Gilgo Beach killings: Prosecutors to rely on DNA, cellphone records and other evidence to make their case against suspected serial killer Rex Heuermann, experts say

The few strands of hair found with the remains of three young women in the thick brush near Gilgo Beach 13 years ago that helped crack the long-unsolved case will loom large in the prosecution of suspected serial killer Rex A. Heuermann, the Massapequa Park architect charged with killing three women, legal experts told Newsday.

The DNA evidence against Heuerman, who has pleaded not guilty and professed his innocence in meetings with his lawyers, amounts to “a prosecutor’s dream,” said former Suffolk County prosecutor Steven Wilutis.

“It could have been somebody else picked up the hair someplace else, but on three different bodies?” Wilutis said. “I’d just put that DNA in and I’d rest [the case.]”

The DNA, coupled with cellphone records connecting Heuermann to the women around the times they disappeared and the similarities in the way the bodies were disposed of, is the type of evidence that the prosecution is expected to make central to their case, law enforcement and legal experts told Newsday.

Those same experts also cautioned that no case is a slam dunk and that any skilled defense attorneys will attempt to poke holes in the prosecution’s evidence.

Evolving DNA science

The 13-year gap between the discoveries of the bodies and an arrest in the case, which prosecutors have said allowed for improvements in DNA testing and cellular phone data collection and analysis that led to Heuermann’s arrest, could also pose the biggest challenge to Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney and his team of prosecutors.

Heuermann’s defense team, for example, is expected to question whether the degradation of the hairs over time makes the DNA evidence unreliable. And, the experts told Newsday, the memories of key witnesses may have faded over time, or others could have died, winnowing the pool of potential witnesses who could testify if the case goes to trial.

High-profile scandals that have tarnished the police department and the district attorney's office are also expected to take center stage during a possible trial, said experts, who predict defense attorneys will attack the credibility of police witnesses and their evidence-gathering abilities during a time when ex-Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota and his protegee, former Suffolk Chief of Department James Burke — now both convicted felons — were the top law-enforcement figures in the county.

Heuermann, 59, was arrested July 13 and pleaded not guilty to first- and second-degree murder charges in the killings of Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Lynn Costello, three of 10 victims whose remains were found along Ocean Parkway. Authorities have said Heuermann is the “prime suspect” in the slaying of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose remains were found with the other three victims in 2010. All four of the women were sex workers.

Tierney has called the DNA evidence “significant.” The link was made through what is called “an abandonment sample” after an FBI agent who was surveilling Heuermann retrieved a pizza box containing pizza crust and a “used napkin” that Heuermann allegedly discarded in a trash can outside his Manhattan office.

"A questioned hair ... was recovered from the bottom of the burlap utilized to constrain the remains of Megan Waterman ... On January 26, 2023, defendant Rex A. Heuermann discarded a pizza box which contained a partially eaten pizza crust and a used napkin ... recovered by FBI ..."Source: Court documents filed in the case

Compared against the DNA sample obtained from the crust and napkin, Heuermann could not be excluded as a match for male hair found at the bottom of burlap used to “restrain and transport” the remains of Waterman, according to a bail letter filed by prosecutors in the case. Prosecutors noted, however, that the forensic lab concluded that 99.96% of the North American population has been excluded as a match.

“Because it was out there for so long, because it was exposed to the elements, those hairs were degraded so you couldn’t use traditional DNA analysis on it,” Tierney said, explaining how the passage of time helped to advance the investigation. “You would have to wait and use mitochondrial DNA, and back in 2010, the technology wasn’t there for mitochondrial DNA. So the investigation proceeded but also technology proceeded as well.”

Tierney’s team has already attempted to bolster the DNA evidence against Heuermann, successfully arguing earlier this month for the presiding judge in the case, Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei, to order Heuermann, who is being held at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead, to submit to a cheek swab for comparison. The swab is expected to be taken sometime later this month.

"If the defendant's DNA from a buccal swab sample matches the mitochondrial DNA profile developed from the hair recovered from Megan Waterman's remains, there is scientific evidence of the Defendant's contact not only with Ms. Waterman ... but also with the burlap utilized to restrain and transport her human remains."Source: Court documents filed in the case

Fred Klein, the former chief of the major offense bureau for the Nassau County District Attorney’s office and a visiting professor of law at Hofstra University, said he likes circumstantial evidence like DNA and cellphone records because it “doesn’t lie” or “make mistakes.”

Prosecutors have also said they linked Heuermann to the remains of Waterman and Costello through his wife, Asa Ellerup, who “cannot be excluded” as the owner of the female hairs found on one of the bodies. Prosecutors have said they don’t believe she had any knowledge of Heuermann’s alleged crimes and her hairs, according to the bail letter, were likely transferred from Heuermann’s clothing.

“You've got his hair and his wife's hair with the bodies where they were disposed, but how did it get there? When did it get there?” said Klein, who referred to DNA as after-the-fact evidence. “It's very strong evidence connecting him and his wife to the bodies, but it's not a slam dunk, because there's always questions about how it got there.”

"The People essentially concede that they have no evidence establishing that defendant Rex A. Heuermann actually ever came into contact with the pizza crust or the used napkin found in the discarded pizza box... "Source: Court documents filed by Heuermann's attorney in the case

Witnesses lost, memories fade over time

The biggest challenge for prosecutors, according to Klein, would be “losing witnesses” with the passage of time.

“The more time that transpires from the crime to the trial, more problems seep in with witnesses’ availability, memory and cooperation,” Klein said. "If they interviewed them 13 years ago and they interview them again and things are a little different, inconsistencies tend to affect their credibility.”

The legal experts and former law enforcement officials interviewed for this story also cautioned that nobody outside of the probe currently knows the full breadth of the evidence gathered by the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force.

Investigators have seized what Tierney called a “voluminous” amount of potential evidence from Heuermann’s Massapequa Park home, two storage units he kept nearby, a Chevy Avalanche he used to own, his Midtown Manhattan office and other properties.

Tierney has said investigators were looking for trace evidence, such as blood, fibers and DNA, but has declined to detail what, if anything, prosecutors have found to advance the case.

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said prosecutors always want more evidence. 

“You could have the pope and three nuns as witnesses and they still want more,” said Giacalone, the author of “The Cold Case Handbook,” published in May.

Tierney, in public statements and in court documents, has detailed the other evidence that culminated in Heuermann’s indictment. Cell site data allegedly links Heuermann’s phone to burner phones allegedly used to arrange meetings with three of the four victims. Heuermann purchased the burner phones before the victims disappeared, Tierney said, “then shortly after the death of the victims, he would get rid of the burner phones.”

In a 14-month period that prosecutors tracked his online activity, Heuermann allegedly searched over 200 times for news on the investigation, Tierney said. That activity, obtained through warrants, showed Heuermann was “compulsively searching” for photographs of the victims and some of their family members, Tierney said.

And Heuermann’s wife and children were on vacation and out of New York state when the killings of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello occurred, Tierney has said. 

Prosecutors also have another key piece of evidence against Heuermann, the first-generation green Chevrolet Avalanche that an eyewitness described as being at the home of Costello on the day before she disappeared. A state police investigator used that witness statement to search a database for owners of that distinct vehicle, which first introduced Heuermann’s name as a potential suspect to investigators on March 14, 2022.

It’s unclear if that witness will testify at a potential trial, but Wilutis, the former Suffolk prosecutor, said not being able to produce eyewitnesses can be a problem with any aging investigation. But he doesn’t see it as a major obstruction in the case against Heuermann.

“This is a very circumstantial case, but it's very strong,” Wilutis said of the evidence made public to date. “Sometimes circumstantial evidence can be stronger than direct evidence.”

 Wilutis recalled working the trial of Rudolph Hoff of Freeport, who was convicted by a jury of killing Kathryn Ann Damm after they left a Lindenhurst bar in October 1954. Wilutis, who was 6 years old when the killing occurred, served as lead prosecutor when a jury convicted Hoff at trial 26 years later.

“I had a lot of a lot of time to work with there and a lot of problems,” Wilutis said of the 1980 trial that ended with Hoff sentenced to life in prison. “The problem was witnesses disappeared, they died.” 

History of police corruption

New York City criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said if he was defending Heuermann, he would tell the jury about the history of corruption in the Suffolk County Police Department and the district attorney's office. 

Burke froze out the FBI after the agency began investigating Burke for beating a criminal suspect in 2012 and participating in a cover-up of the assault. Burke pleaded guilty to civil rights violations and conspiracy to obstruct justice in 2016 and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. Spota is serving a five-year prison sentence for orchestrating the cover-up. They were also leading the Gilgo probe at the time.

Spota publicly quarreled with then-Suffolk Police Commissioner Richard Dormer, over conflicting theories on whether one or more killers were responsible for the 10 slayings.

“They had evidence they could have done something with 13 years ago," Lichtman  said. "Why didn’t they do anything with it years ago? All of a sudden he (Heuermann) is guilty? I would turn it around and make them explain why they didn’t arrest him years ago.”

 He said he would point out there is a lot of pressure on officials to make an arrest. “Everybody wants it wrapped up. There is pressure to wrap it up,” he said. 

Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, professor emeritus of forensic science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said prosecutors can never be too confident.

“It takes just one juror to upset the apple cart,” he said.

The physical evidence in the case likely degraded in the amount of time the human remains sat near Gilgo Beach before being located by police,” Kobilinsky said, citing weather, animals and insect bacteria as factors that likely caused the evidence to breakdown and could cause problems for prosecutors.

 But Kobilinsky noted that serial killers often keep souvenirs from their crimes.

“You [don’t] know what they found in his house,” he said of the currently undisclosed evidence gathered through search warrants last month. 

Retired Suffolk Judge William Condon, who previously tried homicide cases as an assistant district attorney, spoke of one double-murder trial he presided over where prosecutors proved one of the killings almost entirely through phone records.

“The phone pinged off of certain cell tower that put the defendant on a certain date at a certain time in a certain area,” Condon said, adding that prosecutors still had to present that evidence in a way that was easy for the jury to understand.

“You have to keep it simple,” Condon said.

Klein, who in 1994 tried Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin for the murders of 17 women, said that while it can be difficult laying out all the evidence when someone is accused in multiple killings, the volume of evidence can also help convince a jury. Rifkin is currently serving a 203-year prison sentence.

“It's less likely that the defendant is innocent when you've got so much evidence pointing to that person for multiple crimes,” Klein said.

CORRECTION: Heuermann emerged as a potential suspect to Gilgo investigators on March 14, 2022.  A previous version of this story had the wrong year.