Gilgo Beach

No one had connected his name to the women who had vanished from New York City and Long Island. No one knew that years later, investigators would turn their attention to his weathered house in Massapequa Park, excavate parts of the property, and compare his family's movements with a series of murders stretching back into the previous century.

On that cold December day, the police were looking for one woman.

Her name was Shannan Gilbert.

And she had been missing for more than seven months.

Ocean Parkway runs along a narrow strip of land on the southern edge of Long Island. On one side lies the Atlantic Ocean. On the other are bays, marshland and dense coastal brush growing alongside the road.

In summer, traffic flows toward the beaches. Cars packed with people, towels and coolers. Sand works its way into floor mats, and the smell of salt follows people home.

December is different.

The beaches are empty. Wind blows in from the ocean, and the vegetation beside the road stands brown and dry. Beyond the shoulder, it takes only a few steps for someone to disappear from view.

Police officer John Mallia knew the area.

Beside him was Blue, a German shepherd trained for search work.

They were there because of Shannan.

She had disappeared in the early hours of May 1 from Oak Beach, several miles to the east. Her last known hours had been chaotic: a stranger's house, a lengthy 911 call, a desperate run into the darkness and attempts to find someone who would help her.

Then she vanished.

No one had seen her since.

The search dragged on. Months passed. Summer ended. Then autumn.

Now it was December.

Mallia and Blue continued along the road.

It was Blue who stopped.

The dog caught a scent and pulled Mallia away from the roadway and into the brush.

Something was there.

Mallia followed.

Among the vegetation lay something that, from a distance, might have looked like rubbish thrown from the road. The area collected the things people and the wind left behind: plastic, discarded objects, debris gathering in places where few people ever walked.

But as Mallia moved closer, it became clear that this was not rubbish.

They were human remains.

For a moment, Shannan was the obvious thought.

She was the woman they had come to find.

But the woman hidden in the brush was not Shannan Gilbert.

She was small. Her remains had been wrapped and concealed in the dense vegetation only a short distance from the road.

Investigators now had to learn who she was.

The answer came soon afterward.

Melissa Barthelemy.

She was 24 years old.

Melissa had grown up in Buffalo, New York, before later moving south to the Bronx. She was the mother of a young daughter and supported herself in part through sex work, which she advertised online.

In July of the previous year, she had stopped answering her phone.

Her family had been forced to endure more than her disappearance.

After Melissa vanished, her younger sister Amanda began receiving calls from Melissa's phone. A man was on the other end. He mocked the family's hope that Melissa might come home and spoke to the teenage girl in a way that would later make those calls one of the most disturbing elements of the case.

The caller was careful.

The calls were brief.

And investigators were unable to trace them back to the person who had made them.

By the time Melissa's remains were discovered beside Ocean Parkway on December 11, 2010, she had been missing for roughly seventeen months.

Her family finally had an answer to one question.

Melissa was not alive.

Almost everything else remained unanswered.

Who had killed her?

Why had her body ended up here?

And why had someone chosen this particular place?

The discovery changed the nature of the search.

This was no longer only about finding Shannan Gilbert.

Now there was a murder investigation.

Police had to examine the area surrounding the place where Melissa had been concealed. The thick brush that had hidden her remains for so long needed to be searched more carefully.

Ocean Parkway had several qualities that made the area disturbingly well suited to someone who wanted to leave something behind without being seen.

The road was easy to access.

Traffic was sparse at night.

Beyond the shoulder, dense vegetation could swallow a person from sight almost immediately.

And there was no need to venture far from a vehicle.

The police knew that now.

What they did not know was whether Melissa was alone.

Two days later, on December 13, the search continued.

Roughly five hundred feet from where Melissa had been found, investigators discovered another set of human remains.

A woman.

Not far away, they found another.

Then a third.

Within a matter of hours, one body had become four.

The women had been left relatively close together along the same stretch of Ocean Parkway.

They would later be identified as:

Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

Megan Waterman.

Amber Lynn Costello.

Together with Melissa, they would become known by a single name.

The Gilgo Four.

Four young women.

Four families that had waited for a phone call, a piece of information, anything that might explain how someone could simply disappear.

Now all four had been found beside the same road.

It was becoming impossible to believe that was a coincidence.

Shannan Gilbert, however, was still missing.

That strange fact hung over everything.

The search for one woman had uncovered four others.

But not her.

And as police looked across the dense brush lining Ocean Parkway, there was no way to know what else might be hidden there.

Winter had stripped much of the vegetation bare and opened up the landscape.

The search continued.

Over the months that followed, the coastline would surrender more human remains.

Some had been hidden for years.

Some belonged to people the police could not even name.

And slowly, investigators would discover that the story unfolding along Ocean Parkway had not begun with the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert.

It had not begun with Melissa Barthelemy either.

It reached much further back.

But to understand how the police ended up there with Blue in the December cold, we first have to return to the night when a young woman ran from a house in Oak Beach, knocked on strangers' doors and begged for help.

The night Shannan Gilbert disappeared.

Shannan Gilbert arrived in Oak Beach sometime after midnight.

She was 23 years old and had traveled from New York City with her driver, Michael Pak. Their destination was a house inside the secluded beachfront community, where a man named Joseph Brewer was waiting for her.

Shannan advertised sex work online. This was part of her job.

Pak waited outside while she went in.

At first, there was little to suggest that this night would end any differently from others Shannan had worked.

But sometime later, something changed inside the house.

Brewer would later say that Shannan began behaving strangely and that he wanted her to leave. He contacted Pak and asked him to come inside and get her.

When Pak entered the house, Shannan did not want to go with him.

She was frightened.

Exactly what happened inside that house has never been established with complete certainty.

What happened next, however, was recorded.

Shannan called 911.

The call lasted more than twenty minutes.

Her voice shifted throughout the recording.

At times, she spoke calmly.

At times, she was difficult to understand.

Sometimes she did not answer the dispatcher's questions.

And sometimes she screamed.

She said someone was after her.

The dispatcher repeatedly tried to determine where she was.

Shannan did not know.

She could say that she was inside a house.

But she could not provide an address.

That mattered.

The call did not immediately reach the Suffolk County police officers closest to her location. Because dispatchers were unable to determine exactly where she was, the call was transferred to the New York State Police. It later emerged that the officers who responded to calls from neighbors that morning were unaware of the lengthy 911 call Shannan herself had made.

In the background of the recording, two men's voices could be heard.

Brewer.

And Pak.

They were trying to get Shannan to leave.

She did not want to go with them.

At one point, she asked whether they were going to kill her.

It is easy to listen to those minutes backward, knowing what happened afterward.

But inside that house, no one knew that Shannan's voice would eventually become part of one of Long Island's most enduring mysteries.

Shannan knew only one thing.

She wanted out.

She ran.

Out of Brewer's house.

Into the darkness.

Oak Beach was not an ordinary city neighborhood. The houses were scattered, the roads were dark, and beyond the homes lay marshland and dense vegetation where it would have been easy to lose all sense of direction at night.

Shannan ran to a neighbor's house.

The man who lived there was Gus Coletti.

He was shaving early that morning when he heard screaming and frantic pounding at his door.

Shannan was outside.

She asked for help.

Coletti tried to speak with her.

She gave him little explanation.

She appeared terrified.

He picked up the phone and called 911.

When he told Shannan that the police were coming, the obvious thing might have been for her to wait.

She didn't.

She ran again.

Coletti saw a dark SUV moving slowly through the neighborhood.

Michael Pak was behind the wheel.

Shannan's driver.

Pak was looking for her.

For a time, Coletti saw Shannan hiding beneath a boat in his yard.

Then she ran again.

Pak followed.

Coletti shouted at him to stop.

He continued.

Police would later say that both Brewer and Pak were investigated and that no evidence was found linking either man to Shannan's death.

But Coletti could not have known that on this particular morning.

All he could see was a frightened young woman running from a man in a vehicle.

So he called the police again.

It was around 5:21 a.m.

Shannan continued down the street.

Her next confirmed stop was the home of a woman named Barbara Brennan.

Once again, she pounded on a door.

Once again, a neighbor called the police.

It was the last confirmed location of Shannan Gilbert while she was alive.

Officers arrived in the area shortly afterward, at around 5:40 a.m.

But Shannan was gone.

They did not find her in the street.

Not at Coletti's house.

Not outside Brennan's home.

Pak had also driven off in search of her.

And because the responding officers did not know about Shannan's own 911 call, they considered the possibility that she had already left the area with her driver.

She had not.

Morning came to Oak Beach.

Lights appeared in windows.

People stepped outside.

The streets that had seemed dark and threatening only hours earlier became ordinary residential roads again.

But Shannan was gone.

Her phone fell silent.

Her family could not reach her.

And the first days after her disappearance became weeks.

Shannan's family eventually came to Oak Beach themselves. They went from house to house, spoke with residents and distributed photographs of her.

They tried to reconstruct the night she disappeared.

Police searched.

But the terrain was difficult.

The marsh was dense.

The vegetation was thick.

Water separated parts of the residential community from the surrounding shoreline.

And the months passed.

What no one knew was that Shannan had disappeared into a landscape that was already hiding secrets.

Police would later maintain that her death was most likely not the result of homicide.

Her family rejected that conclusion.

Those two interpretations of Shannan's final night have never fully reconciled.

One describes a young woman in extreme distress who ran into the darkness, became disoriented and died after entering the marshland.

The other begins with a much simpler question:

Why was she so afraid?

Shannan said someone was after her.

She begged strangers for help.

She did not wait for the police.

She hid.

She ran.

And then she disappeared.

Seven months later, John Mallia stood beside Ocean Parkway with Blue.

They were still looking for Shannan.

Instead, Blue found Melissa Barthelemy.

Then came Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

Megan Waterman.

Amber Lynn Costello.

And suddenly, police had to confront a different possibility.

Perhaps Shannan had done more than disappear.

Perhaps, without anyone realizing it, the search for her had led investigators into an area where someone had been hiding women for years.

The question was no longer only:

What happened to Shannan Gilbert?

There was another:

Who were the four women the police found while searching for her?

Melissa Barthelemy.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

Megan Waterman.

Amber Lynn Costello.

Four women who had disappeared at different times, from different places, under different circumstances.

Now they were together.

Their remains had been discovered along the same short stretch of Ocean Parkway, concealed in the dense brush between the road and the shoreline.

It was becoming impossible to dismiss this as coincidence.

Someone had brought them here.

But before they became known collectively as the Gilgo Four, they had been four women living four different lives.

And each of them had left behind people waiting for her to come home.

Melissa

Melissa Barthelemy was 24 years old.

Originally from Buffalo, she had moved to the Bronx and supported herself through sex work that she advertised online.

She had a young daughter.

On July 12, 2009, her mother reported her missing after the family had been unable to reach her.

But Melissa's disappearance soon took an unusually disturbing turn.

Her phone had not simply gone silent.

Someone began using it.

Melissa's younger sister, Amanda, received calls from a man who appeared to know that Melissa was missing.

He called again.

And again.

The calls were brief, and he seemed careful not to remain on the line long enough to make tracing him easy.

He taunted the family.

He talked about Melissa.

And he made it clear to her teenage sister that Melissa was not coming back.

For the family, each call must have brought the same nightmare in a different form.

If this man knew what had happened to Melissa, then somewhere there was a person who had the answer they desperately needed.

But he was not calling to help.

He was calling because he could.

Then the calls stopped.

Melissa remained missing.

For seventeen months.

Until Blue entered the brush beside Ocean Parkway.

Maureen

Maureen Brainard-Barnes was 25 years old.

She was from Connecticut and the mother of two children.

In the summer of 2007, she was struggling financially.

She had been doing sex work and traveled to Manhattan hoping to make money.

On July 9, 2007, she disappeared.

Maureen had been staying at a hotel in the city. She had remained in contact with people back home, and there was no indication that she intended to abandon her family and simply vanish.

Then the communication stopped.

Her phone went silent.

Maureen did not come home.

Years passed.

Her children grew older.

Her family waited.

By the time her remains were discovered beside Ocean Parkway in December 2010, more than three years had passed since she disappeared.

She had been left only a short distance from Melissa.

And there were similarities.

Both were young.

Both had advertised sex work.

Both were petite.

Both had vanished without a clear witness who could tell police exactly what happened after they met their final client.

But Maureen had disappeared two years before Melissa.

If the same man had killed them both, this had not begun in the summer of 2009.

He had been doing this for longer.

Megan

Megan Waterman was 22 years old.

She was from Maine.

And she had a young daughter.

In June 2010, Megan was on Long Island, staying at a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge.

In the early hours of June 6, she left the hotel.

She did not take her belongings with her.

Hotel surveillance cameras captured her walking out.

Then she disappeared.

Her family knew something was wrong.

Megan had not abandoned her daughter to begin a new life somewhere else.

She had walked out of a hotel.

And she had never come back.

Six months later, she was lying in the brush beside Ocean Parkway.

Not far from Melissa.

Not far from Maureen.

Three women.

Three different years.

The same stretch of road.

Amber

Amber Lynn Costello was 27 years old.

She lived in West Babylon on Long Island.

Unlike the other three women, her killer did not need to collect her from Manhattan or from a hotel.

Amber did sex work from her home.

On the evening of September 2, 2010, she arranged to meet a client.

The man offered her an unusually large amount of money.

Amber went out to meet him.

She left her phone behind.

She left her purse behind.

She was not expecting to be gone for long.

Witnesses would later remember the man.

He was large.

White.

With dark, bushy hair and glasses reminiscent of an older aviator style.

And he was associated with a vehicle that appeared to be a Chevrolet Avalanche.

In 2010, it was simply a description.

One clue among countless others in a growing murder investigation.

Amber never came home.

Three months later, her remains were found beside Ocean Parkway.

She was the last of the Gilgo Four to disappear.

And she may have left behind one of the most important clues in the entire investigation.

But nearly twelve years would pass before investigators understood just how important it was.

Police now had four names.

Melissa Barthelemy, 24.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25.

Megan Waterman, 22.

Amber Lynn Costello, 27.

All four had done sex work.

All four had advertised their services online.

All four were relatively petite.

And someone had placed their remains within the same small area beside Ocean Parkway.

The conclusion was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

Police were likely hunting a serial killer.

But there was something else that mattered.

Whoever had chosen this location appeared to trust it.

Ocean Parkway was not somewhere a person simply wandered into by accident with a body in a vehicle.

Someone had to drive there.

Stop.

Get out.

And trust that no one was watching.

Again and again.

Maureen had been there since 2007.

Melissa since 2009.

Megan since June 2010.

Amber since September.

Whoever had left them there had reason to believe the brush would keep the secret.

For years, it had.

Then Blue arrived.

But police now faced another problem.

If four women had been concealed along this short stretch of road, why assume they were the only ones?

The search area expanded.

Officers moved farther along Ocean Parkway.

Into the brush.

Along the shoreline.

And as winter gave way to spring, the landscape began surrendering more of its secrets.

In March 2011, more human remains were discovered.

Then more.

And more.

Some belonged to people who had disappeared years earlier.

Some were connected to remains that had already been discovered elsewhere on Long Island.

And some had no name at all.

The Gilgo Four were not the end of the search.

They were only the beginning.

Ocean Parkway had more to give up.

But they also raised a question the police could no longer ignore.

What if there were more?

Ocean Parkway continues along the southern edge of Long Island, running between the ocean, bays and marshland. For long stretches, dense vegetation begins almost as soon as the pavement ends.

If someone had used one part of this landscape to conceal human remains, there was no reason to assume they had used only that one location.

Police expanded the search area.

Winter passed.

And as spring arrived in 2011, the road began giving up its dead again.

On March 29, 2011, human remains were discovered farther east along Ocean Parkway, closer to Tobay Beach.

They belonged to a young woman.

But this was not the first time police had found part of her body.

Eight years earlier, in July 2003, a man walking his dog through a wooded area near Halsey Manor Road in Manorville, much farther east on Long Island, had come across the remains of a woman.

She had been murdered and dismembered.

Her head and hands were missing.

Without them, identification became more difficult.

But police eventually learned who she was.

Jessica Taylor.

She was 20 years old.

Jessica had grown up in Poughkeepsie, New York. She had left home at a young age, and her life had become unstable. She did sex work and had connections to both Manhattan and the Washington, D.C. area.

In the summer of 2003, her life ended in Manorville.

Or at least, that was how the case initially appeared.

Because what police discovered beside Ocean Parkway in 2011 changed the picture.

A skull, hands and part of an arm were recovered from the brush.

DNA testing confirmed that they were the missing parts of Jessica's body.

Someone had left part of her in Manorville.

And another part beside Ocean Parkway.

Two locations.

Roughly forty miles apart.

Eight years between the discoveries.

Now they belonged to the same mystery.

Six days later came another discovery.

April 4, 2011.

Police found more human remains beside Ocean Parkway.

Again, they belonged to a woman.

And again, police had already found part of her body somewhere else on Long Island.

In November 2000, hunters had discovered a dismembered body in a wooded area of Manorville.

The head, hands and right foot were missing.

No one knew who the woman was.

She became an unidentified victim.

Years passed.

Then, in 2011, a skull, hands and a right foot were discovered beside Ocean Parkway.

DNA connected the two sets of remains.

The woman from Manorville and the woman from Ocean Parkway were the same person.

But police still had no name.

For almost another decade, she would be known in the case files only as Jane Doe #6.

It was not until 2020, with the help of genetic genealogy, that her identity was finally confirmed.

Valerie Mack.

She had been 24 years old.

And she had a son.

Now there was a connection that was difficult to ignore.

Jessica Taylor.

Valerie Mack.

Two young women.

Both had been dismembered.

Parts of both bodies had been left in Manorville.

Other parts had ended up beside Ocean Parkway.

They had been killed three years apart.

Valerie in 2000.

Jessica in 2003.

The Gilgo Four had disappeared between 2007 and 2010.

The timeline was stretching backward.

And with it, the question changed.

Police no longer had to ask only whether the person who had left the Gilgo Four beside the road had killed others.

They also had to ask:

How long had someone been using Long Island to hide the dead?

But the discoveries did not stop there.

On the same day that parts of Valerie Mack were found, police discovered the remains of a small child.

The child was believed to have been between sixteen and twenty-four months old.

Several days later, the remains of another person were discovered closer to Tobay Beach.

For years, that person would be referred to in the investigation as Asian Male — an unidentified person of Asian ancestry who appeared to have died years earlier.

Then there were more remains.

Investigators eventually learned that the child's mother was among the victims.

Part of her body had been discovered years earlier, in 1997, at Hempstead Lake State Park.

For years, investigators knew her only as Peaches, a nickname derived from a distinctive tattoo found on her body.

DNA showed that she was the mother of the child found beside Ocean Parkway.

Additional remains belonging to her were also discovered near the child.

A mother and her child.

Dead.

Their remains scattered across different locations.

And still without names police could publicly attach to them.

What had begun with four women was becoming a complicated web of human remains, locations and deaths stretching across more than a decade.

And it was not even clear that one person was responsible for all of them.

Then came another discovery.

On April 11, 2011, police found a skull and other remains near Tobay Beach.

DNA connected them to two legs that had washed ashore at Blue Point Beach on Fire Island fifteen years earlier.

That had happened in April 1996.

At the time, no one had been able to identify the woman.

Now police had recovered more of her remains.

But they still had no name.

She became known as Fire Island Jane Doe.

It would take more than a quarter of a century to learn who she was.

Her name was:

Karen Vergata.

She had been 34 years old when she disappeared.

And she had two sons.

In the space of only a few months, the investigation had transformed.

In December, police had discovered four women in one location.

By the following spring, remains found along Ocean Parkway were being connected to earlier discoveries in Manorville, on Fire Island and at Hempstead Lake.

Some of the cases stretched back into the 1990s.

Some victims had been dismembered.

Others had not.

Some had done sex work.

About others, police knew very little.

Some were women.

One was a child.

And one victim remained unidentified for years, with investigators having only limited information about the person's gender identity and life.

It was tempting to place everything beneath a single label.

The Gilgo Beach serial killer.

But the evidence did not justify that simplification.

Human remains being discovered within the same broad coastal area did not automatically mean that one person had killed everyone found there.

Investigators had to remain open to the possibility that more than one killer had used isolated areas of Long Island to dispose of bodies.

That distinction still matters today.

Rex Heuermann has admitted murdering eight women.

That does not mean every case involving human remains discovered around Gilgo Beach and Ocean Parkway has been solved.

Some have not.

But in 2011, police did not even know what we know now.

They had human remains.

DNA.

Old cases.

Maps covered in points stretching across Long Island.

And families who had been waiting years for answers.

Yet in some of the cases, investigators were still missing the most fundamental thing of all.

A name.

Before they could ask who had killed these people, they first had to determine who they were.

Jessica had her name back.

But Valerie was still Jane Doe #6.

Karen was still Fire Island Jane Doe.

Peaches was still only a nickname investigators had given an unidentified woman because of a tattoo.

Her child had no publicly known name.

And another person remained known in the case only as Asian Doe.

The killer — or killers — had not only taken their lives.

Time had taken their names as well.

The next battle in the investigation was to give them back.

DNA can survive for years. Teeth can be compared with dental records. Bones can offer clues about a life that ended long ago.

But none of those things guarantees an answer to the simplest question.

Who was this person?

Along Ocean Parkway, police confronted that question again and again.

Some of the victims had been missing for years.

Parts of some bodies had been discovered in more than one location.

Families had reported people missing without knowing that the answer they were looking for might already be sitting in an evidence room somewhere else.

DNA databases were smaller.

The technology was more limited.

And if the comparison sample investigators needed did not exist, a DNA profile could sit for years without producing a name.

That is how a person can disappear twice.

First from the lives of the people who knew them.

Then into a system where they become a number.

Jane Doe #6

In November 2000, the remains of a woman were discovered in a wooded area of Manorville.

Her head and hands were missing, along with part of one leg.

Police could not identify her.

In 2011, the missing parts of her body were discovered beside Ocean Parkway.

DNA confirmed that the remains belonged to the same woman.

Police now had more of her body.

But they still did not have her name.

She became known as Jane Doe #6.

The designation said nothing about the person herself.

It described only the investigation.

The sixth unidentified woman.

A number in a file.

A case waiting for an answer.

Behind that number, however, was a woman who had a family.

She had a child.

Somewhere, there were people who had once known the sound of her voice, watched her laugh and called her by name.

Police simply did not know what that name was.

For almost twenty years.

In 2020, that changed.

Investigators turned to genetic genealogy.

The basic idea is relatively simple, even though the work behind it can be extraordinarily complex.

In a conventional forensic investigation, a DNA profile may be compared with known samples contained in law-enforcement databases. If there is no matching profile, the search may produce nothing.

Genetic genealogy approaches the problem differently.

Where laws and database rules permit it, investigators can look for genetic relatives among people who have made their DNA data available for that type of use.

The victim herself does not have to be in the database.

A relative may be enough.

Then the genealogical work begins.

Parents.

Siblings.

Cousins.

Grandparents.

Birth certificates.

Death certificates.

Marriages.

Addresses.

A family tree is built and narrowed until the genetic evidence and traditional detective work begin pointing toward the same person.

In the case of Jane Doe #6, that process finally produced a name.

Valerie Mack.

Valerie had been 24 years old when she was killed.

She had also used the name Melissa Taylor.

She was a mother.

Her last known movements dated to 2000.

Then she disappeared.

While her family remained without answers, part of Valerie's body lay in Manorville.

Another part lay beside Ocean Parkway.

For two decades, those remains existed as evidence from two discoveries that investigators could not connect to a woman with a name.

Now she was no longer Jane Doe #6.

She was Valerie.

And that changed more than a heading in a police file.

Once investigators know who a victim is, they can begin investigating the life that came before the death.

Where did she live?

Who did she know?

Where was she last seen?

Who did she speak to?

How did she work?

Who could have come into contact with her?

A name opens doors that an unidentified body cannot.

And years later, Valerie Mack would become far more important to the investigation than anyone could have imagined in 2020.

Fire Island Jane Doe

Another woman had waited even longer for her name.

On April 20, 1996, a woman's legs were discovered on Fire Island.

Her body had been dismembered.

Police could not identify her.

Fifteen years passed.

Then, in April 2011, additional remains were discovered near Tobay Beach along Ocean Parkway.

DNA connected them to the woman from Fire Island.

The same person.

But once again, police had only connected human remains to other human remains.

Not to a name.

She became known as Fire Island Jane Doe.

And more than a quarter of a century passed after the first discovery of her remains.

In 2022, investigators turned to genetic genealogy.

The work took months.

In August 2023, authorities finally announced who she had been.

Karen Vergata.

She was 34 years old.

A mother of two sons.

She had last been in contact with her father in Manhattan around the middle of February 1996.

Then she disappeared.

No missing-person report associated with Karen had been connected to the remains when they were discovered.

And so two stories had continued separately.

The story of a family that had lost a woman.

And the story of police who had found the remains of a woman without a name.

It took 27 years to bring those stories together.

The timing of Karen's identification in the summer of 2023 was striking.

Only weeks earlier, police had arrested a man in connection with the murders of the Gilgo Four.

Rex Heuermann.

But authorities did not say then that he had killed Karen.

Her case remained under investigation.

Her name had returned.

The answer to who had taken her life had not.

That would take almost three more years.

Peaches and Her Child

Two other victims showed even more starkly how cruelly time can separate a person from their identity.

In 1997, the dismembered torso of a woman was discovered in a container near Hempstead Lake State Park.

Investigators noticed a distinctive tattoo on her chest.

A peach.

When they could not identify her, the nickname remained.

Peaches.

In 2011, additional remains belonging to her were discovered near Ocean Parkway.

A small child was found nearby.

DNA showed that Peaches was the child's mother.

They had been discovered at different times.

In different places.

But genetics brought them back together.

A mother and child.

That alone raised new questions.

Who would kill a mother and a toddler?

Why had their remains been left in more than one location?

And was whoever did this the same person who had left the Gilgo Four beside the road?

In 2011, there was no certain answer.

And it would be wrong to fill those gaps with what we now know about other murders.

Proximity is not proof.

Similarity is not proof.

The Gilgo investigation had grown so large that one of its greatest dangers was the temptation to assume that everything had to be connected to everything else.

The same caution applied to the unidentified person investigators long referred to as Asian Male.

The remains were discovered in 2011.

Investigators believed the person had died years earlier.

But little was known about the life that came before the death.

No name.

No clear history.

No family immediately connected to the discovery.

Only a person who had once walked through streets, spoken to other people and lived a life that was now almost invisible in the investigative record.

Cases like this reveal the limits of what bones can tell us.

They can preserve DNA.

They can preserve injuries.

But they do not automatically preserve a name.

In the years after the discoveries along Ocean Parkway, the technology changed.

DNA analysis became more powerful.

Databases expanded.

Genetic genealogy gave investigators options that had not been realistic when many of the remains were first recovered.

Old evidence could suddenly answer new questions.

Jane Doe #6 became Valerie Mack.

Fire Island Jane Doe became Karen Vergata.

And every recovered name changed the map.

Not because a name solved the murder.

But because investigators could now trace a person backward through time.

Her final days.

Her final contacts.

The last places she had been.

The people around her.

Sometimes a murder investigation does not begin with finding the killer.

It begins with finding the victim.

But one of the names that would eventually become part of the Gilgo Beach story had never been lost.

Police had known who she was from the beginning.

She had been found dead beside a road on Long Island in 1993.

Her name was Sandra Costilla.

For years, her murder appeared to be a different case.

A different place.

A different time.

No obvious connection to four women who would not be discovered beside Ocean Parkway until seventeen years later.

But in 2024, Sandra's name would surface again.

And when it did, investigators would discover that the story they thought had begun at Gilgo Beach reached much further into the past than anyone had realized.

Back to 1993.

Seventeen years before Blue walked into the brush beside Ocean Parkway, a young woman was found beside another road on Long Island.

No one was talking about Gilgo Beach.

No one knew the name Melissa Barthelemy.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes was still a child.

So were Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello.

And the name Rex Heuermann meant nothing to the police officers who arrived at the scene.

The woman's name was Sandra Costilla.

She was 28 years old.

And she had been murdered.

Sandra's body was discovered in a wooded area near Fish Cove Road in North Sea, a small community in Southampton on eastern Long Island.

She had been left outdoors.

Her clothing had been disturbed.

Her injuries showed that she had suffered significant violence.

Investigators believed she had been killed shortly before her body was discovered.

Sandra had been strangled.

There was nothing obvious connecting her murder to what would eventually be discovered along Ocean Parkway.

The location was different.

The circumstances gave investigators no clear path toward the cases that would come years later.

And this was 1993.

The Gilgo Four would not be found for another seventeen years.

Sandra had come to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago.

She had lived in the New York area and engaged in sex work.

She had a young son.

When Sandra was murdered, he was only about five years old.

It is easy to reduce that fact to a single sentence in a murder case.

The victim left behind a son.

But for a child, murder is not a sentence in a police report.

It is an absence that continues.

Birthdays.

Christmases.

School years.

Adulthood.

Questions without answers.

And in Sandra's case, the wait for those answers would last more than three decades.

Police investigated her murder.

The years passed.

No one was charged.

But Sandra's case was not entirely forgotten.

Eventually, attention turned toward another Long Island man.

John Bittrolff.

Bittrolff, a carpenter from Manorville, was later convicted of murdering two other women, Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee.

Both had been strangled.

Both had engaged in sex work.

And investigators saw similarities between those murders and the killing of Sandra Costilla.

For years, suspicion therefore hung over Bittrolff.

But suspicion is not proof.

He was never charged with Sandra's murder.

Her case remained unsolved.

Then came December 2010.

Melissa.

Maureen.

Megan.

Amber.

Then 2011.

Jessica.

Valerie.

Karen.

More human remains.

More old cases.

The map of Long Island began filling with points.

But Sandra Costilla was still not part of the Gilgo story.

She had been found somewhere else.

She had been killed much earlier.

And investigators had already considered another possible suspect.

There was little reason for the public to connect her with the women found beside Ocean Parkway.

That would change.

But not for many years.

After Rex Heuermann's arrest in 2023, investigators began revisiting old unsolved murders.

Not only cases already associated with Gilgo Beach.

They looked elsewhere.

At other years.

Other victims.

Murders that had sat in boxes and databases for decades.

Sandra's was one of them.

And investigators now had tools that police in 1993 could not have imagined.

DNA technology had advanced dramatically.

Old biological evidence that once revealed little could now yield far more information.

Hair without a root — evidence that had once offered limited genetic value — could, with newer forensic techniques, preserve information capable of being compared with particular individuals.

In Sandra's case, one such hair had survived.

More than thirty years had passed since her murder.

But the evidence had waited.

In June 2024, prosecutors stood before a judge in Suffolk County with new murder charges against Rex Heuermann.

He had already been charged in killings connected to the Gilgo investigation.

Now two more names were added.

Jessica Taylor.

And Sandra Costilla.

In an instant, the timeline changed.

If prosecutors were right, the man they had linked to the Gilgo Four had not begun killing in 2007.

Not in 2003.

Not even in 2000.

He had been killing by at least 1993.

Seventeen years before Melissa Barthelemy's remains were discovered beside Ocean Parkway.

Prosecutors said genetic evidence linked Heuermann to a hair recovered in connection with Sandra's body.

But that was not the only reason investigators had begun looking differently at older cases.

During their examination of Heuermann's digital files, they had discovered a document.

Not a diary.

Not a confession.

Something closer to a working document.

Notes.

Planning.

Things to remember.

Mistakes to avoid.

The document had been created years after Sandra's murder, but prosecutors said it revealed how Heuermann thought about preparation, execution and avoiding evidence.

We will return to that document later.

Because it would change the way investigators — and eventually the public — understood the murders.

But by 2024, it had already done something important.

It had helped investigators look at old cases with new eyes.

Sandra Costilla had been left in the woods near Fish Cove Road in 1993.

Jessica Taylor had been found in Manorville in 2003.

The Gilgo Four disappeared between 2007 and 2010.

At first, they looked like different cases.

Different years.

Different locations.

Different methods of disposing of human remains.

But more than thirty years after Sandra's death, the same name was beginning to appear across them.

Rex Heuermann.

At the time, he pleaded not guilty.

The case appeared to be heading toward trial.

Prosecutors would still have to prove their allegations in court.

But that trial would never happen in the way everyone expected.

On April 8, 2026, Heuermann pleaded guilty to Sandra Costilla's murder along with six other murders and admitted killing Karen Vergata as well.

What had been an allegation in 2024 was now part of Heuermann's own admission.

The murders he acknowledged stretched from 1993 to 2010.

Seventeen years.

But those seventeen years contained another pattern.

The killings did not occur at regular intervals.

There were months — sometimes years — between the murders Heuermann is now known to have committed.

That raised another set of questions.

What determined the timing?

What did he need in order to kill without attracting suspicion?

Where was his family?

And when was he alone?

Later, when investigators placed travel records, phone data and murder dates side by side, a pattern began to emerge.

Not for every murder.

But for several of them.

In 2003, his family was in Vermont.

In 2007, they were away again.

In the summer of 2009, his wife, Asa Ellerup, left for Iceland.

Two days later, Melissa Barthelemy was murdered.

In 2010 came more trips.

And more killings.

None of this, by itself, proved that Heuermann deliberately scheduled murders around his family's travel.

But to investigators, their absence mattered.

It gave a man living an ordinary family life something he needed.

Time alone.

He does not have to hide things from a spouse.

He does not have to wait for the children to fall asleep.

And he does not have to wonder whether someone might open a door that is supposed to stay closed.

Rex Heuermann did not live alone.

In Massapequa Park, he shared a small house with his wife, Asa Ellerup, and their children.

From the outside, it was a home.

A family.

An ordinary life in a Long Island suburb.

But years later, when investigators began placing the dates of the murders alongside the family's travel records, something caught their attention.

Again and again, members of Heuermann's family were away when women disappeared.

And Rex Heuermann had stayed behind.

July 2003

In the summer of 2003, Asa traveled with the children to Vermont.

Their destination was Smugglers' Notch Resort.

Travel records later gathered by investigators indicated that the family was there approximately from July 20 to July 27.

Rex did not go with them.

He remained in New York.

Telephone records showed calls between the Long Island home and the family in Vermont during the trip.

There was one adult left at home.

Rex Heuermann.

At roughly the same time, Jessica Taylor disappeared.

Investigators believe she was killed sometime between July 21 and July 26, 2003.

On July 26, parts of her body were discovered in Manorville.

Her head and hands had been removed.

Eight years later, additional remains belonging to Jessica would be discovered beside Ocean Parkway.

While Heuermann's family was vacationing in Vermont, Jessica Taylor had been murdered on Long Island.

Prosecutors would later argue that his family's absence gave Heuermann unrestricted time and opportunity to commit the murder and dispose of her remains.

But in 2003, no one knew that these two calendars would one day be placed side by side.

A family vacation.

A murder.

July 2007

Four years later, something similar happened.

Asa and the children left home in early July.

This time, their destination was Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Records later examined by investigators indicated that the family left around July 6 and remained away until approximately July 20.

At first, Rex stayed behind in New York.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes disappeared on July 9.

She was 25 years old and the mother of two children.

She had traveled from Connecticut to Manhattan and advertised sex work.

Then her trail ended.

Four days later, around July 13, Rex joined his family.

Maureen was already missing.

Her remains would not be discovered until December 2010 beside Ocean Parkway.

But when investigators reconstructed the travel records years later, the same sequence appeared again.

The family left.

Rex stayed behind.

A woman disappeared.

Then he returned to family life.

Iceland, 2009

Then came a trip that would become particularly important to investigators.

On July 8, 2009, Asa left the United States.

She was traveling to Iceland.

The trip itself was not unusual. Asa was born in Iceland, and she and the children had traveled there to visit family.

Rex remained in New York.

Two days later, on July 10, Melissa Barthelemy disappeared.

Melissa had been communicating with a man using a phone that was not registered in his own name.

Years later, investigators would use phone activity, location data and other digital evidence to connect that communications trail to Heuermann.

Melissa was never seen alive again.

Then her phone began making calls.

Not to her mother.

Not to police.

But to her younger sister, Amanda.

A man repeatedly called Amanda using Melissa's phone.

The calls were threatening and degrading.

The caller appeared to know that Melissa was dead.

Throughout this period, Asa remained overseas.

She did not return to the United States until August 18.

By then, Melissa had been missing for more than a month.

Her remains would stay hidden beside Ocean Parkway until Blue discovered them in December 2010.

When investigators later reconstructed the summer of 2009, the timing stood out.

July 8:

Asa leaves for Iceland.

July 10:

Melissa disappears.

The following weeks:

Calls are made to her sister.

August 18:

Asa returns home.

None of this, by itself, proved that Rex had waited for his wife to leave the country before acting.

But to prosecutors, the trip became an important part of the timeline.

He had time.

He had privacy.

And the house was not full of family.

June 2010

The following summer, the family did not need to travel to another country.

A few days were enough.

Data from Asa's cellphone indicated that she traveled from New York to Maryland on June 4, 2010.

She returned on June 8.

Between those dates, Megan Waterman disappeared.

Megan was 22 years old.

She was staying at a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge on Long Island.

In the early hours of June 6, she left the hotel.

Surveillance footage captured her walking out.

Then she vanished.

Asa was in Maryland.

Rex was on Long Island.

Megan's remains were discovered six months later beside Ocean Parkway.

But once again, years would pass before one family's travel calendar and the final hours of a young woman's life were placed on the same page.

August 2010

That same summer, it happened again.

Records indicated that Asa traveled from New York to New Jersey on August 28.

She returned on September 5.

While she was away, Amber Lynn Costello received a client.

The man contacted her and offered an unusually large amount of money.

On the evening of September 2, 2010, Amber left her home in West Babylon.

She left behind her cellphone.

She left behind her purse.

She did not expect to be gone long.

She never came back.

A witness would later remember a large white man with dark, bushy hair and old-fashioned glasses.

And a vehicle.

A Chevrolet Avalanche.

Asa was still in New Jersey.

Three days after Amber disappeared, she returned home.

When the dates are placed together, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

2003.

The family in Vermont.

Jessica Taylor murdered.

2007.

The family in Atlantic City.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes disappears.

2009.

Asa in Iceland.

Melissa Barthelemy disappears two days later.

2010.

Asa in Maryland.

Megan Waterman disappears.

A few months later:

Asa in New Jersey.

Amber Costello disappears.

Prosecutors would later describe these as periods in which Heuermann had unrestricted time and opportunity to commit the murders.

But it is important not to go further than the evidence allows.

None of these trips suggests that Asa knew what her husband was doing.

She has not been charged with participating in the murders.

On the contrary, part of the prosecution's case rested on the fact that she and the children were away when several of the killings occurred.

Nor do the dates alone establish that Heuermann deliberately selected victims according to his family's travel plans.

They demonstrate opportunity.

Investigators still needed evidence.

But when the family returned, the house had to become a home again.

Clothes.

Shoes.

Bathrooms.

A vehicle.

Blankets.

Tape.

Ordinary objects people use without thinking about them.

Years later, microscopic traces from that everyday environment would appear in places where they should not have been.

Hair.

Hair investigators linked to Asa.

And, in one instance, to their daughter.

That did not mean either of them had been at a crime scene.

Prosecutors argued the opposite: that the hairs had likely been transferred indirectly from the household through clothing, materials or other objects Rex had access to.

The family had been away.

But tiny traces of the home could still travel with him.

It was almost as if the house itself had left a fingerprint.

When police discovered the Gilgo Four in 2010, none of this was laid out in front of them.

No reconstructed travel timeline.

No complete picture of the phones.

No genetic connection leading toward a family in Massapequa Park.

No Rex Heuermann.

Only four dead women beside a road.

Over the next several years, the investigation would continue without an arrest.

The families waited.

More human remains were discovered.

Tips came and went.

And all the while, the man who would eventually admit to eight murders continued living in the same house on Long Island.

But the problem was not simply that police did not know who he was.

The investigation itself was entering a period that would later come under intense criticism.

And the man leading the Suffolk County Police Department was about to become part of the story himself.

His name was James Burke.

Four women had been found beside the same road.

Within months, more human remains were discovered.

Old murder cases became connected to new recovery sites.

The media descended.

The public watched.

Families demanded answers.

It seemed impossible that a case of this magnitude could simply stop moving.

But that is what happened.

The years passed.

And no killer was arrested.

The problem was not a lack of information.

It was almost the opposite.

Police had an enormous amount of it.

Phone records.

Tips.

Cellular data.

Witness statements.

Old cases.

Unidentified victims.

Human remains discovered in different places years apart.

Women who had used more than one name.

Phone numbers active only briefly.

People who had moved in and out of the victims' lives.

And above all of it hung a question no one could answer with certainty:

Were police looking for one killer?

Or more than one?

The Gilgo Four appeared to have important things in common.

All were young women.

All had engaged in sex work.

All had advertised their services online.

All had disappeared within a relatively short period.

And all four had been concealed along the same short stretch of Ocean Parkway.

That strongly suggested a connection.

But as the search expanded, the picture became more complicated.

Jessica Taylor had been dismembered.

Valerie Mack had been dismembered.

Parts of both women's bodies had been discovered in Manorville, with other remains later recovered closer to Ocean Parkway.

Karen Vergata had also been dismembered.

Peaches and her child presented another mystery.

Then there was the unidentified person investigators long referred to as Asian Male.

And Shannan Gilbert had disappeared under very different circumstances.

It was tempting to draw one large circle around everything.

But detectives cannot build a murder case because things look as though they belong together.

They have to show how.

Then there were the phone calls.

After Melissa Barthelemy disappeared, a man used her phone to call her sister.

The calls were brief.

The caller was careful.

He appeared to move between locations.

At the time, cellular records could narrow a search area, but they could not automatically put a name to the person holding the phone.

The same problem applied to burner phones.

A phone purchased without being registered to its actual user could leave a digital trail without immediately telling investigators whose pocket it was in.

Something that would eventually become one of the strongest tools against Rex Heuermann therefore already existed in some form.

The data.

What was missing was the connection to the man.

And then there was the vehicle.

In Amber Costello's case, a witness had described a large white man.

Dark, bushy hair.

Old-fashioned glasses.

And a Chevrolet Avalanche.

In hindsight, a clue like that sounds as though it should have led police straight to the killer's door.

But in 2010, it was not a license plate.

It was not a VIN.

It was not a name.

Chevrolet had manufactured tens of thousands of Avalanches.

Witness memories could also be imperfect.

A color might be remembered incorrectly.

A model year could be wrong.

Without other evidence, a large pickup truck was still only one of many vehicles on Long Island.

The clue entered the case.

But it did not lead investigators to Rex Heuermann.

Not yet.

Meanwhile, the families waited.

They had already endured the uncertainty of someone they loved being missing.

Now they had to live with something else.

They knew her body had been found.

But the person who killed her was still free.

The victims' families kept their names alive.

They spoke to reporters.

They pushed for answers.

They asked why the investigation was not moving faster.

And around the case, distrust began to grow.

By 2011, the Suffolk County Police Department was one of the largest suburban police departments in the United States.

But the Gilgo case demanded more than an ordinary homicide investigation.

Victims crossed jurisdictions.

Human remains had been recovered from locations miles apart.

Cellphones and internet activity ignored county boundaries.

Old cases had to be compared with new ones.

The FBI possessed technical capabilities and databases that could be valuable in an investigation of this scale.

Cooperation mattered.

And that was precisely where a controversial problem would later emerge.

In January 2012, James Burke became chief of the Suffolk County Police Department.

He was not an inexperienced police officer.

Burke had spent years inside law enforcement and had powerful allies within Suffolk County government.

He now controlled the department responsible for one of the most notorious unsolved murder investigations in the country.

At roughly the same time, the department's relationship with the FBI was changing.

Burke was later heavily criticized for restricting Suffolk County's cooperation with federal investigators in the Gilgo investigation.

But it is important to be precise about what that means.

We know Burke later committed serious crimes while in office.

We know he used his authority to cover up his own misconduct.

We know he participated in an extensive effort to obstruct a federal investigation into his own actions.

Those facts were established in federal court.

But that is different from saying it was proven that Burke obstructed FBI involvement in the Gilgo investigation in order to conceal his own crimes.

That connection has been publicly discussed and criticized.

It is not the same thing as a fact established by a criminal judgment.

And in this story, that distinction matters.

What is beyond dispute is that something deeply serious happened inside the Suffolk County Police Department while the Gilgo murders remained unsolved.

In December 2012, a young man named Christopher Loeb was arrested.

He had broken into vehicles.

One of them was a police vehicle.

It belonged to James Burke.

Loeb stole items from inside.

What happened next would expose an entirely different crime.

Not in the brush beside Ocean Parkway.

But inside a police station.

Burke personally went to where Loeb was being held.

Loeb was handcuffed and restrained.

And the police chief attacked him.

Then the cover-up began.

Meanwhile, the killer police were searching for remained unidentified.

2012 passed.

No arrest in the Gilgo case.

No one charged with murdering Melissa, Maureen, Megan or Amber.

No Rex Heuermann.

But elsewhere inside the same law-enforcement system, another battle was unfolding over whether the FBI would uncover the truth about the police chief himself.

Burke and others pressured officers who had witnessed the assault on Loeb to remain silent or support a false version of events.

The FBI and federal prosecutors began investigating in 2013.

Threats and pressure contributed to witnesses refusing to cooperate.

The initial federal investigation was ultimately closed in December 2013.

Later, it was reopened.

And when the case finally reached court, the conclusion was clear:

senior figures in Suffolk County law enforcement had used their power in an attempt to prevent federal investigators from uncovering the truth about one of their own.

Burke was arrested in 2015.

In February 2016, he pleaded guilty to violating Loeb's civil rights and conspiring to obstruct justice.

He admitted assaulting a handcuffed man and then participating in an extensive cover-up that lasted for years.

He was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison.

But the case did not end with Burke.

The federal investigation reached further into Suffolk County's power structure.

Eventually, it reached District Attorney Thomas Spota and Christopher McPartland, the chief of the district attorney's Government Corruption Bureau.

Both men were later convicted for their roles in obstructing the investigation into Burke's assault.

This was no longer the story of a single police chief losing his temper.

It was a story about power.

Loyalty.

Fear.

And institutions being used to protect the man at the top.

All the while, the Gilgo files remained with investigators.

Inside them was an old clue about a vehicle.

A Chevrolet Avalanche.

There were cellphone records.

Witness statements.

DNA.

Hair.

Old murders.

Thousands of pages.

And somewhere inside that mass of information was a path that would eventually lead to a small house in Massapequa Park.

But more than a decade would pass after the discovery of the Gilgo Four before a new investigative team began assembling those old clues in a different way.

In 2022, Suffolk County authorities created a new multi-agency task force to refocus the investigation.

At last, something began to move.

But before we get there, we need to understand the man who had occupied the police chief's office during years when the case failed to produce an arrest.

Because the story of James Burke gets worse.

Much worse.

He had begun his career with the New York Police Department in 1985 before moving to Suffolk County a year later.

From there, he climbed through the ranks.

Supervision.

Investigations.

Organized crime.

Command positions.

Beginning in 2006, he served as chief investigator for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.

Now he was Chief of Department — the highest-ranking uniformed officer in one of the largest suburban police departments in the United States.

And sitting on his department's desk was one of the most notorious unsolved murder investigations in the country.

Gilgo Beach.

Ten sets of human remains had been discovered during searches along Ocean Parkway and surrounding areas.

Families were waiting for answers.

The media was watching.

The FBI had been involved.

And the man now given enormous authority over the police department had a history that would later cast a long shadow over the investigation.

Burke was not simply a police chief.

He was part of a power structure.

One of the most important men within that structure was Thomas Spota, the Suffolk County District Attorney.

Their relationship went back years.

Burke had served as chief investigator in Spota's office before becoming police chief.

Federal prosecutors would later describe Spota as Burke's longtime mentor and say their relationship stretched back decades.

That mattered.

Police investigate.

Prosecutors bring charges.

The system is supposed to contain separate responsibilities and internal checks.

But when the men at the top are close allies, power can become concentrated.

In Suffolk County, that would eventually become more than a theoretical concern.

Burke was also a man who inspired strong reactions among people who worked around him.

Some described him as capable and resourceful.

Others described a management style built around loyalty and fear.

Journalist Gus Garcia-Roberts, who spent years investigating Burke's career, later portrayed him as an extraordinarily powerful police official — a man who could be charming, but also intimidating and ruthless.

Descriptions like these, by themselves, prove no crime.

But years later, it became clear that fear inside the system was more than a matter of reputation.

When the FBI began investigating Burke, witnesses said they feared retaliation against themselves and their families if they spoke.

Federal prosecutors would ultimately establish that the influence of senior Suffolk County law-enforcement officials had been used to discourage people from cooperating with federal investigators.

That was still in the future in 2012.

But the system that made it possible was already in place.

And Burke had faced controversy long before becoming police chief.

During the 1990s, an internal Suffolk County investigation examined his conduct in connection with a woman associated with prostitution and drugs.

It did not end his career.

Burke continued to rise.

By 2012, he had reached the top.

Looking back, one question became unavoidable:

How had he gotten there?

But when Burke took command, the victims' families had a far more urgent question:

What was he going to do about Gilgo Beach?

The investigation was already undergoing changes.

Dominick Varrone, a detective who had led part of the Gilgo investigation, later said that after the change in leadership in 2012, he was forced into retirement and was not permitted to pass his knowledge of the serial-killer investigation to the detectives taking over.

Varrone himself said he believed this damaged the investigation and its credibility.

A new leadership structure was taking control.

James Burke stood at its center.

And one of the most controversial issues would become the department's relationship with the FBI.

The FBI possessed resources a local police department could not match on the same scale.

Behavioral-analysis specialists.

Databases.

Technical expertise.

Experience with investigations crossing jurisdictional boundaries.

In a case involving victims from different places, phones moving across geographic areas and human remains scattered across Long Island, that kind of assistance was potentially invaluable.

Yet cooperation diminished.

Burke would later face heavy criticism for limiting Suffolk County's cooperation with federal investigators in the Gilgo Beach case.

It became one of the most controversial elements in the history of the investigation.

Because only months after Burke became police chief, something happened that gave him a deeply personal reason to fear an FBI investigation.

But two things must be kept separate.

It is documented that Burke restricted cooperation with the FBI in the Gilgo investigation.

It is also established that Burke later tried to obstruct an FBI investigation into his own criminal conduct.

What has not been established in court is that Burke kept the FBI away from the Gilgo investigation because he feared federal agents would uncover his own crimes.

The timeline makes the question unavoidable.

It does not make the answer a proven fact.

Meanwhile, the Gilgo investigation continued to grow colder.

The families waited.

Tips accumulated.

Witnesses forgot details.

Phone numbers disappeared from service.

Vehicles were sold.

People moved.

Not all evidence ages in the same way.

DNA can wait for decades.

Human memory cannot.

And a killer who knows police have not found him gains something investigators can never recover.

Time.

It is tempting to look back at those years with everything we know now.

Rex Heuermann was living in Massapequa Park.

He was commuting to work in Manhattan.

A Chevrolet Avalanche had been connected to a witness description in Amber Costello's case.

Phones had left digital trails.

Hairs had been preserved.

And Heuermann continued with his life.

From today's perspective, the question seems simple:

How did police fail to find him?

But investigations do not work backward.

In 2012, the name Rex Heuermann was not written in red letters at the top of an evidence board.

Investigators first needed to find the connection that would allow the other clues to converge on him.

Eventually, they would.

But not under James Burke.

By December 2012, Burke had been police chief for nearly a year.

The Gilgo case remained unsolved.

Then he received a call.

Someone had broken into his police vehicle.

Several items had been stolen.

Among them were his gun belt and ammunition.

But there was also a bag.

And what was inside that bag became something Burke appeared determined to keep under his control.

The man police suspected of the break-in was Christopher Loeb.

He was arrested on December 14, 2012.

Police recovered stolen property at his home.

Burke personally went there.

Then he went to the police station where Loeb was being held.

A police chief with one of America's most notorious unsolved serial-murder investigations under his command was now personally heading toward a prisoner who had broken into his vehicle.

What happened inside that station would destroy Burke's career.

It would send him to federal prison.

It would eventually help bring down the Suffolk County District Attorney.

And it would reveal just how far powerful men were prepared to go to protect one of their own.

It all began with what was inside the vehicle.

And the bag Christopher Loeb stole.

Not a murder.

Not a sprawling corruption investigation.

Not an FBI case.

Just property stolen from a police vehicle.

But the vehicle belonged to the wrong man.

James Burke.

And the thief had taken the wrong bag.

On December 14, 2012, police officers and probation officials arrested Christopher Loeb at his mother's home in Smithtown, Long Island.

Loeb was on probation and had been breaking into vehicles.

During a search of the house, authorities recovered a large amount of property stolen from more than a dozen vehicles.

One of them was James Burke's police vehicle.

Among the items Loeb had taken were the police chief's gun belt and ammunition.

That alone was serious.

But he had also taken cigars, a cigar box and a bag belonging to Burke.

Later, when the case involving Suffolk County's most powerful law-enforcement officials reached federal court, the contents of that bag were described in greater detail.

They included cigars, sex toys, a pornographic video and Viagra.

These were the police chief's personal belongings.

And now they had become evidence in a criminal case against Christopher Loeb.

Burke did not wait for investigators to finish their work.

He personally went to Loeb's home while the search was still underway.

He was allowed inside.

And he was allowed to remove his bag and other belongings from the house.

The police chief then drove to the Fourth Precinct.

Christopher Loeb had been taken there.

Burke was the highest-ranking uniformed police officer in Suffolk County.

Loeb was a prisoner.

The imbalance of power could hardly have been greater.

Inside an interrogation room, Loeb was handcuffed.

He was also chained to a metal ring fixed to the floor.

He could not leave.

Burke walked into the room.

Then he attacked him.

He punched Loeb.

He kicked him.

The blows struck Loeb in the head and body.

This was not an allegation Burke would continue denying forever.

In 2016, he admitted the assault in federal court.

The police chief had personally attacked a handcuffed prisoner.

But according to evidence that later emerged in court, this was about more than anger over stolen ammunition.

Loeb knew what he had found in the vehicle.

He knew what had been inside the bag.

And according to testimony and court records, the contents of that bag became part of what made the incident particularly sensitive for Burke.

Burke had built his career inside law enforcement.

He commanded thousands of employees.

He had a close relationship with the district attorney.

He controlled the department investigating Gilgo Beach.

And now, sitting handcuffed in front of him, was a man who had broken into his police vehicle and taken deeply personal belongings.

Burke did not respond like a police chief determined to ensure that the case followed proper procedure.

He responded himself.

With violence.

Even then, the story could have ended relatively simply.

A police chief had committed a crime.

There were witnesses.

The assault could have been investigated.

Burke could have been charged.

The system could have done what it was supposed to do.

That did not happen.

Because other police officers had been inside the precinct.

They had seen the chief attack a prisoner.

And now Burke's greatest problem was no longer Christopher Loeb.

It was the witnesses.

Burke needed silence.

And he had something most criminal suspects do not.

Power over the people who had witnessed his crime.

Some of the men present belonged to the Criminal Intelligence Unit, an elite squad with close ties to Burke.

Burke sometimes referred to the men in that unit as his “Palace Guards.”

Years later, James Hickey, the unit's commanding officer, testified that three detectives from the squad had participated with Burke in the assault.

Hickey also testified that Burke later praised them for what they had done.

This was no longer simply a moment in which one man had lost control.

More people were now inside the secret.

And Burke was not alone at the top.

The same morning he learned that his vehicle had been burglarized, Burke called Christopher McPartland.

McPartland was a close friend of Burke and the head of the Government Corruption Bureau in the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.

McPartland's boss was Thomas Spota.

Burke's longtime mentor.

The Suffolk County District Attorney.

The men responsible for ensuring that law enforcement obeyed the law were also the men Burke had trusted for years.

And Christopher Loeb's case soon took an unusual turn.

The Government Corruption Bureau assumed responsibility for prosecuting him, even though the charges would not ordinarily have belonged there.

Federal prosecutors later said this was done as part of an effort to control the flow of information and conceal Burke's assault.

What had begun with a stolen bag was becoming something much larger.

Christopher Loeb told his attorney that the police chief had assaulted him.

The allegation began to spread beyond the precinct.

And in April 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI opened a federal investigation into whether Loeb's civil rights had been violated.

James Burke was now in precisely the position powerful men often fear most.

He did not control the investigation.

The FBI did.

And that was when the battle over the truth began.

The officers who had been inside the precinct had to decide whether they would tell federal investigators what they had seen.

Their superiors had to decide which side they were on.

And the men at the top had to decide whether they would protect the institution—

or James Burke.

They chose Burke.

That decision would shape the next several years.

Witnesses would be pressured.

Stories would be coordinated.

A police officer would lie under oath.

A federal investigation would be shut down.

And two of the most powerful figures in Suffolk County's criminal-justice system would eventually find themselves in prison.

Meanwhile, another case remained unsolved.

Young women had been found dead beside Ocean Parkway.

Their killer remained free.

The FBI had offered assistance.

And the police chief who had restricted his department's cooperation with federal investigators in the Gilgo case was now himself trying to keep the FBI from uncovering the truth about his own crime.

That does not prove that the two threads shared the same motive.

But they existed within the same system.

At the same time.

Under the same police chief.

And when federal investigators began pulling at the thread Christopher Loeb had accidentally found inside Burke's vehicle, they discovered that it reached far beyond a single police precinct.

Now they had to make sure everyone stayed silent.

The cover-up lasted for years.

And it was the cover-up that revealed how deep the problem went.

Because once the FBI began asking what had happened inside the Fourth Precinct, protecting the police chief was no longer enough.

The officers who had witnessed the assault had to be controlled.

Stories had to be coordinated.

Witnesses had to be kept away from federal investigators.

And the man at the top had to remain in power.

That required influence.

James Burke had plenty of it.

So did his friends.

At the center of the system were three men.

James Burke, chief of the Suffolk County Police Department.

Thomas Spota, the Suffolk County District Attorney.

And Christopher McPartland, head of the Government Corruption Bureau in Spota's office.

These were not men standing outside the justice system trying to escape it.

They were the justice system.

Burke controlled the police department.

Spota controlled the prosecution of crimes.

McPartland ran the bureau responsible, among other things, for investigating corruption within government.

And now they needed to prevent the FBI from proving that the police chief had beaten a handcuffed prisoner.

The problem was that too many people knew what had happened.

Police officers had been inside the precinct.

Some had witnessed the assault.

Others knew what happened immediately afterward.

One of them was James Hickey, commanding officer of the Criminal Intelligence Unit.

Hickey was close to Burke.

The men in his unit had even been nicknamed Burke's “Palace Guards.”

But the FBI needed only one thing.

Someone willing to talk.

That made silence more important with every passing day.

According to evidence later established in federal court, Burke, Spota, McPartland and other officials coordinated their response.

Witnesses were pressured.

Officers were made to understand that cooperating with the FBI could have consequences.

And the fear worked.

Hickey later said he feared losing his job.

He also feared what might happen to his family.

He lied.

Others remained silent.

FBI investigators encountered a wall.

Not because there were no witnesses.

But because those witnesses worked inside a system where the men they would have to implicate were among the most powerful law-enforcement officials in Suffolk County.

In June 2013, Hickey appeared before a federal grand jury.

He lied about what he knew.

He later admitted giving false testimony to protect Burke.

And it mattered.

The FBI had begun investigating the assault earlier that year.

But without cooperation from key witnesses, proving the case became difficult.

In December 2013, the federal investigation was closed.

For a time, the cover-up appeared to have worked.

James Burke remained police chief.

Thomas Spota remained district attorney.

Christopher McPartland remained a senior official in Spota's office.

And Christopher Loeb was still the man who had broken into the police chief's vehicle.

The power structure remained intact.

But secrets become dangerous when too many people have to keep them.

In 2015, something changed.

James Hickey decided to cooperate with federal authorities.

He told them what had really happened.

He described the assault.

The meetings.

The pressure.

The lies.

And the role played by the men at the top.

The investigation was reopened.

This time, the FBI had someone from inside the system.

In December 2015, James Burke was arrested.

The man who had commanded the Suffolk County Police Department was now facing federal charges himself.

In February 2016, he pleaded guilty.

He admitted violating Christopher Loeb's civil rights by assaulting him.

And he admitted conspiring to obstruct justice.

Burke had not merely beaten a handcuffed man.

He had tried to hide it.

In November 2016, he was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison.

The police chief had fallen.

But the investigation was not over.

Because Burke had not covered up the crime alone.

Federal investigators kept going.

They examined the meetings.

The phone calls.

The testimony.

The pressure placed on police officers.

And they followed the trail upward.

To Thomas Spota.

And Christopher McPartland.

In 2017, both men were indicted.

Federal prosecutors accused them of participating in a conspiracy to conceal Burke's assault and obstruct the federal investigation.

The men responsible for enforcing the law were now accused of using the power of their offices against a law-enforcement investigation.

Their trial began in 2019.

James Hickey took the witness stand.

He described how the men had worked together.

How witnesses had been kept in line.

How he himself had lied.

How the objective had been to protect Burke.

And in December 2019, the verdict came.

Thomas Spota was found guilty.

Christopher McPartland was found guilty.

They were convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and related federal offenses.

In 2021, each was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

This was no longer an allegation of corruption.

Not a rumor.

Not a theory.

A federal court had reached its verdict.

Senior figures within Suffolk County law enforcement had participated in protecting a police chief who had committed a crime.

They had attempted to obstruct the FBI.

They had pressured witnesses.

And for a time, it had worked.

This is where the story comes uncomfortably close to Gilgo Beach.

While all of this was happening, the Ocean Parkway murder investigation remained open.

No one had been arrested.

The families were still waiting.

And James Burke had been criticized for restricting the Suffolk County Police Department's cooperation with the FBI in the Gilgo investigation.

So we know two things.

Burke restricted cooperation with the FBI in the Gilgo case.

And Burke, Spota and McPartland participated in a proven effort to obstruct the FBI in another matter — the investigation into Burke's assault on Christopher Loeb.

What we cannot do is turn those two facts into a third without evidence.

It has not been established in court that Burke kept the FBI away from the Gilgo investigation in order to prevent federal agents from uncovering his own crimes.

Nor can we know with certainty how much sooner Rex Heuermann might have been identified if the investigation had been handled differently.

Years earlier?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

That is a question.

Not a fact.

But there is another question that is harder to avoid.

What did the lost time cost?

More than twelve years passed between the discovery of the Gilgo Four in December 2010 and Rex Heuermann's arrest in July 2023.

During those years, technology changed.

DNA analysis became more powerful.

Investigative genetic genealogy opened new doors.

Cellphone analysis became more sophisticated.

Old evidence could tell new stories.

But some things were lost as well.

Memories faded.

Witnesses disappeared.

Records could be lost.

And the man who would eventually admit to murdering eight women continued to live as a free man.

Burke went to prison.

Spota went to prison.

McPartland went to prison.

But the Gilgo case remained unsolved.

It needed new leadership.

A new approach.

And people willing to open the old boxes again.

In 2022, a special task force was assembled to attack the investigation with renewed focus.

It did not receive a new crime scene.

A new body.

A confession.

Much of what it received was what investigators had possessed for years.

Old records.

Old tips.

Old witness statements.

And among them was one clue that had been sitting inside the case since the early years of the investigation.

A vehicle.

A large pickup truck.

A Chevrolet Avalanche.

When the new investigators picked up that old clue again, it did not take long before it led to a name.

For the first time in this story, the killer was no longer only a shadow beside Ocean Parkway.

He was becoming a man.

With an address.

With a family.

With a job in Manhattan.

And with a name.

Rex Heuermann.

Detectives retire.

Commanders come and go.

Technology changes.

Phones that were once cutting-edge become relics.

Witnesses grow older.

Memories fade.

But evidence can wait.

Inside a box.

On a hard drive.

In a database.

Or in a single line buried in an old police report that no one has yet connected to the right person.

At the beginning of 2022, authorities decided to take another hard look at the Gilgo Beach investigation.

Not simply to continue where others had left off.

But, in some ways, to begin again.

A new Suffolk County District Attorney, Ray Tierney, had taken office.

Rodney Harrison had become Suffolk County's new police commissioner.

And now a special task force was assembled to investigate the Gilgo Beach murders.

It brought together the Suffolk County Police Department, the District Attorney's Office, the New York State Police, the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office and the FBI.

That alone represented a significant change.

Agencies that had not always worked well together would now sit at the same table.

With the same objective.

Find the killer.

The task force held its first meeting on February 1, 2022.

Tierney told investigators not simply to accept the way the case had previously been interpreted.

They were to take the investigation apart.

Return to the original evidence.

Review every piece of it.

Every report.

Every witness statement.

And ask again the questions people might have believed had already been answered.

It was not glamorous work.

No dramatic chase.

No sudden confession.

No secret eyewitness emerging after twelve years.

Most of the work was much simpler.

Read everything again.

The task force initially narrowed its focus to the Gilgo Four.

Melissa Barthelemy.

Maureen Brainard-Barnes.

Megan Waterman.

Amber Lynn Costello.

Four women.

Four sets of remains discovered along the same short stretch of Ocean Parkway.

And enough similarities to strongly suggest that the same man had been responsible for their deaths.

Rather than immediately trying to solve every mystery that had accumulated around Gilgo Beach, investigators could ask a simpler question:

What do we actually know about the final hours of these four women?

When investigators returned to Amber Costello's case, they found an old account.

We have already encountered it in this story.

A man had come to Amber's home in West Babylon shortly before she disappeared.

Amber and a man she lived with had used a ruse they sometimes employed against clients.

The client paid.

Then a man pretending to be an angry boyfriend appeared.

The client backed away.

But he did not disappear from Amber's life.

He contacted her again.

The following evening, Amber agreed to meet him.

She walked out of the house.

And she was never seen alive again.

The witness had described the man.

White.

Middle-aged.

Very large.

Roughly six-foot-four to six-foot-six.

Thick, dark hair.

Glasses.

The witness had even used an unusual word to describe him.

He looked like an “ogre.”

But the witness remembered more than the man.

He remembered the vehicle.

A first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche.

The clue was not new.

It had been there since the original investigation into Amber's disappearance.

But now investigators examined it alongside other information.

Over the years, analysis of cellphone records had narrowed down areas where phones associated with the killings had been used.

One important area was Massapequa Park.

Another was Manhattan, where related phone activity had also occurred.

The new team could therefore ask a much narrower question than:

Who on Long Island drove a Chevrolet Avalanche?

They could look for someone who matched several pieces of the puzzle at once.

A large man.

The right general age.

A connection to Massapequa Park.

A connection to Manhattan.

And access to a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche at the time Amber Costello disappeared.

Suddenly, a very large island became much smaller.

The assignment eventually reached a New York State Police investigator.

Tifini Atai returned to the records and began working through law-enforcement databases.

This was not a Google search.

It meant connecting vehicles, addresses, individuals and other records until one person matched more than one part of the investigation.

And on March 14, 2022, the search produced a result.

A Chevrolet Avalanche matching the type described by the witness had been connected to a man who lived in Massapequa Park when the murders occurred.

The man was an architect.

He worked in Manhattan.

He was large.

About six-foot-four.

Dark hair.

Glasses.

And when investigators looked at his photograph, the old witness description suddenly became far more interesting.

Six weeks.

That was roughly how long it took from the task force's first meeting until investigators had a man they could seriously examine as a possible suspect.

After more than eleven years without an arrest.

That did not mean the original investigation had been worthless.

Quite the opposite.

The new team was working with evidence earlier investigators had collected.

The witness description was old.

The vehicle was an old clue.

The cellphone evidence had been examined years before.

What changed was the way those pieces were brought together.

Vehicle.

Location.

Workplace.

Physical description.

Phones.

One man was beginning to appear at the center of the picture.

But investigators still faced a major problem.

Finding a man who matches several clues is not the same as proving that he is a murderer.

Owning a Chevrolet Avalanche is not a crime.

Living in Massapequa Park is not a crime.

Working in Manhattan is not a crime.

Being large and wearing glasses is not a crime.

Even taken together, those facts left a vast distance between suspicion and proof.

They needed more.

Much more.

Which meant the man could not know that police were now watching him.

The investigation entered a new phase.

The task force began examining his phones.

Online accounts.

Travel.

Credit cards.

Family.

Vehicles.

Trash.

And DNA.

Eventually, hundreds of subpoenas would be issued as investigators built a detailed picture of the man and his movements.

The FBI participated in surveillance.

Investigators watched him without his knowledge.

And the more they examined, the more pieces began to converge.

His personal cellphone appeared in the same general areas as burner phones investigators linked to communications involving the victims.

He lived within the Massapequa Park area identified through cellphone analysis.

He worked within the Manhattan area where other relevant phone activity had occurred.

The old clue was no longer standing alone.

It was beginning to pull other evidence toward it.

But the public knew nothing.

No press conference.

No photograph of a suspect on the news.

No warning to the neighbors.

Life continued in Massapequa Park.

The man went to work.

He took the train into Manhattan.

He came home.

His family lived with him.

Neighbors saw him.

Clients met with him.

And investigators watched.

For the first time in more than a decade, the Gilgo investigation was no longer searching only for an unknown killer.

It was investigating a specific man.

What changed everything was not a piece of evidence discovered in 2022.

It was a clue from 2010.

Something that had been waiting inside the old records.

A vehicle a witness remembered.

And when an investigator finally connected the right information, a name appeared.

A name that had never before stood at the center of the Gilgo Beach investigation.

Rex Andrew Heuermann.

But a name was not enough.

Investigators still had to show that the man connected to the Chevrolet Avalanche was the same man who had met Amber Costello on the night she disappeared.

And as they began tracing the vehicle, the phones and the man together, the clue from 2010 became the first real path toward the killer's front door.

The Chevrolet Avalanche.

He can use a false name.

He can pay in cash.

He can delete data.

But some things are harder to make disappear.

A vehicle.

A home.

A workplace.

Journeys repeated year after year.

When investigators connected Rex Heuermann to a Chevrolet Avalanche in March 2022, they had not solved the Gilgo Beach case.

But they had done something almost as important.

They had found a man they could test against the evidence.

The vehicle had entered the case because of Amber Costello.

The night before she disappeared, a client had come to her home in West Babylon.

After a confrontation that was part of a ruse used by Amber and a man she lived with, the client left.

The witness remembered him.

Large.

Middle-aged.

Dark hair.

Glasses.

But he also remembered the vehicle.

A Chevrolet Avalanche.

First generation.

In 2022, investigators compared that description with vehicle records.

And Rex Heuermann appeared.

He matched the physical description.

He lived in Massapequa Park.

He worked in Manhattan.

And a Chevrolet Avalanche had been registered to him when Amber disappeared.

An old witness account now had a name attached to it.

But investigators needed to know whether the rest of the case fit as well.

The Gilgo investigation had one important advantage.

The killer had needed to communicate.

Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello had advertised their services online.

Clients contacted them by phone.

Meetings were arranged.

Messages passed between people.

And in several instances, investigators had information about phones they believed were connected to the man who had contacted the women.

These phones did not carry the name Rex Heuermann.

They were burner phones.

Cheap phones or numbers that could be used without being obviously connected to their real owner.

But a phone still has to connect to a cellular network.

And each time it does, it leaves behind information about where it was.

Not a precise GPS point.

But an area.

Long before Rex Heuermann became a suspect, investigators had examined those records.

Burner phones associated with communications involving the victims had been active on Long Island.

They had also been used in Manhattan.

By itself, that meant little.

Millions of people move between Long Island and New York City.

But once Heuermann was placed into the picture, the pattern became more interesting.

He lived in Massapequa Park.

He worked in Manhattan.

The same two general areas that mattered in the cellphone evidence.

The investigators could now do something they had never been able to do while the killer remained nameless.

They could compare the movements of a specific suspect with the movements of the burner phones.

They examined Heuermann's personal phone.

His workplace.

His home.

His journeys between Long Island and Manhattan.

And again and again, they found patterns that caught their attention.

When a burner phone connected to the case was active in Manhattan, Heuermann's personal phone was also often in the Manhattan area.

When a burner phone was used on Long Island, its activity was consistent with the area where Heuermann lived or traveled.

The phone did not say:

Rex Heuermann is holding me.

But the comparison gave investigators reason to keep going.

The vehicle had pointed them toward a man.

The phones did not eliminate him.

Quite the opposite.

Then there was Melissa Barthelemy.

After she disappeared in July 2009, her phone was used to call her younger sister.

The caller was a man.

The calls were threatening and degrading.

They did not come from a home on Long Island.

They were made from areas in Manhattan.

The killer appeared to understand that phones could be traced.

He kept the calls short.

He moved between locations.

And over time, the phone became part of the digital trail investigators tried to reconstruct.

Now they had a man who regularly traveled to Manhattan for work.

An architect with an office in Midtown.

Rex Heuermann.

But again:

It was not proof.

It was consistency.

And in a murder investigation, many independent details that seem small on their own can become something much larger when they all begin pointing in the same direction.

So investigators went deeper.

They obtained legal process for more records.

Cellphone data.

Account information.

Internet records.

Credit-card transactions.

Travel information.

And as the picture became clearer, more phones emerged.

Not just one burner phone.

Many.

Phones activated and abandoned.

Accounts under other names.

Online behavior that appeared designed to separate the user's real identity from what he was doing.

What had once looked like a collection of unrelated numbers began to look like a system.

But there was still a problem.

Cellphone data can show that two phones were in similar areas.

By itself, it cannot prove who was holding either phone.

Investigators therefore needed connections that would be harder to explain as coincidence.

They examined when Heuermann's personal phone was used.

When the burner phones were used.

Where they were.

And when they were silent.

If someone wants to keep two identities separate, one simple rule helps:

Don't use both at the same time.

But habits are difficult to hide.

Journeys repeat.

And cellular networks do not forget easily.

Slowly, the investigation was turning itself inside out.

For more than a decade, detectives had asked:

Who could this man be?

Now they were asking:

Could Rex Heuermann be this man?

That is an entirely different investigative question.

Every old piece of evidence could now be tested against him.

Height.

Build.

Vehicle.

Home address.

Workplace.

Travel.

Phone activity.

Family trips.

And eventually, DNA.

Any one of those things might have eliminated him.

If the vehicle had not matched.

If he had lived somewhere else.

If he had been overseas when the women disappeared.

If his cellphone records had placed him hundreds of miles away.

The investigation might have ended there.

But it did not.

Instead, Heuermann became increasingly significant to investigators.

They began watching him.

Not only digitally.

Physically.

They needed to understand how he lived.

Which vehicles he used.

Where he went.

What he threw away.

And whether they could obtain his DNA without alerting him that he was under investigation.

It was delicate.

If Heuermann realized police were closing in, he could destroy data.

Discard phones.

Move evidence.

Or disappear.

So outside the investigation, life continued as though nothing had changed.

In the mornings, Rex Heuermann could leave his old house in Massapequa Park.

He could walk to the train.

Travel into Manhattan.

Go to his office.

Meet clients.

Return home that evening.

The neighbors knew nothing.

His colleagues knew nothing.

His family knew nothing.

But now a team of investigators was documenting his movements.

They knew which vehicle he had owned.

They knew where he lived.

They knew where he worked.

And they were beginning to understand the phones.

The Chevrolet Avalanche had accomplished what no clue before it had managed to do.

It had transformed an unknown killer into a specific man.

But investigators were still missing something.

Something phones and vehicles could not give them.

Hair had been recovered from evidence associated with the victims.

Some of it had survived for more than a decade.

In 2010, it had not been able to tell police who the killer was.

Now the technology was different.

And investigators finally had a man against whom the evidence could be compared.

For that, they needed only one thing.

Rex Heuermann's DNA.

And to get it, they did not need to knock on his door.

They only had to wait for him to throw something away.

For more than a decade, Rex Heuermann had been one of millions of people moving through Long Island and New York City.

Now he was under surveillance.

And what investigators would eventually retrieve from his discarded trash would bring them closer to him than the Chevrolet Avalanche ever could.

But before we go there, we need to meet the man who had been living all this time in Massapequa Park.

The architect.

The husband.

The father.

The man who took the train into Manhattan and returned home at night.

The man no neighbor had any reason to connect with the human remains beside Ocean Parkway.

Rex Heuermann.