A police dog was brought in to nose around the Long Island backyard of accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann Saturday, while investigators dismantled a wooden deck, removed cement tiles from the dilapidated green space and emptied out a storage shed.
The tiles that had been dug up were removed in a wheelbarrow and dumped into a container for closer inspection. Three brown paper bags of evidence, their contents unknown, were also carried out to a police vehicle.
Investigators were later spotted unloading items – including a shovel, rakes and electric gardening tools — from the green storage shed before bagging it all up as evidence.
Multiple hedge clippers of varying sizes were also laid out on a tarp and then later hauled away.
Officials were tight-lipped about what they found in the Messapequa Park backyard but said they were planning to finish their work there soon.
“This is a 24-hour, 7-day a week operation but the team effort is helping us getting to a place where we could present it to Ray Tierney, the district attorney, and put this gentleman away for a very, very long period of time,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison told reporters, adding the investigators would be done at the home in the “next couple of days.”
During their search of the home, cops have pulled out a lifesize doll with blond hair, wearing a red dress and encased in a wooden and glass cabinet.
They’ve also removed hundreds of guns along with various flotsam and jetsam, including magazines, a cat scratch post and a portrait of a battered woman.
Harrison wasn’t able to say how many items had been removed from the home where the alleged killer grew up but said, “It’s a good bit.”
“We’re going to make sure that if there is anything that we need to retrieve that is going to help us with the prosecution we will take it with us and add it to the package,” he said.
Who were the Gilgo Beach victims?
Suspected serial killer Rex Heuermann — a New York City architect and married dad of two — was arrested in connection with the long-unsolved Gilgo Beach murders. The arrest is tied to the so-called “Gilgo Four,” women found wrapped in burlap within days of each other in late 2010.
The years-long investigation that led to the arrest revolved around the discovery of more than 10 sets of human remains along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County between December 2010 and April 2011.
Most victims were petite female sex workers with green or hazel eyes. But there were also two exceptions: a 2-year-old girl and a young Asian man.
Melissa Barthelemy, 24
- Barthelemy was a sex worker who lived in the Unionport section of the Bronx and dreamed of one day opening her own beauty salon. She was last seen alive in her basement apartment on Underhill Avenue on July 12, 2009.
Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25
- Brainard-Barnes was living in Norwich, Connecticut. She went missing after taking an Amtrak train from New London, Connecticut, to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on July 6, 2007.
Amber Lynn Costello, 27
- Costello, 27, was a sex worker and heroin addict who lived in West Babylon, New York, at a home with a woman and two men. She advertised on Craigslist and Backpage to support her and her roommates’ drug habits. Costello was found in December 2010 after having been last seen leaving her home that September.
Megan Waterman, 22
- Waterman, a 22-year-old mom of one, was last seen on June 6, 2010. She lived in Scarborough, Maine, and earned a living as an escort. She was last seen by her family boarding a New York-bound Concord Trailways bus in Maine. Her body was found on December 13, 2010, on the north side of Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach.
Jessica Taylor, 20
- Remains belonging to Jessica Taylor, a 20-year-old woman working as an escort in New York City, were found in a wooded area in Manorville on July 26, 2003. Her additional remains — initially labeled “Jane Doe No. 5” — were discovered on March 29, 2011, along Ocean Parkway.
Valerie Mack, 24
- Valerie Mack was 24 years old and living in Philadelphia when she went missing. She worked as an escort, using the alias “Melissa Taylor.” Relatives last saw Mack in the spring or summer of 2000 in Port Republic, New Jersey, but she was never reported as missing to the police. Her partial skeletal remains were found in Manorville in September 2000 but were initially known as “Jane Doe No. 6.”
Unidentified Asian man
- The skeletal remains of a yet-to-be-identified Asian man were found along Ocean Parkway on April 4, 2011. It is estimated that the man was between 17 and 23 years old at the time of his death. He was approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall with bad teeth.
‘Peaches’ and her daughter
- An African American woman’s partial remains were discovered in Hempstead Lake State Park back in 1997, and she had become known as “Peaches” because of a bitten tattoo of a peach on her left breast. On April 4, 2011, police uncovered the remains of a toddler, who was about 2 years old at the time of her death. DNA testing confirmed that one of the skeletons was that of the 2-year-old girl’s mother, “Peaches.”
Jane Doe No. 7
- Remains found on April 11, 2011, along with the body of the woman dubbed “Peaches” was linked by DNA to a body that was found 15 years earlier on Fire Island. On April 20, 1996, skeletal remains of a young white female were discovered in Davis Park on Blue Point Beach. Two sets of remains, collectively known as “Jane Doe No. 7,” have not been identified.
Shannan Gilbert, 23
- Gilbert was a Craigslist escort who lived in Jersey City, traveled with her driver Michael Pak from Manhattan to meet a client, Joseph Brewer, at his home in the Oak Beach Association on the morning of May 1, 2010. She spoke with two neighbors before disappearing. Her body was discovered in a marsh near Oak Beach — about half a mile from where she was last seen alive — on December 13, 2011.
Heuermann, 59, was finally identified after Harrison created a special Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force in February 2022 soon after joining the department. Harrison was chief of department and then briefly chief of detectives before he left the NYPD to take the post.
The team set out to determine who killed 10 people, including eight women and an unidentified man and toddler, whose remains were found on the beach beginning in 2010.
Heuermann was arrested July 13 outside his Midtown architecture office and charged with killing Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Costello. who were part of the Gilgo four, after cops were able to connect him through DNA from pizza crust thrown out at his office.
He has been named the “prime suspect” in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, but hasn’t been charged yet in her killing.
Massapequa Park Mayor Danny Pearl visited the scene and said it was “a little chaotic” but “there is a lot of intrigue with what’s going on.”
“When this finally clears out, you know, the village will do everything we can to try to give you back the peace that you had before all this happened,” he said, reassuring residents.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to that … kind of quality of life per se, but we are going to work together very closely.”
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