The Gilgo Beach Victims Were Always More Than Escorts

NEW YORK — Twelve years ago, on the Monday after Easter in 2011, on a gray afternoon in New London, Connecticut, Melissa Cann sat at a picnic table on a pier, talking about her big sister, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who disappeared on a trip to Manhattan four years earlier. While Cann described herself as a homebody, she said her older sister was a free spirit, artistic, daring and often clashed with their mother. Brainard-Barnes had worked as a blackjack dealer, as a clerk at a ShopRite and, in the six months or so before she vanished, as an escort.

Cann spoke in a broken voice about the police who brushed off any claim that her sister was actually missing; the fruitless trips Cann’s husband and brother took to New York to search for her; the difficulty, because she was an escort, of even getting Brainard-Barnes’ name onto an official list of missing persons. She talked about the children her sister left behind — an 11-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy — and she admitted that she was surprised by her sister’s escort work. She was afraid to question her sister’s choices, but she also regretted that she couldn’t protect her.

For three years, Cann did practically nothing but think about her sister.

Then, in December 2010, everything changed: Brainard-Barnes’ remains were found along Gilgo Beach on Long Island. The remains of three other women were close by. Melissa Barthelemy disappeared from her apartment in the Bronx in 2009. Megan Waterman vanished in May 2010, and was last seen leaving a hotel on Long Island. Amber Costello had left her home in the town of Babylon, New York, that September, never to be seen again. All four women were petite, and all four came from out of town to work as escorts.

Now that there was a crime attached, police were interested, but these women were soon reduced to a single dimension. Their profession turned them into plot devices in an established true-crime story line. Who they were mattered less than the mystery surrounding their deaths.

As police scoured the beach for more bodies in spring 2010 (and found several), Cann and family members of the other women were caught in a peculiar bind. On one hand, they were energized. Now that they were part of a serial-killer case, the world was beating a path to their doors; perhaps there might even be a break in the case. Then came the horrible hangover of seeing their daughters and sisters in the news, constantly being referred to as prostitutes. The point Cann made to me on that pier was similar to what all the family members eventually said to me: These women were more than this.

“I don’t like how they’re talking about her,” Cann told me. “I understand they only know what she was down there doing, and that’s what they look at her as. But it doesn’t matter what she did. She was still a mother. She still meant the world to her daughter, she meant the world to me.”

Police seemed to resist taking the case seriously at first, and in reality, they had not even been looking for these women. They were found by happenstance, after a fifth woman, Shannan Gilbert, disappeared in 2010 during an escort appointment in Oak Beach, 3 miles from where the first four women were discovered.

At a public-safety hearing on Long Island in May 2011, while teams of rescue workers and police officers were still searching the bramble of Gilgo Beach, Dominick Varrone, chief of detectives of the Suffolk County Police Department, suggested that the public could be at ease because the killer was selecting only a certain sort of victim. The subtext was clear: If the victims had been successful and well-educated — like the victims of David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as Son of Sam — all of Long Island might need to be in a panic. But everyone could relax. Sex workers didn’t seem to deserve the same consideration.

Flash forward a decade, to July 14, 2023. Cann was on Long Island, standing with her husband at a news conference and announcing an arrest in the case that had haunted her for 16 years. Next to them were the relatives of two other victims: Barthelemy’s sister, Amanda, and Waterman’s daughter, Lili.

District Attorney Raymond Tierney said that while the suspect in custody for the killings represented the worst of humanity, the families of the victims seemed to him to embody the best of all of us. Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison gave Cann and each of the family members a long hug. It’s a big difference, 12 years: The victims seem to matter.

To Cann’s point, the news media does not frequently identify victims as prostitutes anymore, but as people who earn money with sex work. Earlier that morning, Gov. Kathy Hochul led an impromptu moment of silence in honor of the victims. It was a far cry from what Shannan Gilbert’s mother, Mari, once said: “I think they look at them like they’re throwaway. They don’t care.”

Just as there is no single form of poverty, there also is no distinct set of family patterns or life circumstances that leads to the choices these women made. No formula exists to explain what brought them to Gilgo Beach. Human trafficking was a factor for one of them, addiction for another.

But if they shared something, it was that they never fell off the grid or lived on the streets the way the TV procedural stereotype dictates. They all remained close to their families. They all came from towns with narrowing options and were seeking a way out. That’s one way of looking at “Lost Girls,” the title of my book about this case, later adapted into a movie: They were only “lost” insofar as we — the police, the media, the social safety net — elected to lose them, by deciding they were worth discarding.

Serial killers understand this, of course. Jack the Ripper targeted the women he did for presumably the same reason that the Green River Killer and Joel Rifkin said they did: These were women they believed no one would ever go looking for. And more often than not, sadly, they were right.

Now, 16 years after Brainard-Barnes went missing, we have an arrest, a suspect: Rex Heuermann was, it seems, living in plain sight, in a Long Island town a short drive from where the bodies were found. He has a spouse and children, and a job with a relatively high profile. In a place as densely populated as New York, he stands accused of a double life that seems hard to contemplate.

His advantage, it would seem, was that no one was looking for him, either. In cases involving escort work, men who are customers often seem like footnotes, at least to the public. Police locked in on Heuermann only last year, more than a decade after the four bodies were found on Gilgo Beach.

For Cann and the other family members, that’s an eternity of wondering and waiting, and feeling every bit as discarded as the loved ones they lost.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/nyregion/gilgo-beach-serial-killer-rex-heuermann.html">The New York Times</a>.