By EFE
The prime suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders, a notorious cold case linked to the multi-year discovery of several bodies in a beach area of upstate New York, was charged today with killing a fourth woman.
The new charge, announced in a Long Island courtroom and reported by the U.S. press, concerns the death of 25-year-old Maureen Brainard-Barnes, whose body was found in 2011 near Gilgo Beach.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, was arrested in July last year in Manhattan and accused of killing three women, all under the age of 30, who were sex workers at the time.
The four women Heuermann has been accused of killing are known as "the Gilgo Four." Since 2011, more human remains have been found on the beach, though Heuermann is not a suspect in all cases.
Rex Heuermann is charged with the deaths of four women in a series of unsolved crimes known as the Gilgo Beach murders. Suffolk County Sheriff's Office via AP.
The event, which was highly publicized in the United States, came to light in the wake of the disappearance in May 2010 of a woman who worked as a prostitute in the Long Island region.
In the months that followed, as they searched for clues to her whereabouts, police discovered several bodies in a remote coastal area near where she had last been seen. All of them turned out to be from young women who prostituted themselves.
Over time, the remains of a total of nine women (including the one originally sought), a man and a baby were found in the area, and police have been considering that several of them were victims of a serial killer for years.
After years of stalling the investigation, in 2020 the authorities published a photograph of a belt marked with initials that they believed could belong to the alleged murderer and asked for citizen collaboration to try to identify him.
The case has been the subject of several documentaries and inspired the film Lost Girls, released in 2020.