A senior police investigator on Long Island, New York, has described the acts attributed to the man charged with three murders in the Gilgo Beach serial killings as “the worst I’ve ever seen”.
The Suffolk county deputy police commissioner, Anthony Carter, told CNN that the suspect Rex Heuermann, the man in custody since last week, was “a demon”.
“It’s really hard to get into the mind of somebody that’s capable of committing the crimes [he] committed,” Carter added. “This person intended to do what he did to these victims. And that is why I say that’s one of the worst, if not the worst.”
Heuermann, 59, was arrested outside his New York architecture office on Thursday and charged a day later with first-degree murder over the 2010 killings of Malissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27. He is also the prime suspect in the murder of a fourth woman, 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The four women were among the 10 sets of adult remains discovered along Gilgo Beach after another woman, Shannan Gilbert, went missing and was found dead in the area.
The deputy police commissioner’s comments came as Suffolk county’s top prosecutor, Ray Tierney, told the outlet his office was “confident” that they would eventually charge Heuermann in the murder of Brainard-Barnes.
Law enforcement officials also told CNN that between 200 and 300 firearms were found in a walled-off vault behind a locked metal door in the basement of Heuermann’s home in Massapequa Park, Long Island.
The collection included pistols, revolvers and semi-automatic rifles, CNN reported, and totaled almost three times the number of permits Heuermann had been issued by New York state.
The unsolved killings baffled authorities for a decade until Heuermann was identified as a possible suspect in March last year, when a New York state trooper found his name registered to a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche that was similar to a car described by witnesses in the Costello case.
Since Thursday, police investigators have scoured the suspect’s home in Massapequa Park, seven miles from where the remains of the women were discovered, on open ground, bound and wrapped in burlap sacks. Police have also been searching a nearby storage locker and Heuermann’s 36th Street Manhattan office.
It was reported on Sunday that among the items removed from Heuermann’s home was a glass cabinet containing a child-sized doll with a red dress and bow.
“We’re just going through his house looking to see if there’s any evidence,” a police source told the New York Post of the search of the home. “If he has any trophies.”
According to forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, there is a “high likelihood that Heuermann collected trophies from the women he killed”.
Lieberman points out that an interior designer has already come forward to say that Heuermann had a locked room in his basement that he wouldn’t let her enter.
“Trophies, like locks of hair or pieces of victims’ clothing, are used by killers – especially sexual sadists – to bask in the satisfying memories of having killed them,” Lieberman said.
Police have not formally said what items have been removed from the suspect’s properties. Heuermann, reportedly an avid hunter, held permits for 92 guns. He was ordered to be detained without bond, and is due back in court on 1 August.
Asked by CNN if there are possibly more murder victims connected to Heuermann, Carter said: “Anything is possible.”
“There are still human remains that have to be investigated further in Gilgo,” he added. “I can’t begin to imagine the pain that these families have had to endure over the last decade, and to know that this demon was capable of doing such an evil act to these families … it is just, you know, beyond comprehension.”
When Heuermann returns to court, Judge Richard Ambro – who ordered him jailed without bail on Friday, citing “the extreme depravity” of his alleged conduct – is likely to begin setting out terms for prosecutors to hand over discovery materials to the suspect’s legal defense team.
In extraordinarily detailed information contained in court papers opposing bail, and at a press conference on Friday, prosecutors have laid out how they used 300 subpoenas to gather evidence to present to a secret grand jury that later returned charges.
Much of the evidence against Heuermann that has been made public – cellphone records from burner phones that allegedly place him in contact with the victims or their families, online searches and a key vehicle – is largely circumstantial.
According to Anna Cominsky, professor of law at New York Law School, the critical evidence that could tie Heuermann directly to the crimes is DNA taken from a discarded pizza box and crust that was recovered from trash outside his home that, prosecutors allege, match hairs found on at least one of the victim’s remains.
“If I was the prosecutor I would want to know that the pizza was consumed by the defendant and only the defendant, and I had evidence to show that the pizza box was 100% the box that he discarded and in no way did it get contaminated,” Cominsky said.
Cominsky added: “We got a real glimpse into the prosecutor’s case, but there’s so much we don’t know … There are bankers’ boxes and computers full of information that we have yet to see.”
