Rex Heuermann, Married Manhattan architect was arrested and charged Friday, accused by authorities on Long Island of allegedly being the infamous Gilgo Beach serial killer.
Rex Heuermann, 59, of Massapequa Park, was arrested late Thursday and charged in the deaths of three women — and is considered prime suspect in a fourth — who were killed more than a decade ago.
In total, police found the remains of 11 people — 10 adults and a toddler — between 2010 and 2011 along a beachside New York highway. They were able to arrest Heuermann and charge him in three of the murders and believe there is evidence to connect him to the fourth.
Through an attorney, Rex Heuermann pleaded not guilty on Friday to the six charges for the murders of three women, smirking throughout his arraignment.
Here’s everything we know about the alleged Long Island serial killer and why it took so long to nab him:
Who is Rex Heuermann?
Rex Heuermann is a lifelong Massapequa Park resident who commuted into New York City, where he ran an architecture firm.
Married with a daughter and a stepson, Heuermann is a licensed architect with a firm on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue that, according to its website, has done store buildouts and other renovations for major retailers, offices and apartments.
His small, red house about 40 miles east of Manhattan was swarmed with law enforcement, neighbors and media Friday, as investigators in protective suits stood on his lawn.
The home, where Heuermann has lived since childhood, belonged to a family that had long kept to themselves, neighbors said, noting that the dilapidated property seemed out of place among rows of single family homes and well kept lawns in the small community.
It also was just across the bay from where the bodies of the women he allegedly killed were found.
Barry Auslander said the man who lived in the house commuted by train to Manhattan each morning, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.
“It was weird. He looked like a businessman,” said Auslander. “But his house is a dump.”
Who were the four victims named in the court documents?
Heuermann is charged with killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello. He is also the main suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who was last seen in New York City on July 9, 2007, according to court papers.
Barthelemy, 24, was last seen on July 10, 2009. She was an escort and went missing after she met with a client. In the following days, someone used her cell phone to call her teenage sister in Buffalo at least a half-dozen times. The caller eventually admitted to the girl he was her sister’s killer.
New York City police tracked the call to midtown Manhattan and searched near Penn Station and the Port Authority bus terminal, but the signal went dead. Cellphone records also showed a call from Massapequa, on Long Island.
Waterman, 22, of Maine, went missing on June 6, 2010. Like Barthelemy, she was using Craigslist to work as an escort. Waterman, who had a child, had been staying at a Long Island motel at the time of her disappearance.
Costello, 27, had last been scene on Sept. 2, 2010, and was also a sex worker. She was living in Long Island when she disappeared and had gone to meet a client before disappearing.
Brainard-Barnes, 25, disappeared three years earlier on July 9, 2007. She was also working as an escort and using Craigslist.
A mother of two, Brainard-Barnes lived in Connecticut and was said to be going to New York City when she vanished.
The arrest came as a shock and a relief to some of the relatives after so many years of waiting for a break in the case.
“I never thought they’d find this person,” said Barthelemy’s cousin, Amy Brotz.
Who are the other victims?
Barthelemy, Waterman, Costello and Maureen Brainard-Barnes — known as the “Gilgo Four” — were all discovered after police began to search for Shannan Gilbert in 2010.
Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker, vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the marsh.
Months later, a police officer and his cadaver dog were looking for her body in the thicket along nearby Ocean Parkway when they happened upon the remains of a different woman. Within days, three other bodies were found, all within a short walk of one another.
By spring 2011, that number had climbed to 10 sets of human remains — those of eight women, one man and one toddler.
Some remains were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, making for a puzzling crime scene that stretched from a park near the New York City limits to a resort community on Fire Island and out to far eastern Long Island.
Police found the skull of a sex worker named Jessica Taylor, who was 20 when most of the rest of her body was found in a wooded area of Manorville shortly after she disappeared in 2003. Body parts found near Gilgo Beach were also linked to another corpse found in Manorville in 2000. That female victim has never been identified.
Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about three miles east of where the other 10 sets were discovered.
In talking about the bodies near Gilgo Beach, investigators have said several times over the years it is unlikely one person killed all the victims.
But authorities have long maintained Gilbert’s death was unrelated and even accidental.
What led the police to Rex Heuermann?
Rex Heuermann, 59, was arrested late Thursday amid a renewed investigation that tied him to a pickup truck a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.
In March, detectives tailing Heuermann recovered his DNA from pizza crust in a box that he’d discarded in a Manhattan trash can and matched it to DNA from a hair found on a restraint used in the killings.
Investigators had searched for a suspect for more than a decade. Last year, an interagency task force was formed with investigators from the FBI, as well as state and local police departments, aimed at solving the case.
After linking Heuermann to the pickup truck, prosecutors said investigators were able to connect him to other evidence, including the burner cellphones allegedly used to arrange meetings with the slain women, and taunting calls that a person claiming to be the killer made to one of Barthelemy’s relatives using her cellphone after she disappeared in 2009.
In recent months, Rex Heuermann sought to keep tabs on the probe and “searched obsessively” on the internet for facts about the Gilgo Beach killings, including the names of women he’s accused of killing, as well as podcasts and documentaries about the case, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said.
Tierney said authorities moved to charge Heuermann now with three of the killings “out of concern for this defendant fleeing and the danger to the community.” They are continuing to work toward charging him in the death of a fourth Gilgo victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
Until his arrest, Heuermann continued to use burner phones, patronize sex workers and search the internet for sadistic materials, including sexually exploitive images of children, Tierney said. He also has access to 92 handguns, the prosecutor said.
“This is a day that is a long time in coming, and hopefully a day that will bring peace to this community and to the families — peace that has been long overdue,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said during an unrelated appearance on Long Island.
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