“Good old fashioned police work” led to the arrest this week of a suspect in a string of killings known as the Gilgo Beach murders, CrimeOnline’s Nancy Grace says, bringing at least some closure to multiple families whose loved ones were found, dead, on the strip of Long Island beach.
Grace told Fox News it was tracking cell phone records — specifically burner phones — that was “seemingly the key” to Rex Heuermann’s arrest.
“Now, we’re hearing there may be some DNA links, but these calls cracked the case wide open,” she said.
Suffolk County police arrested Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect, late Thursday, charging him with first degree murder in three of the deaths and naming him the prime suspect in a fourth. Collectively, those four women were known as the “Gilgo 4,” as their bodies were found near to one another and wrapped in burlap sacks.
The bodies of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, and Maureen Brainerd-Barnes were found in December 2010, as investigators were searching for another woman who had disappeared in May that year. That woman’s body was found in the same area the following December. More remains were found in March and April 2011, for a total of 11 — nine women, a man, and a toddler.
While police say they’re not certain all 11 were killed by the same person, Heuermann has been charged with the deaths of Barthelemy, who disappeared in 2009, and Waterman and Costello, both of whom disappeared in 2010. He is suspected in the death of Brainerd-Barnes, who vanished in 2007.
Neighbors say Heuermann was “an everyday guy, a family man.”
“It’s disturbing because he wore a mask of respectability,” Grace said. “Every day guy. Anything but.”
Grace said she is “so thankful that an arrest has finally been made” for the families of these people.
“They have children, they have mothers, they have families searching for them, only to find that their remains were thrown off the side the beach there at Gilgo,” she said.
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