Gilgo Beach killings: Green Chevy Avalanche once owned by Rex Heuermann became key clue in the case

The dark green Chevrolet Avalanche once owned by suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex A. Heuermann was a key element to cracking the mystery that had stumped investigators for more than a decade. 

So why didn’t Suffolk police investigators identify Heuermann, a Manhattan architect living in Massapequa Park, as a suspect using a vehicle database 13 years earlier, when they first had the information from a witness statement?

Officials and experts say complex factors such as the way the database works and poor communication in a dysfunctional police department under corrupt leadership could be some of the factors explaining why the case wasn’t solved earlier.

David Schaller, who described himself as a roommate of Gilgo Beach victim Amber Lynn Costello, said he spoke to the police early in the investigation.

In a 2011 interview with Newsday, Schaller said the last night she was seen alive, Costello had two lengthy conversations with a man who answered a Craigslist ad she had placed and she had agreed to meet him in a car parked around the corner.

Schaller told Newsday the client was paying $450 for two hours or $1,500 if she spent the night with him, but she couldn’t bring her phone or anything else or tell anyone where she was going.

“You can’t do this,” he said he told her. “At least take a phone so you can call me if something happens.”

Costello refused, he said. “That’s not what he wants,” Schaller said he remembered Costello saying. “She said it was big money.”

Schaller declined several requests for interviews with Newsday after Heuermann’s arrest, but he told The Associated Press in July that he met with detectives multiple times in the roughly two years after Costello was killed. But then the meetings stopped, he said.

Heuermann, 60, was arrested outside his Manhattan office on July 13 and has pleaded not guilty to first- and second-degree murder charges in the killings of three women — Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Costello — whose remains were found near Gilgo Beach 13 years ago.

Authorities also have said Heuermann is the “prime suspect” in the slaying of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose remains were found with the other three victims.

Questions about police’s handling of the case arise

“One of the cardinal rules of homicide investigations is to work chronologically, beginning from the last time the person was seen alive,” said Fred Klein, former chief of the major offense bureau of the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office and a visiting assistant professor of law at Hofstra University in Hempstead.

Klein said sex workers rarely work alone and usually have someone “who is keeping track of whose car they’re getting into,” making a roommate or someone who acted as an intermediary or was at least aware of the clients, a valuable witness.

“From a criminal investigative standpoint, whether the guy is part of the criminal world or not, it shouldn’t really make a difference in terms of following a lead,” Klein said. “Regardless of the background of the witness, I would think they’d want to focus on what they had to say.”

A former law enforcement official previously involved in the case noted the database search that helped crack the case can be an intricate process.

“Whatever leads that we had were followed up on the best they could be followed up on, whatever technology, whatever databases were available at the time,” said the former investigator. “It’s not always clear cut.”

Suffolk County Legis. Rob Trotta, a former police detective, said questions need to be answered about what went wrong.

“It’s a major blunder,” said Trotta, who said the “lawman’s search” that led to Heuermann’s arrest is routine.

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney defended the work of police in the case.

“I think the police work was there,” Tierney said. “I think if the police work was shoddy, we would have never been able to charge anyone in this case. I don’t think the police work was shoddy.”

But Tierney, who dismissed reports of a cover-up when he met with a group of Newsday reporters in August, said there was a failure of agencies to come together and work the case properly.

“That’s a leadership problem,” Tierney asserted.

The district attorney said police faced other challenges.

“When you go and you’re looking prospectively and you’ve got thousands of documents and thousands of searches and synthesizing all that information that you obtained not only from your agency, but other agencies as well, I think it’s a lot more difficult,” Tierney said.

Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison, a former NYPD chief of department who had no involvement in the Gilgo Beach investigation in its early days and took the top job in December 2021, explained why he thought it wasn’t solved sooner.

“The case went down different avenues,” Harrison said. “There were other parts of evidence that came into our attention and suspects that we were looking at. So as much as Heuermann was a client of Costello, we still had some other people we were looking at as well. And that’s what happens in homicide investigations. You have this lead but you also have other stronger leads that you have to follow as well.”

Probe began when police went looking for missing N.J. woman

The first of the remains of the Gilgo Beach victims were found on Dec. 11, 2010, while police conducted a training exercise and searched for Shannan Gilbert, a New Jersey woman working as an escort who disappeared after seeing a client in nearby Oak Beach in May 2010.

In the following months, the remains of 10 people were found — eight women, one man and a female toddler. Gilbert’s remains were later found, but authorities ruled her death accidental.

Dysfunction in Suffolk’s law enforcement community at the time the bodies started turning up in 2010 hurt the investigation.

Then-Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, now in federal prison serving his sentence for a corruption conviction, publicly sparred at the time with the Suffolk police commissioner, the late Richard Dormer, over theories in the case.

Dormer announced at a legislative meeting in December 2011 that he believed a single killer was the source of the bodies. Minutes later, Spota contradicted Dormer, saying he thought at least three killers were responsible.

Later that day, incoming County Executive Steve Bellone named a new interim police commissioner.

At the time, James Burke, a close ally of Spota, worked in the district attorney’s office, but he was soon named by Bellone as police chief, the highest ranking uniformed officer in the department.

A police department in turmoil

Burke, who early in his career had been accused of having sex with a sex worker in his patrol car, discontinued FBI involvement with the probe — a huge handicap for a police department trying to piece together a serial killer case, experts said.

“The FBI can really help out with a complex investigation, so that was a huge blow,” said Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “We know that there was a lot of chaos going on at the time that this case broke. We had a lot of things going on in the police department and Suffolk district attorney’s office that took the eye off the ball.”

And Burke forced out Dominick Varrone, the chief of detectives at the time.

Varrone did not respond to messages seeking comment about his knowledge of the witness statement and what investigative steps were taken.

Burke, who was arrested last month by county park police and charged with public lewdness and indecent exposure at a park in Farmingville, served 46 months in prison for beating a handcuffed prisoner who stole a duffel bag containing a gun belt, ammunition, sex toys and pornography from the chief’s unmarked police SUV in 2012.

Spota and his top deputy, Christopher McPartland, are currently serving 5-year federal prison terms in connection with their roles in the Burke cover-up.

It wasn’t just corruption inside the police department and district attorney’s office that impaired the investigation.

“Spota’s office didn’t believe in cell tower dumps as an investigative lead. They thought it was a fishing expedition,” said a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case, referring to the method of identifying suspects using troves of cellphone location data.

Former Suffolk District Attorney Timothy Sini, who brought the FBI back into the investigation in December 2015, didn’t see eye-to-eye with the lead investigator, Pat Portela, on the case for several years. Portela, now retired, could not be reached for comment.

Sini did not respond to a request for comment.

In May 2021, Harrison said he assigned three detectives and a supervisor to work on the case full time.

“They were told to go back through everything,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They divided up the work.”

The new Gilgo task force goes to work

By the time the new Gilgo task force started to take a new crack at the case, there were 10 file cabinets full of evidence in the “Gilgo Room” in the police department’s Homicide Squad in Yaphank, officials said.

Harrison, who was nominated as commissioner in December 2021 and was sworn in the following month, said he got a Gilgo briefing from Det. Lt. Kevin Beyrer, the chief of the department’s Homicide Squad, at the beginning of his tenure.

“I had him break down the whole case for me, talk me through what was done, and be honest, like what can we do a little more on, and certain things I heard, I was like, ‘OK, that’s good work,’ “ he said.

Asked whether the police department and district attorney’s office were working together on the case when he arrived, Harrison said: “You don’t start working with the district attorney’s office until you have a subject identified. Investigators investigate. Prosecutors prosecute. I know they [the DA’s office] had their own investigators that were assigning with certain cell site information when it came to the box. … They created the box. They got it down to 1,500 houses in the Massapequa Park area. So there was work done. We knew that there was a place where he could possibly be working in midtown Manhattan.”

Investigators get their big first break

Fast forward to March 14, 2022, after a task force comprising those detectives, the FBI and investigators from the district attorney’s office, the state police and the sheriff’s office was created, a state police investigator identified Heuermann as a possible suspect.

A distinctive first-edition Chevrolet Avalanche had been owned by Heuermann, but the registration was transferred to his brother, a South Carolina resident, officials said. After Heuermann’s arrest, the FBI seized the vehicle and brought it back to Suffolk County. It’s unclear what, if any, potential evidence police has been found in the vehicle.

“We didn’t have access to that database,” Harrison said when asked why the police department had not been able to access the information on Heuermann’s Chevrolet Avalanche earlier. That assertion, however, was disputed by law enforcement officials who said those types of searches are routine.

Harrison said investigators re-interviewed the witness once they identified Heuermann as a suspect.

“He was very helpful,” Harrison said of the witness, who he didn’t identify by name. “Once we were able to put that green Avalanche into that box, of course we had to get him to kind of talk about that person again, that ‘ogre’ that he was described as initially, so we went to re-interview and see what he had to say.”

While the witness statement describing a Chevrolet Avalanche was key to identifying Heuermann as a suspect, the cellphone site analysis and DNA evidence provided prosecutors the evidence needed for an arrest.

Other evidence and new DNA technology

Advancements in DNA technology allowed investigators to link Heuermann and his wife to the victims through strands of hair found on the remains of Brainard-Barnes, Waterman and Costello, prosecutors have said.

Investigators linked Heuermann to a hair with Waterman’s remains through a slice of pizza Heuermann allegedly discarded outside his office. Prosecutors later sought a cheek swab from Heuermann to conduct further DNA testing, which hasn’t been released.

Prosecutors also have alleged that Heuermann’s cellphone billing records correspond to cell site locations for the burner cellphones used to arrange meetings with three of the four victims.

One issue that multiple law enforcement officials disputed is the notion that investigators didn’t pursue the case aggressively because the victims were sex workers.

“Anyone in law enforcement knows, it doesn’t matter, a human life is a human life,” said one law enforcement official, adding about the search on Ocean Parkway: “I don’t think we could have looked any harder.”

The witness statement from Costello’s roommate, who lived in West Babylon at the time, helped investigators identify Heuermann, prosecutors said.

Costello got a call from a burner phone purportedly used by Heuermann on Sept. 1, 2010. A man that investigators think was Heuermann, who was seeking a paid sexual liaison, came inside the house, but she and others there executed a ruse to take his money, court papers said.

A man posing as her boyfriend showed up and the client said he was only her friend and left. But that same prospective customer contacted Costello the next night and she left with him. That was the last time she was seen alive, court papers said.

A suspect’s physical description emerges

The witness, who police and prosecutors have declined to identify by name, described the man as a white male in his mid-40s who was about 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-6, according to court documents. He looked like an “ogre,” the witness told police, and had “dark bushy hair” and “big oval style 1970s-type eyeglasses.”

The witness also described seeing a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche “pass the house” after Costello left, the court documents said.

After investigators arrested Heuermann in July, they spent almost two weeks searching his Massapequa Park home, his office in Manhattan and his properties in South Carolina and Las Vegas. They also confiscated the Chevy Avalanche that was in South Carolina at his brother’s property. The vehicle arrived in the Suffolk lab just a few days after Heuermann’s arrest.

“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?”

By Nicole Fuller

nicole.fuller@newsday.com@NicoleFuller

Nicole Fuller is Newsday's senior criminal justice reporter. She began working at Newsday in 2012 and previously covered local government.