Suffolk County DA in WNY as part of investigation of Gilgo Beach serial killings

Ray Tierney, the Suffolk County District Attorney, was in Buffalo earlier this week.

Sources tell me he was here in part to interview the family of Melissa Barthelemy, a Buffalo native who was one of at least six women killed in the Gilgo Beach serial killings .

Tierney told reporters at an unrelated news conference Wednesday: “Obviously, we have a lot of cases in Suffolk One of those cases took us up to here.”

The suspect, now in custody, is 60-year-old Rex Heuermann a New York architect. Authorities think he may be connected to more than 10 murders of women over decades. Their bodies were found buried on or near Gilgo Beach.

Court records show cell phone evidence connected to Barthelemy plays a key role in the case against Heuermann.

Robert Kolker, author of “Lost Girls: An American Mystery,” a nonfiction book about the victims in the Gilgo Beach case, said there are two different cell phones involved. One was a burner phone.

“The case that they've outlined against him says that Melissa had either calls or text messages with someone's burner phone four times in July of 2009,” Kolker said. “And when she vanished, that burner phone signal pinged off a cell tower in Massapequa and then a tower in midtown Manhattan.”

Then, Heuermann is accused of using Barthelemy’s phone to call her sister in Western New York to taunt her in the days after Barthelemy was killed.

“In the summer of 2009, several phone calls made to her from her sister's cell phone, taunting her, teasing her, talking about the ways that her sister was suffering, calling her sister horrible names,” Kolker said.

It would be more than a year until Barthelemy’s body was found by a police officer and his K9 who were conducting a training exercise. The next day, police continued searching and found three more bodies.

In June, Heuermann was charged in the deaths of two more women after prosecutors said they gathered new DNA evidence.

Heuermann is being held without bail. No trial date has been set.