Killing Grounds: The Gilgo Beach Murders

All right, my last question.

If you were a tool or an object

to bring your business to greater heights,

what would it be?

That's an interesting question.

I know.

Because for what I do,

we have to have so many tools in the toolbox.

- Just one. Just one. -Just one.

I have one tool that's pretty much used in almost every job.

And it's actually a cabinetmaker's hammer.

Oh, okay. Cabinetmaker hammer. Okay.

It is persuasive enough...

- -...when I need to persuade something.

-Not someone. -Something.

Sometimes, I have to be the heavy framing hammer.

The heavy framing hammer!

Other times, I'm the lightweight hammer just to nudge things along.

All right, I guess it's a hammer.

We got it.

-Selfie time. -Selfie time.

You're fast.

Ready? One, two, three.

Ah!

-Can you smile? -That is.

Because this case gained such notoriety,

I knew that it would be very easy

for the person who perpetrated these crimes

to utilize the internet to try to figure out what we were doing.

So, that's why I was very quiet

and didn't show up on Gilgo Beach with a big magnifying glass

and talk about all the things we were gonna do.

Because I wanted the perpetrator to think that it was business as usual.

We were spinning our wheels. We weren't making any progress.

To maintain that investigative secrecy,

not everybody in my office knew what we were doing.

Not everybody in the PD or the FBI.

It was just the members of the task force.

We had our first task force meeting February 1st,

and I think March 14th of 2022

was when Rex Heuermann was identified as the suspect

for the first time.

There was a new level of energy injected into this task force.

They were finally starting to see some meaningful movement on this case.

But what we think doesn't matter as prosecutors.

It's what we can prove.

So, we would just work to try to establish more connections

to those murders.

So, we were surveilling him for a number of months.

They tracked where he went.

They tracked him on the train, the LI-double-R.

They tracked him going to his office in Midtown.

For the most part, his activity was business as usual.

He would go to work.

And go home.

That is nothing that is in any way atypical.

But...

we saw within a very short period of time

Rex buy a prepaid phone,

which we confirmed on the camera.

Remember, the killer used burner phones.

So now, we looked at the phone in his name.

And what was the activity, and was it consistent with the times

when the burner phones were being utilized?

And it was.

That was arguably one of the most significant points in this investigation.

There was this tension

because we knew through his use of burner phones

that he was continuing to contact sex workers.

That's obviously concerning.

But you still don't have enough evidence to prosecute.

When you looked at the original crime scene,

there wasn't a lot of evidence.

But what we saw was these five questioned hairs of interest

discovered in December of 2010

with the Gilgo Four.

There was one that as recovered on Amber Costello.

And then, there were three questioned hairs obtained

from Megan Waterman.

And then, hair that was recovered

from the belt buckle of Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

The hairs found on the victims were not a match to the victim,

nor any other profile within CODIS.

The hairs belonged to an unidentified male of Caucasian descent,

as well as three different females.

We need more DNA profiles to compare against.

Maybe these hairs would be associated with the suspect.

The task force obtained DNA samples from the suspect's house.

So, we were able to develop four genetic profiles

off of bottles.

Those genetic profiles were for family members

who lived at the residence in Massapequa Park.

The suspect was married.

They had a biological daughter,

and she had a son who was unrelated to the suspect.

And now, we have to actually see them discarding things that they eat or drink,

and then get the DNA samples

so you know for sure that you have the right profile.

It was painstaking because you're still trying to keep the suspect in your sights,

do the surveillance, obtain this evidence.

But you don't want to blow the investigation.

One day, Rex comes out of the office,

and he throws away his box of pizza.

I just loved hearing this

because it's just good old-fashioned detective work, right?

The detective was standing there,

blending in with everybody else in New York City.

Went over, got the pizza box and therein was a piece of crust.

And he went, and they took that pizza crust, and they ran it.

When I read it, I realized it sounds like we have a match here.

And then, I started calling people in. I said, "Read this."

And we all agreed.

It was on.

We had enough probable cause to arrest Rex Heuermann.

For a myriad of reasons,

we had decided that we wanted to arrest him

in Midtown Manhattan coming out of his place of business.

It was exciting. It was, uh, it was scary.

Um, because you know what this person was capable of.

So, you know, you really worry about keeping people safe.

We got him!

All right.

It's happened.

It's not easy when you go into a case

and you are looking for that needle in the haystack.

There were tens of thousands of hours placed into this investigation

by Suffolk County Police,

the FBI, the district attorney's office, the sheriff's department,

the State Police.

That task force was, in my opinion,

a game changer.

For 13 years, the public has been just so fascinated by it,

and law enforcement has been confounded by it.

There has finally been an arrest.

A Massapequa Park man charged with the murder

of three women.

Rex Heuermann stayed silent

as he walked out of Suffolk County 7 Precinct

to face a judge on Friday afternoon.

My friend, she called me and she was like, "Are you watching TV?"

I was like, "No, why?" She's like...

"Your exact description of an ogre."

"Six-foot-seven, 350 pound-man."

She's like, "He's being arrested right now for Amber's murder."

I've seen what that motherfucker looks like.

Sorry, but that's being nice still.

And he looks like

an AI-generated...

version of Grimace if he was a human.

The first time I saw pictures of him,

I was like, "Wow, what a monster."

Just huge.

And these girls are all so tiny.

And then, the scenarios started coming in my head

of this accused's big body,

and hers, she's so tiny.

And now I have those nightmares in my head

on top of everything else.

If this is the person,

it's gonna save a lot of lives.

No other girl is gonna get hurt the way our girls got hurt.

Our hope is that those families are experiencing some level of comfort

and some level of relief knowing that the person responsible

for their loved one's death is now being held responsible.

It was later on that day they came out with the truck.

And it was just like, holy shit.

They had that, you know, everything for 13 years in front of them.

They just never used it.

If it comes out that this guy's been killing girls

since they could have had him in 2010,

that's what bothers me.

That's what's gonna cause me to lose sleep.

Kristin Thorne is live outside the home

where neighbors were shocked to learn of today's arrest.

Sade, this is sort of the place to be on Long Island right now.

When I come down with my car to drop my wife off,

I see him walking

just like every other American-type person, I guess.

I saw it on Facebook this morning, and I was at work.

And I was just like,

"Listen, I got to take some personal time."

"I gotta go down here because this is a big case."

You know, we gotta see how it plays out too.

We're talking about the Gilgo Four,

so you all know that's not the end of the story, right?

I was at work watching it on TV.

In-In just joking fashion to the guys,

I was just like, "Hey, I probably went to high school with him."

And I found out about three hours later

that they named the suspect,

and it was Rex Heuermann.

We went to the same schools growing up.

He was, uh, more of a recluse.

He was very introverted.

Very skinny and tall.

You know, we would bully him.

You know, we used to call him Herman Munster.

And he never bullied anybody, you know?

He was-- He wasn't that type of person.

When I saw his house, I was more surprised