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Rex Heuermann, a Massapequa Park Architect, Is Arrested and Charged in Three of the Gilgo Beach Murders

Arrested outside his Manhattan office, Heuermann was charged with killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello and named prime suspect in a fourth death.

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Rex Heuermann, handcuffed and in a dark suit, escorted by a court officer

For more than a decade the Gilgo Beach killings had no suspect anyone would name. Late on Thursday, July 13, 2023, investigators surrounded Rex Heuermann outside the Midtown Manhattan office building where he worked as an architect and took him into custody. The next afternoon, Friday, July 14, he was arraigned in Suffolk County and charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello. He pleaded not guilty.

Heuermann, 59, a married father of two, lived in Massapequa Park on Long Island, just across the bay from the stretch of Ocean Parkway where the four women known as the Gilgo Four were found wrapped in burlap in late 2010. Prosecutors said he was also the prime suspect in the 2007 disappearance and killing of the fourth, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, though he had not been charged in her death. "We're also confident that we're going to be able to eventually charge that fourth murder," Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said days later.

The case against him had been building quietly for more than a year. A multiagency task force formed in early 2022 to revisit the killings, and within weeks, Tierney said, it had identified Heuermann as a possible suspect. Investigators first focused on him in March 2022, when he was connected to a Chevrolet pickup truck a witness had seen where a victim disappeared in 2010. They narrowed thousands of cell tower records to a handful of people, then to residents who matched a witness's description of the suspected killer. Heuermann fit the description, lived near the Long Island cell site and worked near the New York City sites where other calls were captured.

A key break came from a pizza crust. Prosecutors said DNA from a male hair found on the burlap around Waterman's body matched DNA taken from a crust Heuermann threw into a Manhattan trash can in January 2023. Tierney told the court Heuermann had used burner phones to run more than 200 searches about the Gilgo investigation and about the victims' families, and called him an "ongoing danger." The judge ordered him held without bail, citing what he called the "extreme depravity of the allegations."

Heuermann's lawyer, Michael J. Brown, called the case "extremely circumstantial in nature." Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison praised the task force. "If not for the members of this task force, he would still be out on the streets today," he said. Megan Waterman's sister, Allie Pertel, said she was shocked at first because he did not look like a monster.

The Gilgo Four were among 11 sets of human remains found along Long Island's South Shore in 2010 and 2011, after the search for a missing woman, Shannan Gilbert, led investigators to the area. The investigation into the other deaths, officials said, would go on.

At this point Heuermann had been charged, not convicted, and he denied the killings. Investigators said they had found his wife's DNA on two of the bodies and treated it as possible transfer; she and the couple's children were out of state when the three women are believed to have been killed, authorities said.

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