New York (AFP) – A New York architect believed to be responsible for a series of murders on Long Island has been charged with a seventh homicide, that of a woman whose remains were found in 2000, prosecutors said Tuesday. Rex Heuermann, 61, had already been charged with the murders of six women whose bodies were found near Gilgo Beach between 1993 and 2010. Heuermann, who was initially arrested in July 2023, has pleaded not guilty.
The body of the new victim, Valerie Mack, was found in two locations: in a wooded area of Long Island, east of Manhattan, in 2000, and then in 2011 not far from Gilgo Beach. At a hearing in Suffolk County court, Heuermann pleaded not guilty to Mack’s murder. The families “are very grateful for the small bit of closure that the task force has been able to provide,” county district attorney Ray Tierney said. “The lives of these women matter.”
The remains of 11 murder victims — nine women, one man, and a young girl — were found in 2010 and 2011 in the scrub along the parkway near Gilgo Beach, an Atlantic Ocean barrier beach on Long Island’s south shore. The Gilgo Beach case had stumped investigators for years, with the bodies of the victims, most of them female sex workers, found along the same isolated stretch of beach but no suspects identified.
But in 2022, investigators narrowed their focus onto Heuermann, after he was discovered to be the registered owner of a vehicle one of the victims had been spotted in. Since then, the case against Heuermann — a married father of two at the time of the killings — has been based on DNA evidence from a discarded pizza box, and cell phone data linking him to the victims. Some of that evidence was found in the family home in Massapequa Park.
Heuermann also performed hundreds of internet searches about the investigation into the murders, asking questions such as “Why hasn’t the Long Island serial killer been caught?” In the Mack case, DNA evidence found on the victim’s body matched the genetic profile of Heuermann’s daughter, who was a little girl at the time. Heuermann is expected to go on trial in 2025.
© 2024 AFP
