Gilgo Beach Long Island Serial Killer Arrested

July 17, 2023 9:33 AM

In December 2010, the first of eleven murder victims were recovered from Jones Beach Island, Long Island. Many of the victims had been women engaged in sex work in the New York City area. Four victims who had disappeared between 2007 and 2010 were found within a 500 meter stretch of Gilgo Beach; all had been bound and three were wrapped in burlap sacks. Late last week, Rex Heuermann of nearby Massapequa Park, NY was indicted and arrested for the murder of three of the "Gilgo Four".

Evidence against the suspect: The evidence accumulated prior to Heuermann's arrest is exhaustively documented in the Bail Application prepared by the Suffolk County Grand Jury prosecutors. A search of the suspect's home and a storage unit began this weekend and are ongoing. A few key items of known evidence:

• Witness identification of suspect and truck. On the night before allegedly murdering one of the victims, Amber Costello, the suspect visited her home and was seen in person and driving a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche. It is thought that these descriptions first brought investigator attention to the suspect.
• Voluminous cell phone time and location data. The suspect used burner phones to contact victims, as well as the victims' own phones to taunt their families. A pattern of location data places these calls near the suspect's home on Long Island and office in Manhattan.
• DNA evidence. DNA matched female human hairs on three victim to an individual living in the suspect's house, likely his wife. A male hair discovered on one victim was matched to the suspect, using a discarded pizza crust.
• Travel records. Three of the four murders have been associated to periods out-of-state/international travel by the suspect's wife and children. The suspect's own subsequent travel with his family is exactly associated to extended gaps in taunting phone calls to the victims.

Other victims: The remains of 11 individuals were recovered from Jones Beach Island following an initial search by a single officer and cadaver dog investigating the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert in late 2010. The "Gilgo Four" were discovered first, on December 11, 2010, and are most strongly associated by evidence, which led to the charges. But police have said little about the other victims. In chronological order of their disappearance (as best as can be determined, with "Gilgo Four" in bold), they are:

1. "Jane Doe #7" / "Fire Island Jane Doe" --- Partial remains of a female victim were found in 1996 on Fire Island, 10 miles east of Gilgo Beach. During the 2010-2011 search, additional remains of this victim were recovered on Jones Beach Island.
2. "Jane Doe #3" / "Peaches" --- A female torso (with a tattoo of peaches) was recovered in 1997 from Hempstead Lake State Park in Lakeview, 15 miles northwest of Gilgo Beach. Additional remains of this victim were found on Jones Beach Island during the 2010-2011 search. The remains of a toddler, found at the opposite end of the island, was later found to be the child of this victim.
3. "Baby Doe" --- The remains of a toddler were discovered in the 2010-2011 search, near the eastern end of Gilgo Beach, next to the remains of Valerie Mack. Later identified as the child of Jane Doe #3.
4. Valerie Mack --- Partial remains of a female victim were found in a wooded area of Manorville, 40 miles northwest of Gilgo Beach, in November 2000. Additional remains of the victim were recovered on Gilgo Beach during the 2010-2011 search. In 2020 the victim was identified via forensic geneology as a young woman who disappeared from the Philadelphia area in the Spring of 2000.
5. Jessica Taylor --- Shortly after disappearing from Manhattan in July 2003, the partial remains of this upstate NY native were discovered in a wooded area of Manorville, less than a mile from those of Valerie Mack. Additional remains of the victim were recovered from Jones Island Beach in the 2010-2011 search.
6. John Doe --- The remains of a young male (though possibly transgender) asian victim were discovered less than a half mile from the "Gilgo Four" during the 2010-2011 search. Police estimate he had been murdered 5-10 years earlier.
7. Maureen Brainard Barnes --- This Norwich, CT native disappeared from Manhattan on July 9, 2007.
8. Melissa Barthelemy --- This native of Buffalo, NY disappeared from The Bronx on July 12, 2009.
9. Shannan Gilbert --- This Jersey City resident, originally of Ellenville, NY, made a panicked 911 call on May 1, 2010 from Oak Beach, a small community at the eastern end of Jones Beach Island where she had been meeting a client for sex work. After telling 911, "They are trying to kill me," she disappeared. Although her disappearance spurred the search that led to the Gilgo Beach discoveries, her remains were not found until December 2011, near where she had last been seen in Oak Beach. Police have said that her death was likely accidental and not related to the killings.
10. Megan Watermann --- A native of South Portland, ME, she disappeared from Hauppauge, NY on June 6, 2010.
11. Amber Lynn Costello --- Originally of Wilmington, NC, Amber Costello disappeared from her Long Island home in North Babylon on September 2, 2010. She was meeting a sex work client who had visited her home the previous day and is thought to have been the suspect, Rex Heuermann.

posted by pjenks (49 comments total)

DNA matched female human hairs on three victim to an individual living in the suspect's house, likely his wife.
Three of the four murders have been associated to periods out-of-state/international travel by the suspect's wife and children.

I'm just numb. Just, fuck me, what the hell.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:36 AM on July 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Robert Kolker wrote a very good book about the case in 2013, Lost Girls, which highlighted the victims and their families. It was made into a Netflix movie in 2020.
posted by pjenks at 9:43 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm kind of baffled, did the guy stop doing it in 2010? That's the strangest thing to me. How/why would a person with this kind of sickness just stop. Or, is more likely, just kept on killing SWs and trafficked women who had no one to miss them. Also, because cops.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:43 AM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I agree seanmpuckett, it seems weird that he stopped. The police have evidence of the suspect's recent contact with sex workers, I think, and they mentioned that the arrest happened now "out of concern for this defendant fleeing and the danger to the community".

But, some arguments that he did feel pressure to stop: (1) the first bodies were discovered just three months after the last known murder (Amber Costello), and (2) it was that last murder where he exposed himself and his truck to witnesses.
posted by pjenks at 9:48 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I understand how discussing criminal cases is something of interest for many and the details are public. However, a lively discussion of how various sex workers were killed and what DNA evidence was found, etc. with links to each of their photos with full names makes me very uncomfortable -- especially when it's mostly men doing the talking. I think Lost Girls is valuable because it celebrates the humanity of the victims. However, I'd be horrified if I were one of the women killed and, therefore, part of a thread on MetaFilter discussing my demise. I know MeFites do try to be mindful in situations like this so please, please be extra mindful in the discussion about it all here.
posted by smorgasbord at 9:53 AM on July 17, 2023 [22 favorites]

The BBC ran this story under a subhead of 'a demon walks among us', quoting a local law enforcement official.

Hard to disagree with that in this case.
posted by jamjam at 9:56 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The first bodies on the beach were discovered in 2010. It's possible that pushed him to stop, serial killers do, despite the common wisdom, sometimes halt for long periods, but it also seems possible he simply started using a different location.
posted by tavella at 9:56 AM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

with links to each of their photos with full names

On the contrary, I think it's more important to focus on the identities of the victims than on that of the guy who murdered them. I want to hear their names, not his.
posted by praemunire at 10:05 AM on July 17, 2023 [30 favorites]

For me the most interesting angle is buried in this older article from 2020 (NYT), which focuses on the new Suffolk Country Police Commissioner and her intentions to revive the case. It suggests that it languished from 2011-18 because the previous commish was a spiteful dickhead who cut off contact with the FBI. The world of serial killers is fairly alien and bewildering, but bad cops are an ongoing concern.
posted by anhedonic at 10:14 AM on July 17, 2023 [22 favorites]

However, a lively discussion of how various sex workers were killed and what DNA evidence was found, etc. with links to each of their photos with full names makes me very uncomfortable

I really, really disagree with this, fwiw. They were people. They deserve to be treated exactly the same way that any other person would be treated if they were the victim of a crime. They do not need to be hidden behind a shame screen because they were sex workers. They need the opposite: to have their full humanity described and celebrated. I don't want to dwell on the ugly details of anyone's murder, and I wish the media and true crime industry would do a lot less of that, but I absolutely think we should name and memorialize the victims.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:25 AM on July 17, 2023 [39 favorites]

I saw a list of traits and predictions about the killer that forensic profilers said the killer would have, and it seemed a good example of how - while pop culture tells us that profilers are near-psychic, discerning otherwise-undiscoverable things about a perpetrator - a lot of it seems more like some combination of raw statistics and things that seem kind of obvious. Less like an actual psychic and more like a stage psychic doing part of a cold reading.

Like, "white male between 20 - 40" is probably the most likely demographic for person to be a serial killer. "Has a truck or large vehicle" seems obvious - it's a lot easier to move a body in a truck or SUV than a honda civic. "Lives in or near the area" - I know I wouldn't want to drive too far with a body in my truck. The economic predictions and social predictions that were included seem pretty much what you'd expect if you want to find someone who has successfully engaged professional sex workers - I expect that anyone who's regularly getting work via Craigslist has a pretty good filter to exclude the people who can't manage to fake "reasonable human being with extra money and an un-met need." (Harder to filter for people who can manage to fake it but really aren't operating where the rest of us are.)
posted by rmd1023 at 10:45 AM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The killer made calls to the victims' families, taunting them.

That detail always made me wonder how the hell he didn't get caught back then.
posted by chaz at 10:48 AM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

The part that gets me is the availability of call data up to a decade later. That seems a long time hang onto everyone's call data including location in order to sort through it later. The same with the footage of him buying a burner phone.
posted by srboisvert at 11:00 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

That is a long time to have the data around. I don't know how much is because they were saving that area's stuff in particular or what. I guess disk storage is cheap enough and keeps getting cheaper, and in the absence of data retention rules, nobody wants to be the one to stand up and say "yeah, we can get rid of this data after 36 months."
posted by rmd1023 at 11:11 AM on July 17, 2023

I would imagine they gathered that cell data back in 2011 during the initial investigation, closer to the time the calls were made. The "Bail Application" document notes that cell phone records for the suspect's wife could not be obtained for the time of the 2007 murder (as it was for the 2009 and 2010 murders), so perhaps that indicates the time that the data is stored (~3y). Also they say, about the suspect's personal cell phone, "although cell site records from that time period no longer existed, investigators obtained cellular billing records which showed general location information..."

The footage of him reloading the burner phone is from May 19, 2023. The association of the suspect to prior burners was made by rough geolocation with respect to his personal cell phone, and, in at least one instance in 2011, the registration of Tinder/AOL accounts using that phone.

EDIT: the "~3y" statement I made doesn't make sense. Apparently they were able to obtain some cell phone records for the suspect's wife for 2009, but not for 2007. These were not necessarily cell tower location records, however. I think all of the specific tower location data could have been collected long before any suspect was known.
posted by pjenks at 11:24 AM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I agree that we shouldn’t “hide” sex workers behind a “shame screen” but then reality is that society continues to treat sex workers as less than human and the fact that their job titles are so prominent in this all is because media knows that it gets more attention and titillates many. I’m glad so many people are supportive; it’d be nice if the media attention turned more members of the mainstream public into advocates or at least more compassionate people but nope.
posted by smorgasbord at 11:50 AM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I dunno smorgasbord, if anything I think the murders of sex workers are usually something the media (and law enforcement) tend to ignore. That's part of why predators target people who do sex work. I'm glad these women's families will see justice.
posted by cakelite at 11:59 AM on July 17, 2023 [13 favorites]

Robert Kolker wrote a very good book about the case in 2013, Lost Girls

Kolker is the author of the second link in the post.
posted by doctornemo at 12:05 PM on July 17, 2023

The New York Times' habit of always using an honorific when mentioning people tends to feel old-fashioned and annoying to me, but I will say that seeing the victims' names repeated as "Ms. Costello, Ms. Mack, Ms. Barnes, Ms. Watermann, Ms. Barthelemy," felt really good to me.
posted by Well I never at 12:51 PM on July 17, 2023 [18 favorites]

.
(for all the known and yet to be known victims)

Jane Doe #3 / Baby Doe - that gets to me.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:27 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wow, the photo of the home this architect lives in is... surprising.

It's very unusual that someone described as so meticulous and detail oriented WRT buildings they was working on would live in a home with moss growing on the roof and the porch overhang propped up with random boards. Not even repairing or maintaining the home to the standard of the neighborhood in order to blend in just seems incredibly odd if you're trying to stay hidden- and then to be an architect on top of that makes it extra weird.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:37 PM on July 17, 2023 [8 favorites]

"Has a truck or large vehicle" seems obvious - it's a lot easier to move a body in a truck or SUV than a honda civic.

When I read the part about the guy driving a giant black truck, I thought, "checks out" .... but not from a link to trunk capacity.
posted by Dashy at 2:11 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

and then to be an architect on top of that makes it extra weird.

I read he is not an architect per se, but a consultant who helps architects and others navigate city hall and building codes, etc. Still weird though, I agree.
posted by Rumple at 2:20 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not that weird that people might be (deliberately or inadvertently) terrible at the upkeep of their own house even if they have a profession that deals with building codes. The cobbler's children do sometimes go barefoot. (I might also speculate he may have had many reasons for not wanting contractors on site.)
posted by Earthtopus at 2:23 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

the murders of sex workers are usually something the media (and law enforcement) tend to ignore

Almost certainly the case here prior to the new police management, in fact.
posted by praemunire at 2:37 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The NYT piece links to a 20 minute interview with Heuermann about his job and it was chilling to watch (the video has now been made private). Rare to see candid fare from a serial killer in real life and impossible to not compare to all the movie portrayals I've seen before. He mostly seemed like a forgettable Long Island uncle but his eyes were scary and his little arrogances took on wicked undertones. A reminder again that evil doesn't look it everyday.
posted by macrael at 3:36 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm kind of baffled, did the guy stop doing it in 2010? That's the strangest thing to me. How/why would a person with this kind of sickness just stop. Or, is more likely, just kept on killing SWs and trafficked women who had no one to miss them. Also, because cops.

One of the unsettling things that forensic genealogy is highlighting is that quite a few people appear to be able to commit ghastly, extremely violent crimes for a period ranging from once to repeatedly, for years, and then just stop. Joseph James DeAngelo, Jr., now generally referred to as the "Golden State Killer", is maybe the most high profile example.

That said, the arrest here seems to have been motivated by a belief that Heuermann was getting ready to kill again.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:49 PM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's very unusual that someone described as so meticulous and detail oriented WRT buildings they was working on would live in a home with moss growing on the roof and the porch overhang propped up with random boards.

Also, FWIW, I'm a librarian and very detail-oriented in my day job, but books are just piled all over the place willy-nilly at the house. Sometimes you need a break from work.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:03 PM on July 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

All of this took so long because the Suffolk County Chief of Police (at the time of the discovery of the bodies) didn't want SCPD or the FBI to do anything bc he was involved in some (maybe?) ancillary sex stuff. Maybe it was related to the Oak Beach Shannan Gilbert death. Who knows. But we do know James Burke went to prison. And it slowed everything down for years.
posted by atomicstone at 4:05 PM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think it's going to be difficult to try and reconstruct the investigation just on the documents presented, they are presenting a criminal case, not necessarily a chronological narrative of what was discovered when. I don't think they've been entirly transparent about when this guy became a suspect and why.

My first random suspicion was that they performed forensic genealogy on the wife's hair follicles and didn't want to reveal that as she's not a suspect in the crime.

My second suspicion is closer to atomicstones - that due to the investigative office, this guy has been a suspect since the original investigation but it wasn't until his recent activity that they finally arrested him.
posted by muddgirl at 4:31 PM on July 17, 2023

Oh, I don't think that. I believe it took this task force almost no time to find him, just like they said. And that no one was allowed to even examine the evidence enough until a year ago, when new "blood" was brought in.
I also do kind of a little believe the conspiracy theories that Burke is involved in whatever led Gilbert to her death in Oak Beach. But maybe it's just too movie perfect.
posted by atomicstone at 4:47 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sorry I misunderstood!
posted by muddgirl at 4:50 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

No worries!
posted by atomicstone at 5:14 PM on July 17, 2023

Apparently he had over 200 guns stored at his house. It's good the investigation was kept as quiet as it was, because if he had suspicions he might have decided to take more people with him on the way out.

Also, FWIW, I'm a librarian and very detail-oriented in my day job, but books are just piled all over the place willy-nilly at the house. Sometimes you need a break from work.

This would be more like if you piled all your books on your back porch and left them out in the weather year after year. His house is in actual disrepair.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:26 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like, I'm a landscape architect and my garden looks like ass right now, but I haven't let dead shrubs and trees rot in place in the garden along with an established feral cat colony.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:29 PM on July 17, 2023

I was in this guy's high school class. Yikes.
posted by Lyme Drop at 6:23 PM on July 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

Billy Baldwin was in that class, too.

Heuermann's younger brother, Craig (57), lives in rural South Carolina; the brothers own land in Chester (population: 5,199), and Craig told neighbors Rex planned to retire to the area. The backs of their lots meet a series of connecting ponds, where some locals keep boats.

As part of the Gilgo Beach Task Force's investigation, the Chester County Sheriff’s Office seized Craig Heuermann's truck.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:56 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

If we include Andrew Tate, the score appears to be

Pizza Boxes: 2
Predatory Men: 0

Levity aside, it's just hard to wrap one's head around how this guy could be like that.
posted by Schmucko at 7:27 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Gilgo Beach Victims Were Always More Than Escorts [NYT gift link]
posted by bendy at 11:39 PM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

The focus here is, rightly, on the actual murder victims, and should remain there. But I do also feel for this dude's family, who likely had zero idea what was going on and are now in an absolute living nightmare. I can't help being reminded of the Stephen King novella A Good Marriage, which still scares the living shit out of me.
posted by peakes at 1:58 AM on July 18, 2023

Rolling Stone has a Q&A with Robert Kolker, in which he talks about the changes he's seen in the attitude towards the victims and their families.
posted by In Your Shell Like at 4:37 AM on July 18, 2023

Wow, the brother sounds really horrible, too:

The neighbor said he went to cut grass one Sunday at a property he used to own across from Craig. When the neighbor approached the area, Craig apparently came up behind him and hit him with a "steel pole."

"Out of nowhere," the neighbor recalled. "I called the police because I was going to shoot him, but my wife talked me out of it. We called the police, and when we talked to [Craig], he said, ‘Well, I told him not to cut grass on Sunday.’"

Craig also apparently left business cards in mailboxes on his street that read, "I'm an a--hole."

What the hell was their childhood like?
posted by LooseFilter at 6:43 AM on July 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've long said that the only reason I could imagine buying a gun would be if I had an abusive ex, but let me amend that slightly to having a person like this as a neighbor.
posted by praemunire at 8:59 AM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

For me the most interesting angle is buried in this older article from 2020 (NYT), which focuses on the new Suffolk Country Police Commissioner and her intentions to revive the case. It suggests that it languished from 2011-18 because the previous commish was a spiteful dickhead who cut off contact with the FBI. The world of serial killers is fairly alien and bewildering, but bad cops are an ongoing concern.

I remember after the Netflix series came out (maybe it was IN the Netflix series?) there was speculation that a police officer was involved in the crimes, and that this intransigence was a cover-up. It's interesting that this is almost always a theory in cases like this, but really it's just a case of cops being very bad at solving murders. Even more so when the victims are marginalized in some way.
posted by lunasol at 1:33 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is it just me, or do other people find his mugshot very unsettling?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:36 PM on July 18, 2023

Here's a repost of the killer being interviewed by the YouTube channel Bonjour Realty. The interviewer has a French accent & he seems to be the type of interviewer who will laugh at anything his interviewee says. I haven't had time to watch the whole thing yet, but it looks really creepy in context.
posted by jonp72 at 1:49 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Two new articles from the NYTimes:

The Polygon and the Avalanche: How the Gilgo Beach Suspect Was Found

and

For Families of Other Gilgo Beach Victims, an Agonizing Wait Goes On

The suspect's wife has filed for divorce.
posted by pjenks at 1:04 PM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Gilgo Beach killer hunt slowed by infighting between prosecutors, police (WaPost, 2023-08-01)

Nothing very new here, but a deep dive into the multiple rounds of corruption, incompetence, and malfeasance.
posted by pjenks at 2:06 PM on August 1, 2023

This, in contrast, is big new news. The first of the eleven victims found on Jones Beach Island has now been identified (actually she was identified in 2022, but the announcement was held until after the arrest of Heuermann).

To update the original list:

1. Karen Vergata (formerly referred to as "Jane Doe #7" / "Fire Island Jane Doe") --- Partial remains of a female victim were found in 1996 on Fire Island, 10 miles east of Gilgo Beach. During the 2010-2011 search, additional remains of this victim were recovered on Jones Beach Island.

According to the Suffolk County District Attorney, the 34 year-old woman was apparently working in sex work while living in Manhattan when she disappeared on February 14, 1996. Her partial remains were discovered on Fire Island two months later, but her skull was recovered from Jones Beach Island in April 2011, about four months after the "Gilgo Four".
posted by pjenks at 9:33 AM on August 4, 2023 [2 favorites]