Behind the scenes of the Gilgo Beach murders with the commissioner who led the hunt

Soon after Rodney Harrison started as the Suffolk County police commissioner he sat down with the homicide squad to get an update on an investigation that had baffled police for more than a decade.

Multiple women's remains were discovered near Gilgo Beach in 2010 and no one had any idea who was responsible.

Harrison, the former chief of detectives at the NYPD, was dismayed: a single detective was assigned the case, he said. The department was not working with federal or state law enforcement to pursue leads. It was 2021 and the Suffolk County Police Department was not much closer to finding a killer than when the bodies were found.

Drawing from his experience in the NYPD, Harrison said he set up a task force that partnered his investigators with law enforcement from the FBI, state police, the district attorney’s office and others.

Within a few months, detectives were on the trail of Rex Heuermann, the 62-year-old architect from Massapequa Park who pleaded guilty this week to murdering seven women and admitted to killing an eighth.

Harrison spoke to Gothamist after Heuermann’s guilty plea this week about how investigators ultimately solved one of New York’s most infamous murder sprees.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gothamist: How did the task force land on Heuermann?

Harrison: The investigator from the state police did a deep dive into one of the sex worker's, Amber Costello's, clients after interviewing Amber Costello's roommates.

There was some very, very important information that really helped us go in the right direction, which was, there was one of Amber Costello's clients who was a very, very big man: 6'6", about 300 pounds, bushy hair, looked like an ogre.

And these two roommates used to rob a lot of Amber Costello's clients, but they chose not to rob this individual because of his size. And this individual drove a green [Chevrolet] Avalanche, and that's a very, very important part of what I'm going to share next.

So she [the investigator] looked at that part and she knew that we had cellular data [from the suspect] in two locations. One was in Massapequa Park, the other part was in Midtown Manhattan.

So she did her due diligence and through the database that the state police had, she was able to see how many types of green Avalanches are in Massapequa Park, which is a residential area. And it only popped with a couple of individuals that had green Avalanches.

We were able to identify an individual who was a person who worked in Midtown Manhattan who fit the description that the roommates of Amber Costello shared and kind of fit the location of where the cell site towers ping from the previous hit from the [suspect’s] burner phones.

And that was the tipping point of us taking a closer look. He was a person of interest at that time. We did not have probable cause. We still now had to do a follow-up and see what Rex Heuermann was about.

And what year would that have been?

That was in April 2022.

And then ultimately you found DNA evidence that linked Heuermann to one of the victims. Is that right?

So the ball started rolling and we started looking into his habits and doing subpoenas on his internet searches and his credit card use. And started taking a closer look at his family and how he traveled back and forth and did light surveillance because we didn't want to raise up anything. Meaning, have him concerned and know that he's being followed.

So we took a kind of closer look at who Mr. Rex Heuermann was, and we saw he lived a very deviant life. Some of the internet searches, his engagement with sex workers through different apps that he had. A lot of engagement with sex workers was when his wife was out of town.

So we started seeing that he was somebody that lived a double life.

So because we had recovered DNA from some of the bodies that were discovered on Ocean Parkway, we felt the need to try to figure out how do we recover some type of DNA from Rex Heuermann.

So when individuals put their trash out to the curb, it's open to the public and we seized a couple of items and we were able to recover some DNA from some family members.

But then we strengthened the surveillance and as the case was going on we had to get DNA specifically off of Rex Heuermann to compare it to the degraded DNA that was recovered off of some of the bodies that were discovered on Ocean Parkway.

And some of the agents that were involved, or the investigators working together on the task force followed him from a pizza shop. He threw the pizza box out and we were able to recover the box and use the crust and recover DNA from that and send it to a lab. Eventually we were able to get a match from Rex Heuermann to several of the, well, we'll say the Gilgo Four [the original four women whose bodies were found in Gilgo Beach in 2010].

Were there hiccups or road bumps along the way?

I don't want to say there were speed bumps, but I will say there were disagreements regarding what the next steps should be.

You know, should we strengthen our surveillance? Who should we have involved? Should we do a long-term grand jury or should we just put it in a regular grand jury.

How do we apprehend him? He had 97 registered guns. Do we pick him up coming out of his office, or do we track him coming from his house? Do we grab him on the Long Island Rail Road?

There's going to be certain ideas that everybody doesn't agree upon. We were able to come together, figure out the best way to go forward and place him under arrest.

Looking back at when you took the job in Suffolk County — do you think it's sort of disappointing that they hadn't handled the case in the way that you sort of immediately did?

When I wanted to get an update about the investigation, there was only one person that could really break down the whole case to me.

And that was Kevin Beyrer. Kevin Beyrer was the detective lieutenant from the homicide squad, and he gave me a very, very intimate breakdown of everything about the case: what was going on, who went missing on what day? The man did not look at a piece of paper.

So, which leads me to believe he was living this case. This case maybe even haunted him, but he just needed some assistance. And I think that's where I had some disappointment.

I asked him every deep dive question about the case and the guy didn't flinch. So the disappointing factor was he just needed a commitment from other law enforcement agencies.

Heuermann admitted to killing eight women. What's your view of the plea deal?

You hear different messages and different questions. Why is he taking a plea now? If you ask me, I personally believe he's trying to stop any forms of embarrassment to his family. There were questions about, he was concerned about the family members of the victims. I apologize how this is gonna come out: I call bulls---.

Other people were saying, well, maybe he came to his senses and because he's cooperating with the FBI’s behavioral science unit that’s why he's cooperating. That's nonsense.

He was a deviant human being. He did some very, very disgusting things and he knows if he goes to trial, these things will come out and the level of embarrassment to his family will be enormous.

So there are things that haven't been released in the pretrial hearings that show the extent of his sort of depravity in your view?

The key word is the extent. I mean a lot of things have been shared, but when you dive in deeper and you show the extent of a lot of the things that he was involved in, not only will he be embarrassed, but his family will be embarrassed as well.

A lot of the stuff is in the affidavit. But if you go to trial and you start going deep into the things that he was involved in and a lot of violence and rapes and other types of forms of sex acts. If you're a family member, you'll have to close your ears and close your eyes. And I'm sure he's trying to avoid that.

I saw this notion that he's going to work with the FBI's behavioral unit, which interviews violent criminals to get a better understanding of their motivations. Do you think there's any benefit to that, or does that interest you at all?

So I have two different thoughts. Absolutely there's a benefit because it kind of allows law enforcement to get a better understanding of the mindset of serial killers. And unfortunately, I pray that there's never a situation where there is another serial killer case, but unfortunately the potential is there.

But it will allow investigators to kind of get a better understanding of the mind of somebody who is a serial killer, what the motive may be, and maybe be able to identify a person of interest based upon the engagement that we hear from Rex Heuermann while he's in custody.

The problem here is this: I don't think he's going to be transparent. I don't think he's going to be forthcoming. What I saw yesterday was a psychopath having a smirk on his face. He's a narcissist. So is he going to be transparent and forthcoming? We'll see.

But he thought he got away with this for a long period of time until the men and women of the task force came along and put his a-- in jail.