August 8, 2023 • 28 mins
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack provide an update and captivating insights into the intricacies of the Gilgo Beach case, the suspect, Rex Heuermann, and the challenges faced by investigators. Speculations arise surrounding Heuermann’s behaviors and the possibilities of further crimes despite his hiatus. They examine the intricacies of the case, the perplexing behavior of serial perpetrators, and how a deep understanding of forensics can shine a light on the darkest of mysteries.
Time codes:
[00:00:20] Joseph Scott Morgan tells of Benjamin Parks' gold discovery in 1828, the biggest in America back then, likening the gold discovery to forensic investigation, where evidence demands meticulous searching.
[00:02:00] Introduction to the episode’s main topic: the enigmatic Gilgo Beach murders and revelations of recent court developments.
[00:03:20] Dave Mack outlines the consuming nature of the Gilgo Beach investigation.
[00:04:00] Career impacts and missed chances due to the case's complications are touched upon by Joe Scott.
[00:05:00] The hosts dive into Rex Heuermann's arrest, his closeness to the crime scene, and possible additional charges in connection to the Gilgo Beach murders.
[00:06:20] Discussion on the recent court hearing for Heuermann and the significant evidence passed to the defense team.
[00:08:11] Dave Mack reveals the vast manhours and resources put into the Gilgo Beach murder investigations and elucidates how Shannon Gilbert's separate case led to discovering the Gilgo Beach murders.
[00:10:20] Heuermann's knowledge of Long Island, especially the waterways, and its potential use in evading detection is debated.
[00:13:12] The late DNA cheek swab request from authorities becomes a point of intrigue.
[00:15:27] The communication between Rex Humerman and his wife post-arrest sparks speculation. Joseph Scott Morgan contemplates whether Rex might have brought a victim to his residence.
[00:17:20] Evidence removed from Hueurmann’s Long Island home indicates possible renovations as methods to conceal evidence.
[00:20:00] The challenges of investigating a cluttered crime scene are delved into.
[00:23:07] The tragic victims involved in the case are introduced. Joe Scott speculates about the Gilgo victims' cause of death, the scarcity of physical evidence, and the puzzling behaviors of serial criminals.
[00:26:00] Dave Mack addresses the murder's ongoing investigation and the nonexistence of a statute of limitations. The perpetrator's potential pause in crimes is questioned.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Have you ever been
walking in a parking lot perhaps and you look down
on the ground and you find money. I think the
(00:29):
most I've ever found was probably a twenty dollar bill
that was laid on the ground, and big deal, you know,
twenty bucks of found money in I think it was
eighteen twenty eight in North Georgia, outside of a town
that became known and is currently known as Delanago. Do
you know that there was a deer hunter that was
up there and he was walking along as the name
(00:49):
was Benjamin Parks. He's walking along and he stumps his
toe as he's hunting for a deer on a large rock. Well,
what he thought was simply a rock, and he picks
this thing up and he looks at it and it
is filled with gold. Can you imagine that that find
that Parks had that day led to prior to the
(01:12):
gold Rush of San Francisco. The eighteen forty nine gold
rush was the largest find of gold in America to
that time, and still you can find gold up in
that region. But the gold was everywhere they claimed, but
they finally had to begin to mine for it. As
investigators wouldn't it be great if we could go out
to scenes and have forensic evidence that was just there.
(01:37):
But you know, sometimes you gotta dig. Sometimes you got
to remove things and examine not just the front side,
but the backside that you can't necessarily appreciate without disrupting
a physical structure. We're going to revisit for the next
few moments the gig Beach murders and what has come
(01:57):
to light in court in the last few days. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Imagine finding a chunk of gold, Dave. Wouldn't that be something?
And you don't have to get your hands dirty. You
just stump your toe on. I mean, stumping your toe hurts, right,
But I'd be willing to endure the pain of a
stump toe if I knew that I could stumble over
a boulder. I'm saying a boulder, but a large rock
(02:30):
that is filled with gold. I'm ready to endure that pain.
How about you, my friend, buddy, if that was the case.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I wonder about those stories, you know, we're here, they
just look down and saw a nugget or whatever. And
I've seen those those stories and played them out and
they usually follow along with the same thing about the
island filled with the gold, treasure hidden and lockness monster,
all the other stories. But yeah, if I look down
and saw something, I'm out there hunting and find something. Yeah,
I'm gonna dig this story. Joe, I do not see
(03:01):
that we're at the ending. We're talking about people that
were murdered. We're talking about women that were murdered and
one man and trying to find the purp who did this?
And are we looking for more than one? I'm curious
because this is right down Joseph Scott Morgan's alley. The
body bags story is here. This could take the rest
(03:22):
of your career to figure out what happened. This could
consume it if you think about it, Joe, look at
what we're I mean, right now, we've got one man
and reality here, three women identified as his victims, and
of course the possible fourth. But that's it. We have
a whole bunch more families waiting for resolution of their
(03:47):
loved ones death with this case.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
You say that it could take the rest of my
career of doing this, certainly, I hope that that is
not the case. I hope it's not the case. For
the families and for the investigators. It's train wrecked apparently
a couple of careers. Now, isn't that a horrible thing
to consider, just for a moment that because people may
have drugged their feet, or there was infighting or something
like that, this has not had the most expeditious path
(04:12):
that could have been pursued, and you've left people wanting
maybe you've missed opportunities, just maybe something was lost in
the past that could have prevented someone winding up in
harm's way. I don't know. We don't have those answers yet,
and that's kind of ominous when you think about it.
But just reflectively, the day that they finally arrested Rex human,
(04:36):
I was I think shocked. I didn't see it coming.
I don't think you saw it coming. We talked about
it once before. And now reflectively we're looking back at
the three cases that he is currently being charged with,
and then there's one more that he suspected in. They're
really taking a hard look. I've heard other people say
(04:59):
they anticipate that he he may be charged in that case.
I don't know yet, but certainly, when we began to
see kind of the depth and breadth of everything that
was involved here and kind of concentrically located in this
ranch style I guess you'd call it a ranch style
kind of fifty sixty home, sixties model home there in
(05:24):
Massapequa Park. Hey, dude, that's twenty six minutes door to
door from that domicile to Gilgo Beach where these four
were found. I got to tell you, Man, I was shocked.
I mean, I really was that he was domicil so
close to where these bodies, these three that he's accused
of we were deposited. You get involved in projects in
(06:04):
your life and you look at it and you stand
there and you see the depth and breadth of what
you have to accomplish as it's laid out before you,
and you think, I'll never get done with this task.
I got a couple of things on my plate like
that right now, Dave. But I got to tell you,
they just have had this hearing where Rex Huerman appeared.
(06:24):
I guess it was August first, twenty twenty three, and Dave,
there's something that stood out to me. Man. I couldn't
take the measure of it because I'm not a computer guy.
They turned over they being the state and I get
this eight terabytes, and this included everything from autopsy reports
(06:44):
to I understand there's some anthropological reports, there's DNA, there's
crime scene photos, and all of this has been turned
over to the defense. You know, this is part of
the discovery process because you have to, you know, if
you're going to accuse somebody, And this is why it works.
If you're going to accuse somebody, the defense has the
(07:05):
right to see what the basis of all of this
is so that they can examine it and they can
take their time with it. And forgive me because I
know that I've got computer people in our audience, and
I bow to your greatness. I got to tell you,
but I looked at that, I'm starting to think eight terabytes.
I think that's if I'm not mistaken, I think that's
eight hundred trillion bites of information. So that kind of
(07:28):
frames it right there. This is going to be very dense,
I think, as far as what the defense has in
front of them to try to get through and try
to understand two hundred twenty five hundred pages of a
record's day.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
And to be honest with you, when you look at
the crimes, how long the investigations have gone on that
doesn't even seem like that much because there's so much here,
even on just one based on what we have done
as a person who follows crime and reports on crime,
knowing the investigators and how much time they invest in
(08:05):
one murder to solve it. When you have a body
that is recovered and you don't know how long it's
been there. If you found just one and didn't have
an immediate resolution, didn't have an immediate suspect, just we
found a body, think about the number of man hours,
the amount of evidence you collect, the different paths you
go down, and that is what has happened here, Joe.
(08:27):
I've been a part of six different shows that have
dealt with the Gilgo Beach murders over the last eight
or nine years. Part of the problem with reporting on
crimes is sometimes because you're listening to so many different
reports from different angles and from different people. You have
a documentary that includes a detective from a different district
who's offering his or her insight, and then you have
(08:49):
a detective that once worked on the case, and then
you have a private investigator and an attorney that are
associated with one or two of the other families, and
you have all of these different individuals involved, and everybody
has a different opinion and a different thought of what
happened to their loved one or whoever they're representing, And
it's the culmination of all of these voices yammering that
(09:10):
leads down to one path. How do you explain an
investigation that started with Shannon Gilbert was the reason we're
here today, her going missing and it not being properly investigated,
her nine to one one phone call, her attorney for
the family coming forward and challenging her sister, challenging the
actual results of the police. And by the way, Shanning
(09:32):
Gilbert is probably the one person who is not part
of this actual guil go Beach in my mind, okay,
and just in my mind, she's not part of this.
I think her death was separate unto itself based on
what we see in the others. But I could be wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
No, I think you're speaking the truth there, because what
you're looking for any kind of serialized event or commonalities,
And with what you're talking about here, I think in
the three that he is charged with, first off, we
have deposition, don't we We have where these bodies are
deposited out there along that roadway, which again is mind
(10:10):
blowing to me. I think about the narrative of it
being somebody that would have knowledge of an area or
procedural knowledge of how these things are handled. I can
see why people would think, Yeah, this has got to
be somebody that is either a foreign police officer, they
know how to avoid detection. But you know, there's something
else that comes along with this. They're alleging that human
(10:33):
is actually who perpetrated these three at least, Well, what
do we know about him? We know that he grew
up in Long Island, We know that he has familiarity. Look, man,
I'm sure that where you and I both grew up,
in the different areas we grew up, they're little you know,
as we say, down here in the South, little pig
trails that we're aware of. There are places where people
(10:55):
can and cannot see us because as kids we ran
up and down those roads. We know where all little
hiding spots are. Perhaps, and if you purposed in your
mind to participate in a serialized homicide, which they're ledging
that he is or has, that even gives you more focus,
doesn't it. So you're thinking Okay, how can I do
(11:16):
this in the most efficient, quickest way possible to get
as much distance between myself and the bodies and get
out of here so nobody will see me. Well, if
you do it at night, you just pull over on
the shoulder of the road and you drag a body
out into the brush and you're backing your cart. No
one's the wiser. Because my understanding from friends of mine
(11:39):
that live out on Long Island and have frequented this area.
In my mind, people you know, when you think New York,
people think about the city, but you don't realize you
get on Long Island. It's isolated. Man. There stretches a
road where you won't see a headlight for a while,
particularly if it's in the middle of the night. So
you've got the cover of darkness working for you and
you're right off of the road. It's not like this
(12:02):
individual is going off into the brush to dig some
deep involved grave and to cover them up. That's not
what's going on here. You've got these women that are
wrapped similar burr lap that are taken and deposited off
the roadway, not very far from one another. So you've
got that commonality as well. It's not just the address, say,
(12:25):
for instance, in the one thousand block of this road
or whatever it is, you've got within feet. That goes
to familiarity, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yes, it absolutely goes to familiarity. Also, you have to
throw in it was accessible by water. And for somebody
who say, is a duck hunter used to being in
water that is not very deep marshy area, and that's
what we have in rex Huerman is an avid duck hunter.
And the area actually quicker to access by water and
buy a boat. And if you're out there in the
(12:54):
middle of the night or a dark tough to fine,
tough to see, and you've got the noise of the road,
you got the noise of the water. People won't realize
that it's not quiet when you're near water. It's oftentimes loud.
There's a lot going on. So but I have a
real I've got a couple of questions for you, Joe,
that I'm serious. I really need these answered at this point. Yet,
(13:15):
you know when he goes into court the other day,
Hureman does, and it's probably going to be our last time.
You mentioned the amount purely the amount of the evidence,
the terabytes of evidence But my question here is why
is it now that they just are having to request
a cheek swab for his DNA. I thought they would
have already had that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Maybe at this point from a procedural standpoint, if he
contacted his council as soon as this happened, they may
have set up kind of this barrier around him and
said you're not to say anything. You all right, you
be polite. And they say that he is compliant in jail,
all right, you be polite. You respond to their questions.
(13:56):
Anything regarding an evidentiary request or anything, it has to
come through me. And I'm sure that the attorneys did
that as well. So they've been trying to negotiate where
the investigation is, I think, and this is a great
demonstration of this. If they have to compel him at
this point in order to render a cheek swab, perhaps
(14:18):
it's just a procedural issue, or perhaps they've created this
kind of barrier around him where they want to make
sure that every box is ticked along the way, that
nothing is mismanaged, because they think about just in time
and man hours alone, how much has been lost up
to this point. So to me, it seems as though
(14:39):
that they will be taking their time moving forward. They
have to have it though, because it's essential. They need
to harvest that DNA directly from him, so.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
That takes care of why the DNA and why the
buckleswob being needed now. But one of the things that
we did find out Joe from Huerman's wife. By the way,
we know, according to the attorney for rex Huerman, that
his wife was blindsided by the whole thing. His children
are shocked. His step son, who is a special needs
(15:10):
step son is thirty three years old, that he has
been really shaken by this, and their daughter that he
shares with his wife, she too was shocked. You know,
they are devastated by what has happened because it came
out of left field. But his wife has actually been
communicating with him. According to rex Huerman's attorney, they've actually
been talking since he's been in jail, which kind of
(15:32):
was a shocker for me on one way, but totally
understandable on another because if she didn't know and had
no hint of what was going on in his other world,
then she's probably got a lot of questions. But I
have a feeling that his arrest actually answered a lot
of questions for her, don't you think.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, they've tried to marry up the times where her
and these kids were out of town. And some people
are speculating that the disappearance of these poor victims kind
of coincides with the timeline where they think that she
may have been out of town. Now, what does that mean?
(16:10):
Does that mean that he took that opportunity to go
out and hunt specifically for these victims? Does that mean
does that mean, even as if that isn't ominous enough,
that there's a chance he may have brought a victim
back to that home they talked about the police at
least had some type of evidence that's something that had
(16:32):
taken place in the house itself.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, it looks like the bathroom based on what his
wife is saying.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Hey, yeah, you remember I was talking about finding gold
And I've been a part of many death investigations and
it's amazing the link that crime scene investigators go to
and they have to literally disassembling the interior of a home.
Obviously you have to keep it still structurally sound. But
the image that's going to stick with me is that
(16:59):
image of the back bathtub. It's a vinyl bathtub, and
it has been cut out or the side has been
cut out so that they could access beneath. You can
see it. You can kind of see the bowl of
the bathtub itself from an interior view, and there's that
dark space beneath there. And the question is this from
investigatively as you track back, you think, well, was that
(17:20):
bathroom renovated at any point in time? Had a renovation
taken place at some point in time that would compel
the police to say, okay, during the course of these disappearances,
the bathroom was renovated. Is there a chance that something
could have been deposited beneath this area where the bathroom
was put in? Maybe that was their motivation, or maybe
(17:42):
they're casting a wide net. We're going to explore every
possible area. And I can tell you that cutout area
that you see in that image, and not just that
cutout area, but did you notice as well in that
shot that the tile has been pulled up off the
floor as well.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
I was going to ask you about that because it
looked like those little ceramic tiles. As you walk into
the bathroom, if you can imagine, you have a door
that opens up and on the right hand side, immediately
as you walk in, you would have a sink and
then the toilet directly in front of you. You're looking
at the bathtub and the tile flooring, and if you
well what Joe's actually talking about. The part they cut
(18:19):
out the out of the tub that we could see
is the side of the tub that does open up
to where you can see underneath the bathtub. And I thought,
based on where they cut that piece out of the
bathtub and the tile directly in front of it and
the grout that goes between the tile and the bathtub,
I was thinking they were looking for DNA some type, Yeah,
they could.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Have, or some kind of deposit of what appears to
be blood. Maybe they just want to have the optimum
opportunity to explore the surfaces and leave no stone unturned.
And you know, just looking at the bathroom itself, it
looks newer than certainly the construction of the home. Like
(19:00):
I guess they refer to the tiled walls, it's kind
of the I think they refer to that as subway tile.
It looks newer, certainly than something that would have been
that fits the circa of the home. So that's probably
a targeted area and Another problem here, Dave, relative to
this dwelling is that apparently the folks that live here,
(19:23):
let's see, I'll say it plainly, they're pack rats. You've
got stacks and stacks of stuff. I think that some
people would like to portray this as well. The police
moved all the stuff around and they just kind of
piled it. No, I think that this is a normal
presentation within this home.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
From the very beginning. The police said that it was cluttered,
and that was a polite term to use it.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's a very polite term to use. Yeah, it is. So.
Can you imagine, though, walking in there and you're looking
for just for a second, imagine how overwhelming this might
be from the perspective of a forensics issue. Are you
going to be looking for trace evidence? You also have to,
(20:06):
in this weird kind of way, think like a perpetrator might. Okay,
I'm going to take advantage of the natural structure of
my environment, the fact that nothing never gets thrown out here,
and if something has gone on, I can hide something
within all of this and no one will ever be
any of the wiser because only I know that it's
(20:27):
going to be here. It's so defeating to walk into
an environment that is just strewn with all of this stuff,
and I think that it would be defeating to anybody
that perhaps maybe was a police officer and they were
going to do a search. So they've had to go
through all of this stuff, Dave, and it's an overwhelming
volume of items to kind of have to suss through.
(21:09):
We've waited all these years for an arrest to be affected.
It's happened. We've got an appearance in court charging, we've
got evidence collection, we've got eight terabytes of data that
has been turned over to defense, Dave, were right on
the precipice of this thing heading toward a court date
(21:31):
at some point in time. It's going to take a
while to get everything, I think prepared from the perspective
of what they're going to have to do just for
these three cases. But these aren't the only three cases though,
that are out there right.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Right And you mentioned the terabytes of information the evidence
that they already have, and you're talking about the three
people he's been charged with killing, and that would be
Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthellomy, and Amber Costello. The fourth one
that there's the guild Go four and these are the
four women that were murdered in a very similar fashion.
Their bodies were found in a similar fashion. The fourth
(22:08):
is Marine Brandard Barnes, and we keep waiting for that
announcement that he's been charged with that, but he hasn't.
And they still have three. But you know, you've got
a total of ten between two different sites too. We've
got another site where in Manorville where the dismembered remains
(22:29):
were partially found at Guilgo. How do you come onto
a crime scene, Joe, and you have these four similar victims,
but in the same area you have other victims, but
they're not the same, and in fact you've got dismemberment
and another drop zone.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Okay, from a forensics purely forensic science perspective, it's going
to be difficult any way you examine this. It's going
to be very difficult to kind of tie him back
unless you have circumstantial evidence. I don't know if you're
going to be able to harvest enough scientific evidence, because
here's what I'm left with. I've heard people hold forth
(23:10):
on what they believe are the causes of death in
regards to the GILG four, specifically the three. Some people
have said that it's kind of a it might be strangulation,
but I'm hearing that bodies are severely decomposed. I'd have
to know how they arrived at those conclusions. You know,
what kind of physical evidence do they have. We don't
have the autopsy reports. And then I've heard people say, well,
(23:31):
it's kind of non specific homicidal violence. And anytime you
hear that, it's almost like saying, Okay, we know they
died at the hands of another, but we can't really
say what the causative effect was in that. And so
that can be a real problem when you begin to
do the assessment and trying to marry these things up,
(23:54):
and then you throw on and look, I'm thinking, hey man,
what are the odds that you're going to have these
three and the fourth that he hasn't been charged with,
and you're going to have other associated remains that are
out there. How's he not related to that? Well, you
have to be able to prove that. And one of
the difficult things if he is a serialized perpetrator, like
(24:17):
they are alleging that he is the behaviorist out there,
they like to talk about copycats and all these sorts
of things. They go on air and talk about this,
it's not something that you see frequently. And then if
you've got a perpetrator that has a specific way of
carrying out these serialized events. Let's just say it's a
sex assault and they like to choke people out, they
(24:39):
would like to wrap the bodies up and deposit. That's
a completely different animal from an individual that commits a
homicide and then takes the time to take a sharp
instrument and dissect out the body that's and dismembering the
body and then depositing those remains different locations. Where you've
(25:01):
cut hands off, you've cut heads off, and they're deposited
in one location. You might have legs found in another location.
That almost smax is of something a different animal at
that point in time, because how do you get an
individual that changes horses in the middle of the stream.
From a procedural standpoint, because serial perpetrators are all about procedure,
(25:22):
they're all about the order in which they do things.
They're deriving pleasure from this, they have certain ways they
go about it because they're living out fantasies in their mind.
And how does that level of violence or post mortem
violence play into what we're seeing with wrapped dumped bodies.
(25:42):
I think that that's something that's going to require a
lot of explanation going forward and further examination. If they're
going to try to tie these other bodies back to him,
I don't know that they're necessarily going to be able
to do it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Dave. That's the part that I am very curious about,
because in reality, there is no statute of limitations on murder.
So even though we've got a case here rex Hureman
charged with three murders, it doesn't mean the other cases
go by the wayside. They've just got to finish this
with him, all the while knowing that you've got other
(26:16):
issues with the other victims that were found that don't
match up. The mo is not the same and maybe changed.
But there's also the fact that there are many years
in between when the last body was found at Gilgo
Beach and his arrest. Are we to believe are we
to assume that he stopped even though we know based
on what the police said, the reason they went and
(26:37):
got him the day they did was because they knew
he was talking with other workers, he was doing the
same things as before, and they were concerned that he
was looking for someone else to take off. Are we
to now believe that he stopped for years and was
getting ready to start back when they caught it.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's hard to buy because it's always been idea, has
always been propagated out there that this is unquenchable thirst,
that anytime you have somebody that engages in this behavior,
the only thing that is going to stop them is
either going to be law enforcement catching up to them,
it'll be their own death or their own infirmity where
(27:16):
they just can no longer carry on and continue to
perpetrate because they've hit that kind of age barrier and
perhaps continue to live in this fantasy world in their mind,
but they don't have the ability to go out and
do that. Are we to think that he stopped and
took this bigger break? There have been others that have
done that in the past. But listen, we're right at
(27:40):
the beginning. As you've stated, Dave, this is not the end.
We've got a long road to travel in these cases,
and we'll see what the future holds. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is body Bags
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Have you ever been
walking in a parking lot perhaps and you look down
on the ground and you find money. I think the
(00:29):
most I've ever found was probably a twenty dollar bill
that was laid on the ground, and big deal, you know,
twenty bucks of found money in I think it was
eighteen twenty eight in North Georgia, outside of a town
that became known and is currently known as Delanago. Do
you know that there was a deer hunter that was
up there and he was walking along as the name
(00:49):
was Benjamin Parks. He's walking along and he stumps his
toe as he's hunting for a deer on a large rock. Well,
what he thought was simply a rock, and he picks
this thing up and he looks at it and it
is filled with gold. Can you imagine that that find
that Parks had that day led to prior to the
(01:12):
gold Rush of San Francisco. The eighteen forty nine gold
rush was the largest find of gold in America to
that time, and still you can find gold up in
that region. But the gold was everywhere they claimed, but
they finally had to begin to mine for it. As
investigators wouldn't it be great if we could go out
to scenes and have forensic evidence that was just there.
(01:37):
But you know, sometimes you gotta dig. Sometimes you got
to remove things and examine not just the front side,
but the backside that you can't necessarily appreciate without disrupting
a physical structure. We're going to revisit for the next
few moments the gig Beach murders and what has come
(01:57):
to light in court in the last few days. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Imagine finding a chunk of gold, Dave. Wouldn't that be something?
And you don't have to get your hands dirty. You
just stump your toe on. I mean, stumping your toe hurts, right,
But I'd be willing to endure the pain of a
stump toe if I knew that I could stumble over
a boulder. I'm saying a boulder, but a large rock
(02:30):
that is filled with gold. I'm ready to endure that pain.
How about you, my friend, buddy, if that was the case.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I wonder about those stories, you know, we're here, they
just look down and saw a nugget or whatever. And
I've seen those those stories and played them out and
they usually follow along with the same thing about the
island filled with the gold, treasure hidden and lockness monster,
all the other stories. But yeah, if I look down
and saw something, I'm out there hunting and find something. Yeah,
I'm gonna dig this story. Joe, I do not see
(03:01):
that we're at the ending. We're talking about people that
were murdered. We're talking about women that were murdered and
one man and trying to find the purp who did this?
And are we looking for more than one? I'm curious
because this is right down Joseph Scott Morgan's alley. The
body bags story is here. This could take the rest
(03:22):
of your career to figure out what happened. This could
consume it if you think about it, Joe, look at
what we're I mean, right now, we've got one man
and reality here, three women identified as his victims, and
of course the possible fourth. But that's it. We have
a whole bunch more families waiting for resolution of their
(03:47):
loved ones death with this case.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
You say that it could take the rest of my
career of doing this, certainly, I hope that that is
not the case. I hope it's not the case. For
the families and for the investigators. It's train wrecked apparently
a couple of careers. Now, isn't that a horrible thing
to consider, just for a moment that because people may
have drugged their feet, or there was infighting or something
like that, this has not had the most expeditious path
(04:12):
that could have been pursued, and you've left people wanting
maybe you've missed opportunities, just maybe something was lost in
the past that could have prevented someone winding up in
harm's way. I don't know. We don't have those answers yet,
and that's kind of ominous when you think about it.
But just reflectively, the day that they finally arrested Rex human,
(04:36):
I was I think shocked. I didn't see it coming.
I don't think you saw it coming. We talked about
it once before. And now reflectively we're looking back at
the three cases that he is currently being charged with,
and then there's one more that he suspected in. They're
really taking a hard look. I've heard other people say
(04:59):
they anticipate that he he may be charged in that case.
I don't know yet, but certainly, when we began to
see kind of the depth and breadth of everything that
was involved here and kind of concentrically located in this
ranch style I guess you'd call it a ranch style
kind of fifty sixty home, sixties model home there in
(05:24):
Massapequa Park. Hey, dude, that's twenty six minutes door to
door from that domicile to Gilgo Beach where these four
were found. I got to tell you, Man, I was shocked.
I mean, I really was that he was domicil so
close to where these bodies, these three that he's accused
of we were deposited. You get involved in projects in
(06:04):
your life and you look at it and you stand
there and you see the depth and breadth of what
you have to accomplish as it's laid out before you,
and you think, I'll never get done with this task.
I got a couple of things on my plate like
that right now, Dave. But I got to tell you,
they just have had this hearing where Rex Huerman appeared.
(06:24):
I guess it was August first, twenty twenty three, and Dave,
there's something that stood out to me. Man. I couldn't
take the measure of it because I'm not a computer guy.
They turned over they being the state and I get
this eight terabytes, and this included everything from autopsy reports
(06:44):
to I understand there's some anthropological reports, there's DNA, there's
crime scene photos, and all of this has been turned
over to the defense. You know, this is part of
the discovery process because you have to, you know, if
you're going to accuse somebody, And this is why it works.
If you're going to accuse somebody, the defense has the
(07:05):
right to see what the basis of all of this
is so that they can examine it and they can
take their time with it. And forgive me because I
know that I've got computer people in our audience, and
I bow to your greatness. I got to tell you,
but I looked at that, I'm starting to think eight terabytes.
I think that's if I'm not mistaken, I think that's
eight hundred trillion bites of information. So that kind of
(07:28):
frames it right there. This is going to be very dense,
I think, as far as what the defense has in
front of them to try to get through and try
to understand two hundred twenty five hundred pages of a
record's day.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
And to be honest with you, when you look at
the crimes, how long the investigations have gone on that
doesn't even seem like that much because there's so much here,
even on just one based on what we have done
as a person who follows crime and reports on crime,
knowing the investigators and how much time they invest in
(08:05):
one murder to solve it. When you have a body
that is recovered and you don't know how long it's
been there. If you found just one and didn't have
an immediate resolution, didn't have an immediate suspect, just we
found a body, think about the number of man hours,
the amount of evidence you collect, the different paths you
go down, and that is what has happened here, Joe.
(08:27):
I've been a part of six different shows that have
dealt with the Gilgo Beach murders over the last eight
or nine years. Part of the problem with reporting on
crimes is sometimes because you're listening to so many different
reports from different angles and from different people. You have
a documentary that includes a detective from a different district
who's offering his or her insight, and then you have
(08:49):
a detective that once worked on the case, and then
you have a private investigator and an attorney that are
associated with one or two of the other families, and
you have all of these different individuals involved, and everybody
has a different opinion and a different thought of what
happened to their loved one or whoever they're representing, And
it's the culmination of all of these voices yammering that
(09:10):
leads down to one path. How do you explain an
investigation that started with Shannon Gilbert was the reason we're
here today, her going missing and it not being properly investigated,
her nine to one one phone call, her attorney for
the family coming forward and challenging her sister, challenging the
actual results of the police. And by the way, Shanning
(09:32):
Gilbert is probably the one person who is not part
of this actual guil go Beach in my mind, okay,
and just in my mind, she's not part of this.
I think her death was separate unto itself based on
what we see in the others. But I could be wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
No, I think you're speaking the truth there, because what
you're looking for any kind of serialized event or commonalities,
And with what you're talking about here, I think in
the three that he is charged with, first off, we
have deposition, don't we We have where these bodies are
deposited out there along that roadway, which again is mind
(10:10):
blowing to me. I think about the narrative of it
being somebody that would have knowledge of an area or
procedural knowledge of how these things are handled. I can
see why people would think, Yeah, this has got to
be somebody that is either a foreign police officer, they
know how to avoid detection. But you know, there's something
else that comes along with this. They're alleging that human
(10:33):
is actually who perpetrated these three at least, Well, what
do we know about him? We know that he grew
up in Long Island, We know that he has familiarity. Look, man,
I'm sure that where you and I both grew up,
in the different areas we grew up, they're little you know,
as we say, down here in the South, little pig
trails that we're aware of. There are places where people
(10:55):
can and cannot see us because as kids we ran
up and down those roads. We know where all little
hiding spots are. Perhaps, and if you purposed in your
mind to participate in a serialized homicide, which they're ledging
that he is or has, that even gives you more focus,
doesn't it. So you're thinking Okay, how can I do
(11:16):
this in the most efficient, quickest way possible to get
as much distance between myself and the bodies and get
out of here so nobody will see me. Well, if
you do it at night, you just pull over on
the shoulder of the road and you drag a body
out into the brush and you're backing your cart. No
one's the wiser. Because my understanding from friends of mine
(11:39):
that live out on Long Island and have frequented this area.
In my mind, people you know, when you think New York,
people think about the city, but you don't realize you
get on Long Island. It's isolated. Man. There stretches a
road where you won't see a headlight for a while,
particularly if it's in the middle of the night. So
you've got the cover of darkness working for you and
you're right off of the road. It's not like this
(12:02):
individual is going off into the brush to dig some
deep involved grave and to cover them up. That's not
what's going on here. You've got these women that are
wrapped similar burr lap that are taken and deposited off
the roadway, not very far from one another. So you've
got that commonality as well. It's not just the address, say,
(12:25):
for instance, in the one thousand block of this road
or whatever it is, you've got within feet. That goes
to familiarity, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yes, it absolutely goes to familiarity. Also, you have to
throw in it was accessible by water. And for somebody
who say, is a duck hunter used to being in
water that is not very deep marshy area, and that's
what we have in rex Huerman is an avid duck hunter.
And the area actually quicker to access by water and
buy a boat. And if you're out there in the
(12:54):
middle of the night or a dark tough to fine,
tough to see, and you've got the noise of the road,
you got the noise of the water. People won't realize
that it's not quiet when you're near water. It's oftentimes loud.
There's a lot going on. So but I have a
real I've got a couple of questions for you, Joe,
that I'm serious. I really need these answered at this point. Yet,
(13:15):
you know when he goes into court the other day,
Hureman does, and it's probably going to be our last time.
You mentioned the amount purely the amount of the evidence,
the terabytes of evidence But my question here is why
is it now that they just are having to request
a cheek swab for his DNA. I thought they would
have already had that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Maybe at this point from a procedural standpoint, if he
contacted his council as soon as this happened, they may
have set up kind of this barrier around him and
said you're not to say anything. You all right, you
be polite. And they say that he is compliant in jail,
all right, you be polite. You respond to their questions.
(13:56):
Anything regarding an evidentiary request or anything, it has to
come through me. And I'm sure that the attorneys did
that as well. So they've been trying to negotiate where
the investigation is, I think, and this is a great
demonstration of this. If they have to compel him at
this point in order to render a cheek swab, perhaps
(14:18):
it's just a procedural issue, or perhaps they've created this
kind of barrier around him where they want to make
sure that every box is ticked along the way, that
nothing is mismanaged, because they think about just in time
and man hours alone, how much has been lost up
to this point. So to me, it seems as though
(14:39):
that they will be taking their time moving forward. They
have to have it though, because it's essential. They need
to harvest that DNA directly from him, so.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
That takes care of why the DNA and why the
buckleswob being needed now. But one of the things that
we did find out Joe from Huerman's wife. By the way,
we know, according to the attorney for rex Huerman, that
his wife was blindsided by the whole thing. His children
are shocked. His step son, who is a special needs
(15:10):
step son is thirty three years old, that he has
been really shaken by this, and their daughter that he
shares with his wife, she too was shocked. You know,
they are devastated by what has happened because it came
out of left field. But his wife has actually been
communicating with him. According to rex Huerman's attorney, they've actually
been talking since he's been in jail, which kind of
(15:32):
was a shocker for me on one way, but totally
understandable on another because if she didn't know and had
no hint of what was going on in his other world,
then she's probably got a lot of questions. But I
have a feeling that his arrest actually answered a lot
of questions for her, don't you think.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, they've tried to marry up the times where her
and these kids were out of town. And some people
are speculating that the disappearance of these poor victims kind
of coincides with the timeline where they think that she
may have been out of town. Now, what does that mean?
(16:10):
Does that mean that he took that opportunity to go
out and hunt specifically for these victims? Does that mean
does that mean, even as if that isn't ominous enough,
that there's a chance he may have brought a victim
back to that home they talked about the police at
least had some type of evidence that's something that had
(16:32):
taken place in the house itself.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, it looks like the bathroom based on what his
wife is saying.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Hey, yeah, you remember I was talking about finding gold
And I've been a part of many death investigations and
it's amazing the link that crime scene investigators go to
and they have to literally disassembling the interior of a home.
Obviously you have to keep it still structurally sound. But
the image that's going to stick with me is that
(16:59):
image of the back bathtub. It's a vinyl bathtub, and
it has been cut out or the side has been
cut out so that they could access beneath. You can
see it. You can kind of see the bowl of
the bathtub itself from an interior view, and there's that
dark space beneath there. And the question is this from
investigatively as you track back, you think, well, was that
(17:20):
bathroom renovated at any point in time? Had a renovation
taken place at some point in time that would compel
the police to say, okay, during the course of these disappearances,
the bathroom was renovated. Is there a chance that something
could have been deposited beneath this area where the bathroom
was put in? Maybe that was their motivation, or maybe
(17:42):
they're casting a wide net. We're going to explore every
possible area. And I can tell you that cutout area
that you see in that image, and not just that
cutout area, but did you notice as well in that
shot that the tile has been pulled up off the
floor as well.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
I was going to ask you about that because it
looked like those little ceramic tiles. As you walk into
the bathroom, if you can imagine, you have a door
that opens up and on the right hand side, immediately
as you walk in, you would have a sink and
then the toilet directly in front of you. You're looking
at the bathtub and the tile flooring, and if you
well what Joe's actually talking about. The part they cut
(18:19):
out the out of the tub that we could see
is the side of the tub that does open up
to where you can see underneath the bathtub. And I thought,
based on where they cut that piece out of the
bathtub and the tile directly in front of it and
the grout that goes between the tile and the bathtub,
I was thinking they were looking for DNA some type, Yeah,
they could.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Have, or some kind of deposit of what appears to
be blood. Maybe they just want to have the optimum
opportunity to explore the surfaces and leave no stone unturned.
And you know, just looking at the bathroom itself, it
looks newer than certainly the construction of the home. Like
(19:00):
I guess they refer to the tiled walls, it's kind
of the I think they refer to that as subway tile.
It looks newer, certainly than something that would have been
that fits the circa of the home. So that's probably
a targeted area and Another problem here, Dave, relative to
this dwelling is that apparently the folks that live here,
(19:23):
let's see, I'll say it plainly, they're pack rats. You've
got stacks and stacks of stuff. I think that some
people would like to portray this as well. The police
moved all the stuff around and they just kind of
piled it. No, I think that this is a normal
presentation within this home.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
From the very beginning. The police said that it was cluttered,
and that was a polite term to use it.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's a very polite term to use. Yeah, it is. So.
Can you imagine, though, walking in there and you're looking
for just for a second, imagine how overwhelming this might
be from the perspective of a forensics issue. Are you
going to be looking for trace evidence? You also have to,
(20:06):
in this weird kind of way, think like a perpetrator might. Okay,
I'm going to take advantage of the natural structure of
my environment, the fact that nothing never gets thrown out here,
and if something has gone on, I can hide something
within all of this and no one will ever be
any of the wiser because only I know that it's
(20:27):
going to be here. It's so defeating to walk into
an environment that is just strewn with all of this stuff,
and I think that it would be defeating to anybody
that perhaps maybe was a police officer and they were
going to do a search. So they've had to go
through all of this stuff, Dave, and it's an overwhelming
volume of items to kind of have to suss through.
(21:09):
We've waited all these years for an arrest to be affected.
It's happened. We've got an appearance in court charging, we've
got evidence collection, we've got eight terabytes of data that
has been turned over to defense, Dave, were right on
the precipice of this thing heading toward a court date
(21:31):
at some point in time. It's going to take a
while to get everything, I think prepared from the perspective
of what they're going to have to do just for
these three cases. But these aren't the only three cases though,
that are out there right.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Right And you mentioned the terabytes of information the evidence
that they already have, and you're talking about the three
people he's been charged with killing, and that would be
Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthellomy, and Amber Costello. The fourth one
that there's the guild Go four and these are the
four women that were murdered in a very similar fashion.
Their bodies were found in a similar fashion. The fourth
(22:08):
is Marine Brandard Barnes, and we keep waiting for that
announcement that he's been charged with that, but he hasn't.
And they still have three. But you know, you've got
a total of ten between two different sites too. We've
got another site where in Manorville where the dismembered remains
(22:29):
were partially found at Guilgo. How do you come onto
a crime scene, Joe, and you have these four similar victims,
but in the same area you have other victims, but
they're not the same, and in fact you've got dismemberment
and another drop zone.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Okay, from a forensics purely forensic science perspective, it's going
to be difficult any way you examine this. It's going
to be very difficult to kind of tie him back
unless you have circumstantial evidence. I don't know if you're
going to be able to harvest enough scientific evidence, because
here's what I'm left with. I've heard people hold forth
(23:10):
on what they believe are the causes of death in
regards to the GILG four, specifically the three. Some people
have said that it's kind of a it might be strangulation,
but I'm hearing that bodies are severely decomposed. I'd have
to know how they arrived at those conclusions. You know,
what kind of physical evidence do they have. We don't
have the autopsy reports. And then I've heard people say, well,
(23:31):
it's kind of non specific homicidal violence. And anytime you
hear that, it's almost like saying, Okay, we know they
died at the hands of another, but we can't really
say what the causative effect was in that. And so
that can be a real problem when you begin to
do the assessment and trying to marry these things up,
(23:54):
and then you throw on and look, I'm thinking, hey man,
what are the odds that you're going to have these
three and the fourth that he hasn't been charged with,
and you're going to have other associated remains that are
out there. How's he not related to that? Well, you
have to be able to prove that. And one of
the difficult things if he is a serialized perpetrator, like
(24:17):
they are alleging that he is the behaviorist out there,
they like to talk about copycats and all these sorts
of things. They go on air and talk about this,
it's not something that you see frequently. And then if
you've got a perpetrator that has a specific way of
carrying out these serialized events. Let's just say it's a
sex assault and they like to choke people out, they
(24:39):
would like to wrap the bodies up and deposit. That's
a completely different animal from an individual that commits a
homicide and then takes the time to take a sharp
instrument and dissect out the body that's and dismembering the
body and then depositing those remains different locations. Where you've
(25:01):
cut hands off, you've cut heads off, and they're deposited
in one location. You might have legs found in another location.
That almost smax is of something a different animal at
that point in time, because how do you get an
individual that changes horses in the middle of the stream.
From a procedural standpoint, because serial perpetrators are all about procedure,
(25:22):
they're all about the order in which they do things.
They're deriving pleasure from this, they have certain ways they
go about it because they're living out fantasies in their mind.
And how does that level of violence or post mortem
violence play into what we're seeing with wrapped dumped bodies.
(25:42):
I think that that's something that's going to require a
lot of explanation going forward and further examination. If they're
going to try to tie these other bodies back to him,
I don't know that they're necessarily going to be able
to do it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Dave. That's the part that I am very curious about,
because in reality, there is no statute of limitations on murder.
So even though we've got a case here rex Hureman
charged with three murders, it doesn't mean the other cases
go by the wayside. They've just got to finish this
with him, all the while knowing that you've got other
(26:16):
issues with the other victims that were found that don't
match up. The mo is not the same and maybe changed.
But there's also the fact that there are many years
in between when the last body was found at Gilgo
Beach and his arrest. Are we to believe are we
to assume that he stopped even though we know based
on what the police said, the reason they went and
(26:37):
got him the day they did was because they knew
he was talking with other workers, he was doing the
same things as before, and they were concerned that he
was looking for someone else to take off. Are we
to now believe that he stopped for years and was
getting ready to start back when they caught it.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's hard to buy because it's always been idea, has
always been propagated out there that this is unquenchable thirst,
that anytime you have somebody that engages in this behavior,
the only thing that is going to stop them is
either going to be law enforcement catching up to them,
it'll be their own death or their own infirmity where
(27:16):
they just can no longer carry on and continue to
perpetrate because they've hit that kind of age barrier and
perhaps continue to live in this fantasy world in their mind,
but they don't have the ability to go out and
do that. Are we to think that he stopped and
took this bigger break? There have been others that have
done that in the past. But listen, we're right at
(27:40):
the beginning. As you've stated, Dave, this is not the end.
We've got a long road to travel in these cases,
and we'll see what the future holds. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is body Bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.