Who is Rex Heuermann? The suspect in Gilgo Beach serial killings
Long Island architect Rex Heuermann has been charged with murder in the deaths of three of the 11 victims in a long-unsolved string of killings known as the Gilgo Beach murders in New York.
He is charged with the murder of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, whose remains were found buried along a remote beach-side road in 2010.
He is also considered the prime suspect in the death of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose body was bound and hidden in thick underbrush close to the other remains.
The 59-year-old has pleaded not guilty.
Who is Rex Heuermann and what led to his arrest?
Married father-of-two Rex Heuermann has for decades lived across a bay from where the remains were found.
He was arrested last Thursday amid a renewed investigation that first identified him as a suspect in March last year, when detectives linked him to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.
The witness described the driver as an "ogre".
A source told CNN that Heuermann only had one question during his jail intake: “Is it in the news?”
Prosecutors say he met his alleged victims, who were sex workers at the time of their deaths, via classified adverts website Craigslist, Channel 4 News reports.
After connecting Heuermann to the pickup truck, prosecutors said, investigators were able to link him to other evidence, including burner phones used to arrange meetings with the dead women, and taunting calls that a person claiming to be the killer made to one of Barthelemy’s relatives using her phone after she disappeared in 2009.
In March, detectives recovered his DNA from pizza crust in a box that he threw away in a Manhattan bin and matched it to a hair found on a restraint used in the killings.
In recent months, Heuermann “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.
A search was carried out at storage units linked to Heuermann on Sunday and Monday, which are both less than a 10-minute drive from his house.
More than 200 guns were found during a search of his house in Massapequa Park, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said on Monday.
What do we know about the Gilgo Beach murders?
The long-unsolved string of killings known as the Gilgo Beach murders has left authorities stumped for more than a decade.
Investigators have said it’s unlikely just one person killed all 11 of the victims, and they insist the probe is far from over after the watershed moment of Heuermann's arrest.
Most of those found were young women, but a toddler and unidentified man were among those found in 2010 and 2011.
The case began with a search for Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker who had called 911 as she ran from a client’s home, saying someone was chasing her.
Police were looking for Gilbert in December 2010 when they stumbled upon the remains of someone else: Melissa Barthelemy, last seen alive the year before.
As the toll of victims grew and the search expanded, police used horses to reach the remote area, climbed firefighters’ ladders to see over poison ivy-infested thickets, scoured parking ticket records and got aerial surveillance photos from the FBI.
Over the years, reward money was offered, FBI experts profiled the killer and evolving DNA techniques were used.
Harrison announced a new task force to work the case shortly after he became commissioner in January 2022.
“We’re just in the infancy of the work that needs to be done going forward,” Deputy Commissioner Anthony Carter said on Monday.
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