found. Among them were Valerie Mack, a 24-year-old mother from southern New Jersey and the six other people –
four women, one man and a two-year-old girl – whose remains were discovered near the beach.

Heuermann’s arrest bears out police chief Rodney Harrison’s reinvigoration of the investigation. The case was 11 years old when he took office in January last year. “I’m feeling confident that we’re getting closer to making an arrest,” he told a local news outlet and sought to reassure skeptical local residents that had been no “cover-up”.

Within two months, Heuermann had been identified. The investigation was ongoing, law enforcement officials confirmed on Friday.

“They never stopped working and will continue to work tirelessly until we bring justice to all the families involved,” Harrison said.