Rex Heuermann.Photo:Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office
Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office
New witnesses have surfaced that have allegedly linked Long Island Serial Killer suspectRex Heuermannto two women connected to Gilgo Beach.
At a press conference Wednesday, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison said his investigators are looking into the claims of four witnesses who have come forward to attorney John Ray, who represents the family ofShannan Gilbert, a sex worker who disappeared in May of 2010 after calling 911 and fleeing a client’s Oak Beach home. Her remains were found in December 2011. (Ray stood alongside Harrison at the press conference.)
“We have a job here as law enforcement, as Suffolk County Police Department, to make sure we investigate every single complaint or interest in this case, make sure we look under every single stone to see if there is any connection Rex Heuermann or if there is a connection to somebody else that may be involved with the bodies that were discovered on Ocean Parkway,” Harrison said.
Harrison said they added two more investigators to their task force into the bodies found along Gilgo Beach “to take this type of information in and to follow it to see if it is credible.”
Heuermann, a former architect, was charged in July with the murders ofMelissa Barthelemy,Amber CostelloandMegan Waterman. He is also the prime suspect in the killing of Maureen Brainard-Barnes. All four women had worked as online escorts and had been missing between 2007 and 2010.
Shannan Gilbert.Jersey City Police
Jersey City Police
Ray said at Wednesday’s press conference that one of the witnesses, a cab driver, said in a signed affidavit that she picked up a woman she believed to be Shannan Gilbert from a Sayville motel in the late summer or fall of 2009.
She claimed that prior to picking the woman up, a dispatcher told her that the person had locked herself in the bathroom in a room at the motel. Once at the motel, she said she drove to the room, flashed her headlights and honked the horn.
The cab driver, said Ray, continued to “flash her lights and beep her horn, and out comes a girl, crying, shaking, very upset, and gets in her car."
The woman who fled the hotel room told the cab driver that she had met the man on Craigslist and that he had promised to take care of her family.
According to the affidavit, he gave the woman a thick white envelope. He then went to the bathroom, and the woman said she looked inside the envelope and found it stuffed with cut-up paper. She said the man then got aggressive, and she ran into the bathroom to get away from him.
The cab driver said she drove the woman to the Ronkonkoma train station.
Another witness alleged that she and her police detective boyfriend were swingers and went to Heuermann’s house after they found his number posted on a wall for hook-ups at a swinger’s bar in New York City around Valentine’s Day 1996. Before they drove to Heuermann’s house, she alleged they picked up Karen Vergata, a 34-year-old sex worker, previously known as Jane Doe No. 7, whose remains were found on Long Island’s Fire Island on April 20, 1996. Additional body parts were discovered on Long Island’s Tobay Beach on April 11, 2011.
Vergata was identified through genetic genealogy in August.
The witness said they went inside Heuermann’s home and met his wife Asa Ellerup.
Karen Vergata.Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office
Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office
“’Karen went upstairs," the witness wrote. “I stayed upstairs with Asa. My partner, who I believe was bisexual, kept disappearing. I believed he was elsewhere in the house, having sex with Rex. I believe I had sex with Rex as well. I never went downstairs.”
Her boyfriend, she claimed, “told me not to worry about her, that she was okay, they were only playing a game. We left without her. I felt uneasy that we left without the woman.”
Another witness — a sex worker — described having sex with Heuermann multiple times, Ray said, while Ellerup was in the home.
Asked at the press conference if the information was credible, Harrison responded: “It is still an ongoing investigation. We have the information and we are working it and we will see where it leads us down the road.”
From left [clockwise] Maureen Brainard-Barnes; Melissa Barthelemy; Amber Lynn Costello; Megan Waterman.Suffolk County Police Department; Barthelemy family; Suffolk County Police Department (2)
Suffolk County Police Department; Barthelemy family; Suffolk County Police Department (2)
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Investigators will “try to nail down time frames, look at radio runs that can help us kind of pinpoint if there is any credibility to these complaints that came forward,” Harrison said.
Harrison said they are taking a “closer look and see if [Vergata and Gilbert] are connected to our defendant.”
Bob Macedonio, an attorney representing Ellerup, tells PEOPLE that the sex worker’s claims that she had sex with Heuermann while his wife was in the house are not true.
“You’re going to bring prostitutes to your house and you’re going back 10, 15 years ago when the children are teens, if not younger, and go downstairs with prostitutes in the house when you’re upstairs with your kids” he says. “Any normal woman would never do that with the children in the house, you didn’t even allow it to go on. Think about that.”
source: people.com
