Suffolk County police on Lengthy Island introduced a surprising growth on Friday in a case that’s obsessed followers of true crime for over a decade. Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect, was arrested in what’s generally known as the Gilgo Seashore serial killings, at the least ten deaths that stretch way back to the Nineteen Nineties.
A number of of the victims, in addition to the then-abortive seek for the killer, have been immortalized in Robert Kolker’s 2013 non-fiction bestseller Misplaced Women: An American Unsolved Thriller. A high-profile dramatic adaptation of that ebook, starring Amy Ryan and Gabriel Byrne, dropped on Netflix in 2020. Although it didn’t make a lot of a splash on the time (the rising pandemic overshadowed its launch on March 13), with the story on the entrance web page of each paper within the nation, it’s doubtless Misplaced Women will see an uptick in views on the platform in coming days, although police say its central determine won’t be one of many Lengthy Island serial killer’s precise victims.
A grand jury had charged Heuermann with six counts of homicide for the slayings of Melissa Barthelemy in 2009, and Megan Waterman and Amber Costello in 2010, in keeping with Suffolk County District Legal professional Ray Tierney. He is additionally “the prime suspect within the 2007 disappearance and loss of life of a fourth lady, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, in keeping with a bail utility from prosecutors,” however has but to be charged in that case, in keeping with CNN.
Heuermann has denied all involvement within the deaths and entered a plea of not responsible on all fees.
To only about everybody’s shock, actor Billy Baldwin popped up on social media to substantiate that he went to highschool with the suspect. “Thoughts-boggling… Massapequa is in shock,” he mentioned.
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In a subsequent Instagram publish, Baldwin wrote that his tweeted point out of DNA check package 23andMe was a reference to a apply generally known as forensic DNA, by which comparable exams are used to hyperlink individuals by way of relations to previous crimes. “When individuals permit their 23 and Me DNA outcomes to be posted publicly, it could possibly typically resolve a chilly case crime or paternity challenge as a result of they’ll hyperlink somebody’s youngster or niece or nephew to a suspect by their 23 and Me outcomes,” Baldwin mentioned.
Investigators say it was cellphone information and a particular pickup truck that directed them towards Heuermann, and the AP studies that the DNA proof in query was recovered from a pizza crust discarded by Heuermann and strands of his spouse’s hair that police say matched proof discovered on one of many victims.
That sufferer, in addition to others linked to the case, have been discovered alongside a freeway close to Heuermann’s residence between 2010 and 2011, solely after the mom of one other lacking lady—Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in 2010—pushed police to look the realm. Throughout that search, the stays of a number of different girls, most of them intercourse employees, have been discovered alongside Ocean Parkway within the tony Lengthy Island enclave of Oak Seashore. A number of different our bodies have been discovered within the space in years since, a lot of whom police say have been killed by the identical individual. Till Friday, no arrests have ever been made, nor have been any suspects introduced within the homicides.
