Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann pleads not guilty to three murders

Long Island architect Rex Heuermann pleaded not guilty Friday to brutally executing three women in the long-unsolved Gilgo Beach murders — a lethal spree that fascinated and horrified New Yorkers for more than a decade.

The accused predator stood mutely during a Long Island hearing after stating his name, with defense attorney Michael Brown entering the plea before telling Criminal Court Judge Richard Ambro that his client insisted on his innocence.

Heuermann, 59, was busted on a Manhattan street before an army of cops descended on his Massapequa Park home Thursday night, scouring his Nassau County residence as the once-cold case burst into a law enforcement inferno.

A chilling 32-page court filing charged the defendant with three counts of first-degree murder and three more of second-degree murder for the killings of sex workers Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello in 2009 and 2010.

Heuermann was also identified as the prime suspect in the murder of a fourth victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen alive on July 9, 2007, in New York City. Their bodies were all found bound with tape or belts by the killer, officials said.

Court papers also said he made taunting calls to the sister of Barthlemy after the murder.

The suspect was arrested around 8:30 p.m. Thursday outside 373 Fifth Ave., near his Midtown office — where state and Suffolk County investigators descended Friday with a search warrant, sources said.

“The Gilgo Beach task force ... did place one individual under arrest, and he’s currently in custody,” confirmed Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison outside the suspect’s home.

Harrison, who made the investigation a priority last year, spoke shortly before police towed a black pickup truck from the suspect’s driveway.

Heuermann allegedly remained fascinated with the slayings across the years. He “searched obsessively” on the internet for facts about the killings — including the names of the women he is accused of killing and podcasts and documentaries about the case, said Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney.

Court papers say Heuermann’s searches over the last 16 months included the names of four victims and the words “Long Island serial killer.”

Heuermann’s internet searches also covered “pictures of the victims, pictures of their relatives, their sisters, their children ... He was trying to locate those individuals. In addition to that there was a lot of torture porn and what you would consider depictions of women being abused, being raped and being killed,” Tierney said. Heuermann also searched for child porn, court papers say.

Papers filed in Heuermann’s case detailed cellphone site tower information used in tracing the defendant’s whereabouts and burner phones used to contact his doomed victims as part of the damning evidence in the case.

For each murder, Heuermann used a different burner phone to contact his victims, Tierney said. “And shortly after the death of the victims he then would get rid of the burner phone,” said the DA.

When FBI investigators triangulated the data from the different burner phones “they immediately honed in on some similarities,” said Tierney.

They saw that the phone calls went through four cell towers in the Massapequa Park area. “The perpetrator of these crimes was probably located in that area during at or around the times of the murders,” Tierney said.

The FBI investigators also traced calls with the burner phones to part of Midtown Manhattan, where Heuermann was later found to have an office.

Task force investigators also found that cell phone data put Heuermann in the area around Gilgo Beach at the point where one of the victims went missing, a source told The News.

DNA evidence is also key to the case, say court papers. A pizza crust pulled from the defendant’s garbage this past January also linked him to a male hair found on the burlap used to “restrain and transport” victim Waterman’s naked corpse, the papers alleged.

Some of the DNA analysis used in the investigation was not technologically feasible around the time of the murders, said Tierney.

Heuermann had permits for 92 firearms, said Tierney. Authorities decided to charge him with three of the killings “out of concern for this defendant fleeing, and the danger to the community,” the prosecutor said.

“I will say to you folks that it’s extremely circumstantial in nature,” said Brown of the case against his client. “The only thing I can tell you that he did say, as he was in tears, was ‘I didn’t do this.’”

Heuermann, the father of two and a lifelong Long Islander, was slapped with a half-dozen charges in the gruesome murders where he preyed on young sex workers.

“This is a day that has a long time been coming, and hopefully a day that will bring peace to this community and to the families,” said Gov. Hochul. “Peace that has been long overdue.”

His arrest came more than a year after Suffolk County investigators announced a ramped-up effort for answers in the unsolved spate of horrific slayings. A $50,000 reward was posted in May 2022 in the killings.

“The work is not done here,” said Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone. “But this is a major, major step forward in achieving the goal that we have had from the beginning and that is again to bring closure to these families and to bring justice to the victims.”

State police and cops from both Suffolk and Nassau counties closed off a portion of the street outside Heuermann’s suburban home as the investigation of the 12-year-old murders heated up after years without answers for the victims’ families.

Massapequa Park is roughly 15 miles from Gilgo Beach, where a total of 10 murder victims — eight women, an Asian man dressed as a woman and a toddler — were found in 2010 and 2011.

The bodies were recovered as police searched for Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker who disappeared into a marshy area in Oak Beach, L.I., in May 2010.

Gilbert vanished after leaving a client’s house on foot in the seafront community of Oak Beach, disappearing into the wetlands.

Months later, a police officer and his cadaver dog were looking for her body in the thicket along nearby Ocean Parkway when they discovered the remains of a second woman. Within days, three other bodies were found, all within a short walk of one another.

By spring 2011, the number climbed to 10 sets of human remains. Some were later linked to dismembered body parts found elsewhere on Long Island, creating a puzzling crime scene that stretched from a park near the New York City limits to a resort community on Fire Island and out to far eastern Long Island.

Gilbert’s body was found in December 2011, about three miles east of where the other 10 victims were discovered. Cops said her death was an accident, something her family has disputed for more than a decade.

In talking about the bodies near Gilgo Beach, investigators have said several times over the years it is unlikely one person killed all the victims.

In addition to Gilbert, cops identified Waterman, Barthelemy, Brainard-Barnes, Costello, Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack as victims.

Waterman was seen on surveillance video at the Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge in the days and hours before she was killed, according to police.

John Ray, an attorney for Taylor’s family, said he was in contact with investigators on the case as recently as last week — and was told that detectives had received a “strong, credible tip” and were “closing in on an arrest.”

Cops released Gilbert’s chilling 911 call before her disappearance in the hopes to get more tips about the murders.

“There’s somebody after me!” Gilbert, 24, screamed in the rambling call. “Somebody’s after me, please. No! No! Stop no!”

The case was reopened with the aid of the FBI, and Harrison repeatedly asked the public for tips in the ongoing probe.

With Tim Balk