Investigators comb through the home of Rex Heuermann in Massapequa Park, N.Y., after he was arrested as the suspect in the Gilgo Beach killings, on July 15.JOHNNY MILANO/The New York Times News Service
The rundown red house at 105 First Ave. has gone from local eyesore to international infamy almost overnight, and it has taken this unassuming Long Island town with it.
It is the home of Rex Heuermann, the quiet father of two police have linked to one of the most brutal unsolved cases of serial killing in recent U.S. history. More than a decade ago, the burlap-wrapped remains of 11 people were discovered on or near a remote area known as Gilgo Beach, a few miles away.
The case remained cold until last week, when police arrested and charged Mr. Heuermann with murdering three – young women police say were sex workers – and said he was the prime suspect in a fourth killing. The investigation has since spread to South Carolina, where Mr. Heuermann owned property, and to Nevada. Mr. Heuermann, 59, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and is in custody.
Kimi Allen-Hayes, a Massapequa Park resident, shakes her head in disappointment as she scans the scene around Mr. Heuermann’s dingy bungalow, with its swayback roof and rickety front porch, looking forlorn and out of place in the neighbourhood of prim and proper houses.
Investigators at the home of Rex Heuermann in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on July 14. On most days, Heuermann made a culturally cosmic leap from his home in Massapequa Park to his Manhattan office on Fifth Avenue.JOHNNY MILANO/The New York Times News Service
“This isn’t who we are,” she says. “It’s embarrassing.”
It is a circus, to be sure. Giant police mobile tactical and forensic units crowd the street in front. Investigators in hazmat suits walk to and from the house carrying plastic bags. Throngs of police officers from local, county and state forces guard the scene. Yellow police tape cordons off the entire block, and marks an area where television news crews and onlookers stand, cameras rolling and iPhones snapping.
On nearby streets, families with young children tumble out of SUVs bearing out-of-state plates, eager for glimpses of the spectacle. Crowds of gawkers have been so large that impromptu tailgate parties have broken out.
The wide interest in the case should be no surprise considering its scope. For many Massapequa Park residents, however, the revelations about Mr. Heuermann – a quiet neighbour, fellow commuter to his architect’s job at a Manhattan firm, and former classmate – are surreal.
This is not a fancy place, neither rich nor poor, but there is a pride among its 1,800 residents in its normalcy. Here, being ordinary is a virtue.
“This was Mayberry, until now,” Ms. Allen-Hayes says, referring to the idyllic town from 1960s television. “People wouldn’t even take out their garbage cans if they were wearing pyjamas.”
The houses are excruciatingly well-maintained. Front walks are swept, fences are painted, gardens are tended and no blade of grass is out of place.
American flags flutter from the street light posts. Kids ride their bikes carefree on the sidewalks, while people walk dogs and parents push strollers.
A member of the Suffolk County Police Department searches along the shore near near Gilgo Beach on the south shore of Long Island.ROBERT STOLARIK/The New York Times News Service
“This is a tight, loving, caring community,” says Patty Sturm. “It’s the kind of town where everyone goes to the Memorial Day parade. And if there’s a school sports event, everyone shows up whether they have kids who go there or not.”
That’s why there is curiosity – even amazement – that anyone could engage in such behaviour with family and neighbours around, even though police say Mr. Heuermann’s wife and children had no knowledge of his alleged criminal behaviour. Mr. Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup, filed for divorce on Wednesday.
“Long Islanders are nosy,” says Christine Blotta, who has travelled from nearby Bethpage to see the scene. “We want to know everything that goes on in our neighbourhood – and we usually do.”
To say the town has lost its innocence because of these developments is perhaps too dramatic. After all, it is intimately connected to New York City, hardly a beacon of purity. But bad things like this aren’t supposed to happen in good towns like this.
That’s why Carlotta Lambert moved here recently from Queens with her husband Nicolas and their 21-month-old daughter.
“It’s hard to believe,” she says, staring the at the little red house. “We’re still in shock.”
Testosterone is flowing faster than Budweiser over lunch at the Dark Horse Tavern, a local watering hole on Massapequa Park’s main drag where regulars say Mr. Heuermann sometimes stopped on his way home from the Long Island Rail Road commuter train station steps away.
This is where the town’s blue-collar guys, many of them dads, come for burgers, beers and beef sessions. This is a no-nonsense, paid-by-the-hour crowd – there are no safe spaces or time outs. If you toss out an opinion, prepare to defend it.
This time of year, the talk is usually about baseball – more specifically, the age-old rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees. But there’s no back-and-forth about America’s pastime today.
These guys are angry and anxious. Many of them have young families. They don’t hide their rage that an alleged serial killer with more than 200 guns in his basement lived among them for so long, and what that does to their sense of security.
Gerardo Giannattiso feels the tension. He moved his wife and four young daughters from Queens because of the town’s reputation.
“This was like a fairy tale compared to Queens,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. It was a safe and quiet small town. At first, I felt like it was fake, like a movie set.”
Now, Mr. Giannattiso says, this is not the movie he expected to see.
The men become animated as they talk about seeing Mr. Heuermann, a hulking man standing 6 foot 5 and weighing 250 pounds, in the town park a week earlier, and knowing what they know now, what they would do to him. They marvel that a police profile of the killer developed years ago is eerily similar to Mr. Heuermann.
Mr. Giannattiso appreciates the arrest was a remarkable combination of old-school police work, modern DNA technology and some luck. And there is broad agreement the break in the case – linking DNA from a pizza box Mr. Heuermann discarded near his Fifth Avenue office in midtown Manhattan to a hair found in the burlap wrapping on one of the bodies – was right out of a suspense movie.
A general view of Gilgo Beach on July 18.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Still, there is concern that it took the police so long to charge a suspect. That has them on edge. One burly diner grumbles that a stranger waved hello to his young daughter in the IGA grocery store across the street on the weekend, and he felt like punching him in the nose. Heads nod in approval all down the bar.
Along with the rage, Mr. Giannattiso and his buddies are annoyed this is the impression people are getting of their town.
They are quick to point out this is home to famous people – like the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the Baldwin brothers, and comedian Steve Guttenberg. They laugh that Joey Buttafuoco, the central figure in the Long Island Lolita case years ago, is one of their goofier townsfolk.
But they also acknowledge Massapequa Park has rubbed shoulders with real evil before. Like Joel Rifkin from next door in East Meadow, who was convicted of killing and dismembering nine women between 1989 and 1993 and believed to be responsible for eight more murders. And there’s Ronald DeFeo Jr., who was convicted of killing six of his family members in Amityville, immediately east of town, in 1974.
And while most of them are too young to have been around at the time, they all know about David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City in the mid-1970s.
The drive to Gilgo Beach from Massapequa Park is easy, even in midday traffic. A quick right past the train station, then left onto the Wantagh Parkway causeways over marshland heading toward the Atlantic Ocean beaches. Another left at the giant Art Deco water tower near the Jones Beach concert arena and Ocean Parkway East unfolds, long and straight. Seven miles along, just across the Nassau-Suffolk county line, a small sign marks the spot. In all, it takes about 15 minutes.
Long Island Sound
Remains found
NEW YORK
Manorville
LONG ISLAND
Massapequa Park
DETAIL
Cedar
Island
105 First Ave.
OCEAN PKWY
GILGO BEACH
JONES BEACH
1 km
Atlantic Ocean
10 km
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP;
SUFFOLK COUNTY POLICE; ASSOCIATED PRESS
Long Island Sound
Remains found
NEW YORK
Manorville
LONG ISLAND
Massapequa Park
DETAIL
Cedar
Island
105 First Ave.
OCEAN PKWY
GILGO BEACH
JONES BEACH
1 km
Atlantic Ocean
10 km
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP;
SUFFOLK COUNTY POLICE; ASSOCIATED PRESS
Long Island Sound
Remains found
NEW YORK
Manorville
LONG ISLAND
Massapequa Park
DETAIL
105 First Ave.
Cedar
Island
OCEAN PKWY
JONES BEACH
1 km
GILGO BEACH
Atlantic Ocean
10 km
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP;
SUFFOLK COUNTY POLICE; ASSOCIATED PRESS
Even on a day of near-record summer heat and humidity, Gilgo Beach is sparsely populated – a few sunbathers, swimmers and surfers here and there but certainly not as crowded as Jones Beach to the west or the posh Hamptons beaches farther east.
It is so isolated beachgoers here are closer to the passengers in the planes flying overhead, taking off and landing at nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport, than they are to their fellow sun-worshippers on Jones Beach.
White crosses marked where many of the victims’ bodies were dumped, but most have been worn away by time and storms. Ms. Sturm says she and her husband, Arthur, often rode their motorcycles to the area to put flowers on the crosses as a tribute to the victims.
“I remember when they were discovering the bodies, day after day, one after another,” Ms. Sturm says. “We kept wondering when it would end.”
She admits she has some morbid curiosity about the crimes. She often walks on the area’s network of nature trails. She knows that as sparse as Gilgo Beach is in the summer, it is absolutely desolate in the winter months, making it an ideal place to do bad things undetected.
It’s a chilling thought for anyone walking through the sugar-white sand where the victims’ remains were discovered. How serene it all is, bathed in warm sunshine and caressed by the ocean breeze, compared with the commotion at the little red house only 15 minutes away. But as idyllic as it seems, even a visitor can feel there is no peace here.
Onlookers gather alongside media to watch the heavy police presence at the house of Rex Heuermann on July 14.JOHNNY MILANO/The New York Times News Service
Outside Mr. Heuermann’s house, the afternoon crowd of onlookers has swelled, buzzing as word spreads of more developments in the case. Police are raiding storage lockers rented by Mr. Heuermann in Amityville, and police in South Carolina and Nevada are chasing leads linking him to those areas.
Ms. Blotta looks at her husband, Joey, and smirks.
“He didn’t want to come with me today,” she tells the group digesting news of the expanding investigation. “He didn’t want to come and see what was happening here.”
Mr. Blotta, an amiable fellow with a broad smile who works as a bread delivery truck driver, acknowledges he would have rather gone to the beach on such a warm day than rubberneck an alleged crime scene. But he’s getting hooked on the excitement.
“Don’t you see now?” his wife asks. “This is history – we’re living history, and it could be bigger than we know. This could be the big ugly.”