Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect searched online 'compulsively' for pictures of his victims and their families, prosecutor says

• The Gilgo Beach killer suspect was obsessed with photos of his victims and their families, a prosecutor said.
• The prosecutor said secrecy was key to catching the suspect because "we knew the person responsible for these murders" was watching.

The Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect kept searching online for photos of his victims and their families, including their children, a prosecutor in the case said Friday.

"He was compulsively searching pictures of the victims, but not only pictures of the victims, pictures of their relatives, their sisters, their children, and he was trying to locate those individuals," said Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney.

On Friday, Tierney said that Rex Heuermann — a prominent New York architect arrested as the suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings — was also active online searching for information on how police were investigating the murders.

Heuermann searched the internet over 200 times to track if investigators were on his trail — including searches into how police were using the internet and cell phones to try and identify him, the prosecutor alleged.

Heuermann was arrested on Friday and charged by a grand jury Friday with six counts of murder in connection to some deaths in the Gilgo Beach serial murders.

"In a 14-month period, he had over 200 searches pertaining to the Gilgo investigation," Tierney said. "He was looking, trying to figure out, 'how is the task force using cellphones to try to figure out what's happening,' 'what are the developments' with regard to the task force.

The cold cases are a string of unsolved killings involving at least 10 sets of human remains discovered on Long Island since 2010.