“Is it a cop?”: Long Island feared to find a serial killer wearing the badge, but the truth was much worse

For nearly two decades, a serial killer in Massapequa lived three streets away from people who hunted him for a living.

Massapequa is a small town perched on Long Island’s South Shore, an hour from Manhattan and home to more police officers per square mile than almost anywhere else in New York. No, I’m not making that number up. Massapequa has so many cops that its residents probably can’t throw a donut without hitting an off-duty officer by accident.

Which makes the horrifying case of Rex Heuermann even more baffling.

Since 2010 (per BBC), detectives had been investigating a series of murders, and of bodies being pulled from the brush and scrub near Gilgo Beach. The victims were young women, bound, wrapped in burlap, and discarded like an afterthought.

Their deaths spanned two decades, so the question Massapequa whispered to itself, in the local bar and between friends and when no one else is within earshot, was: Could it be a cop?

Well, it wasn’t. Rex Heuermann, 62, who confessed to the killings, was a married architect who commuted daily from his unkempt house in Massapequa Park to a midtown Manhattan office, passing the local police bar on his way to and from the train. As detectives crowded into that same bar on Friday nights, shaken by what they’d found on the beach, Heuermann walked past them.

Exactly 1,000 days after his arrest, Heuermann showed no signs of emotional distress as he addressed a Suffolk County courtroom (via Fox News) packed with media, victims’ families and uniformed officials. He answered the prosecutor’s questions about each murder — how he contacted the women, how he lured them, how he killed them.

Why the locals suspected the law enforcement

The case had haunted Long Island’s law enforcement community in more ways than one. While the killer remained at large, Suffolk County Police Chief Jimmy Burke — then in charge of the Gilgo Beach investigation — was arrested on charges involving sex toys, pornography, coercion of witnesses and a cover-up.

He eventually pleaded guilty and went to prison. So did the Suffolk County District Attorney and the chief of the DA’s corruption bureau. The officials tasked with solving the murders of sex workers had their own crimes to answer for, which did nothing to quiet the theories that someone with a badge was involved in the killings themselves.

Those theories turned out to be wrong. The truth, as Suffolk County DA Ray Tierney put it in the courthouse afterward, was something quieter and in some ways more disturbing. “This defendant walked among us, play-acting as a normal suburban dad when, in reality, all along he was obsessively targeting innocent women for death,” Tierney said.

Investigators cracked the case in 2022 using a vehicle registration database to connect Heuermann to a pickup truck a witness had reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010. Heurmann was arrested in July 2023.

The perfect hiding place, it turned out, wasn’t some remote cabin or a false identity. It was a house a couple of streets from the precinct.