Gilgo Beach murders: 3 questions for author of 'Lost Girls' after suspect's arrest

Robert Kolker was out walking his dog in Brooklyn, N.Y., early Friday morning when his wife texted him with some very unexpected news: More than 13 years after the bodies of five women were found on the same Long Island beach, and nearly a decade after “Lost Girls” — his bestselling book about their lives and the unsolved murders, later adapted into a Netflix movie — was published, authorities had finally arrested a suspect in the case.

“I gasped,” Kolker told Yahoo News in an interview. “I thought, ‘A suspect? Really?’ I rushed home, sat down in front of my computer and really didn't get up again for the rest of the day.”

[Gilgo Beach murders: How authorities identified the suspect]

According to police, Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect, was taken into custody without incident near his office in Manhattan on Thursday night and charged with murder in the deaths of three of the 11 victims in a long-unsolved string of killings known as the Gilgo Beach murders: Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello.

Heuermann is also the prime suspect in the 2007 disappearance and death of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, according to Suffolk County prosecutors, but has yet to be charged.

In a new Yahoo News interview series called 3 Questions, we asked Kolker to help us make sense of Heuermann’s arrest, what it means for the families of the victims and where the case goes from here. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

1. When you heard about the arrest and then saw the suspect — who prosecutors described as living in plain sight — what were your first thoughts?

He lived in Massapequa Park, and my first reaction was how close that was to where those four sets of remains were dumped. I thought, Well, that's very convenient. Then I learned he was an architect who worked in Manhattan, and I immediately thought of the cellphone pings from a few of the victims’ phones that were traced to midtown. And then I looked at his office and I saw that it was a block from Madison Square Garden, which also happens to be Penn Station, where Maureen Brainard-Barnes was last heard from before she disappeared. And so all of that seemed right to me. But the thing that really surprised me was that he had this very public-facing job at an architecture firm that had done work for a lot of high-profile, established corporate clients. And my personal feeling this whole time was that the killer would be someone who is more of a loner. Then I learned he was a family man, that he's married, that he has two kids. That also surprised me. Then we all learned more about the case and the details from the DA’s office. There were many, many more surprises: He owned 92 gun permits; his DNA is traced to the victims. And here this is someone whose name never came up before publicly. Simply amazing, amazing developments.

2. Prosecutors said they looked at his internet search history and found that not only was he looking at news about the crimes and the investigation, but he was also looking into victims' family members and following them on social media. What did you make of that?

We've known for years that he used one victim's phone to make harassing phone calls to the family members of that victim. And so clearly from the start he wanted some sort of contact, some sort of relationship with the family members of the victims. I suppose you could say that that's about domination, that's about him wanting to prolong the experience in some way. But it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if the person responsible would be Googling like crazy for years, trying to relive and prolong the experience. And it makes me wonder what else is on his computer. They raided his house, so I'm wondering what else they found.

3. The focus of your book was on the lives of the victims, and you wrote in the New York Times over the weekend that when you first started reporting on this case, these women were reduced in the media to a “single dimension” by their profession as prostitutes, that police were reluctant to even look for them when they disappeared and how much that has changed for the better. But do you have any fear that given the renewed media attention on the case and suspect, there’s a possibility of that reduction happening again?

There's always a possibility of the reduction happening again. The arrest in this case doesn't mean an end to misogyny by any stretch of the imagination. I was moved to write something because I knew that the news cycle was gonna go hard on the suspect, and it's gonna be all about him very soon. And so I thought, "Well, here's one last chance to talk about the family members, to talk about the victims and to make it clear that they aren't just plot devices in a true-crime story." However, I really do feel that at the press conference, not only did they have family members there, they also spoke in highly respectful tones about the victims. I mean, you could call it performative if you want to, but it happened. That is different. The relationship between the police and the victims’ families back when I first reported “Lost Girls” was tense, uncomfortable and highly acrimonious. At times it seemed like the police had contempt for them. And that's certainly not the case anymore.

OK, those are my “3 Questions,” but I was wondering, have you already gotten a call to work on a follow-up or an updated version of “Lost Girls”?

I've been getting a lot of calls for sure. And there are a lot of folks who would like me to continue reporting on this, and I'm definitely going to stay in it and want to see this through.

Are you expecting to be called as a witness?

I am not expecting to, but I guess life is full of surprises.