Vivid new details have emerged raising questions about why it took so long for authorities to identify and arrest accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann.
Speaking publicly for the first time since Heuermann’s arrest, Dave Schaller told the Associated Press that after his housemate, Amber Costello, and three other women were found buried on the Long Island shoreline in December 2010, he told police about someone they should investigate.
That person, Schaller said, was a hulking man who drove a Chevrolet Avalanche. Schaller knew this information because earlier that year, he had come home to find that man inside his house. Costello, who at times performed sex work, had locked herself in a bathroom.
Schaller told the AP that he and the stranger got into a fight before the man fled in the truck.
Costello is believed to have met the same client on September 2, 2010, the last say she was seen alive. One witness told investigators they saw a dark-colored truck drive past the home after she left to meet the client.
“When they told me she was dead, he was the first person who jumped in my head,” Schaller told the AP. “I’ve been picturing his face for 13 years.”
Multiple law enforcement officials told the AP that local authorities bungled the investigation and that it was plagued by an array of problems in the years following the discovery of the bodies.
Two high-ranking officials told the AP they were never made aware of the witness statements that described the vehicle or the suspect. The AP did not identify the officials because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Sources also told the AP that various scandals afflicting Suffolk County and territorial divisions among investigating agencies may have contributed to the failure to solve the case earlier.
“They made some serious blunders here,” former Suffolk County Police detective Rob Trotta told the AP.
In 2012, James Burke, then chief of the Suffolk County Police Department, stopped cooperating with the FBI as he was being investigating by the feds for his own malfeasance. Burke later pleaded guilty to violating civil rights and conspiracy to obstruct justice after he sought to cover up the assault of a man who found pornography and sex toys in his police vehicle.
Former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and another prosecutor, Christopher McPartland, also were investigated by the feds and sentenced to prison for corruption related to the Burke scandal, according to The New York Times.
It was not until just last year that the investigation really heated up. After a new task force was formed to examine the killings in 2022, a state investigator discovered the description of the truck described by Schaller. A subsequent search of a vehicle database revealed that a man named Rex Heuermann owned a Chevy Avalanche and lived in the same neighborhood where police were already focusing based on new analysis of cellphone data, the AP reports. At 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds, Heuermann also fit the suspect description provided by Schaller.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who did not take office until 2022, said he did not know why investigators had not searched the vehicle database earlier. He told the AP the information about the vehicle might have been “lost within a sea of other tips and information.”
Beyond the vehicle lead and cellphone data, innovation in DNA technology also helped connect Heuermann to the murders.
Tim Sini, who served as police commissioner after Burke and later as the district attorney, told the AP that the investigation was “in disarray” when he inherited it. While he said investigators did important work since the task force was formed to crack the case, Heuermann’s arrest was long overdue.
“I wouldn’t call it a major success,” Sini told the AP. “The case should’ve been solved earlier.”
Heuermann, arrested on July 14, faces charges of first- and second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Costello, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman. He is also the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes and authorities across the country are exploring whether he might be involved in other unsolved cases.
Schaller, who had picked the truck out from a line-up of photographs of vehicles, still doesn’t understand what took so long.
“I gave them the exact description of the truck and the dude,” Schaller told the AP. “I mean come on, why didn’t they use that?”
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty.
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[Feature Photo: Rex Heuermann/Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office via AP]
