By JAKE OFFENHARTZ (Associated Press)
NEW YORK (AP) — In the winter of 2010, shortly after police found the stays of his roommate and three different girls buried on a distant stretch of Long Island shoreline, Dave Schaller offered detectives with an outline of the particular person he believed to be the killer.
More crucially, Schaller advised them about his truck.
The man they have been searching for was a towering, Frankenstein-like determine with an “empty gaze” who drove a first-generation Chrysler Avalanche, Schaller recalled telling investigators. The man’s dimension caught out, as did his uncommon pick-up truck, which he’d used to flee the home Schaller shared with Amber Costello.
On that night time, Schaller stated he got here house to seek out the stranger threatening Costello, an occasional intercourse employee, who had locked herself within the rest room. The two males got here to blows, with the hulking intruder finally leaving within the truck.
Prosecutors say Costello was final seen alive on Sept. 2, 2010, as she left her house to satisfy that very same consumer. A witness noticed a dark-colored truck drive by the home once more shortly after she left.
“When they told me she was dead, he was the first person who jumped in my head,” Schaller advised The Associated Press. “I’ve been picturing his face for 13 years.”
On July 14, police arrested Rex Heuermann on costs of killing Costello and two different girls, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman. He is the prime suspect within the demise of a fourth girl, Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann, an architect who labored in Manhattan, has pleaded not responsible to the costs.
The arrest marked a surprising breakthrough within the hunt for a serial killer who had eluded investigators and whose crimes gripped Long Islanders for the reason that our bodies of 4 girls — all of them intercourse staff — have been discovered wrapped in burlap close to Gilgo Beach.
Within months, the stays of six different our bodies, together with a toddler, have been found elsewhere alongside the identical seashore freeway. Heuermann has not been accused in any of these instances. Police have stated the deaths stands out as the work of a number of killers.
The arrest has introduced a measure of aid to households of the victims at a second when the path appeared to have gone chilly. But as new particulars emerge about how police lastly caught the alleged killer, they’ve additionally raised questions on whether or not investigators adequately pursued a key lead — Schaller’s description of the stranger and his truck —which will have helped clear up the case sooner.
“This was crucial information, and I don’t know why they didn’t share it,” stated Rob Trotta, a county legislator who labored as a Suffolk County Police detective till 2013. “They made some serious blunders here.”
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who inherited the investigation when he took workplace in 2022, stated the important thing to unraveling the case was the outline of the truck, found by a state investigator after the launch of a brand new activity drive fashioned to take a contemporary take a look at the proof.
When they ran it by means of a car data database, one of many outcomes turned up successful: A person who owned a Chevy Avalanche lived in a neighborhood that investigators have been already zeroing in on because the suspect’s seemingly location due to a complicated evaluation of cellphone location information and name data. Heuermann match the bodily description offered by Schaller, too: He was 6 ft, 4 inches (193 centimeters) tall and weighed 240 kilos (109 kilograms).
Tierney advised the AP he didn’t know why police had not run a search earlier, however steered the piece of knowledge might have been “lost within a sea of other tips and information.”
He confused there have been different parts that finally helped investigators arrest Heuermann, together with new expertise that helped match samples of DNA to the suspect.
“What solved this case was a lot of dedicated investigators, analysts and attorneys from a bunch of agencies getting together and collaborating,” he stated.
But for Schaller, any emotions of aid over the arrest have been quickly eclipsed by anger and confusion.
Speaking out for the primary time for the reason that arrest, he stated he had met with murder detectives on a number of events in the course of the preliminary years of the investigation.
During one among their closing conferences, roughly two years after the ladies went lacking, he stated he picked the truck’s mannequin out of a line-up of pictures offered by the detectives.
“I gave them the exact description of the truck and the dude,” he stated. “I mean come on, why didn’t they use that?”
The query has vexed some legislation enforcement officers as nicely. Two high-ranking officers who labored carefully on the case and attended briefings between 2011 and 2013 stated they by no means heard something a couple of witness assertion describing the suspect and his car.
The legislation enforcement officers spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t approved to reveal details about the investigation.
According to a car historical past report, Heuermann purchased the pickup — a darkish inexperienced, first-generation version — at a Chevrolet vendor on Long Island in 2002 and transferred possession to his brother, Craig, in South Carolina in 2012.
Authorities seized the car final week. In a search warrant, they stated they have been searching for different clues within the car or at property the brothers owned in Chester County, South Carolina, similar to DNA, fluids, fingerprints, telephones and what they described as doable “trophies” which will have belonged to the victims — clothes, jewellery, Bibles or images.
Investigators stated they have been additionally searching for any electronics, video recordings and writings associated to the killings; burlap; duct tape; weapons and ammunition; reducing instruments; and a selected kind of paper towel from the Bounty Modern Print Collection.
While it’s not clear whether or not investigators pursued the tip in regards to the car earlier than final yr, these concerned within the case pointed to fierce divisions between the assorted legislation enforcement businesses — in addition to overlapping scandals that engulfed Suffolk County — as a possible clarification for a key clue slipping by means of the cracks.
Shortly after taking on the Suffolk County police division in 2012, James Burke moved to finish cooperation with the FBI amid federal scrutiny of his personal misconduct.
Four years later, Burke was sentenced to 46 months in jail after he was discovered to have conspired to cover-up his beating of a person who had found intercourse toys and pornography inside his automotive.
The federal inquiry would additionally result in jail sentences for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, who oversaw the early years of the Gilgo Beach case, in addition to the county’s prime anticorruption prosecutor, Christopher McPartland.
“This was a dark cloud over the community,” recalled Tim Sini, who succeeded Burke as police commissioner and later turned the county’s district lawyer. “When you have the police department and the district attorney’s office blocking the FBI, that does not engender trust in law enforcement.”
Sini stated he inherited an investigation that was “in disarray,” with detectives blocked from cooperating not solely with federal investigators, however with the neighboring police division in Nassau County, the place Heuermann lived.
He declined to say if he knew in regards to the description of a suspect and its car, however famous that his workplace invested closely in expertise that allowed investigators to trace information from cellphone towers utilized by the suspect’s burner telephone.
The arrest, Sini stated, was the results of painstaking detective work that spanned a number of administrations and relied on a variety of proof. But, he added, “I wouldn’t call it a major success. The case should’ve been solved earlier.”
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Associated Press journalists Michael R. Sisak, Robert Bumsted and Julie Walker contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”