Gilgo Beach killings: Victim Megan Waterman remembered by family, those who searched for her

After police arrested and charged a man with killing Megan Waterman and at least two other women and stashing their bodies off a wind-swept stretch of Gilgo Beach, reaction has been bittersweet from the family who loved her and the people who once worked to find her alive.

“It's like we’re starting all over again,” Waterman’s second cousin, Amanda Seavey, of Milbridge, Maine, said this week. “And now we’ve finally got the first step toward moving forward.”

Police, on July 13, arrested 59-year-old architect Rex A. Heuermann of Massapequa Park in connection with the serial killings. A day later, he pleaded not guilty to three counts each of first- and second-degree murder in the deaths of Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, whose bodies were found in December 2010. Authorities have also called him the “prime suspect” in the killing of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose body was also found at the time in the same area. All of the women worked as sex workers, authorities have said.

Waterman, 22, a single mother from Scarborough, Maine, was reported missing on June 8, 2010. She had dropped out of high school and was working in sandwich shops when in 2009 she met Akeem Cruz of Brooklyn, a man later convicted of the interstate transportation of Waterman for the purpose of prostitution. Waterman would regularly travel to Long Island to meet clients, her family and police told Newsday at the time. Her family added that she had taken a bus to New York City with Cruz just before Memorial Day 2010.

Seavey said that Waterman, her "little cousin" and mom to daughter Lily, was "such a friendly and outgoing person who had so many friends."

As news spread of Heuermann's arrest, family members of some of the victims reacted in anger. Melissa Cann, Brainard-Barnes' sister, called Heuermann a "coward" and a "monster" in a Facebook message she sent to a Newsday reporter.

Seavey, though, said she simply “lost it when I heard the news [of Heuermann’s arrest]. … I don’t know why it took 13 years. But we never gave up hope. We never gave up hope.”

In the months before Waterman's remains were discovered, Scarborough police searched for her, and family members mounted a desperate search of their own. Her mother, Lorraine Ela, contacted a nonprofit that helped families searching for loved ones. Her older brother, Greg Waterman, and her best friend, Nicole Haycock, pawned possessions to get to Long Island to search themselves. The family visited a Hauppauge ShopRite to hand out information about Waterman.

Others reacting to the news of Heuermann's arrest included Scarborough Police Det. Donald Blatchford, the initial investigator in Waterman’s missing persons case. That investigation had lasted about six months, but he had followed the work of the task force and knew in advance of the arrest, he said.

“There wasn’t a day that went by that you forget about something like that,” Blatchford said. “You tend to hold on to those cases that do not get solved in a fairly quick manner. It’s not a matter of failure or disappointment, but you want to get information for the family.”

Blatchford said his department’s search for Waterman had led to several other investigations that revealed “a degree of human trafficking going on between New York and Maine” that previously had run “somewhat under the radar.”

He described semi-organized criminal activity involving “recruiting and, in some cases, intimidating females” from Maine, Connecticut and upstate New York into working as prostitutes and drug mules carrying drugs that included cocaine from the metro area up north. Dozens of women were involved, he said.

“It really opened our eyes to a problem we didn’t know we had up here,” Blatchford said.

Those investigations led to multiple prosecutions, he said. Cruz was sentenced to three years in prison in 2013 for federal prostitution offenses, and in 2021 to more than eight years on a federal drug charge.

Blatchford said Waterman’s death “opened a number of people’s eyes in how dangerous that type of profession and those associations are.”

Blatchford praised the work of the police task force that arrested Heuermann. “I think he’s facing overwhelming evidence.”

Ela didn’t live to see the arrest of a suspect in her daughter’s killing. She died last August, according to an online obituary.

But Cynthia Caron, founder of LostNMissing, a Londonderry, New Hampshire, nonprofit that helps families search for loved ones, said Ela never lost her conviction that there would be an arrest.

“I don’t think she ever wavered," she said. "I don’t recall Lorraine crying, or ever being in a defeated mode.”

The two became friends when they worked together on Waterman’s case, and Ela began volunteering with Caron’s group.

Caron said that Ela also led a group of family members of Gilgo victims — mainly women — who “prayed together, searched together and stayed together.”

When authorities found Waterman's body, Caron said, Ela “shifted into the next mode, seeking justice.” The mission felt all the more urgent because “there were multiple bodies found, and they kept adding up, and adding up,” Caron recalled.

Ela’s view, which she shared, was that “they need to find this person and put a stop to it — that many bodies, they’re not going to stop.”