The Gilgo Beach murders might have been solved years ago if police and prosecutors hadn't fumbled the case

• A task force to solve the Gilgo Beach cold case murders was launched in early 2022.
• It took investigators just six weeks to resurface a crucial witness tip that ultimately helped crack the case.

When authorities launched a task force early last year to solve the decade-old Gilgo Beach serial killings case, investigators took just six weeks to resurface a vital clue that would eventually help pinpoint a suspect in four of the 11 killings that have haunted Long Island's South Shore.

The witness who last saw victim Amber Costello in September 2010 described the suspect and his vehicle to police: A dark, first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche driven by a tall, dark-haired, heavyset man. According to Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, that tip went uninvestigated over the years.

"There are piles of evidence," Tierney told reporters at a press conference earlier this month. "What is credible, what's not, what seems likely, what's not — it's not as simple as it seems."

But when that witness' tip was rediscovered in 2022, investigators used the vehicle's description and cellphone location data to identify architect Rex Heuermann of Massapequa Park as a suspect. Authorities arrested Heuermann on July 13 and charged him with the murders of three women.

He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The speed at which the investigation proceeded, some 13 years after the bodies were found, has raised speculation about whether the murders could have been solved long before now. Multiple law enforcement agencies famously bungled their investigation over the years while a corruption scandal ensnared Suffolk County's police department and district attorney's office. Several key figures involved in the Gilgo Beach investigation were ultimately convicted of crimes they committed while in office.

The top two lawmen in charge of the Gilgo Beach investigation spurned the help of the FBI and sought to cover up their own crimes

The first Gilgo Beach victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, first disappeared in 2007. Her body, and the bodies of 10 other people, weren't discovered until December of 2010 when a police officer's K9 partner inadvertently stumbled upon human remains during a training exercise, according to court documents.

The case quickly went cold from there. The Suffolk County police chief at the time, James Burke, reportedly refused to share information with the FBI, hamstringing the federal investigation until Burke was eventually indicted for attacking a criminal suspect who had stolen Burke's bag of sex toys and pornography.

"This case was bungled and polluted from the beginning," John Ray, an attorney for several families of Gilgo Beach victims, told The New York Post.

Burke was ultimately convicted of violating the civil rights of the man he assaulted and of conspiring to obstruct justice when the feds investigated him. He was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.

Suffolk County's former district attorney, Thomas Spota, was also given prison time after he helped cover for Burke. Spota was convicted of witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and being an accessory after-the-fact to Burke's civil rights violation. He is currently serving a five-year prison sentence.

The newfound focus on the investigation, plus technological advancements, helped crack the case

After Burke and Spota were arrested, the Suffolk County Police Department's new chief refocused the department on solving the Gilgo Beach murders, homing in on data the FBI had compiled on the burner phones the killer had used.

According to Tierney, the killer had used burner phones to communicate with four victims, then discarded the phones shortly after they were killed. The FBI used cellphone tower data from the burners and victims' phones, eventually finding an "area of confluence" of four cell towers in the Massapequa Park area.

As the years went by and technology advanced, investigators were slowly able to narrow down the size of that area to cover a group of several hundred homes in Massapequa Park, The New York Times reported.

When the new Gilgo Beach task force began their work in 2022 and discovered the tip about the suspect's Chevrolet Avalanche, they searched a vehicle database for a car of that description owned by someone in the Massapequa Park area. They quickly landed on Heuermann's name and realized he fit the physical description the witness who last saw Costello alive had provided.

Tierney said investigators followed Heuermann, who worked in midtown Manhattan, and obtained samples of his and his relatives' DNA and compared it to samples found on the victims' bodies. One sample came from pizza crusts Heuermann discarded in a public garbage can.

Though DNA had previously been a dead end in the Gilgo Beach case due to the degraded quality of the hairs found on the victims' bodies, new mitochondrial DNA technology was able to match the samples to the DNA of Heuermann and his wife, Asa Ellerup.

Tierney said he learned of those DNA results in June. Though investigators are still working to link Heuermann to more of the Gilgo Beach killings, Tierney said they decided to arrest Heuermann in July in the interests of public safety.

"One of the reasons we had to take the case down was we learned the defendant was using these alternate identities and alternate instruments to continue to patronize sex workers, which, of course, made us very nervous," Tierney said.