A team brought together in 2022 by Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney took just six weeks to identify suspected Gilgo Beach mass killer Rex Heuermann, the prosecutor said Monday.
In an interview on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now," Tierney celebrated the investigators as "the right team" for the job of identifying the Long Island architect as a suspect in the deaths of three women whose bodies were found at Gilgo Beach between July 2007 and September 2010.
"I took office in January of 2022. We formed our task force Feb. 1 of 2022," Tierney said. "Six weeks later, this defendant [Heuermann] was first identified for the first time as a suspect in the case."
"A lot of the other evidence in the case tied him back to that," he told Newsmax. "What we wanted to do was, there were five suspect hairs that were left at the site of the burial of where the women were left, so we needed to get a profile, a DNA profile."
He said what followed a surveillance of Heuermann to get samples of "mainly obtained DNA that he discarded either by eating something ... drinking something but not only from him, but from his family members."
In all, the remains of 11 slain women were found at Gilgo Beach over the years; Heuermann, 59, was charged in the deaths of three women and is the prime suspect in another woman's death; all four were found in the same proximity. Others were found at other locations along the beach.
Tierney said once the DNA profiles from Heuermann's throw-aways were obtained, "we compared them back to the hairs found at the scene and one of those hairs [was] a match [of] the genetic profile of the defendant and two of those hairs match the generic profile of his wife.
"The right team [was there] when I came into office ... we work with the new police commissioner, we formed a task force, we worked with Suffolk County Sheriff's Office ... the New York State police ... the FBI."
"We were able to not only six weeks later develop your man as a suspect, but we were able to charge him with these three murders," he said.
One of the most difficult tasks, he said, was "we have to go back 12, 13 years; so there's a tremendous amount of evidence to pour through and what the public sees is the evidence that … makes the connection. But there's a ton of other information that you have to work through."
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