RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — Prosecutors say they are planning a major announcement in their investigation into the suspected serial killings of a group of women whose bodies were found scattered along a coastal road near Gilgo Beach on Long Island.
The main suspect in some of those murders, Rex Heuermann, is due to appear in court on Tuesday, months after he was charged in the deaths of three women. Prosecutors had also said they were working to charge him with a fourth murder.
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney will make the announcement following a hearing in the case in Riverhead, New York.
Heuermann was charged in July with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello, whose bodies were found buried along a remote beach park. Prosecutors said Heuermann is also suspected in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who disappeared in 2007.
He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead.
The arrest of Heuermann, a 60-year-old architect, came more than a decade after police in a search for a missing woman found 10 sets of human remains hidden in dense brush near Gilgo Beach.
The deaths had long baffled investigators and sparked enormous public attention on Long Island and beyond, with the killings leading to the 2020 Netflix film “Lost Girls.” Authorities suspect a serial killer committed some of the killings, but say that they do not believe that all the victims were murdered by the same person. Most of the murders remain unsolved.
Heuermann was first identified as a suspect in 2022 when detectives linked him to a pickup truck that a witness had seen when one of the victims disappeared.
The next year, detectives tracking Heuermann found his DNA from pizza crust in a box he had thrown away in a Manhattan trash can and compared it to a hair found on a fastener used in the killings, authorities said.
Heuermann had worked as a licensed architect at a Manhattan-based firm and lived in Massapequa Park, a suburb close to where the bodies were found.