A Suffolk County judge has scheduled a hearing to determine the admissibility of DNA evidence in the case against alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann during the suspect’s latest pretrial appearance on Wednesday.
The hearing, which is known as a Frye hearing, will begin on March 28, and will include witnesses from both the prosecution and defense discussing the evidence against the architect from Massapequa Park who is charged with the murders of seven women. Authorities linked Heuermann to each victim through hairs found on their bodies that were found to be a match for either the suspect, his estranged wife Asa Ellerup, or his daughter Victoria Heuermann.
Heuermann’s defense attorneys, Michael Brown and Danielle Coysh, have criticized the DNA evidence in the case, particularly the nuclear DNA evidence, for which testing was conducted by the California-based Astrea Labs Inc. If admitted, this would be the first case involving Astrea in New York State.
“This new science, we don’t believe it’s science in this realm, in the forensic criminal field realm,” Brown said. “This Astrea corporation … has never been accepted in any forensic setting, with the sole exception of a recent case in Idaho, which was a cold case, and cold in the sense that it was a 20- or 25-year-old murder. And the state of Idaho had a lesser standard than the state of New York.”
Related: Gilgo Beach serial killer case lawyers continue sparring over DNA
Prosecutors have alleged that Heuermann is linked to five of the seven victims – Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Megan Waterman, Sandra Costilla, and Amber Lynn Costello – by both mitochondrial DNA testing and nuclear DNA testing. For only one victim – Maureen Brainard-Barnes – is he linked solely through nuclear DNA, in addition to other evidence in the bail application.
Melissa Barthelemy is the only victim in the case for whom DNA was not used to charge Heuermann.
“If we were not confident, we would not have used it,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said of the DNA evidence. “We’re going to have a hearing on it, so it doesn’t matter what I say. But I think we’re all intelligent people. I think we all live in the real world. We know that DNA technology is used in a whole host of medical sciences. It’s far from unproven. Quite the opposite, actually. So, this is an application of a very reliable and well-used science that that we have to litigate.”
Separate Trials For Separate Murders
Brown also submitted his response to prosecutors’ recent response to his motion requesting that the cases should be tried separately. He has previously mentioned seeking as many as five trials; one for Waterman, Costello, and Barthelemy, one for Brainard-Barnes, one for Taylor, one for Mack, and one for Costilla. Prosecutors countered that there should be one trial for all of the cases.
Related: Suspected Gilgo Beach Killer Rex Heuermann May Seek Five Separate Trials for Murder Charges
“It’s our position that it is cumulative in nature, and that some of the allegations have nothing to do with the other allegations,” Brown said. “We talked in the past about and the motions predicated in part on just piling on information and evidence and victims, and what happens then is the juries generally will consider the danger is they can consider unrelated charges to help establish the guilt on other charges. Each charge must fall or rise on its own, and you never want to use evidence that’s unrelated, which would prejudice the jury’s determination.”
But Tierney has argued, both to the media and in court filings, that Heuermann must face one trial for all seven murders.
“The theory of the people’s case, that planning document, the methodology, the modes that were used, the theory of the prosecution case is that this is an individual who had the specific intent to kill, to identify, locate, obtain control over and murder multiple with victims,” Tierney said. “And so, evidence of one murder would necessarily be evidence of the other alleged murder.”
Additional Charges?
Four victims found along Ocean Parkway are still unaccounted for in terms of charges. Those are an unidentified Asian biological male – who may have identified as a woman – who was found on Ocean Parkway in 2011, Karen Vergata, whose remains were found on Fire Island in 1996 and Tobay Beach in 2011, “Peaches” Doe, whose remains were found at Hempstead Lake State Park in 1997 and Jones Beach in 2011, and Baby Doe, Peaches’s child who was deemed to be two or three years old and was found roughly 250 feet from Valerie Mack’s remains near Gilgo Beach.
Related: Who Is The Girl With the Peach Tattoo?
Tierney refused to explicitly name Heuermann a suspect in any of the remaining unsolved Gilgo murders but noted that the investigation is continuing into those cases.
“When we have a unsolved murder, we start we don’t assume a particular person is or is not a suspect,” he said. “We start at that murder, and then we move out from that case and the crime scene and the evidence we find. So, until we’re able to charge, until we’re at the point where we go into the grand jury, we’re not going to say we think someone did it or someone didn’t do it. It doesn’t matter what we think.”
He has also told the Press that there are obvious similarities between the victims Heuermann is charged with and the other victims along Ocean Parkway.
Tierney also said of Peaches, Baby Doe, and Asian Doe that “I don’t believe those individuals have been publicly identified yet.” He declined to answer when asked if law enforcement knew their identities.
Related: Is The FBI Close to Identifying The Murder Victim Known as Peaches?
