Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann appeared in a Long Island court Tuesday for the first time since being indicted last month on charges of killing a fourth woman.
Heuermann, 60, silently entered the Suffolk County Courthouse in Riverhead wearing a black suit and white shirt — marking his first time back before Justice Timothy Mazzei since he pleaded not guilty on Jan. 16 to an indictment charging him with killing sex worker Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old mom of two, in 2007.
The hearing was scheduled to give the judge an update on the progress of the case.
Heuermann — an architect and married father of two — had already been behind bars since his July arrest for the killings of Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Melissa Bethelemy, 24, and Megan Waterman, 22, — who along with Brainard-Barnes make up the tragic so-called “Gilgo Four.”
Heuermann was tied to the murders of the prior three women through DNA found on a discarded pizza box. He was connected to the July 9, 2007, slaying of Brainard-Barnes — the first of the “Gilgo Four” to go missing while working as a call girl — through DNA evidence taken off of the Monster energy beverage from which his 26-year daughter Victoria drank, officials said last month.
Heuermann is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
From December 2010 through April 2011, 11 bodies including the “Gilgo Four” were found along a quiet stretch of Ocean Parkway, shaking the local community and beyond — all while cops went 13 years without a suspect to pin the crimes on.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney last month said a grand jury probe involving the remains of the other seven dead people is still ongoing.
After the new indictment from last month, Heuermann’s alleged sick online search history was exposed in court papers — which showed his twisted searches had included: “Tied up fat girl porn,” “Skinny white teen crying porn,” “medieval torture of women” and “skinny black slave girl.”
Heuermann allegedly made the searches under the Gmail account “sandbagger303,” which he created in 2017 with the false name “Andrew Robert.” In April 2021, he continued his stomach-turning Google searches using a T/Hawk email account, prosecutors said at the time.
He also searched dozens of times for updates on the Gilgo Beach murders and looked for law enforcement techniques used to track cellphones and the use of DNA evidence to solve crimes, court papers revealed at the time.
Heuermann’s lawyer, Michael Brown, last month defended his client’s alleged “sadistic” search history, arguing that most people have done questionable Web sleuthing.
“One thing leads to another – you see a show about something, you start searching, and they talk about how somebody got killed,” Brown said at the time. “You start searching, and then they talk about another way, and you start searching. Think about if they looked at your own personal search history, how all of a sudden you’re guilty because of your search history?”
Tierney has said Heuermann waited for his daughter and his now-estranged wife Asa Ellerup to be out of town to carry out his killings, but victim lawyer John Ray said at an event over the weekend that the spouse may have been in town longer than investigators think.
Ray — who reps the families of Shannan Gilbert and Jessica Taylor — said he spoke with a hotel manager in Atlantic City who told him Ellerup, Victoria and the couple’s son arrived later than law enforcement believes — and they could have been around for at least one of the murders.
But Ellerup’s lawyer Bob Macedonia said he believes Tierney wouldn’t have gotten such a crucial fact wrong.