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Due to the nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and bias. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.
In July 2023, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney announced the arrest of Rex Heuermann for what had long been known only as the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Standing behind Tierney were the families of three of the victims, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelome, and Maureen Brainerd Barnes.
Their presence was a visual representation of the fact that these women mattered to detectives. Their stories mattered. Bringing closure to the case mattered. But it wasn't always this way.
For 16 years, the investigation into the Gilgo Beach serial killer was hampered by police stonewalling, dysfunction, and their failure to pursue all leads and tips. An air of disregard for the victim's involvement in sex work underlied many press conferences, police interactions, and news articles. All while an unknown killer terrorized Long Island.
I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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Hi there, Carter Roy here. If you're interested in true crime, especially unsolved murders, serial killers, and cold cases, you'll love my brand new show, Murder True Crime Stories. Each episode covers a notorious murder or murders with a special focus on those who were impacted the most. We'll always leave with the knowledge of why these stories need to be heard. You can listen to Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. Before we get into this story, amongst the many sources we used, we found our interview with Robert Kolker and his book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery extremely helpful to our research. The audiobook edition of Lost Girls is available for Spotify Premium subscribers in Spotify's audiobook catalog, where you can check it out after listening to this episode.
By December 2010, Melissa Cann was hitting a wall in the search for her missing sister, Maureen Brainerd Barnes. Maureen disappeared on July 9th, 2007 from a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan. The police hadn't been much help. When Melissa explained that her sister was an escort, they refused to even put her on their missing persons list. Since then, Melissa had taken up the search for her sister herself.
Melissa had combed through Maureen's email, searched for Jane Doe's, and taken several trips to New York. Her only clue was a ping from Maureen's cell phone from Fire Island in 2008. Melissa was the last known person to have contact with Maureen. They spoke on the phone the night Maureen went missing. Three years later, she turned on the news to a surprise.
Four sets of human remains had been found along Ocean Parkway between Gilgo Beach and Cedar Beach in Long Island, New York. It was around 15 miles from the location of Melissa's last phone ping. So though the bodies had yet to be identified, Melissa knew one of them had to be Maureen.
Her suspicions were confirmed by the end of January 2011. Maureen's remains were positively identified, along with those of Amber Costello, Megan Waterman, and Melissa Barthelemy. Collectively, they became known as the Gilgo Four. The women had all worked as escorts. Their bodies had all been wrapped in burlap.
With the similarities and close proximity of the bodies, police officially announced they were looking for a serial killer. And suddenly, after hardly any word from police for more than three years, Melissa was thrust into the spotlight. And once it becomes a serial killer case, then the whole lens changes, the whole spotlight changes. And so she was caught in this very strange position, she and all the rest of the family members.
The world was beating a path to her door now. That's Robert Kolker, journalist and author of the 2013 book on the then-unsolved Gilgo Beach case, Lost Girls, an Unsolved American Mystery. 2020 wanted to talk to her. 48 Hours wanted to talk to her. The New York Times wanted to talk to her. Everybody wanted to talk to her. And they all said the same thing. They said, you know, your sister is a prostitute or was a prostitute. And Melissa...
Her response was, she was my sister. You know, she was the mother of my niece and nephew. She was a lot of things. Just to see her sister written off as one thing and not another,
was a shock. And then to be placed in the role of having to be the spokesperson for her sister and speak up for her over and over again and protest about the way the media was portraying her, that was yet another shock. And then the shock that she was part of a serial killer case, that this was a killer who was still at large, that was a third shock. Bob Kolker learned about the case at the same time as the rest of the world. In December of 2010, when the first four
Sets of human remains were found along Ocean Parkway in Long Island. I was a staff writer at New York Magazine. I had written crime stories before, and some of them had been set on Long Island before. And so when this news story
emerged, my editor thought it might be natural for me. Bob traveled to Long Island with two assumptions. The first... I thought that the case would be solved right away because, according to the news reports, it was four victims, all of whom had advertised on Craigslist. There had been a Craigslist killer maybe 18 months earlier who had been found, and so my thought was that this case would be over before it began. And the second... And, um...
To be honest, I also wondered if we would ever learn anything about the victims because I think I had fallen prey to the same stereotype a lot of us mainstream media people have, which is that the victims in cases like this are off the grid.
estranged from their families, perhaps involved in substances and just are people who you might never learn their identities at all. Bob says he was proven wrong on both counts. The case remained unsolved and very, very quickly these victims were identified and their families emerged as people who had been looking for them for months and in two cases for years.
Bob learned the Gilgo Four had a lot in common. The 2008 financial crisis had impacted their abilities to bring in a steady income. These were all families that were from struggling parts of America that the media didn't pay much attention to. And these were all parts of the country that had not really recovered from the crash, places where options were narrowing, where young people growing up in a community like Wilmington, North Carolina or Groton, Connecticut,
They wouldn't have the same options that their parents had or their grandparents had. They might be working at the Walmart or at the Dunkin Donuts. But something like sex work, where you could be your own boss and manage your own professional life online without having to walk down the street, that was appealing to some people as a means of social mobility, as a way to pay the rent or support your kids. And that's what some of these women did. And then, of course, their difficulties
increased after that. But it intrigued me that the thing that they all had in common was that it was the economic pressures of their lives and the need for social mobility that really made escort work practical for them and really solved their problems briefly. As Bob uncovered more about the victims' lives, he decided to expand his story into a book. The idea was to look at the case in motion and to
take an especially close look at the victims in the case and also their families. The idea would be to learn about their lives and help the victims rise above being just plot devices, which was what they really were coming to be seen as in this case as it was unfolding.
In an effort to learn more about the Gilgo Four, Bob reached out to their families. The first person he talked to was Melissa Cann, Maureen Brainerd Barnes' sister.
And Melissa laid it all out for me. She said that her sister disappeared three and a half years before her remains were found. And in those three and a half years, they were begging for attention. They were begging for the police to care. They went to New York countless times from Connecticut, taking time off of work. They begged the local police for help, too. There was no headway. There was no information. And no one seemed to be bothering to look for her.
Bob also learned more about Maureen in life. Maureen grew up in Groton, Connecticut. With her mother often away working two jobs, Maureen and her siblings explored the woods behind their apartment complex by day and made their own dinners by night.
Maureen was described by loved ones as introspective and artistic. She wrote down her dreams in journals and took in stray cats. She held many different odd jobs: card dealer at Foxwoods Casino, pizza delivery person, and supermarket cashier. But she also had aspirations to become a rapper or a model.
She was promoting her music via MySpace when she discovered that sex workers advertising on Craigslist kept 100% of their profits. So Maureen began booking clients through the site using the name Marie as an alias.
By 2007, Maureen had mostly left the business. She'd had two children and found work as a telemarketer. But come February of that year, Maureen was laid off. She was in a bind. She was already laid on rent, and her landlord had been threatening eviction.
So she turned to Craigslist once again, this time bringing her friend Sarah Carnes into the fold with her. The two frequently traveled to New York City hotels to meet high-paying clients. And that's where they were on July 9th, 2007. Maureen needed to be back in Groton the next day for a court hearing. She had one final night in the city to make enough money to thwart eviction.
Though she normally worked in hotel rooms, that night Maureen told her sister Melissa she'd be making an out call, meaning she'd meet the client in a location of their own choosing. The next day, she planned to take the train back to Connecticut, but Maureen never got on that train and didn't show up for her day in court.
Her sister Melissa reported her missing, but when the police found out she was an escort, they dismissively suggested to Melissa that Maureen may have run away. The first clue that Maureen had not run away came a few days after her disappearance, when Sarah Carnes received a phone call from a blocked number. Sarah told People magazine that the man on the other end of the line said he saw Maureen in Queens. At first, Sarah was skeptical.
But then the man described her friend to a T. Sarah passed on the information to police, but the investigation fizzled out not long after, and she wouldn't be the last loved one to receive an ominous phone call. Two years after Maureen went missing, almost to the day, 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy disappeared.
Melissa grew up in Buffalo, New York. She was a great student and had a penchant for taking in stray cats and had aspirations to become a hairdresser. She attended the Continental Beauty School in Buffalo, then briefly worked at Supercuts. In 2007, Melissa and her boyfriend Jordan moved to the Bronx after a man nicknamed Blaze offered her a job at a salon.
But a few months after the move, the salon shuttered. Blaze offered Melissa a different job: escorting. He'd act as her pimp and take a cut of her money. On the Manhattan streets, she used the name "Chloe." By spring 2008, Melissa had turned to Craigslist and began making out calls.
On the night of July 11th, 2009, Melissa sent a text to her little sister Amanda to nail down plans for her upcoming visit to New York. The next day, she called Blaze and told him she'd be meeting a client that night in Long Island. He was offering $1,000 for her services.
Then, Melissa went silent. Her mother Lynn tried to contact her, but she wasn't returning any texts or phone calls. It was unlike Melissa, so Lynn tried to file a missing persons report. For 10 days, police gave Lynn the runaround, which she suspected was because of Melissa's status as an escort.
Four days after Melissa's disappearance, Amanda received a call from her sister's phone. The voice on the other end of the line sounded male. He spoke with a taunting and soft tone. He asked her if she was Melissa's little sister, then called her vulgar names. The call ended in under three minutes.
Amanda received eight calls in all, each more disturbing than the last. Police traced the calls to cellular towers in crowded locations such as Times Square and Madison Square Garden, and more remote areas like Massapequa, Long Island. The final call occurred on August 26, 2009. The man told Amanda he was looking at her sister's dead body.
As Bob Kolker continued to uncover the lives of the Gilgo Four, he learned Melissa Ken had been in contact with some of the other victims' families. And from there, he saw a story developing. A sisterhood. She was finding comfort talking to other people in the same position. And so when I told my editor about it all at New York Magazine, he very wisely said, why don't you get them all together? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well...
You talk to one of them, why not talk to all of them? Bring them to New York. We'll photograph them all. They'll all sit at a table and talk to one another. And it was probably one of the most breathtaking experiences I've had as a reporter. So on May 2, 2011, the families traveled to New York and met with Bob and had their first face-to-face meeting as a group. They all came to the city. They all sat around together.
In this meeting, Bob learned more about the third woman to go missing, 22-year-old Megan Waterman.
Megan grew up in southern Maine with her grandmother Muriel. As a preteen, Megan was a regular at her town's roller skate rink. She was described as bubbly and outgoing. It wasn't hard for her to make friends everywhere she went.
Megan gave birth to a daughter in 2006. Soon after, she started to feel the financial pressures of having a child. She received $400 a month from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, but the checks were barely enough to support herself, let alone an infant.
Megan was working at a sandwich shop when she met Akeem Cruz, whom Megan's family now believes forced her into sex work. Allegedly, Cruz acted as a pimp and posted Megan's ads on Craigslist under the name Lexi. In spring 2009, the pair started making out calls to Long Island.
On June 5th, 2010, Megan was sharing a room with Cruz at a Holiday Inn Express in Hoppog on Long Island. She posted an ad on Craigslist shortly after midnight on the 6th. A security camera caught her leaving the hotel at 1:30 a.m., presumably to meet a client. The next day, Cruz found the hotel room empty and reported her missing.
Later, in 2013, Cruz would plead guilty to transporting Megan across state lines for sex trafficking and be sentenced to three years in prison. Bob also learned more about Amber Lynn Costello from her sister Kim. Amber spent her childhood in the port city of Wilmington. She was close with Kim and doted on her nieces and nephews. Friends later described her as "sweet and loving, with a heart for children."
When Kim was a sophomore in college and Amber was just 13, their parents suffered consecutive medical crises. The bills started piling up, and then Kim met Teresa. Teresa ran Coed Confidential, which promised entertainment to men in the form of stripping at bachelor parties and personal massage appointments. In an effort to support her family and their growing medical costs, Kim started a job as a call operator for the company.
She made good money answering phones, but then she saw how much could be made by actually going out on the calls. Kim's first client paid her hundreds of dollars one night to strip and dance. So she left the phone operator's life behind.
Later, Amber joined her sister at Coed Confidential. Teresa threw drug-fueled parties for her employees, supplying them with crack, ecstasy, cocaine, and heroin. The parties kicked off a years-long struggle with heroin addiction for both Amber and Kim.
Amber and Kim moved to several locations together along the East Coast, Hilton Head, Florida, and New Orleans, to name a few. But in 2007, Amber decided to give up the vagabond lifestyle and settle down. She married Don Costello in Florida and moved into his condo. But after a miscarriage and an adoption that fell through, Amber and Don's relationship unraveled. They divorced after 15 months of marriage.
In February 2010, Amber decided to head back to New York, where Kim was living, to get clean. Kim paid for her plane ticket and placed her sister in a drug detox program at Nassau University Medical Center. Once Amber's stay was over, she moved into a home in North Babylon, Long Island with her boyfriend Bjorn and Kim's friend Dave. But she soon returned to sex work, this time via Craigslist under the name Carolina.
On September 2nd, 2010, Amber received an offer that exceeded her expectations. A client was offering $1,500 for sex work. Her rate was normally around $250. This gig was too good to pass up.
Later that evening, she left her apartment to meet the client. She had no idea that the man she was about to meet was, in all likelihood, the Gilgo Beach serial killer. As Bob learned more about the victims and their families, he could see just how special this gathering was.
And I was really meeting them all for the first time, just as many of them were meeting each other for the first time. And so we all were new to one another. It was really quite meaningful. And I was really kind of unpacking it for days after it happened. But even as the families talked, got to know one another, and shared tears over their lost loved ones, there was one family in attendance who couldn't experience the same catharsis.
One woman's disappearance had kicked off the entire investigation, and she was still missing. Just before 5 a.m. on May 1, 2010, Michael Pack sat in his car in Oak Beach, Long Island. He was a driver for an escort service, and he'd been taking Shannon Gilbert to her appointments for about eight months.
This morning, he'd been waiting for three hours outside of a small cottage in the isolated, gated community. When the front door swung open, Michael expected to see Shannon. But to his surprise, the client, Joe Brewer, came out instead. Joe told Michael that Shannon was frantic inside and refusing to leave.
Michael went inside the home, but Shannon refused to come with him. In a panic, she called 911. Michael chased her for some time, but eventually lost sight of her. He left Oak Beach and hoped she'd found a ride home. She was never seen alive again. Oak Beach is a small community located in Suffolk County, bordered to the east by Captree State Park and to the west by Gilgo State Park.
I think a lot of people, when they think about a serial killer in New York, think about this densely populated area, maybe skyscrapers, maybe millions of people wandering around, tourists and such. But the thing about this case is that while it was in New York and it was pretty close by, it was really in a desolate part of the region. It was in a part of Long Island that was along the shoreline, the south shore of Long Island. And the bodies were found really off the side of a highway that was...
a 15 mile long highway along the barrier island beaches that was not lit at night, that you could see headlights coming from a mile away. So really kind of an ideal place for someone who didn't want to be noticed, who didn't want to be seen. Also, the communities in that area are very particular places. Anyone who lives along the barrier islands on the south shore of Long Island, and I'm not talking about fancy areas like the Hamptons or Fire Island, I'm talking about closer in,
These are people who don't mind if it takes them 20 minutes to drive to the grocery store. They are happy to be secluded. They want a private life. They didn't want the attention that came from an escort going missing in their community, even one that may have knocked on their front door hours earlier. The community seemed especially motivated to keep the disappearance quiet. And even the police sort of came and went, knowing that this place was
meant to be a quiet place. It seemed to me as an outsider to be kind of ridiculous to think that a woman would run screaming down the street, call 911 and disappear, and then the police would essentially shrug it off. But that is exactly what happened to Shannon Gilbert. Bob says when the bodies of Melissa, Maureen, Amber, and Megan were found in December 2010, he and other journalists hadn't even heard of Shannon Gilbert. And yet...
Shannon isn't technically part of this arrest, but she's the only reason why there's a case because when she ran screaming through the street and calling 911 and then disappearing, that was when police started searching the area. And they really didn't start searching for months after she disappeared. It was almost like a training exercise to try and find a missing person. This is the lack of urgency that seemed to greet cases like this involving sex workers. So that meant that
In those months that Shannon remained missing and the police really weren't doing much to find her, that there were two more victims in this case.
As we mentioned, by the end of January 2011, Amber, Melissa, Maureen and Megan had all been positively identified. But Shannon still hadn't been found. Shannon's mother, Mary, felt out of place in the group. The other women knew where their loved ones were. Her daughter's disappearance helped find the other missing women. Yet Shannon was still missing. Suddenly, this was a serial killer case. Shannon was still missing.
and the communities wanted nothing to do with it. They kept slamming doors on reporters. They kept shouting and screaming at family members when they came knocking on doors to find out what happened to Shannon. It was this intense fishbowl that the media was all caught up in as well.
On December 13, 2011, detectives found Shannon's remains on the far side of the Oak Beach Marsh, less than a mile from where the three other victims' bodies had been discovered. She was only found a year after those other four women were found. And she was found in a marsh right next to where she was last seen, which, of course, raises all sorts of questions about how hard the police had been looking for her in the first place.
Before an autopsy was even performed, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer suggested her death was an accident. But even the autopsy didn't give Shannon's family any answers. On May 1, 2012, Suffolk County medical examiners deemed Shannon's cause of death to be "undetermined." They did, however, conclude her death was unrelated to the other bodies found in Gilgo Beach.
By the time Shannon's remains were discovered, seven other bodies had been found in and around Gilgo Beach, bringing the total to 11. Though not all of them have been connected to the same killer, Shannon remains the only presumed accident. She was found so far into the marsh that it's hard to believe that she was able to get there by herself.
Because when I'm talking about a marsh, I'm talking about something with weeds that are really the width of your arm, almost like tree trunks, a tangle of bramble, and hundreds of yards that she would have to get to to where her body was found. So it's hard to believe that she got there herself, hard to believe that she wasn't in actual danger. And yet this has been the police theory about her disappearance the entire time. They believe she was hysterical, that she was having a psychotic episode. But the fact is the police were only there for a little while.
that they barely searched for her, that it took them a year and a half to find her. And only by happenstance did the case even make the media at all, because they found all those other sets of human remains.
The coroner's report didn't satisfy Shannon's family, who believed Shannon was murdered and should be considered part of the Gilgo Beach serial killer case. As for Bob Kolker... I believe that the neighbors at Oak Beach know more than what they're talking about with me or with other members of the media or even with the police. I believe they know what happened to Shannon that morning. And whether it was an accidental death or whether it was foul play, there's just something that they're keeping secret.
I think there was some effort made to sweep her disappearance under the rug in the short term. They just didn't want scrutiny. Maybe they asked somebody to get rid of her body while she was still conscious, or maybe she actually had lost consciousness. Maybe she was in real medical distress. But I feel like the most likely explanation is that somebody decided to grab her, drive her around the corner and dump her in the marsh.
I have no proof of this. I have no idea which of the people it might be, but it seemed to me like that would be the quickest solution to their problem. Because remember, they knew the police were coming. They didn't know that Shannon had called 911, but they knew that two other neighbors had. And so what you have, I think, is a conspiracy of silence.
- Since the moment the Gilgo Beach story hit the airwaves, the media, the police, the people of Oak Beach and the families of the victims have been at odds. - I think there's a certain amount of apathy
and even sometimes contempt for people who are escorts, even if they're doing it part-time. And it's not just a police problem, and it's not just a media problem, it's also a neighbor problem. I think everyone who encountered these women at every stage, when they were working, when they were vulnerable, when they were scared and being preyed upon, and then when they were missing, at every stage they were encountering apathy and actually fear
at times contempt and dismissal. It's almost as if they mattered less. I think the thing that other reporters and I kept marveling at as we were looking at this case was that if these missing women had been college students or had been, you know, restaurant workers or office workers or, you know, daughters of judges and lawyers, then this would be a very different case.
It's this apathy and bias that may have contributed to the 13 years it's taken to get an arrest in the case. Research shows a distrustful relationship between sex workers and police.
Sex workers experience high rates of violent crimes, but much of it goes unreported. They're afraid that police won't take their concerns seriously. Some even fear getting arrested themselves or suffering violence at the hands of those entrusted with public safety. The sad part about Amber is that in her case, the people around her, people who were her friends, even her sister, were too afraid to go to the police when she disappeared.
Part of it was that they didn't want scrutiny for what they were up to, and the other part of it was that they didn't really have faith that the police would care anyway. Bob says there are other factors that clouded the ability of the police to solve this case, like corruption. My understanding is that the department was in such disarray and was caught so flat-footed by this case and was so caught up in some internal dramas of its own, including corruption, that the case itself was
never became a huge priority. And that pretty soon after those bodies were found, like within a year or so, the department kind of closed ranks and even stopped working with the FBI. And that meant that the investigation did suffer. It was pretty much frozen for a few years.
James Burke was the police chief of the Suffolk County Police Department from 2012 to 2015. He was in charge of the investigation into the Gilgo Beach serial killings, but received criticism for refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
In 2012, Burke assaulted a handcuffed man who'd been arrested on charges of stealing personal items from a police vehicle. When federal agents launched an investigation into the assault, Burke initiated a cover-up by intimidating witnesses and ordering district attorney staff to wiretap detectives.
Burke resigned from his position in 2015. The following year, he pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation for attacking the suspect and obstruction of justice for leading the cover-up. He was sentenced to 46 months in prison and was released in 2019.
Also involved in the cover-up was Thomas Spoda, Suffolk County's district attorney from 2002 to 2017. His charges included conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison in 2021. Like Burke, Spoda had also been accused of pushing away the federal authorities tasked with solving the Gilgo Beach murders.
While the personnel at the helm of the investigation were embroiled in scandal and corruption, they missed key clues that Bob believes could have led to a much quicker arrest of a suspect. In 2011, shortly after Amber Costello's body was identified, police received a tip about one of Amber's clients. The unidentified witness said a green Chevy Avalanche was parked in Amber's driveway shortly before her disappearance.
The witness said the client looked like an ogre. He stood around 6'6 and looked to be in his 40s. It was the most descriptive tip police had gotten during the entirety of the investigation. But before long, it was buried under the stacks of clues and leads and forgotten for 12 years.
By 2022, the scandal in Suffolk County had petered out, and a new district attorney, Raymond Tierney, organized a new task force dedicated to solving the Gilgo Beach murders. One month later, police learned who owned that green Chevy Avalanche. And they did a search and found a vehicle of that make and model owned by someone else.
in Central Long Island, and it was Rex Herman, and he checked off other boxes too, and suddenly they had somebody new to look at, somebody they had never looked at before. I have to say that's the number one question I've had since Rex Herman's arrest. Did you know about him? Did anybody know about him?
And the answer was no and no. Nobody really knew about him. And so then that just leads to more questions. How does someone like that stay hidden for so long? And I think one of the answers is that the police weren't ready and didn't make themselves ready for years. For more than a year, the task force pursued Rex Heuermann while the mountain of evidence against him grew far beyond just a truck.
Heuermann's burner phones were allegedly used to contact Melissa, Megan and Amber. His internet search history revealed he'd been following the Gilgo Beach investigation and searching for sadistic and violent pornography. Using pizza crusts he discarded while being tailed, investigators also matched his DNA to hairs found on Megan's body.
In July 2023, Rex Heuermann was arrested for the murders of Amber Costello, Megan Waterman, and Melissa Bartholomew. The following January, he was charged for the murder of Maureen Brainerd Barnes. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to all four killings.
And it's possible he could be connected to more deaths. Again, 11 bodies were found in and around Gilgo Beach. Some deaths have been connected to other killers, but some are still unsolved. And a few remain unidentified. It's a real open question whether, assuming he's guilty, whether there are other people he's harmed in his life. Certainly these other sets of human remains, it's very possible that
They are attributable to all to the same killer. But on the other hand, there are instances around the country where more than one serial killer has left their victims in similar places, places nearby to one another. So what seemed impossible to me and other people 10 years ago when I wrote Lost Girls actually might be possible. It's possible that there is someone else or was someone else who was leaving remains behind.
Bob was out walking his dog when he heard the news of the arrest. I was stunned because it had been 10 years, really almost to the week, 10 years since my book had been published. It had been 12 years since those bodies had first appeared. And I'd never stopped getting emails and phone calls from various readers who knew about the case and thought, well, you know,
This guy I met five years ago, he seems like he might be the killer. You know, lots of very murky leads. And to hear that the police had made an arrest, not just brought someone in for questioning, not just declared someone to be a person of interest, but actually made the arrest, that really felt solid to me. For Bob, many things about Rex Heuermann matched what he had in mind when he thought about the killer.
Certain things about him seemed to fit perfectly. The idea that he lived in Massapequa Park, which was central Long Island, a very short drive from where those women were found, and commuted into midtown Manhattan, which is where Maureen Brainerd Barnes disappeared. It's where there were certain cell phone pings registered to Melissa Barthelemy's cell phone.
For the longest time, people had been thinking that it was someone who lived in Long Island and commuted to New York. And sure enough, here was someone who lived in Long Island and commuted to New York. Also, the fact that he was a lifelong Long Islander, that was important, too, because the remains in this case, as I said before, are in these remote locations where if you're just coming into town on your way from point A to point B, you don't necessarily know a place like this as a place to where you know you can't be noticed.
But there were also things about Huerman that surprised Bob. I really was expecting someone who was much more of a loner, much more of an introvert. Someone like Joel Rifkin, a previous Long Island serial killer, who I think he worked as a landscape gardener. He basically spent his days driving around Long Island with a truck with landscaping equipment. So that gave him a lot of freedom to go where he wanted to go unnoticed, not have to talk to a lot of people.
Rex Herman, on the other hand, has a job where he's talking to a lot of people. He has a very public-facing job as an architect working on very well-to-do buildings, condos and co-ops in Manhattan, helping buildings navigate governmental regulations when they're doing their renovations. And so here's a guy who kind of valued his ability to talk to people and to get things done. Not that he was the most
likable individual, but he sort of had a high opinion of his ability to deal with people. Also, he had a family. He had a wife and a daughter and a stepson. And the kids lived at home. And so you have to wonder how a person like that arranges their life so that they are able to do something like this and also stay hidden for so long.
The most promising thing that stood out to Bob was that in the 13 years since he'd begun reporting on the story, attitudes had shifted significantly. That night I watched the press conference by the district attorney and the police commissioner, and I saw that they actually had the victim families arrested.
many of them up there behind the podium, standing there during the press conference, which signaled to me, first of all, that they had been told, you know, that they had to come in from out of state or from pretty far away. So they must have been alerted before anyone else had, which showed a kind of a special
acknowledgement by the police that they mattered. And then in the press conference itself, they could not have been nicer to the families, which to me is like a night and day turnaround because the police, when I was worried writing about the case 10 years ago, they were, they really kept their distance. Sometimes they were rude and dismissive and other times they just didn't really want them to speak. So to see them up there showed that there'd been some progress.
But the story isn't over, and there's still work to be done in strengthening the relationship between sex workers and law enforcement. I think sometimes police make some assurances of immunity so that people can come forward and talk, and that those assurances are kind of squishy and not really well-defined. But that in other places, there are actual immunity laws that
that allow people who feel like they're in danger, who are in this line of work, to go to the police without fear that they're going to be arrested or they're going to be prosecuted. I think that needs to be a lot more solidified and there needs to be a little bit of trust built between law enforcement and people in this profession.
But above all, there's one thing Bob hopes that readers take from his work and stories of Amber Costello, Megan Waterman, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, and Shannon Gilbert. And the bottom line, I think, for readers is there's a reason killers choose women like this, because they think that no one will miss them. And the point of Lost Girls is that they were missed, that they were loved, that they were not off the grid, that they...
had lives that were worthy of attention and care. Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay safe out there.
Serial Killers is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Chelsea Wood, researched, edited, and produced by Chelsea Wood and Connor Sampson. Fact-checked by Laurie Siegel and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.