Prosecutors are now turning their attention to prosecuting those cases and investigating other bodies found nearby.
Brainard Barnes, 25, who worked as a dealer at Foxwoods Resort Casino, left her hometown of Norwich, Connecticut, on July 9, 2007, and headed to Manhattan to work as a sex worker, with plans to return the next day, according to the British Daily Mail. . To her friends who became concerned when she uncharacteristically stopped using her phone.
She never came back.
“I was only 7 years old when my mother was killed,” Nicolette Brainard Barnes, 24, said at the news conference on Tuesday. “I remember her reading to me every night. Now I can’t remember her voice anymore.”
Heuerman was arrested July 14 and charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, three women who authorities say were sex workers. Heuerman's lawyer said he denied committing the crimes. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the murders of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello.
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Brainard Barnes was the first of the four women to disappear. Their remains were found along the same stretch of road (400 metres) in the Gilgo Beach area of Jones Beach Island in 2010. Further search turned up the remains of six other adults and a young child who was the child of one of the victims.
Investigators also found electronic evidence that Heuerman had accessed Costello's prostitution advertisement on Sept. 1, 2010, according to court documents.
Police concluded that an 11th person found dead in a tidal marsh on the same barrier island had drowned accidentally.
Investigators said Heuerman, who lived in Massapequa Park across the bay from where the bodies were found, may not have been responsible for all the deaths. Some victims disappeared in the mid-1990s.
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Investigators zeroed in on Heuermann when a new task force ran an old tip about a Chevy Avalanche pickup through a vehicle records database. One of those makes and models belonged to Hoerman, who lived in a neighborhood police were focusing on because of cellphone location data and call logs, authorities said.
With that information breathing new life into the investigation, authorities charted numerous cell phone calls and trips, isolated email aliases, delved into search histories and collected discarded bottles — and even a pizza crust — for advanced DNA testing, according to court papers. Investigators said Herman's DNA found on the pizza crust matched the hair found on the handcuffs used in the killings.
Last summer, Heuerman's ex-wife, stepson and daughter agreed to provide DNA samples to prosecutors, according to court documents. Investigators compared it to DNA collected from bottles that Heuerman sipped and threw into trash cans near his home.
Police said other evidence linked Heuerman to the victims, including cellphones used to arrange meetings with the murdered women.
After the arrest, investigators spent nearly two weeks combing Heuerman's home, including digging up the yard, dismantling the porch and greenhouse, and removing several of the home's contents for testing.
Investigators found hundreds of electronic devices during their lengthy search of Heuerman's home, according to court documents released Tuesday.
Prosecutors say the devices contained a collection of pornographic material related to slavery and torture.
AP
