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 and removed cement tiles from the dilapidated green space.
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.
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 remove 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.
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.
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.”