The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer
By Robert Kolker, Oct. 19, 2023, NY Times
[ . . . ] In the 1970s, to take one notable example, the Suffolk County Police Dept’s homicide unit was known for an impossibly high confession rate of 97 percent, which almost certainly meant they engaged in coercion.. When that statistic made the news, officers in that unit proudly took to wearing T-shirts with the insignia “97%.” Prosecutors have, at times, ignored and even enabled those excesses. In 1988, a teenager named Martin Tankleff was driven to confess falsely to the murder of his father; it would take almost 18 years for him to be exonerated and released. And a year later, in 1989, New York’s Commission of Investigation issued a report lambasting the Suffolk Police and the district attorney’s office and citing evidence of more coerced confessions, plus illegal wiretaps, preferential treatment for people close to public officials and “the practice of sweeping law enforcement misconduct under the rug.”

The police often went unchecked because in Suffolk County, their union is a powerful source of campaign contributions with its own super PAC. The union’s political clout helps explain why the Suffolk Police Department is one of the nation’s largest, with about 2,500 sworn officers, and their salaries are among the highest. A politician who supports the police can earn the union’s backing and ensure a swift rise to the top. And for many decades, any district attorney with ambition would not look too closely at police indiscretions and even indulge them or, better still, use them to consolidate political power.

When Thomas Spota first became district attorney in 2002, he was perceived as a white knight, largely expected to clean house after an era of corruption. But Spota, it became clear later, found ways to install his own allies in police leadership positions, which, in turn, would secure the union’s support. When the Gilgo case emerged eight years into Spota’s tenure, he was actively reshaping the Police Department — even as the body count around Gilgo Beach rose, the media took up residence on the South Shore and investigators struggled to handle an unprecedented case involving at least one serial killer.

The Suffolk detectives had more than enough to deal with in those first few months. Ten possible victims meant 10 different sets of evidence — not just bodies, but also physical evidence and phone records. The police knew the killer targeted women who posted ads on Craigslist. They knew he used camouflaged burlap straps to bind them, the kind a hunter uses. They knew he used hard-to-trace burner phones to contact each woman, a different phone for each victim: 16 calls or texts to Maureen Brainard-Barnes before she vanished in 2009, and four before Melissa Barthelemy disappeared. At the time, the burner phones made him seem clever — a loyal watcher of certain police procedurals, perhaps.

But the killer made mistakes, too. Police knew he used tape to wrap the victims and found at least a few hairs. With the right technology, furnished by the F.B.I. or an outside lab with expertise, they might be able to extract DNA and find a match, provided they had a suspect’s DNA to compare it with. They also recovered a belt on the scene with initials, either “HM” or “WH.”

The police started to understand where this killer might operate — where he lived and maybe where he worked. They learned how in the summer of 2009, the killer made taunting phone calls from Midtown Manhattan to Melissa Barthelemy’s younger sister, using Melissa’s phone. Brainard-Barnes’s phone also connected to a cell tower in Midtown Manhattan, near the Queensboro Bridge — the bridge a person might take if they were heading to Long Island — before she vanished in 2007. Waterman’s phone last registered at a cell tower in central Long Island, near Massapequa Park. So did Barthelemy’s. Here was a pattern: a killer who potentially commuted between central Long Island and Midtown Manhattan.

These were densely populated areas, where it might seem impossible that he could ever be traced. And yet during the first year of the Gilgo case, in 2011, the F.B.I. started to provide help on that front: technology that might track those burner phones by seeing if their numbers appeared in the records of certain cell towers on Long Island. Cell-tower data is voluminous, a haystack full of needles: Think of all the signals from all the phones that ping at various cell towers every second. But if any of the killer’s burner phones pinged at the same towers, they would have a sense of where, perhaps, he spent most of his time.

If this seemed promising, Suffolk’s investigation for most of 2011 was essentially at a standstill, in part because the district attorney, Spota, was stepping up his efforts to orchestrate a soft takeover of the police. He went public with his fury at the existing police leadership in May after senior officials suggested that a single killer might be responsible for all the murders. Spota “was so incensed by the one-killer theory,” a former senior police officer told me recently, because he believed it encouraged panic. “That heightens the alarm to everyone that we have an active killer — that it could happen again.”

Days later, Spota held a news conference of his own. He made sure Richard Dormer, the police commissioner, was standing there as he spoke — a public defenestration. “Dormer has no idea what Spota is going to say,” the former senior officer recalled. “And Spota runs the whole show. He’s got the clipboards up, and he shows where all the bodies are laid out. It’s very telling.” Spota announced that there could be as many as three killers at work on Long Island — that the South Shore might have been a dumping ground. “It is clear that the area in and around Gilgo Beach has been used to discard human remains for some period of time,” Spota declared. “As distasteful and disturbing as that is, there is no evidence that all of these remains are the work of a single killer.”

Among the police and the media, those watching the case were baffled. Isn’t an open disagreement between the police commissioner and the district attorney a gift to any future defense lawyer handling the case at trial? But insiders understood that this wasn’t so much about solving this case as it was about Spota’s larger ambitions. They knew that Dormer was an appointee of Steve Levy, the county executive and Spota’s political foe, and that Spota was going after them both. Publicly, he excoriated Dormer, while privately, he had Levy investigated for campaign-finance improprieties. In March, two months before this news conference, Spota pressured Levy to drop his bid for re-election in return for not being prosecuted. Dormer was out as commissioner before the end of the year.

The public would never learn exactly what Levy supposedly did — a classic Suffolk County back-room deal. And his successor, Steve Bellone, was happy to sign off on a new chief of the Police Department, who happened to be a longtime protégé of Spota’s — and who, to the eternal detriment of the Gilgo investigation, would go on to become widely known as the most corrupt police official in modern Suffolk history.

Shortly after the bodies were identified by DNA in early 2011, the police visited the home of Amber Costello, the most recent victim, in a rented house in Babylon. All summer before her disappearance in September, she shared the home with her boyfriend, Bjorn Brodsky, and a friend, Dave Schaller. The place was a drug pit, well known to neighbors, who had been watching cars coming and going for months. All three housemates spent most of their days doing heroin, with Costello’s sister popping by for visits. The money for the heroin came from Costello’s escort work, starting at $250 a call.

Schaller at the time said that during Costello’s last night at the house, she was on the phone with a potential client and arrived at an unusually high fee: $1,500 for the whole night. She asked to meet him outside the house. Schaller walked Costello out the door, but he didn’t see Costello’s client. He wrote in a 2012 Facebook post that he was too high to remember him. But the police had access to Costello’s phone records, and they saw that the same man she was talking with had also been texting her the night before. They even saw a text message suggesting he had met with her in person that first night: The client seemed mad that something had gone wrong, and he wanted to see her again.

The police learned that on the first night, the client wanted to hire Costello, but as soon as he paid, Schaller jumped out of the shadows and chased him away. This was a scam Schaller and Brodsky pulled whenever they could that summer — accosting Costello’s clients and taking their money before she had to follow through with the job. But this time, the client seemed to want another chance.

Police started looking for anyone who could remember seeing the client on that first night. They found a witness who saw a large, white male, 6-foot-4 or taller — resembling an “ogre” — in his mid-40s, with “dark bushy hair” and big glasses. The witness also spotted the car this man drove: a green Chevrolet Avalanche with a distinctive rear door, like a truck’s. At that moment, with the description of a man and a make, model and color of a car, the police were closer to targeting a suspect than they had ever been.

And then the lead withered away. The initial database search for the car went nowhere. A source close to the Gilgo investigators told me that the detectives were using a program known as Lawman — a product of 1990s database technology, accessing millions of New York State’s paper D.M..V. records. When it first became available, the Lawman search seemed like a godsend. Pretty much everything that sat in the D.M.V. archives was instantly searchable. But over the years, as databases age, their data becomes harder to navigate. New cars like Avalanches, which are a blend of a truck and a car, could be misfiled by the D.M.V. — and what gets mangled by the D.M.V. can disappear entirely in the Lawman searches. In retrospect, the source told me, the car must have been miscategorized.

It’s hard to imagine that the police would not at least have tried to continue pursuing eyewitness information about the last man to see Costello alive. But that did not happen. Just like that, the police seemed to stop talking about the “ogre” and the Avalanche — not with their superiors in the department and not with an outside agency like the State Police or the F.B.I. A senior police official with close knowledge of the investigation’s first year told me that he had no recollection of the Avalanche tip. The chief of detectives at the time, Dominick Varrone, has also said he heard nothing about it. For a decade, the lead sat at the bottom of a growing case file, with no sign that it might ever be discovered again.

Around the same time, the department was adrift, waiting for Spota’s handpicked police chief to arrive. James Burke was a former Suffolk narcotics detective whose alliance with Spota spanned decades, almost like a blood tie. In a 1979 case that brought him recognition as a young prosecutor, Spota secured the convictions of two teenage defendants for the murder of a 13-year-old boy named John Pius. A key witness was Burke, who at the time was just 14. A decade later, participants in the case claimed that witnesses had been coached to lie on the stand. Spota was never charged with, and has denied, any wrongdoing. And his bond with Burke never wavered — even years later, when Burke ran into trouble.

As a police officer, Burke lost track of his firearm more than once. And in 1993, an internal affairs investigation accused him of patronizing and smoking crack with a sex worker. Spota, who was in private practice at the time, offered to represent Burke. Burke eventually was punished with the loss of 15 vacation days. Once Spota became district attorney in 2002, he gave Burke a senior role overseeing a group of detectives in his office. It was clear back then to Spota’s staff that one day, when Spota had the chance, he would put Burke in charge of the Police Department.

With Burke arriving as chief in 2012, Spota managed to do what even in Suffolk County once seemed impossible — consolidate political power between the police and the district attorney’s office. There was nothing to hold back the impulse to close ranks and remove all outside scrutiny. “It was: ‘Hey, we run our own shop. Stay out,’” Bellone, the county executive during much of Spota’s tenure, told me.

When, in early 2012, staff members from the F.B.I.’s celebrated Behavioral Analysis Unit arrived in New York from Quantico, Va., to help with the case at the invitation of the previous leaders of the Police Department, Spota had them turn around and fly back home, declaring their work unnecessary.

The loss of the F.B.I.’s help was a severe blow to the Gilgo investigation, impeding any meaningful progress in the case. Before being shut out, the F.B.I. handed the police a raft of cell-tower information that they had collected over the past several months. Their analysis traced the signals from the killer’s burner phones to two regions on a map — geographic “boxes,” they called them — one in central Long Island (including Massapequa Park), and one in Midtown Manhattan. As a next step, the F.B.I. was willing to help search cell-tower data in central Long Island for other cellphone numbers that registered with those towers at the same time as the killer’s burner phones. In theory, whoever used those burner phones also carried a regular phone that pinged the same towers at the same time. That number, unlike the burners, would be traceable.

Spota abandoned this entire approach. He refused to petition the courts to search any more cell-tower data on Long Island. Spota’s staff members, who would have had to request the warrants for that data, waved off the idea as a fishing expedition. “They didn’t understand it, and they didn’t want to litigate something that they didn’t understand,” the source close to the Gilgo investigators told me. In truth, cell-tower data was hardly novel; in 2004 it helped disprove the alibi of the accused California wife-killer Scott Peterson. A different district attorney might have seen where the data led.

There were other ways for Spota to rationalize not squandering time and resources on cell-tower data. Just because the killer made some calls from central Long Island didn’t mean he had to be living there. Clearly the killer was good at avoiding detection. He seemed too smart to continue living a few miles from where the bodies were found. By now, he had to be a ghost. The problem with that argument was that every lead they had, upon examination, could be written off as a long shot. A police source who was part of the early investigation told me that they had been pulling hunting licenses in the area because the burlap found on the bodies suggested the killer was a hunter. They appeared to drop that strategy, but Rex Heuermann, it turns out, was an enthusiastic hunter. “I find it hard to believe his name isn’t somewhere,” the source told me.

Despite that initial interest in hunting licenses, the team hadn’t concentrated on gun permits. “The victims weren’t shot,” the source close to the Gilgo investigators told me. This was technically true — the bodies had no signs of gun trauma, causing many to speculate that they were strangled. But a different set of investigators, one that closely partnered with other agencies like the F.B.I. or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, might have looked at gun permits and noticed the man in Massapequa Park with 97.

In the four years that Burke ran the Police Department, from 2012 to 2015, the “Gilgo room” at Suffolk Police Headquarters became a place for part-time work, with little urgency dictated from above. Under Burke, the police were in what would later be characterized by federal prosecutors as a complete ethical free-fall: His staff served drinks in his office every night. He ordered officers to spy on his girlfriend, her exes and her son and follow his perceived adversaries, including Steve Bellone, the county executive. He turned the police force into his own empire, punishing anyone he deemed disloyal and then celebrating with friends after their demotion.

Instead of prioritizing the search for an at-large serial killer, Spota, too, seemed more interested in investigating his rivals, including Bellone, who recalled being approached more than once by Spota’s staff, apparently just to let him know they were watching. “D.A. is the most powerful office that we have,” Bellone told me. “If you’re willing to target people and go after people — that is an awesome power. You don’t even have to indict somebody to ruin their life. Just starting to investigate someone can cause people to lose jobs.”

For about a year, things went smoothly for Spota and Burke, until Burke spoiled everything with an unchecked explosion of violence inside a Suffolk Police precinct house. In December 2012, a witness in a drug case who also happened to be pilfering from police vehicles grabbed a duffel bag from Burke’s car that contained pornography, sex toys, cigars, a gun belt and ammunition. (Federal prosecutors would later call this duffel Burke’s “party bag.”) When Burke found out, he attacked the witness in full view of several other detectives, some of whom took part in the beating, and even bragged about it later. Federal agents started investigating Burke in April, and Burke spent the next year or so pressuring witnesses to take part in a cover-up.

He had help from Spota’s staff, who used wiretaps and car-tracking devices to monitor police detectives he distrusted, searching for blackmail material. Instead of filing subpoenas for more cell-tower data in the Gilgo case, Spota’s staff were wiretapping a police detective they suspected of leaking information about a gang case to Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. The tapes included calls between the detective and F.B.I. agents — as well as the federal prosecutors involved in the investigation into Burke.

By law, Spota needed to notify Loretta Lynch, then the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, when federal agents appeared on police wiretaps. When he did, one source told The Times in 2016, federal officials immediately saw how far afield those wiretaps went — and how, perhaps, the whole point may have been to learn how close the F.B.I. might be to taking down Burke. “The problem for them,” Bellone told me, “was that they didn’t know that President Obama was going to nominate Loretta Lynch to be the attorney general of the United States.” Once that happened, the federal investigation into Burke expanded into an inquiry of all of Suffolk County law enforcement.

Lynch’s office issued “immunity orders,” or a requirement to testify, to witnesses in the department who had seen Burke in action. Burke was indicted and pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiring to obstruct justice and violating the civil rights of the witness he had beaten. He served a sentence of 46 months. Back home on Long Island, he still receives a pension. (In a bleak but strangely resonant moment, Burke was arrested this August for soliciting sex in a public park. He has pleaded not guilty, and the case is still proceeding.)

Spota resigned in 2017, the day after he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and other crimes. Bellone, finally free of Spota’s surveillance and intimidation, said during a news conference that Spota and Burke had been running a “criminal enterprise.” In December 2019, Spota was convicted in federal court and later sentenced to five years. He’s still in prison.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/magazine/gilgo-beach-killer-suffolk-police.html