Gilgo Beach ‘serial killer’ Rex Heuerman is meeting with ‘clergyman’ once a week while in jail, as top cop says he’s been taken off suicide watch and is ’emotionless’
Gilgo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann has been seeing a preacher in jail once a week at his request because he still seems “emotionless” after being taken off suicide watch.
Heuermann, 59, is charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, who disappeared in 2009 and 2010, and is the prime suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who disappeared in 2007.
He spent the first few days in jail isolated in his cage in his 60-square-foot cell, often looking up at the ceiling, but has since settled in, Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. said. from Suffolk Thursday to Newsweek.
“I didn’t see any emotion from him,” the sheriff said. “You wonder what’s going on… Is there something brewing inside?”
Toulon recounted the architect’s five-week jail sentence at Riverhead’s Suffolk County Jail and related that Heuermann goes for walks alone in a small recreation area and spends his time reading and watching television.
Rex Heuermann was arrested last month in connection with the murder of three women whose bodies were found dumped in burlap sacks on Gilgo Beach.
While reporters and fans of true crimes have been asking to see him, Heuermann has only met his attorney Michael Brown and a man the sheriff declined to identify.
As part of the investigation, police spoke to sex workers operating in the Long Island area.
Two prostitutes hired by Gilgo Beach murder suspect Rex Heuermann have accused him of being “violent” and “aggressive” towards them.
Interviewed in late July, shortly after Heuermann’s arrest, they said they became fearful for their safety during intimate encounters with the New York-based architect.
“A person that size who was a little bit aggressive was probably scary,” Toulon said of Heuermann, who is six feet tall and weighs 240 pounds.
Although they were not injured, both sex workers told police they were nervous after their only encounter with the suspect.
Heuermann’s arrest marked a stunning breakthrough in the long-stalled cold case that first made headlines in 2010, when police began searching for a missing woman, Shannon Gilbert, near Gilgo Beach on Long Island.
The first victim, Melissa Barthelemy, 24, was discovered by Suffolk County Police on December 11, 2010. The body of Megan Waterman, 22, was found two days later.
Maureen Brainard-Barnes was 25 years old when she went missing (left). Amber Lynn Costello was 27 years old. Their bodies were found near Barthelemy the same day
Instead, they discovered ten sets of human remains scattered across an abandoned barrier island. The dead included eight women, a man and a young child.
Prosecutors are tight-lipped about whether Heuermann is a suspect in the other murders.
However, police are investigating possible links between Heuermann and the unsolved “Eastbound Strangler” murders of four female sex workers in Atlantic City.
The high-profile case was cracked after DNA from a pizza crust and a napkin that Heuermann tossed into a garbage can outside his Manhattan architecture office matched 99.96 percent with the DNA profile created from hair recovered from the “bottom of the burlap sack’ used to transport Aquarius’s naked body.
Vergata’s legs were found nearly twenty years earlier on April 20, 1996, in a plastic bag in Davis Park on Blue Point Beach on Fire Island. Her skull was subsequently found off Ocean Parkway in 2011.
Heuermann is accused of killing the women while his family was out of town, with investigators finding his and his wife’s hair on the bodies of some of the alleged victims.
His wife Asa Ellerup and her two children, Victoria, 26, and Christopher, 32, looked solemn as they returned to the wrecked property with their family dog.
Ellerup was at the property when authorities raided it on July 14. Her lawyer said the family was “blindsided” by the murder allegations.
“Obviously this has been a shocking time for them and quite a difficult time to understand,” said Robert Macedonio.
“As with any family, it is extremely distressing and they are totally shocked and taken aback. The family does not want to comment more than that.’