[ad_1]
Content Warning: Contains graphic descriptions of violence
This month, prosecutors charged Rex Heuermann with two more murders. Gilgo Beach Serial Murders In Long Island, New York, they also
Describes him as “Planning Documents”.
Prosecutors said Heuerman created the document to “methodically plan” the selection, killing and disposal of victims, according to a bail application filed with the indictment.
Written in capital letters, the manual is structured as a series of reminder lists with topics such as “Before Preparation,” which offer banal tips such as the importance of checking the weather forecast and looking for security cameras. The “Before Preparation” section is more serious, with instructions to set up a detention area and “lay out” equipment for explicit sexual abuse. The “Body Preparation” list includes reminders on how to avoid leaving evidence.
The manual is the most informative narrative evidence revealed since prosecutors filed legal documents after Heuermann’s arrest detailing investigators’ 18-month manhunt. Prosecutors say the document, created by the defendant to avoid detection, could become damning evidence against him in their hands, even after the disclosure of DNA matches, phone records and Internet activity that prosecutors say tie Heuermann to the killings.
Raymond A. Tierney, the Suffolk County district attorney, said the modus operandi described in “exquisite detail” in the documents matched the way he had committed the six murders, adding that Heuerman’s “intent was to find these victims, hunt them down, restrain them and kill them.”
Heuermann, a 60-year-old architect, was arrested last summer and subsequently charged with the murders of the so-called Gilgo Four, who were among 10 human remains found in 2010 and 2011 on a deserted stretch of Ocean Parkway east of Jones Beach.
He has pleaded not guilty to all six murders and remains in jail awaiting trial.
Legal experts agree that the newly disclosed documents are devastating to Hoylman.
“It’s a road map to conviction,” said Stephen Scaring, a Long Island criminal defense attorney and former chief of homicide cases for the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office.
Tierney said the instructions in the manual for “packaging” bodies for transport match the conditions in which the Gilgo Four were found near Ocean Parkway. He said the instructions also match how the bodies of the two women Herman is accused of killing this month were handled.
One was Sandra Costilla, a 28-year-old Queens woman who was found dismembered in a wooded area in Southampton in 1993. Another was Jessica Taylor, whose dismembered remains were partially found near Gilgo Beach in 2011 and then linked to other remains found eight years earlier in a remote wooded area in Manorville, a 45-minute drive east.
Prosecutors said the document, which Heuermann created in 2000 and modified in 2002, was stored on a computer hard drive and was seized by investigators during a sweep of Heuermann’s basement after his arrest last summer.
The manual, carefully compiled by an architect, provided prosecutors with a strong argument that Heuerman led a double life, waiting for his wife and children to go on vacation before possibly detaining, torturing and killing his victims in the basement of the family home in Massapequa Park, a middle-class neighborhood with many well-kept homes.
“This document is deadly. It’s more powerful than a written or videotaped confession because with that, any good attorney can create doubt on cross-examination,” said William Keahon, a Long Island defense attorney and former chief of the homicide unit of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
“But how do you question him about a document he created on his computer?”
Michael Brown, Heuerman’s usually calm defense attorney, has been trying to dodge a steady stream of damaging details since his client’s arrest. But news of the manual, released before his client was indicted, kept him busy answering questions about a document in which his client referred to searching for victims as “hunting” and physical contact with them as “playtime.”
In a phone interview, Brown questioned the document’s authorship and whether prosecutors might have taken it out of context, but said he needed more time to review it.
Brown did call the two new charges and the manual’s notes on mutilation and dismemberment “inconsistent with prosecutors’ initial theory of the Gilgo Four.” Unlike Taylor and Costilla, all four victims were killed within a few years of being found in 2010, with their bodies dumped densely together and intact.
Scullin said that in this case, the defense attorney can try to use the opponent’s case to his advantage, saying that his client was framed and that “no case is so convincing and has dragged on for so many years without being solved.”
Prosecutors did not release the planning document itself, but instead published images of its lists and reminders.
Prosecutors said the manual contained a reminder to “destroy computer files,” and Heuermann took steps to delete it. But forensic experts recovered the manual in March, and its contents triggered a new round of searches, including at his home in Massapequa Park, prosecutors said.
Investigators had already searched the house after Heuermann was arrested last summer. But they returned in May with infrared lights and spent six days searching the basement’s paneled walls and suspended ceilings, looking for signs that Heuermann might have used tape and thumbtacks to hang dust sheets to conceal an act of violence, as the manual recommended.
The filing also prompted a nine-day police search with police dogs in the woods of Manorville and Southampton, where Taylor’s body was found, looking for more clues about Costilla.
Costilla’s death is the earliest murder for which Heuerman has been charged. Costilla was killed in 1993, just as his mother and a former partner moved out of the Massapequa Park house where he had lived all his life.
Costilla’s long-unsolved murder case had not previously been connected to the Gilgo Beach investigation, and her involvement suggests that Heuerman may be connected to murders outside of the Gilgo case.
Tierney said at a news conference after the indictment this month that the investigation will continue as long as leads emerge.
While the document contains mostly general instructions and reminders, it also specifically mentions some possible victims and the crime scene, including a woman’s phone number and the number of surveillance cameras on the Long Island Expressway.
A section about the dump mentions Mill Road, which prosecutors say is located in an area of Manorville near where investigators found Taylor’s partial remains, as well as those of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000. More of Mack’s remains were found near Gilgo Beach in 2011, where Taylor’s remains were also found, and the reference to Mill Road in the brochure led prosecutors to name Heuerman as the prime suspect in her death, Tierney said.
Scott Bonn, a criminologist and serial killer expert, said that while the document is not a manifesto, it reveals something about Herman’s personality. “It fits his personality type perfectly,” he said. “He’s an extremely careful, methodical, BroadCast Unitedligent person who doesn’t overlook a single detail.”
“For him, it was all about planning and detail. As an architect, he was meticulous about the details of his work and his kills,” Bonn said. “Just like he would draw blueprints for a building, he had blueprints for murder.”
This article was originally published on New York Times.
By Corey Kilgannon
Photographs: Johnny Milano and AP
©2024 The New York Times
[ad_2]
Source link
