The Long Island serial killer investigation sent tendrils out across the country this week as investigators began looking at property suspect Rex Heuermann owns in South Carolina and Las Vegas.
CrimeOnline’s Nancy Grace gathered a panel of experts to talk about the latest for her Crime Stories podcast.
“I immediately said, ‘South Carolina, that is a place You can hide the body and nobody would ever find it,'” Grace said to kick off the discussion. And Las Vegas? “There’s so many transients, tourists, there’s hookers, there’s models — people could go missing there. And it’s so close to the desert.”
“The aerial view of the South Carolina property is massive,” WABC reporter Kristin Thorne pointed out. “It’s surrounded by woods.”
Even more interesting, Thorne noted, are Heuermann’s depositions in several civil cases. At the end of one, she said, the deposer asked Heuermann about his travels, and he mentions Las Vegas.
“And the deposer says, ‘Was it a pleasure trip?’ And he said, ‘You could put it that way.”
“It does raise questions about what may have happened in Las Vegas,” she added. “He’s had that property there since 2005. He bought it with his wife. but he also says in the deposition that his wife did not come with him to Las Vegas.”
The Las Vegas property, a luxury timeshare, includes an Olympic sized pool and a hot tub. Thorne pointed out the difference between that property and the Long Island home where Heuermann lived in Massapequa Park.
“I was there so I’ve seen it with my own eyes, the difference, right?” she said. “So maybe when we talk about a double life, I mean this really may have been one. The property in Massapequa Park, I’m sure people have seen the pictures, it is dilapidated. It’s the one house on that street and that whole neighborhood that if you walk down the street you would say some one strange lives at that house. Every other house is meticulous landscaping, and that house is falling down.”
As for the South Carolina property, Heuermann bought it in 2021, according to property records, reportedly so he could retire near his brother, who lives on adjacent property in the Mirror Lakes II subdivision in Chester County. The property is surrounded by a weather beaten fence with multiple “No trespassing” signs, including one with a skull and crossbones.
“It’s right out of a movie,” Thorne said. “You know. I wonder if the wife and the children went to the South Carolina property. I’m certainly curious about that. I haven’t read anywhere if they went to that property.”
Grace suggested cadaver dogs and ground penetrating radar to search the property, and Thorne agreed.
“I mean you look at the scale of this property,” she said.
Thorne said it’s going to be interesting to see what comes out of all three of Heuermann’s properties, plus two storage units that were searched this week. Another panelist, forensic consulting specialist Toby Wolson, spoke about what investigators in those two locales will be looking for.
“They need to be looking for similar homicides and disappearances that match New York ones because the MO develops over time, but it stays essentially similar from beginning to end,” he said. “So they need to see if they have homicides and disappearances in those areas that match the MO of the New York cases. And then once they do that, then they start processing those properties to see if they can find some connection between the missing or dead person and those properties.”
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[Rex Heuermann/Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office via AP]
