Accused Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann has now been tied to the brutal slayings of all of the women known as the “Gilgo Beach Four,” prosecutors said Tuesday.
Heuermann, 60, was named in a new indictment unsealed in Suffolk County court charging him with murder in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, the last of the four former escorts whose remains were found along the Sound Shore in 2010 and whose killings remained unsolved for 13 years.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney last year identified the hulking New York City architect as the prime suspect in Brainard-Barnes’ death and told The Post in November that his office was “very close” to linking Heuermann to her case.
Heuermann has been held without bail since his arrest in July on charges that he murdered the other three victims and dumped them along the shore.
Brainard-Barnes, 25, went missing on July 9, 2007 — the first of the “Gilgo Four” to disappear.
When her body was found on Dec. 13, 2010, Brainard-Barnes was reportedly bound with a belt stamped with the initials “WH,” which prosecutors have suggested may have belonged to Heuermann’s late grandfather, William Heuermann.
Among the more than 10 sets of human remains eventually found along the desolate stretch of beach along Ocean Parkway between December 2010 and April 2011 were three other women who worked as escorts — Amber Lynn Costello, 27; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; and Megan Waterman, 22.
They became known as the “Gilgo Four.”
Brainard-Barnes grew up in Groton, Connecticut, where she was a straight-A student before dropping out at 17 after she got pregnant, New York Magazine said in a profile in July.
She worked various jobs, including as a card dealer at the Foxwoods Resort Casino, at a local ShopRite and at an area gas station, the magazine reported.
In 2006, she replied to a modeling job ad in Manhattan and was soon working as an escort, selling her services on Craigslist in the city and on Long Island.
Her sister, Melissa Cann, told New York Mag at the time that cops didn’t take Brainard-Barnes’ disappearance seriously when she went missing.
“I drove myself to the point where I didn’t want to get up in the morning to brush my teeth,” she said. “I didn’t want to go to sleep. I just wanted to figure out where my sister was.”
Cann could not be reached for comment on Monday.
The first of the bodies were discovered while police searched for another missing escort, Shannan Gilbert, a Jersey City woman who disappeared in May 2010 and has not been linked to Heuermann.
John Ray, an attorney representing Gilbert’s sisters, told The Post this week that they reacted with “careful caution” when told of the new charges against Heuermann.
“Let’s not draw too many conclusions,” Ray said. “Let’s keep the pressure on the police to do the right thing and get this thing investigated and not let it drop because they now caught somebody.
“There can be no such thing as closure, especially in Shannan’s family, because the losses are so great,” he added. “The best one can say is that there might be a certain amount of an ability to accept that the murderers are on their way to being caught. That’s about it.”
Heuermann, a married father of two from Massapequa Park and an architect with offices in Midtown Manhattan was linked to three of the women through DNA found on a discarded pizza.
Police later searched his home for additional evidence, and removed a cache of guns kept inside.
The murders had remained unsolved for years until Rodney Harrison, a former NYPD chief, took over as Suffolk County police commissioner in January 2022 and reopened the Gilgo Beach case — with Heuermann identified as the prime suspect within two months.