The bound bodies of four women are found along a desolate stretch of beach. Disturbing new details about the architect police say is a serial killer. “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.
A judge in the Gilgo Beach murders case ruled Wednesday that cutting-edge advanced DNA testing can be used in Rex Heuermann’s upcoming trial on Long Island.
The defense immediately challenged the judge’s decision, claiming it violates public health law because the lab that conducted the testing is not licensed in New York.
The judge will rule on that challenge on Sept. 23.
The families of some victims were in the courtroom, along with Heuermann’s ex-wife Asa Ellerup.
Heuermann entered the courtroom under heavy guard. He had a new haircut.
The judge’s 27-page decision is considered a major victory for Suffolk County prosecutors. Astrea Forensics connected Heuermann, his ex-wife and his adult daughter Victoria to nine hair strands found on the remains of six of the seven victims.
The defense had argued the method of genome testing from “degraded, rootless hairs” is inaccurate and inconclusive.
“The court’s decision is that the questioned hairs with regards to the nuclear DNA testing, that has been deemed admissible by the court,” Suffolk County DA Raymond Tierney said.
What is whole genome sequencing?
Investigators used what’s known as whole genome sequencing, which can extract DNA from degraded samples.
In layman’s terms, it allows old, rootless or poor quality hair strands to be used to identify a suspect if thousands of small locations on the DNA match up.
“Rather than look at 24 to 27 areas of the DNA, which is what we typically do in forensic cases, we look at thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of different variations in the DNA,” explained Michael Marciano, director of research for Syracuse University’s Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute. “If you think about your DNA, a lot of people see it as a sequence of letters. We’re looking for differences in those letters.
“We share most of our DNA with each other. We’re looking for those differences, and those differences can provide information as to the identity of an individual,” he continued.
Rex Heuermann appears in court on Sept. 3, 2025.
CBS News New York
Heuermann’s attorneys have criticized the process, calling it “magic,” but prosecutors say it’s commonly used throughout forensic science. It’s already used in health care and to exonerate or identify people, but not in murder cases.
“It’s not widespread, but this could be one of those critical moments in moving forward in forensic DNA analysis that brings this to the mainstream,” Marciano said.
The judge held a series of what are called Frye hearings to hear arguments about the possible use of this DNA testing over the past several months, during which both sides called witnesses, doctors and other experts to make their case.
The founder of the California lab that extracted the DNA testified it’s widely accepted science. Dr. Richard Green said law enforcement has referred hundreds of cases to his lab to identify human remains, and that Suffolk County alone had spent $130,000 on the Gilgo cases.
Prosecutors say DNA testing matched Heuermann to hairs that were found on belts, tape and burlap around his alleged victims. Shortly after his arrest, the district attorney’s office announced DNA from a discarded pizza box linked him to to hair found on one of the victims.
There is plenty of additional evidence in the case, prosecutors say, including a document allegedly written by Heuermann, internet searches, his vehicle, a witness, and pings on burner phones. The murders took place while his family was out of town.
Heuermann has denied it all, and wants to go to trial.
“There’s no plea deal. There’s no plea. I stood in front of you folks from day one, we are preparing for trial,” defense attorney Michael Brown said.
Renee Anderson is a digital producer at CBS New York, where she covers breaking news and other local stories. Before joining the team in 2016, Renee worked at WMUR-TV.
Allleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, center, inside courtroom at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead on Thursday, June. 6, 2024. His attorney, Michael J. Brown, is at left. (James Carbone/Newsday via Pool)
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Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect charged with murdering six women over a 31-year span, is scheduled to appear Wednesday in Suffolk County court for his latest pretrial hearing.
The 60-year-old architect from Massapequa Park has pleaded not guilty to the murders of four women known as the Gilgo Four found dead in 2010, a woman whose remains were scattered near Gilgo and in Manorville, and a woman found in the Hamptons in 1993. His attorney Michael Brown has said he is seeking to have the cases tried separately.
Heuermann has been held without bail at Suffolk County jail in Riverhead since he was arrested near his Manhattan office in July 2023, when he was charged with killing Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, and Melissa Barthelemy. In January, he was charged with the murder of the fourth Gilgo victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
The Suffolk grand jury that indicted the suspect in those cases additionally indicted him in June on charges of murdering Jessica Taylor and Sandra Castilla. Taylor’s dismembered remains were found in Manorville in July 2003 and her skull and limbs were found near Cedar Beach in 2010 during an expanded search of the Gilgo sparked by the discovery of the Gilgo Four. Castilla was found brutally stabbed in a wooded area in North Sea near Sag Harbor.
Suffolk County District Attorney Raymon Tierney has said the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force is continuing to examine evidence in the murders of five other victims found dead in the Gilgo area. Tierney has said Heuermann is the prime suspect in the murder of Valerie Mack, whose remains were also found in Manorville in 2000 and near Gilgo in 2010.
Last month, investigators released an updated composite sketch of an unidentified Asian male victim found in 2010 in the brush off Ocean Parkway. Last year, prosecutors also revealed that authorities identified Karen Vergata, the victim who had been known as Fire Island Jane Doe. Her remains were found near Davis Park in 1996 and near Tobay Beach in 2010.
And the task force is continuing to investigate whether Heuermann may also be responsible for the murders of the unidentified victim known as Peaches, whose remains were found near Hempstead Lake State Park in 1997, and her daughter, who was found near Cedar Beach in 2010.
LONG ISLAND, New York (WABC) — Even though there has been an arrest in the Gilgo Beach serial killings, investigators are still trying to solve cold case murders.
Monday, we expect to see a new sketch of one of the Gilgo Beach victims, an Asian male whose remains were recovered along ocean parkway in April 2011.
There is a sketch that was previously released in the investigation.
The goal is to learn more about the victim, including his identity, and ask for the public’s help.
Authorities are not expected to announce any new charges against Rex Heuermann, the architect and father who has pleaded not guilty to killing six women.
Investigators found 10 other bodies in the search for missing sex worker Shannan Gilbert on a stretch of beach along Long Island’s South Shore.
He was first charged with the deaths of women known as the “Gilgo Four” — Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Amber Costello — whose bodies were found covered in burlap in December 2010, according to court records.
Earlier this year, investigators charged Heuermann with the murders of two more women — the 2003 murder of Jessica Taylor, whose remains were found on Gilgo Beach and in Manorville, and the 1993 murder of Sandra Costilla, whose remains were found in North Sea, Long Island, in 1993.
Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to their murders.
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Law enforcement officials released enhanced images Monday as they seek to identify one of the as yet unknown victims whose remains were found along a coastal highway in New York’s Long Island more than a decade ago, a string of deaths known as the Gilgo Beach killings.
Suffolk County officials shared forensic reconstruction images as well as informational flyers regarding the so-called “Asian Doe,” a biological male who was wearing women’s clothing and possibly identified as female at the time of his death. He may have been a sex worker. The victim was between 18 and 23 years old and of Southern Chinese descent.
He died of blunt force trauma. His remains were found in 2011.
Investigators have said they believe the unidentified man died five to 10 years earlier.
Officials published renderings of what he may have looked like that were made through anthropological reconstruction in hopes of generating new leads.
Local officials released a more basic sketch of the victim back in 2011.
DNA records from Asian people are less common in U.S. genetic databases, making it difficult to compare and identify the remains through traditional methods, according to investigators. They hope someone will remember a person who looked like the person in the photos who disappeared around the same time.
No one has been charged in the death. A local architect is accused in the killings of six women, some of whose remains were found near the unidentified man’s.
Rex Heuermann, 61, was arraigned in June in connection with the deaths of two young women long believed to have been preyed upon as sex workers.
The charges came after recent police searches of Heuermann’s home and a wooded area on Long Island.
Jessica Taylor disappeared in 2003 and Sandra Costilla was killed 30 years ago, in 1993.
Costilla’s inclusion in the case indicates prosecutors now believe Heuermann was killing women far longer than previously thought.
Heuermann was previously charged with killing four others: Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Amber Lynn Costello and Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
Since late 2010, police have been investigating the deaths of at least 10 people — mostly female sex workers — whose remains were discovered along an isolated highway near Gilgo Beach.
Heuermann, who lived across the bay, was arrested last July.
He has pleaded not guilty and his attorney, Michael Brown, has denied any wrongdoing on his behalf.
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NBC New York Staff and Philip Marcelo l The Associated Press
The bound bodies of four women are found along a desolate stretch of beach. Disturbing new details about the architect police say is a serial killer. “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.
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New York State Police returned Monday to the Massapequa Park home of the suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings to execute a search warrant, according to the attorney for Rex Heuermann’s ex-wife.
Architect Rex Heuermann was arrested in July 2023 in connection to a string of murders and bodies found along Gilgo Beach on Long Island. He has been charged in the deaths of four women, including a Connecticut mother of two who vanished in 2007 and whose remains were found more than three years later along a coastal highway in New York.
“As District Attorney Tierney has previously stated, the work of the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task force is continuing,” a spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office said in a statement Monday. “We do not comment on investigative steps while ongoing.”
Crime lab technicians could be seen in the front yard of the home on First Ave setting up a tent. A heavily police presence was spotted in the area by Chopper 4 and the street in front of the home was closed off.
Chopper 4
Heuermann has maintained his innocence and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
“They had little bits of evidence and focused on Rex Heuermann and then they accumulated more evidence and tried to fit that evidence to complete their narrative,” Heuermann’s attorney Mike Brown said in January after his client was charged in the fourth killing.
Searchers were back out with dogs in Manorville, their third day looking for potential evidence in the Gilgo Beach serial murder investigation. NBC New York’s Greg Cergol reports.
Police have not officially explained why teams had been combing through woods in Manorville for days, though a source previously said the search was in connection with the Gilgo Beach murder investigation. That search expanded on Friday to the Southampton community of North Sea, about 30 miles away, according to a law enforcement source.
An unsolved murder there from 1993 has been linked to Manorville carpenter John Bittrolff, who was convicted in 2016 of killing sex workers Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee. Bittrolff’s name has at times been mentioned in connection to the Gilgo case.
Prosecutors wouldn’t say if the North Sea search was connected to the one going on in Manorville.
After nine months behind bars, the accused Gilgo Beach serial killer returned to a Long Island courtroom, as new evidence was turned over in the case. Rex Heuermann’s defense is turning their focus on who they believe is the real killer, while his estranged wife showed up to court in support.
Rex Heuermann has been charged with killing four women, all of whom were sex workers and whose bodies were found along a coastal highway on Long Island more than a decade ago
The architect has maintained his innocence from “day one” and looks forward to defending himself in court, attorney Mike Brown has said
Asa Ellerup, his estranged wife, who filed for divorce days after his arrest in July 2023, released a new statement through her attorneys this week saying she gives her husband the benefit of the doubt
The wife of an architect charged in a string of slayings known as the Gilgo Beach serial killings released a statement late Wednesday in her husband’s defense, saying she didn’t believe him capable of the brutality of which he is accused.
The statement, released on Asa Ellerup’s behalf by Asa Ellerup’s lawyers, is her first statement in months since her husband’s arrest in the now-infamous case last July. She has not been charged with any crimes, and investigators say she and her daughter were away on each of the four occasions when Rex Heuermann allegedly killed a woman.
Ellerup filed for divorce from Heuermann days after his arrest, but still visits him weekly, according to her attorneys.
“Nobody deserves to die in that manner,” the statement on Ellerup’s behalf said, with her lawyers sharing her “heartfelt sympathies” for the victims and their families. “I will listen to all of the evidence and withhold judgment until the end of trial. I have given Rex the benefit of the doubt, as we all deserve.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the statement from Ellerup Wednesday.
Heuermann was most recently charged in mid-January with a fourth slaying, that of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a Connecticut mother of two who vanished in 2007 and whose remains were found more than three years later along a coastal highway on Long Island.
The charges came months after he was labeled the prime suspect in her death when he was arrested in July in the deaths of three other women. He pleaded not guilty in Brainard-Barnes’ death, as he had done in the other cases.
Heuermann is being held without bail. He faces several life sentences without parole if convicted.
Heuermann has maintained his innocence from “day one” and looks forward to defending himself in court, attorney Mike Brown has said. Brown said he is still reviewing new information presented by prosecutors in court documents.
“They had little bits of evidence and focused on Rex Heuermann and then they accumulated more evidence and tried to fit that evidence to complete their narrative,” said Brown.
Their remains were found along the same quarter-mile stretch of parkway in the Gilgo Beach area of Jones Beach Island in 2010. Additional searching turned up the remains of six more adults and a toddler who was the child of one of the victims.
Investigators have said Heuermann, who lived in Massapequa Park across the bay from where the bodies were found, was probably not responsible for all the deaths. Some of the victims disappeared in the mid-1990s.
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — New charges were filed Tuesday against accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann.
It comes six months after his arrest.
He was indicted Tuesday in the death of his fourth alleged victim, 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes of Connecticut.
For the first time, her grieving family spoke publicly.
Suffolk County district attorney Ray Tierney inside Judge Timothy P. Mazzei’s courtroom at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024, where alleged Gilgo Killer Rex Heurmann was indicted in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
James Carbone
“I was only 7-years-old when my mother was murdered. Her loss drastically changed the trajectory of my life,” daughter Nicolette Brainard-Barnes said. “While the loss of my mom has been extremely painful for me, the indictment by the grand jury has brought hope for justice for my mom and my family.”
Nicolette’s family had prayed for a resolution.
Investigators said they linked Brainard-Barnes’ murder to Heuermann via DNA from a female hair found in the buckle of a belt used to bind her ankles, feet and legs – eight trillion to one that it matched Heuermann’s wife Asa Ellerup or daughter Victoria, who was tailed on an LIRR train and threw out an energy drink, according to court documents.
Read the superseding bail application in the Gilgo Beach murders case
Prosecutors made it clear they believed all hair transfer were made from Heuermann to his alleged victims. The family was out of town for the murders of the Gilgo Beach Four.
“Asa Ellerup and her children were not involved, not even in the jurisdiction, when these murders took place,” Ellerup’s attorney Robert Madedonio siad.
The accused serial killer, his hands shackled behind his hulking back, showed no emotion at all. He was wearing a tie and gray suit, and barely made eye contact with anyone during the court proceeding.
“You’re talking about a gentleman who has never been arrested before. He’s a productive member of society. He’s going to work every day. He’s supporting his family, and he’s incarcerated. And he’s claiming he didn’t do this. But he is looking forward to having his day in a courtroom,” Heuermann’s attorney Michael Brown said.
“Your reaction to the hairs linked to his daughter and wife?” CBS New York’s Jennifer McLogan asked.
“Miraculously, nuclear DNA testing and results have come forward,” Brown said.
DA Ray Tierney says it’s not a time for sarcasm, and it was worth the wait, and that nuclear DNA will help bring justice to the four murder victims.
“Science has caught up. I would, a good break for justice. A good break for the investigation,” Tierney said.
New court documents also reveal how the accused killer used burner phones to reach out to sex workers as recently as last year. They said the hundreds of electronic devices seized from his Massapequa Park home included searches for the Gilgo victims, and software that would wipe or erase data.
“She was an intellectual. She was a writer. She was an artistic person. She cared very deeply about the people that she loved,” Tierney said. “It’s been an honor and a privilege to work these cases, and to provide that small measure of closure.”
“It has been 16 years since I last saw my sister, 16 years since I heard her voice, because 16 years ago, she was silenced,” Brainard-Barnes’ sister Melissa Cann said. “Maureen was a mother of two amazing children, and they will forever be without their mother. Maureen was my older sister, who was always there for me when I needed her.”
When Heuermann was arrested in July and charged as the elusive Gilgo Beach serial killer, prosecutors said his DNA from discarded pizza and burner phone evidence tied him to three murdered women — Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello — whose bodies were found along Gilgo Beach in 2010.
The petite 25-year-old from Norwich, Connecticut, was a mother of two. She was working as a Craigslist escort in Manhattan when she disappeared in July 2007. Her remains were found three years later near three other women’s bodies, dumped along desolate Ocean Parkway on Long Island.
Police dubbed them the “Gilgo Four.” They were all sex workers, wrapped in burlap. Now prosecutors say they were all murdered, at different times, by Heuermann.
The DA said the grand jury will continue to try to solve the remaining murders at Gilgo Beach.
New York criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor David Schwartz spoke with CBS New York ahead of Tuesday’s court appearance to put the developments into perspective. He called it a “scientific case.”
“Heuermann was indicted and remanded for the first three murders. They made the strategic decision to make the arrest at that moment in time, because they were already surveilling him for about a year. They just didn’t want anything to go wrong,” he explained. “So they made that arrest, and in the meantime, they were investigating the fourth murder. They were waiting for the mitochondrial DNA analysis on the fourth murder.”
Schwartz went on to add “DNA is not a layup.”
“They didn’t use nuclear DNA, which specifically points to a particular person. They used mitochondrial DNA, because of — 13 years later, all this time went by, which excludes 99.6% of the population,” he said. “So it’s scientific evidence, plus circumstantial evidence — they have his truck, they have phone records, they have all types of other evidence that they’re going to piece this case together. So I expect this case to be a complicated case, and I expect it to last a good amount of time.”
During her decades-long career, Jennifer McLogan has been recognized for her coverage of breaking news and live reporting on major stories that include the September 11 attacks, Superstorm Sandy, the Gilgo Beach Murders, the Long Island Rail Road massacre, the crash of TWA Flight 800, the Philadelphia Police firebombing of the radical group Move, the Hamptons’ Pine Barrens fires, and major snowstorms crippling the Northeast. In sports, she covered Super Bowl XLVI, World Series with both the Yankees and the Mets, NBA Finals with Michael Jordan and the death of Arthur Ashe.
The estranged wife of accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, just four months after filing for divorce, turned up Wednesday at his latest Long Island court appearance.
Spouse Asa Ellerup wore a slight smile on her face while staring at the towering 60-year-old defendant as he was led into the Suffolk County courtroom for a quick procedural hearing, with the district attorney agreeing to turn over more evidence in the serial killing case against her estranged spouse.
She left the courtroom and said nothing to a crowd of trailing reporters while walking to her car.
Heuermann stands accused of murdering three young women on Long Island in a 14-month stretch of 2009 and 2010, with the long-cold cases finally closed after Suffolk County police reopened the probe in 2022. The Long Island father of two was arrested a year later as he walked down a Manhattan street near his architecture office, and was charged with murder in the deaths of the suburban sex workers.
Ellerup had filed court papers seeking to end their marriage of 27 years this past July after the allegations against her husband were made public. Her attorney declined comment on reports that his client was working with a documentary film crew on the case.
James Carbone / Newsday
Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann appears in Judge Tim Mazzei’s courtroom at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead on Sept. 27, 2023. His lawyer, Michael J. Brown, is at left. (James Carbone / Newsday)
The defendant’s next court appearance was set for Feb. 6.
Police finally nabbed the long-sought serial-killing suspect based on a tip from a Long Island pimp, a DNA sample from a pizza crust and his own damning internet searches about the crimes and victims, with prosecutors collecting a “massive amount of materials” in their investigation.
In addition to murder victims Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, Heuermann is still a prime suspect in the killing of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen alive on July 9, 2007. He was ordered held without bail as the headline-making investigation continued.
Rex Heuermann
Jeenah Moon/AP
New York State police officers stand guard as law enforcement searches the home of Rex Heuermann on July 15 in Massapequa Park, LI. (AP Photo/Jeenah Moon)
The couple shared a home in Massapequa Park, L.I., with their two children, and authorities spent 12 days scouring the suburban residence once Heuermann was in handcuffs.
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. (AP) — DNA from Gilgo Beach serial killing suspect Rex Heuermann’s cheek swab matches the DNA that authorities had previously collected from a pizza crust and used to link Heuermann to one of the victims, prosecutors said in court Wednesday.
Heurmann, 60, was arrested July 13 on murder charges in the killings of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, three of the women whose bodies were found along a remote beach highway on Long island, and has been named as the the prime suspect in the death of a fourth woman.
He pleaded not guilty and has been held without bail at Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead.
At the time of his arrest, prosecutors said they had analyzed DNA from a pizza crust that Heuermann had discarded in a Manhattan trash can and matched it to DNA from hairs found on Waterman’s body. Prosecutors then got permission from the court to collect DNA from a cheek swab of Heuermann as further proof of his link to Waterman’s killing.
“The buccal swab erases all doubt,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney told the judge, according to Newsday.
The DNA from the pizza crust had previously been linked to Heuermann’s estranged wife, Asa Ellerup, not to him directly.
Rex Heuermann appears in Suffolk County Court on Aug. 1, 2023, in Riverhead, New York.
James Carbone/Newsday via AP
The arrest of Heuermann, an architect, came 13 years after police searching for a missing woman found 10 sets of human remains buried in the scrub near Long Island’s remote Gilgo Beach.
Authorities suspected that a serial killer had committed some of the murders but have long said they did not believe all of the victims were killed by the same person. The majority of the killings remain unsolved.
Prosecutors told Suffolk County Court Judge Timothy Mazzei on Wednesday that they had turned over thousands of documents to Heuermann’s defense team.
Heuermann told the judge he has been spending two to three hours a day reviewing the evidence against him.
Heuermann’s lawyer disputed the significance of the DNA sample. “There is nobody on the face of the earth that is credible is going to say that hair is my client’s hair,” defense attorney Michael Brown said outside the courtroom, according to the New York Post.
James Burke, a former Long Island police chief who served federal prison time for beating a suspect, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly soliciting sex and exposing himself at a public park.
Burke, 58, was taken into custody by park rangers in a Farmingville, Long Island park shortly after 10 a.m., according to a spokesperson for Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone. He faces charges of offering a sex act, public lewdness, indecent exposure, and criminal solicitation, with additional potential charges pending, the spokesperson said.
An attorney for Burke could not be reached. The Suffolk County District Attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Burke led the Suffolk County Police Department, one of the nation’s largest police forces, between 2012 and 2015, a tumultuous three-year period that ended with the conviction of Burke and multiple other officials on federal charges of obstruction and assault.
Amid the federal inquiry into his conduct, Burke oversaw the high-profile investigation into the Gilgo Beach killings, in which the bodies of multiple sex workers were discovered on a desolate stretch of Long Island coastline. His handling of the case, including a decision to end cooperation with the FBI, has been widely criticized, drawing renewed scrutiny following the arrest of a suspect in some of the killings earlier this summer.
Burke resigned in late 2015, shortly before federal prosecutors brought charges against him for assaulting a handcuffed man suspected of stealing embarrassing items from his police department SUV, including sex toys and pornography.
He pleaded guilty in 2016 to violating victim Christopher Loeb’s civil rights and obstructing justice for leading a conspiracy to conceal his involvement in the assault. He served 40 months in prison and was released in April 2019.
Burke attacked Loeb in a police station interrogation room after Loeb was arrested for breaking into the ex-chief’s unlocked, department-issued GMC Yukon and stealing a bag containing his gun belt, ammunition, a box of cigars and a bag containing sex toys and pornography.
Loeb’s three-year prison sentence was vacated after Burke pleaded guilty. Authorities suspect he was stealing from cars to buy heroin.
Former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and the chief of Spota’s anti-corruption bureau, Christopher McPartland, were convicted in December 2019 of witness tampering, obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges for helping cover up the assault.
Spota, 81, and McPartland, 57, are both serving five-year prison sentences.
According to federal prosecutors, Spota, McPartland, Burke and other police officers met and spoke by phone to discuss how to conceal Burke’s role in the assault on Loeb. In addition to pressuring people not to cooperate, they asked witnesses to provide investigators with false information and withhold relevant information from investigators, federal prosecutors said.
Attorneys representing the wife and children of Rex Heuermann, the suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders, said the family is struggling to meet their basic needs after a police search of their Long Island home left extensive damage.
The attorneys stressed what law enforcement have previously said: that Asa Ellerup and her children, 33-year-old Christopher Sheridan and 26-year-old Victoria Heuermann, did not have any knowledge of the killings of four women whose bodies were found on the Long Island, New York, beach in 2010. Authorities alleged that Rex Heuermann lived a double life and that in at least three of the killings acted only when his family was out of town.
That’s made the family victims as well, the attorneys said, as they announced at a news conference on Friday that the family will file a notice of claim, a precursor to a potential lawsuit, to “protect their rights” against law enforcement who they say damaged their Massapequa Park home during the 12-day search.
Asa Ellerup, 59, (right) the estranged wife of Rex Heuermann, is joined by her daughter Victoria Heuermann in the office of their attorney Robert Macedonio in Central Islip, New York, on July 31.
James Carbone/Newsday RM via Getty Images
Robert Macedonio, the attorney representing Ellerup, who has filed to divorce Heuermann, said he is unsure which law enforcement agencies were involved in the search but will file accordingly when he learns more.
Macedonio said he toured the home on Sunday and painted a bleak picture of the condition that investigators left it in.
“It was piled floor to ceiling with debris that was just taken out the attics, the closet, every inch of the house,” he said. “There was a path probably a foot or two wide to get from the front door to the kitchen, and that was the way through the house.”
“The children and Asa were sleeping on foam mats on the floor, next to the dog bed where the dog was sleeping,” Macedonio said.
Macedonio also said that some reports about what was found in the house have been inaccurate. He said reports of a “soundproof” vault in the basement were false, describing it as a security door with an open ceiling that served as storage for Heuermann’s guns.
Crime laboratory officers are seen outside the home of Rex Heuermann in Massapequa Park, New York, on July 18.
YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images
Vess Mitev, the attorney representing Heuermann’s adult children, said the conditions inside their home were “deplorable” and said the family has been deprived of basic human needs.
“Every moment that they spend in this waking surreal nightmare they have to keep reevaluating where they are,” Mitev said. ”Their valuables were shattered, their beds were destroyed, the places where they laid their heads down at night no longer exist.”
Macedonio added that Ellerup has been treated for cancer for several years and was depending on her husband’s health insurance. With his arrest and the pending divorce, she’s set to lose that.
“That’s a big fear and stress on her on top of all this other stuff that’s going on,” Macedonio said.
Heuermann has been charged with the murders of three women and is suspected in the killing of another. The investigation is continuing, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Rex Heuermann, the man suspected of several murders near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach, appeared in court Tuesday. His wife, who has filed for divorce, said in a statement before the hearing that their children cry themselves to sleep. Errol Barnett reports.
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Investigators have wrapped up their search of the home of Rex Heuermann, the man accused of killing at least three women on Long Island. Errol Barnett has the latest on the investigation.
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Investigators used an excavator to dig up the yard of the Gilgo Beach murder suspect’s home as authorities continue to search for evidence in the deaths of several women.
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CBS News has learned that the man suspected in the cold-case murders of at least three women on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach area is now being investigated to determine if he has any connection to unsolved murders in other states. Lilia Luciano has the latest.
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Rex Heuermann was detained and charged with murder in New York City in connection with the deaths of three of the four women who became known as the “Gilgo Four.” Heuermann entered a not guilty plea. According to the prosecution, he is now the prime suspect in a fourth homicide. Meg Oliver reports.
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