Rodney Harrison was not in the courtroom in Riverhead on New York’s Long Island last week when serial killer Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women and volunteered that he’d also murdered an eighth.
But as the New York police department’s former chief of detectives, who was brought in to be police commissioner of Suffolk county – the area where Heuermann had dumped his victims – it was Harrison who pulled together a taskforce that came to crack the case.
“I’m happy we’re able to put this behind us now,” Harrison said on Friday, just days after Heuermann admitted that he’d murdered the women, who were mostly sex workers, in a spree that lasted 17 years from 1993 to 2010.
“Anytime there’s a criminal that’s gotten away with such heinous crimes for such a long time, and now they’re going to jail for a long period, is very rewarding in the law enforcement world.”
When Harrison was named police commissioner in 2020, it was already a decade after police had found four sets of remains later identified as Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello on Gilgo Beach in Suffolk county. They were searching for another missing woman, Shannan Gilbert.
Barthelemy, Brainard-Barnes, Waterman and Costello came to be known as the Gilgo Four. Each had been discarded in a similar fashion, 500ft apart, each swathed or covered in burlap sack cloth. Six more bodies were found in the same area and none were known to be local to the area, though all of them had used Craigslist to post for work.
There was no suspect and, astonishingly, only one detective was by then assigned to the case. Allegations of police incompetence and bureaucratic paralysis surrounded the investigation. Suffolk county investigators had invited and then waved off the help of the FBI.
“This is not just Suffolk county but a lot of local agencies where there is a bit of an ego. ‘Hey, we can figure this out ourselves. We don’t need to partner with anybody.’ But Suffolk county didn’t have all the resources and different databases and I think hindered the investigation,” Harrison told the Guardian.
Harrison said from the outset that allegations of Suffolk police misconduct was a disservice to the investigation, but he found some of what police had said “alarming”.
“I can’t speculate on what was done or not done, and it would be unfair to say they didn’t have a vested interest in their line of work,” he says, adding: “When you put the right people in leadership, and you hear the frustration of the victims’ families and place it as a priority, that equals someone being identified and going to jail.”
Suffolk county’s district attorney, Ray Tierney, who had worked with Harrison in Brooklyn, made the case a department priority. They called in the FBI, assembled a team of local detectives and soon focused on the housemates of victim Amber Costello, who disappeared in September 2010.
Dave Schaller, a housemate, had described a towering, “ogre-like” figure with an “empty gaze” he’d encountered threatening Costello at their home. Crucially, Schaller told investigators that the man drove a green Chevrolet Avalanche pickup truck.
“That was the thing that broke the case – being able to attach that to Rex Heuermann,” Harrison said, noting that the information had been in the files all along. “For there not to have been a deeper dive into the green Avalanche is disappointing – that should have been caught a long time ago.”
Ultimately, state investigators tracked a similar vehicle to an owner in Massapequa Park, a town 30 miles east of Manhattan. Within three weeks of assembling the taskforce, Harrison told reporters he was “confident that we’re getting closer to making an arrest”. In April 2022, police internally identified Heuermann as a person of interest in the case.
Investigators tracked cell tower data from burner phones Heuermann used over a period of two years to contact sex workers and linked that geographical data of his registered phone and those of Costello. Detectives tracked his internet searches and his credit card use and saw he was leading a double life. Then they used mitochondrial DNA to match hair found on a piece of burlap from a victim to DNA on a pizza crust that the suspect had discarded outside his midtown Manhattan office. Heuermann was arrested and charged in July 2023.
Harrison, now a commentator at CBS News, was not at Heuermann’s court appearance last week when he changed his plea and agreed to submit to interviews with the FBI’s behavioral unit after his sentencing in June. Heuermann is set to receive consecutive life sentences.
Heuermann’s deal, in some ways, deprives victims’ families of a full accounting of his crimes. Harrison believes Heuermann changed his plea because he could see “his days were numbered”, likely after a judge ruled in favor of allowing the aforementioned DNA evidence into court last year.
“He saw that he was cornered. If he were to go to trial, the level of embarrassment that would come to him and his family ... He realized what was going to come out so he thought: ‘Let me take the plea deal and put this thing behind me,’” Harrison said, before adding: “He’s able to rest, and I don’t like it. Rex Heuermann is getting one over. But God willing, he’s going to apologize to the families at the sentencing.”
The discovery of the Gilgo Four came about because police were searching for Gilbert, whose death in the marshes, police maintain, was likely due to drowning during a drug-or-alcohol-fuelled panic in 2010.
“I think it was a horrible and unfortunate accident but because she was a sex worker, and everybody else was involved in that lifestyle, people want to put them together. We know of no relationship other than they were involved in the same line of work,” Harrison said.
The people who should be getting the credit for solving the case are the people assigned to the taskforce, Harrison emphasized, noting: “I didn’t do one computer check, I didn’t interview one witness or look at any of the case folders, I just came in there and rejuvenated the investigation.”
The credit, he says, should go to a 31-year department veteran Det Lt Kevin Beyrer, Suffolk county’s homicide chief, who led the Gilgo Beach investigation and retired two months ago.
But with so many unanswered questions about the case, Harrison believes the taskforce should remain intact. At last week’s hearing, Heuermann admitted to killing an additional victim: Karen Vergata, a sex worker who went missing in 1996 and whose dismembered remains were found in two different locations on Long Island.
That raises the question of whether Heuermann’s grotesque crime spree could yield more victims.
“The taskforce needs to remain intact,” Harrison said. “We need to see if there are other missing sex workers out there and to maybe attach them to Rex Heuermann or other predators who are engaged in the same activity.”
Heuermann, he says, “is going away for the rest of his life but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be a voice for other sex workers that are missing”.
