Although he couldn’t offer details, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison says that suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann was engaging in “disturbing” activity as police surveilled him in the months before his arrest in July.
Heuermann, 59, has been charged with the murders of three of the Gilgo 4 — four women found dead on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in December 2010, wrapped in burlap — and is the prime suspect in the death of the fourth.
“We were able to bring comfort to three families, we’re very close to a fourth one, but we still have more work to do to identify the subject or subjects that were involved with the other bodies that were discovered,” Harrison told Newsday in a lengthy interview on Wednesday.
At least 11 bodies have been found on and in close proximity to Gilgo Beach, including a man and a toddler, as CrimeOnline has reported. But police have not connected Heuermann to any of the other killings.
“I wish I could give you an answer,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you at this time. Is Rex Heuermann going to be held accountable for the other bodies on Ocean Parkway? Time will tell.”
Harrison, a 30-year veteran of the New York Police Department, left that job in 2021 to head up the Suffolk agency. Almost immediately he created a task force to investigate the Gilgo Beach murders after learning there was only one detective assigned to the case.
“When I found out that there was one investigator assigned to this case, I was like, ‘this case is never gonna be solved like that, especially if this person, this detective, is also catching other cases,’” said Harrison, who added three more investigators to the case and brought in other agencies. “ … We’re going to take these individuals and put them in a place where they’re only looking at Gilgo.”
The FBI was a hard sell, he said, but they eventually came on board, and it was an FBI agent who retrieved the pizza crust and napkin from Heuermann’s Manhattan office garbage that helped tie him to the crimes.
“Once we got Rex in our sights, we had to figure out how to collect his DNA,” Harrison said. “That was something that they really had a major role in, gave us some guidance in sending us to the right labs. … Once we got those matches, I don’t think I need to tell you anything else, that was really a place where we went from reasonable suspicion to probable cause.”
Heuermann’s attorney has challenged the DNA found on the pizza crust, claiming it didn’t provide probable cause to arrest his client, who has pleaded not guilty. But this week, a judge ordered Heuermann to provide a DNA sample. CrimeOnline’s Nancy Grace said that would prove the DNA belonged to the suspect, “not his purported DNA off a pizza crust.”
Heuermann was identified as a suspect in March 2022 and surveilled in “a host of different ways” until his July 13 arrest.
“I can’t talk about if he was preparing to kill again …” Harrison told Newsday. “He’s somebody that was still engaging in activity that was disturbing, be it his internet searches, be it engaging in other activities that he shouldn’t be engaging in. That’s something I was very, very passionate about, regarding ‘we need to see what his lifestyle is.’”
“I’m very confident that Mr. Heuermann’s our subject,” Harrison added. “Because of my confidence, I’m gonna call him what I wanna call him — somebody that ruined families, somebody who’s a predator, somebody who shattered lives. And not just one, several, and there may be more. I didn’t say that there is, but there may be more.”
But, Harrison said, detectives still don’t believe that Shannan Gilbert, whose disappearance in 2010 led to the discovery of bodies on Gilgo Beach, will turn out to be a murder victim.
“It’s a horrible accident and as of right now, myself and the investigators assigned to the homicide squad still believe it was just an incident where she ran into the marsh and unfortunately drowned on that horrible day,” Harrison said.
Suffolk County’s autopsy listed Gilbert’s cause of death as “undetermined.” A lawyer representing Gilbert’s estate, however, says that a second autopsy commissioned by her family said her death was “consistent with homicidal strangulation.”
Heuermann has been charged with the deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Costello, and Megan Waterman. He is the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
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[Featured image: Rex Heuermann/Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office via AP]
