2 days Ago By Yahoo News
Netflix’s new documentary series, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, tries to answer why it took police more than a decade to identify a suspect in a series of murders on Long Island. Between 2010 and 2011, the remains of 11 people were discovered along Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach on New York’s Long Island. Four of the victims were found within a quarter mile of each other and in similar conditions — bound with belts or tape and wrapped in burlap — suggesting to police and the community that there was a serial killer in the area.
But it wasn’t until July 2023 that police finally arrested 61-year-old Rex Heuermann, a New York City architect living in Nassau County, as a suspect in several of the killings. Heuermann has since been charged with murdering seven women: Amber Lynn Costello, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valerie Mack. The three-part series, which airs on Netflix March 31, suggests that the reason it took police so long to arrest Heuermann is because all of his alleged victims were sex workers.
“Police were saying, if you’re not a sex worker, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Long Island Press reporter Jaclyn Gallucci says in the first episode. “You don’t want to think that somebody’s going around murdering women, and you want to say, ‘OK, they put themselves in that situation, this is the reason why this happened to them and this is the reason this could never happen to me.’” The victims’ families and friends, who are interviewed throughout the series, also say they felt their loved ones were dismissed by police and the media because they were sex workers.
Some say they even gave police information about a man matching Heuermann’s description years before he was arrested. Dave Schaller and Bear Brodsky, who both lived with 27-year-old Amber Lynn Costello when she went missing in 2010, recalled an encounter they say they had with Heuermann before Costello’s disappearance. According to the former roommates, Costello had called them asking for help because a client of hers was at the house and scaring her.
Schaller and Brodsky say they went into the house and told the man to leave. They said they knew Costello took another call from the man in September 2010 and went to see him, saying she was promised $1,500, and then was never seen again. When Costello disappeared, Schaller and Brodsky went to the police and described the man in detail, including the exact car he was driving — a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche.
When Heuermann’s face was shown on TV after he was arrested, Schaller said it was the same man he and Brodsky had described to police 13 years earlier. Heuermann was also driving a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche at the time of his arrest. “[Police] had their answers for f***ing years,” Schaller said.
The series does not feature interviews with any officers who were employed by the Suffolk County Police Department at the time, however, the second episode dives into controversies surrounding former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and former Police Chief James Burke, who supervised the investigation of the Gilgo Beach murders. Spota resigned from office in 2017, was disbarred in 2020 and sentenced to federal prison in 2021 for helping cover up a suspect abuse scandal; Burke stepped down in 2015 and was arrested in 2023 for soliciting a sex worker. Investigative reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts, who covered the case for Newsweek, says that, in retrospect, it seemed like Burke’s effort to cover up his own alleged crimes may have affected how much attention was spent on the Gilgo investigation.
Neither Spota nor Burke were interviewed for the docuseries. The documentary’s final episode seems to support Garcia-Roberts’s theory. In it, Ray Tierney, the current Suffolk County district attorney who assumed office in January 2022, says that once a new team of investigators was assigned to the office, it took them six weeks before they identified Heuermann as a suspect.
Detectives tracked Heuermann’s physical movements as well as his cellphone records for months before they were finally able to match a hair recovered from one of the victims to DNA on a leftover pizza crust Heuermann threw out in January 2023. He was arrested at his Manhattan office seven months later. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and has requested separate trials for the women he’s accused of murdering, but prosecutors have objected to splitting up the cases.
A trial date has not yet been set..
