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

BUFFALO — Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney was in Buffalo earlier this week.

Sources told 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 brought us here.”

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

Court documents show that evidence collected from Barthelemy’s cell phone plays a key role in the case against Heuermann.

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

“The case they presented against him indicates that Melissa received calls or text messages from someone’s disposable phone on four separate occasions in July 2009,” Kolker said. “And when she disappeared, the signal from that disposable phone was transmitted to a cell tower in Massapequa and then to a tower in midtown Manhattan.”

Heuermann is later accused of using Barthelemy’s phone to call his sister in western New York to taunt her in the days after Barthelemy’s death.

“During the summer of 2009, she received several phone calls from her sister’s cell phone, taunting her, teasing her, talking about her sister’s suffering, calling her horrible names,” Kolker said.

It took more than a year before Barthelemy’s body was found by a police officer and his K9 dog who were conducting a training exercise. The next day, police continued their search and found three more bodies.

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

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