He got here head to head with an alleged serial killer. 12 years later, his tip helped crack the case

NEW YORK — Within the winter of 2010, shortly after police found the stays of his roommate and three different girls buried on a distant stretch of Lengthy Island shoreline, Dave Schaller offered detectives with an outline of the particular person he believed to be the killer.

Extra crucially, Schaller informed them about his truck.

The person they have been searching for was a towering, Frankenstein-like determine with an “empty gaze” who drove a first-generation Chevrolet Avalanche, Schaller recalled telling investigators. The person’s measurement caught out, as did his uncommon pick-up truck, which he’d used to flee the home Schaller shared with Amber Costello.

On that night time, Schaller stated he got here residence to search out the stranger threatening Costello, an occasional intercourse employee, who had locked herself within the toilet. The 2 males got here to blows, with the hulking intruder ultimately leaving within the truck.

Prosecutors say Costello was final seen alive on Sept. 2, 2010, as she left her residence to satisfy that very same consumer. A witness noticed a dark-colored truck drive by the home once more shortly after she left.

“After they informed me she was lifeless, he was the primary one who jumped in my head,” Schaller informed The Related Press. “I’ve been picturing his face for 13 years.”

On July 14, police arrested Rex Heuermann on prices of killing Costello and two different girls, Melissa Barthelemy and Megan Waterman. He’s the prime suspect within the dying of a fourth lady, Maureen Brainard-Barnes. Heuermann, an architect who labored in Manhattan, has pleaded not responsible to the costs.

The arrest marked a surprising breakthrough within the hunt for a serial killer who had eluded investigators and whose crimes gripped Lengthy Islanders because the our bodies of 4 girls — all of them intercourse staff — have been discovered wrapped in burlap close to Gilgo Seashore.

Inside months, the stays of six different our bodies, together with a toddler, have been found elsewhere alongside the identical seashore freeway. Heuermann has not been accused in any of these circumstances. Police have stated the deaths could be the work of a number of killers.

The arrest has introduced a measure of aid to households of the victims at a second when the path appeared to have gone chilly. However as new particulars emerge about how police lastly caught the alleged killer, they’ve additionally raised questions on whether or not investigators adequately pursued a key lead — Schaller’s description of the stranger and his truck —that will have helped clear up the case sooner.

“This was essential info, and I don’t know why they didn’t share it,” stated Rob Trotta, a county legislator who labored as a Suffolk County Police detective till 2013. “They made some severe blunders right here.”

Suffolk County District Legal professional Ray Tierney, who inherited the investigation when he took workplace in 2022, stated the important thing to unraveling the case was the outline of the truck, found by a state investigator after the launch of a brand new process power shaped to take a recent take a look at the proof.

After they ran it via a automobile data database, one of many outcomes turned up a success: A person who owned a Chevy Avalanche lived in a neighborhood that investigators have been already zeroing in on because the suspect’s possible location due to a classy evaluation of cellphone location information and name data. Heuermann match the bodily description offered by Schaller, too: He was 6 toes, 4 inches (193 centimeters) tall and weighed 240 kilos (109 kilograms).

Tierney informed the AP he didn’t know why police had not run a search earlier, however instructed the piece of data might have been “misplaced inside a sea of different suggestions and knowledge.”

He burdened there have been different parts that in the end helped investigators arrest Heuermann, together with new know-how that helped match samples of DNA to the suspect.

“What solved this case was lots of devoted investigators, analysts and attorneys from a bunch of businesses getting collectively and collaborating,” he stated.

However for Schaller, any emotions of aid over the arrest have been quickly eclipsed by anger and confusion.

Talking out for the primary time because the arrest, he stated he had met with murder detectives on a number of events throughout the preliminary years of the investigation.

Throughout one among their closing conferences, roughly two years after the ladies went lacking, he stated he picked the truck’s mannequin out of a line-up of images offered by the detectives.

“I gave them the precise description of the truck and the dude,” he stated. “I imply come on, why didn’t they use that?”

The query has vexed some legislation enforcement officers as properly. Two high-ranking officers who labored intently on the case and attended briefings between 2011 and 2013 stated they by no means heard something a couple of witness assertion describing the suspect and his automobile.

The legislation enforcement officers spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t approved to reveal details about the investigation.

In line with a automobile historical past report, Heuermann purchased the pickup — a darkish inexperienced, first-generation version — at a Chevrolet vendor on Lengthy Island in 2002 and transferred possession to his brother, Craig, in South Carolina in 2012.

Authorities seized the automobile final week. In a search warrant, they stated they have been searching for different clues within the automobile or at property the brothers owned in Chester County, South Carolina, similar to DNA, fluids, fingerprints, telephones and what they described as attainable “trophies” that will have belonged to the victims — clothes, jewellery, Bibles or photographs.

Investigators stated they have been additionally searching for any electronics, video recordings and writings associated to the killings; burlap; duct tape; weapons and ammunition; slicing instruments; and a selected kind of paper towel from the Bounty Fashionable Print Assortment.

Whereas it’s not clear whether or not investigators pursued the tip concerning the automobile earlier than final yr, these concerned within the case pointed to fierce divisions between the assorted legislation enforcement businesses — in addition to overlapping scandals that engulfed Suffolk County — as a possible rationalization for a key clue slipping via the cracks.

Shortly after taking up the Suffolk County police division in 2012, James Burke moved to finish cooperation with the FBI amid federal scrutiny of his personal misconduct.

4 years later, Burke was sentenced to 46 months in jail after he was discovered to have conspired to cover-up his beating of a person who had found intercourse toys and pornography inside his automobile.

The federal inquiry would additionally result in jail sentences for Suffolk County District Legal professional Thomas Spota, who oversaw the early years of the Gilgo Seashore case, in addition to the county’s high anticorruption prosecutor, Christopher McPartland.

“This was a darkish cloud over the group,” recalled Tim Sini, who succeeded Burke as police commissioner and later grew to become the county’s district legal professional. “When you could have the police division and the district legal professional’s workplace blocking the FBI, that doesn’t engender belief in legislation enforcement.”

Sini stated he inherited an investigation that was “in disarray,” with detectives blocked from cooperating not solely with federal investigators, however with the neighboring police division in Nassau County, the place Heuermann lived.

He declined to say if he knew concerning the description of a suspect and its automobile, however famous that his workplace invested closely in know-how that allowed investigators to trace information from cellphone towers utilized by the suspect’s burner telephone.

The arrest, Sini stated, was the results of painstaking detective work that spanned a number of administrations and relied on a variety of proof. However, he added, “I wouldn’t name it a significant success. The case ought to’ve been solved earlier.”

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This story corrects the mannequin of a truck to a Chevrolet Avalanche. A earlier model referred to the automobile as a Chrysler Avalanche.

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Related Press journalists Michael R. Sisak, Robert Bumsted and Julie Walker contributed to this report.