Investigators on Long Island on Tuesday morning will announce a “significant development” in the investigation of Rex Heuermann, who has already been accused of murdering five women in the Gilgo Beach serial killings.
The Suffolk County district attorney’s office said on Monday that the announcement would happen after a 9:30 a.m. court hearing for Mr. Heuermann, but did not provide any more details.
The authorities have been working intently to secure indictments against him in the killings of five other people whose remains were found near a Long Island beach. Only two of those victims have been identified: Valerie Mack and Karen Vergata. In September, investigators held a news conference seeking information on one of the unidentified victims, a young Asian man found wearing women’s clothing.
Investigators have been seeking to tie Mr. Heuermann to a DNA profile of Ms. Mack, whose relatives indicated in recent days that the Suffolk authorities had been in touch with them.
“We’re just processing so many emotions right now,” her father, Edwin Mack, said by phone last week from his southern New Jersey home, adding that he was unsure whether he would attend the Tuesday hearing.
Tricia Hazen, a half sister of Ms. Mack, said on Monday that she had been notified about the news conference, but had no details.
Gloria Allred, a lawyer who represents relatives of several victims and has appeared at past indictments in the case, said that she would be at the courthouse, but would not elaborate on why.
The district attorney, Ray Tierney, did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Heuermann’s lawyer, Michael J. Brown, said he had not been told what the development in the case was.
A message left Monday for Ms. Vergata’s stepsister Brenda Breen was not returned.
Mr. Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty to killing the women, remains in jail awaiting a trial that the judge in the case is pushing to schedule next year.
In addition to DNA matches, phone records and internet activity that prosecutors say tie Mr. Heuermann to the killings, they also say he created a planning document on a computer to “methodically blueprint” the selection, torture, killing and disposal of victims.
The file, which suggests he engaged in sadistic sexual acts with his victims before and after their deaths, bolsters prosecutors’ argument that he led a double life. They have said he waited for his wife and their children to leave on vacations and then possibly attacked his victims in the basement of the family’s home in Massapequa Park.
Prosecutors say they used advances in DNA technology to match hairs found on the remains of the six victims to the genetic profiles of Mr. Heuermann and his wife and adult daughter.
Investigators in 2010 and 2011 discovered the 10 Gilgo victims — eight women, a man and a little girl. They soon identified the so-called Gilgo Four, a quartet of bodies in a neat grouping along a quarter-mile stretch of Ocean Parkway near Jones Beach. Progress was much slower in identifying the other six bodies.
Ms. Mack’s partial remains were found along with the other victims’, but for years she was known only as Jane Doe No. 6. Then in 2020, investigators were able to match her genetic profile with a cousin in Georgia and then to blood relatives in New Jersey, including Ms. Hazen.
With that, they were able to find and notify the Macks, her adoptive parents. Mr. Mack and his wife, JoAnn, had not seen Valerie since 2000. She had led a troubled life involving drugs and prostitution and at 24 disappeared after leaving her parents’ home, bound for New York.
Mr. Vergata disappeared four years earlier than Ms. Mack, and was identified shortly after Mr. Heuermann’s arrest last year. She has been known as “Fire Island Jane Doe,” because while her skull was found in the Gilgo area, her legs had been found in Davis Park on Fire Island the year she disappeared.
Born and raised in Glen Head on Long Island, she was 34 and is believed to have been working as an escort at the time of her disappearance in 1996.
In June, Mr. Heuermann was indicted in the fifth and sixth murders: of Jessica Taylor, whose partial remains were found in the Gilgo area, and of Sandra Costilla, whose remains were found in Southampton and had not previously been associated with the Gilgo investigation.
The three still unidentified Gilgo victims include the Asian man, a woman referred to as Peaches because of a tattoo, and her toddler daughter, who was found wrapped in a blanket, wearing gold jewelry and bearing no signs of trauma.
Ms. Mack was born in 1976 as Valerie Fulton, the youngest of five children of Patricia Fulton, who herself was one of 15 children and whose life was so marred by drugs and hardship that she placed her young children in foster care, Ms. Hazen said.
In 2021, the Macks gained some solace by claiming Valerie’s remains and holding a memorial on their back deck. Her ashes are kept in a container next to her framed photo.
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