New search launched of accused Gilgo beach serial killer Rex Heuermann’s Long Island home
NEW YORK — Nearly a year after accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann’s Long Island home was searched for 12 days, police were back with another warrant Monday morning, according to local reports.
State Troopers and Suffolk County police flooded Heuermann’s Massapequa Park block and home, according to Newsday, while the suspect’s wife and two children were elsewhere.
“The work of the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task force is continuing,” Tania Lopez, a spokeswoman for Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney told Newsday. “We do not comment on investigative steps while ongoing.”
Heuermann, 60, was busted on a midtown Manhattan street outside his architecture firm in July before an army of cops descended on his home, scouring his Nassau County residence as the once-cold case burst into a law enforcement inferno.
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to brutally executing four women in the long-unsolved Gilgo Beach murders — a lethal spree that fascinated and horrified New Yorkers for more than a decade.
in July, Heuermann pleaded not guilty to killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, young Long Island sex workers.
In January, he was charged with killing a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who was last seen alive on July 9, 2007.
A tip from a Long Island pimp in 2022, along with DNA lifted from a pizza crust recovered from the suspect’s trash and Heuermann’s chilling web searches, steered investigators to the defendant and his green Chevrolet Avalanche, authorities said.
Massapequa Park is about 15 miles from Gilgo Beach, where a total of 10 bodies of murder victims — eight women, an Asian man dressed as a woman and a toddler — were found in 2010 and 2011.
The corpses were recovered as police searched for Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker who disappeared into a marshy area in Oak Beach in May 2010. Gilbert vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the wetlands.
Months later, a police officer and his cadaver dog were looking for her body in the thicket along nearby Ocean Parkway when they discovered the remains of a different woman. Within days, three other bodies were found, all within a short walk of one another.
By spring 2011, the number climbed to 10 sets of human remains. Some were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, creating 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.
Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about three miles east of where the other 10 victims were discovered. Cops said her death was an accident, something her family has disputed for more than a decade.
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(With Emma Seiwell)
