Suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann taken off jail’s suicide watch, sheriff says

Rex Heuermann, the 59-year-old New York City architect accused of killing three young women and dumping their bodies in a remote marsh closer to his suburban home, has been taken off suicide watch in a Long Island jail, the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office revealed Monday.

“Mental health staff at the jail have made the determination to remove Rex Heuermann from suicide watch at this time,” Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. said in a statement. “He will continue to be evaluated periodically. His housing and security protocols have not changed.”

Heuermann has been held at the jail in Yaphank since mid-July on six murder charges in the cold case deaths of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27, whose bodies police discovered in 2010 while searching for a different missing woman – Shannan Gilbert, 23.

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Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney has also said that Heuermann remains the prime suspect in the slaying of a fourth woman whose remains were found near the others, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25. 

Gilbert’s remains were discovered a few miles away months later, but police said last year they believe she died in an accident. Six other sets of human remains were discovered during the search.

Heuermann faces life in prison without parole and is still under investigation in Suffolk County and elsewhere in connection with unsolved murder cases that may fit a pattern.

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Heuermann’s alleged victims have been described as “petite,” with three of the “Gilgo Four” women under 5 feet tall and all around 100 pounds.

Three were concealed in camouflaged burlap material used for making duck blinds in the remote brush to the north of Ocean Parkway, just east of Gilgo Beach, about 45 miles east of Manhattan. Some of their relatives received mocking phone calls from the suspect originating on their deceased loved ones’ phones.

Heuermann allegedly met them online, using anonymous “burner” phones in a high-tech effort to conceal his communications, and, according to prosecutors, he allegedly continued to contact sex workers for years.

But police were able to track those phones and link them back to Heuermann, according to court filings. They also collected his DNA from a pizza box he discarded in a sidewalk trash can and say they matched it to evidence recovered with Waterman’s body.

Heuermann has pleaded not guilty. He is due back in court Tuesday.

After his arrest, his wife filed for divorce. She and her two adult children returned to the family’s home after police spent nearly two weeks searching it – removing boxes upon boxes of evidence, including hundreds of firearms and revealing the presence of a six-foot vault in the basement where he kept them.