Gilgo Beach killings: 15 years after investigators found 4 sets of human remains, the case still haunts Long Islanders

Fifteen years ago this week, a search for one missing woman opened the darkest chapter in Long Island’s recent history.

What began as a desperate hunt for Shannan Gilbert in the marshes near Gilgo Beach became, in three astonishing days in December 2010, the unmasking of a possible serial killer. One set of human remains was found. Then another. And another. By the end of the weekend, the remains of four young women had been pulled from the brush. and the shape of a far larger horror had come into view.

Gilbert, the New Jersey escort whose disappearance had prompted the search, was not among them. She would not be found for another year. By then, the body count had climbed to 11.

The discovery shattered any illusion that the South Shore’s long, lonely highway was just another coastal road. Prosecutors now say it was a dumping ground for at least one alleged serial killer — and possibly more.

Former Suffolk police Insp. Stuart Cameron, who oversaw the original searches, still thinks about what might have happened if Gilbert had never vanished.

"Those bodies might still be out there," he said. "The suspect could still be living his everyday life. That’s absolutely possible."

Instead, a convergence of timing, terrain and tenacity exposed a crime scene stretched across miles of dense, unforgiving marshland — just years before Superstorm Sandy would batter the same coastline.

Three days that changed everything

The first report of the Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010, discovery of human remains at Gilgo Beach — confirmed ­39 days later as 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy, last seen July 12, 2009, in the Bronx — was a 113-word brief on Page 16 in Newsday. By Monday afternoon, it was a national story as three more sets of remains belonging to women were found.

Suffolk County Police Officer John Mallia and his K-9 unit, Blue, found all four sets of remains.

The initial search was held around the Oak Beach Association, where Gilbert was last seen alive, and spanned about 100 acres of "extremely difficult terrain," Cameron said. Eventually, a decision was made to leave the area of Oak Beach.

Mallia and Blue roamed the north shoulder on the westbound side of Ocean Parkway. At the time, there was a grass shoulder with no guardrail. A walking path that exists now was not yet cleared.

To the north of the shoulder was a "heavily vegetated area," Cameron said. The median was also dense with brush, blocking sightlines from the eastbound lanes, he added.

"So you could basically pull your car right off the pavement, right onto the shoulder, right adjacent to this vegetated area and if you were inclined to dump a body, you could do so very effectively with the very low chance of being discovered by anyone and be able to get back in your car and get out of there very quickly," Cameron said.

It made sense to search there.

At the time, following the retirement of two other police dogs, Blue was the only Suffolk police canine trained in the detection of human remains and he was paired with Mallia, an officer with a stellar reputation among peers.

"In general, the Suffolk County Police Department K-9 is one of the best in the country, but John Mallia was the best of the best," said Cameron, now chief of the Old Westbury Police Department. "He just had a tremendous amount of instinct ... [and] a lot of determination."

Mallia spoke of his tenacity in a December 2010 interview with Newsday and said it's a trait he shared with Blue.

"He doesn’t give up, and I don’t give up, and we keep going," Mallia said of the partnership. "The more intense I am, the more intense he is."

That steadfastness resulted in them discovering both the Gilgo Four and Gilbert’s personal belongings in the Oak Beach marsh, closer to the original search location.

Newsday staff photographer James Carbone was working as a freelancer for the newspaper on Dec. 13, 2010, the day Mallia and Blue discovered what would later be identified as the remains of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, of Norwich, Connecticut, Megan Waterman, 22, of Scarborough, Maine, and Amber Lynn Costello, 27, of North Babylon. A dispatch heard over the police scanner calling to assist in the closure of Ocean Parkway compelled Carbone to check out the scene.

All four victims were found about a quarter mile apart and a mile east of the entrance to Gilgo Beach, which is how the name was adopted despite none of the bodies being found within that community or on its public beach.

"I knew it was a body because they said there were cadaver dogs coming in," said Carbone, who estimates he has spent more time photographing the Gilgo Beach case than any other story in his two-decade career. "And then when I got there, crime scene was there, the way they were acting and homicide detectives were all over the place, I just knew."

Cameron called it a "very shocking day" to find three sets of remains in one 24-hour stretch, a feat the department would endure once more the following spring when three more discoveries were made along the same roadway as part of the continued search.

"It was completely atypical and unusual and concerning," Cameron said. "It was pretty clear that there was a serial killer working and if they dumped four bodies, perhaps there were more."

A particularly snowy winter shut the search down until March 29, but partial remains of Jessica Taylor, 20, of Manhattan, were found the day efforts resumed, less than a mile from where Waterman was located, followed by five more discoveries in the next two weeks.

Rex A. Heuermann, 62, a Massapequa Park resident who Suffolk prosecutors have said once worked along Ocean Parkway at Jones Beach and was intimately familiar with the area, was charged in six of the killings, and for a seventh woman found nearly two decades earlier in the Southampton Town hamlet of North Sea. Heuermann has pleaded not guilty to multiple murder charges.

The seven alleged victims in the Heuermann case were known to have engaged in sex work, as did Gilbert, police and prosecutors have said.

'They did the job'

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said what the crime scene investigators did in December 2010 and years earlier as other remains related to the Heuermann case were discovered on the East End was crucial to help build a case today.

While the passage of time makes some aspects of any homicide investigation more challenging, advances in technology have been beneficial to solidifying the case against Heuermann through nuclear DNA analysis. He was arrested in July 2023 and is expected to stand trial next year.

"The crime scene work, starting with Sandra Costilla in 1993, and you find these fibers and these hairs and they meticulously take these hairs, even though back then you couldn’t get a DNA sample from a hair shaft, they put in the work and they did the job," Tierney said of investigators.

Early work of the FBI cellphone team found  phone calls Heuermann allegedly made to victims and their family members with burner phones came from Massapequa Park and Manhattan, where he worked as an architect. This evidence was also critical to identifying Heuermann as a suspect, Tierney said.

When the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force began around the early part of 2022, they started at the beginning, Tierney said, using this early information to curate some of the most compelling pieces of evidence prosecutors could present to a potential jury next fall.

Nuclear DNA analysis of hair samples from the Costilla crime scene were linked to Heuermann and his first wife, Elizabeth, prosecutors have said. They were recovered from her right arm and a shirt pulled above her head, according to court records. A Heuermann hair was also found on a surgical drape underneath Taylor’s remains and burlap used to contain Waterman, court records show.

Four additional hairs linked to Heuermann’s second wife, Asa Ellerup, were found around Waterman’s head, and an additional Ellerup hair was found on an infamous belt buckle used to restrain the lower portion of Brainard-Barnes’ body, records show.

A hair strand linked to Heuermann’s daughter, Victoria, was found on tape near Costello’s head and inside a garbage bag near the wrist of alleged victim Valerie Mack, 24, of Atlantic City, whose severed remains were located close to Taylor’s both at Gilgo Beach and in Manorville.

Despite recent questions about an emerging plea deal in the case, which Tierney and defense attorney Michael J. Brown have publicly refuted, Heuermann has to date denied any involvement in the killings.

"Your honor, I’m not guilty of any of these charges," the accused killer told Suffolk Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei at the December 2024 arraignment charging him in the death of Mack.

Heuermann is due back in court Jan. 13.

Brown and co-counsel Danielle Coysh will file motions on that date seeking to suppress evidence and challenging grand jury presentations, Brown said

"It’s our position that at least two of the victims, Mack and Costilla, the presentation to the [grand] jury does not rise to reasonable cause," Brown said.

Those pretrial issues would be decided in the first part of the year with a trial planned for September, Brown said.

A new prosecution

Cameron and Tierney agree Gilbert’s disappearance in May 2010 and the search leading to the discoveries in 2010 and 2011 came at a fortunate time. Superstorm Sandy struck the South Shore particularly hard the following fall and the remains and evidence there could have been washed away if more time elapsed, they theorized.

"It was incredibly important that those victims be found, but it was also very important that they be found at that time before Hurricane Sandy," Cameron said.

"Thank God we got the breaks we did," Tierney added.

The discoveries along Ocean Parkway have also now resulted in a second criminal case, which is currently playing out in Nassau County. Andrew Dykes, 66, of Tampa, Florida, was arrested last week and is facing a murder charge in connection with the 1997 death of Tanya Denise Jackson, whose partial remains were found in April 2011 along Ocean Parkway near Jones Beach after some of her remains were found in Hempstead Lake State Park in Lakeview 14 years earlier. The remains of their toddler, Tatiana Marie Dykes, were discovered near Mack on April 4, 2011.

Cameron, who said the horror of discovering the deceased 2-year-old still haunts investigators 15 years later, believes finding all the bodies when they did may have stopped the killings.

Brainard-Barnes had disappeared in 2007, Barthelemy in 2009 and only three months had lapsed between the deaths of Waterman and Costello in 2010. From an early point in the investigation, it appeared to detectives the killings were beginning to occur with more frequency.

"Not only did John Mallia start this vast investigation that hopefully will eventually result in the conviction of the person responsible for these killings, he also probably rocked the person back on their heels and stopped them from killing other people," Cameron said of the Heuermann case. "God knows how many other young women would have gotten killed if he had not made this discovery."

Many close followers of the case believe Gilbert is also owed a debt of gratitude for the incidental role her search played. While Suffolk police have recently stated in civil court filings that her homicide case remains open, detectives have stated her death was likely an accident.

That explanation does not sit well with attorney John Ray, of Miller Place, who represents Gilbert’s estate and points to haunting 911 calls that show Gilbert believed she was in danger the night she went missing as evidence foul play may have been a factor.

"I call it a concocted approach," Ray said in November of what’s been publicly shared about the Suffolk police theory in Gilbert’s death. "She was confused on drugs and ran crazily into the marsh, took her clothes off at some point and then ran another third of a mile and then managed to kill herself somehow or die by some accident? They’re supposed to be involved in fact finding and proving things by facts and evidence, they have no evidence whatsoever she died of an accident."

Babylon native Maggie Antaki said she believes Gilbert's disappearance had a profound impact on many, and the case remains in the thoughts of her community.

Antaki spent a good portion of that summer at Gilgo Beach, having graduated from Babylon High School in June 2010. She was a freshman at college when the first 10 sets of remains were discovered that fall and spring and said 15 years later she still thinks about them whenever she travels along Ocean Parkway. She believes Gilbert is owed a permanent memorial there.

"That night she was running in terror and she met her tragic fate," Antaki said. "But with that tragic fate there was this miraculous finding. ... It was just this unbelievable discovery of all these girls who deserved, and their families deserved, closure."

Tierney said it will be difficult to truly appreciate all of the work done by police and prosecutors until each of the investigations is closed. To date, one Gilgo Beach victim has still not been identified. No charges have been filed in three deaths in addition to Gilbert.

"That’s what drives us," the prosecutor said. "That initial bit of closure that we were able to give the families of the seven victims that we charged was great. We have to finish it. These are just allegations, we understand that, but it continues. There are more bodies on that beach. And there are more bodies elsewhere."

Newsday TV's Doug Geed contributed to this story.