A community in shock. After more than ten years of investigating serial discoveries of the corpses of prostitutes near Long Island beacheseast of New York, a suspect has been arrested and charged in the murders of three of them, authorities said Friday.
In court on Friday, suspect Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old New York architect, was charged and pleaded not guilty to the 2009 and 2010 murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, while he is the number one suspect in the murder of a fourth, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, according to a court document from the Suffolk County prosecutor’s office.
strangled victims
According to the American media, this father was arrested Thursday evening near his offices in Manhattan, while his residence, in the village of Massapequa Park which is near the beaches where the victims were found, was searched.
The victims, discovered within a radius of less than 500 meters near Gilgo Beach, were sex workers between the ages of 22 and 27. They were all strangled and found “in the same position, tied in the same way or by belts or duct tape, and three of them wrapped in a burlap-like material”, explained during an interview. prosecutor Ray Tierney’s press conference.
The case began with the report in May 2010 of the disappearance of a 24-year-old prostitute from neighboring New Jersey, Shannon Gilbert, for whom Rex Heuermann is not being prosecuted.
11 bodies found
In total, the remains of eleven human bodies, nine women, a man and a girl, were found between 2010 and 2011 along the beaches of Gilgo Beach, Oak Beach, in bramble bushes located between the sand and the road. , among the dunes. These discoveries had frightened the local population and held the police in check for years, without it being known, to this day, if one or more killers had raged in the region.
According to the court document, the investigation focused on the architect in 2022 after it was discovered that a vehicle in which a victim had been seen at the time of his disappearance was registered in his name. From there, investigators uncovered DNA and phone evidence against the suspect.
According to the prosecutor, Rex Heuermann also conducted hundreds of internet searches on the investigation, with questions such as “Why hasn’t the Long Island serial killer been arrested?” “. Pornographic torture images were also found on his computer, the prosecutor said.
This series of miscellaneous facts had been adapted in 2020 in the documentary Lost Girlsstreaming on Netflix.