John Ray, the Long Island attorney who has waged a decade-long campaign to solve the riddle of possibly 10 murder victims found near Gilgo Beach, has said the arrest of the accused serial killer Rex Heuermann has “elated” the families of two victims he represents.
Ray’s involvement in the case centers on Shannan Gilbert, a sex worker and aspiring actor who disappeared aged 23 in May 2010 from a house several miles from Gilgo Beach. Her disappearance triggered a police investigation that later uncovered the remains of four women in their 20s who had been wrapped in burlap sacks and came to be known as the “Gilgo Four”.
Last week, the 59-year old Manhattan architect Rex Heuermann was arrested and charged with the murders of three of the women – Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello. Police say Heuermann is the “prime suspect” in the murder of a fourth woman, Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty.
But six more sets of remains were found in the area, including those of Gilbert and Jessica Taylor, whose families are represented by Ray. Those cases have never been resolved. Gilbert’s family, and Ray, have long maintained she was murdered after meeting a client in Oak Beach, seven miles from Gilgo. Police in Suffolk county said her death was a “horrible accident”.
Last week, Heuermann’s DNA was entered into a crime database – a move that has the potential to link him to other murder investigations. But none of the developments over the weekend have shed light on the deaths of the other women, man and child whose remains were found in the area.
Ray welcomed the multi-agency taskforce formed early last year that, 18 months later, led to the arrest of Heuermann. He has nothing but praise for the Suffolk county district attorney, Ray Tierney, and the police commissioner, Rodney Harrison.
“They changed the entire approach from what the police had been doing,” he said.
For a decade before the taskforce was formed, he said, “the Suffolk police had acted in complete isolation. They had old eyes looking at the same case, they pushed out the FBI as well as other police departments that have information.” Those included the New York police department and the Jersey City and Nassau county police, all of which had information.
While his misgivings have been somewhat satiated by the recent arrest of Heuermann, Ray said that “the light that it brings also casts a shadow over the past work of the police department that we always said was a problem and inadequate”.
The problems Ray identified included a series of scandals inside the Suffolk police department which hampered the investigation.
The disgraced former chief of the Suffolk county police department James Burke was long accused of keeping the FBI out of the loop on the Gilgo case in part, it was alleged, because the federal law enforcement agency was then investigating him for corruption.
Burke had been promoted through the ranks of the department despite scandals that included him sleeping with a prostitute, in uniform, in his patrol car. Burke was described by colleagues as a “psychopath” who thought he was “untouchable”. In 2016, Burke was jailed for 46 months for battering Christopher Loeb, a thief who stole a bag from Burke’s police cruiser that contained porn and sex toys.
“He didn’t want the FBI involved because he was turf-obsessed and didn’t want another agency to get credit – and was predisposed against the feds,” says Gus Garcia-Roberts, author of Jimmy The King: Murder, Vice and the Reign of a Dirty Cop.
“After the Loeb beating, which sparked a federal investigation shortly after it occurred in 2012, his hatred of the feds grew even more. He was determined to keep them out of his jurisdiction as much as possible, which had disastrous effects on the Gilgo investigation as well as any law enforcement attempts to stem the rise of MS-13 in Long Island.”
If the Suffolk police had not been isolated, they might not have ignored a key tip from the pimp for Amber Lynn Costello giving cops a general description of a 6ft 4in “ogre” as well as the make and model of the luxury pickup he drove. “Isolating the department and keeping it away from use of other agencies was a mixture of pride and bureaucratic tradition,” Ray said.
On Wednesday, Newsday reported that the vehicle, a green Chevy Avalanche, had been brought to Suffolk police headquarters on a flatbed. The critical piece of evidence had been seized under an FBI warrant by the sheriff’s department in Chester county, South Carolina. Both Heuermann and his brother, Craig, own property on a secluded road in Chester.
But the arrest of Heuermann, whom Ray described as “a Tyrannosaurus rex, a beast”, has raised more questions. Earlier this year, Ray, his partner and daughter all received sinister phone calls in the middle of the night. That struck a chord at Heuermann’s arraignment when prosecutors alleged that the suspect had been behind a number of taunting phone calls to family members of the Gilgo Four after they went missing.
In one call, the caller told Ray they hoped he was enjoying his pizza. Seconds later, a Dominos pizza, which had not been ordered by Ray or his family, arrived at his home. The fact that it was a pizza box and crusts that provided investigators with Heuermann’s DNA that they was then matched to the Gilgo crime scene strikes Ray as suspicious.
“This guy who has been pursuing us is not just your typical crank caller,” he said. “Remember that Heuermann is a taunter, and this person was delivering loud messages that he was surveilling us.”
Ray has further posited that a woman may have been involved in one of the unsolved cases. During a search of the beach area, the remains of a currently unidentified woman, referred to as Jane Doe No 3, and her 10-month-old daughter, were found. The child, he said, was found wrapped in a blanket – an act he said is more likely to have been done by a woman than a man.
But while Ray does not believe that Heuermann was involved with Gilbert’s disappearance “at this time”, there remains the mystery of who, based on a rambling 21-minute call to 911 in which she said “there’s somebody after me”, may have chased her into a swamp where, as police theorize, she died of hypothermia or drowned.
An independent autopsy commissioned by her family found that her death was consistent with a homicide after finding a fractured thyroid bone in her neck. Never answered, too, was why Gilbert’s purse with a photo ID inside, her jeans and shoes, as well as a cellphone, were found a considerable distance from her body.
Police searching Heuermann’s run-down property in Massapequa Park and several nearby storage lockers have recovered more than 200 guns, along with what appeared to be creepy paintings and a doll with a red dress and sash. On Tuesday, the police commissioner, Rodney Harrison, said the guns were one reason they elected to arrest him on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
“Anytime somebody has that type of arsenal we have some concerns,” he told Fox News.
Separately, Tierney told CBS News he was “confident that we’re going to be able to eventually charge that fourth murder” of Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann is also being investigated for the murders of six other victims whose bodies were found near Gilgo Beach, including potentially Gilbert.
“Shannan Gilbert triggered the investigation, and she was the only one where they had strong circumstantial evidence that she was murdered. The police department willfully neglected that case, and willfully offered a misleading narrative for 12 years that it was an accident,” Ray said.
He continued: “Gilbert was a sex worker in a cemetery of sex workers. She was a walking among them. What kind of sex worker calls 911 and repeats ‘they’re trying to kill me’ inside a client’s house. She runs out, and that’s the perfectly rational thing. She’s knocking on doors and doing everything you’d do if you were truly frightened.”
But as police continue to collect evidence against Heuermann in the case of the Gilgo Four, Ray is not making any predictions about whether he could eventually be linked to the other sex workers, including Gilbert.
“We don’t have any evidence that Heuermann was involved with Gilbert or the others,” he said. “But he had the capacity, the motive and opportunity, so there’s a reasonable possibility and there needs to be an examination of what occurred in the investigation up to the time that the taskforce came in because there are other potential murderers on Long Island.”
