“Cold Case” solved in Long Island, where a 59-year-old architect was arrested on suspicion of being the serial killer who killed several women and buried their bodies on Gilgo Beach in New York over 13 years ago. The man, Rex Heuerman, has been charged with DNA evidence on the box of a pizza he ate that matches that of at least three of the victims, according to American media. Heuerman was arrested Thursday night and pleaded not guilty. The judge upheld his arrest, stressing the “extreme depravity” of the crimes he was charged with. The man led a double life: by day the architecture studio near the Empire State Building, by night the videos of tortured women and the 92 pistols kept in a safe at home 50 kilometers from New York.
Charged with murdering three prostitutes
The man has been charged with the murders of three prostitutes – Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello – whose bodies were found in Gilgo Beach in 2010, and he is also suspected of the death of a fourth, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose remains were found found nearby. District Attorney Ray Tierney said the four women were “found in similar positions, similarly bound with tape or straps, three of them wrapped in burlap.”
Framed by the DNA comparison
The charges against Heuerman are based on telephone traffic data linking him to the victims and a pickup truck seen near the women’s home. The alleged serial killer used disposable phones to communicate with his victims. Investigators later compared the DNA of a hair found on the burlap the bodies were wrapped in to DNA found on a pizza box that Heuerman threw in the trash can outside his Manhattan home in January. The alleged murders all occurred while Heuermann’s wife and children were out of town. Brainard-Barnes disappeared in 2007, Barthelemy in 2009, Waterman and Costello in 2010. But the crimes could have been more. Between 2010 and 2011, the remains of eleven people (nine women, one man and a small child) were found on Gilgo Beach. Four of the bodies, including those of the man and child, have not yet been identified.
