The case should’ve been solved earlier.” _ But, he added, “I wouldn’t call it a major success. The arrest, Sini said, was the result of painstaking detective work that spanned multiple administrations and relied on a wide range of evidence. He declined to say if he knew about the description of a suspect and its vehicle, but noted that his office invested heavily in technology that allowed investigators to track data from cellphone towers used by the suspect’s burner phone. Sini said he inherited an investigation that was “in disarray,” with detectives blocked from cooperating not only with federal investigators, but with the neighboring police department in Nassau County, where Heuermann lived. “When you have the police department and the district attorney’s office blocking the FBI, that does not engender trust in law enforcement.” “This was a dark cloud over the community,” recalled Tim Sini, who succeeded Burke as police commissioner and later became the county’s district attorney. The federal inquiry would also lead to prison sentences for Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, who oversaw the early years of the Gilgo Beach case, as well as the county’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Christopher McPartland. Shortly after taking over the Suffolk County police department in 2012, James Burke moved to end cooperation with the FBI amid federal scrutiny of his own misconduct.įour years later, Burke was sentenced to 46 months in prison after he was found to have conspired to cover-up his beating of a man who had discovered sex toys and pornography inside his car. While it’s not clear whether investigators pursued the tip about the vehicle before last year, those involved in the case pointed to fierce divisions between the various law enforcement agencies - as well as overlapping scandals that engulfed Suffolk County - as a potential explanation for a key clue slipping through the cracks. Investigators said they were also looking for any electronics, video recordings and writings related to the killings burlap duct tape guns and ammunition cutting tools and a specific type of paper towel from the Bounty Modern Print Collection. In a search warrant, they said they were looking for other clues in the vehicle or at property the brothers owned in Chester County, South Carolina, such as DNA, fluids, fingerprints, phones and what they described as possible “trophies” that may have belonged to the victims - clothing, jewelry, Bibles or photos. Heuermann fit the physical description provided by Schaller, too: He was 6 feet, 4 inches (193 centimeters) tall and weighed 240 pounds (109 kilograms).Īuthorities seized the vehicle last week. When they ran it through a vehicle records database, one of the results turned up a hit: A man who owned a Chevy Avalanche lived in a neighborhood that investigators were already zeroing in on as the suspect’s likely location because of a sophisticated analysis of cellphone location data and call records. Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who inherited the investigation when he took office in 2022, said the key to unraveling the case was the description of the truck, discovered by a state investigator after the launch of a new task force formed to take a fresh look at the evidence. “This was crucial information, and I don’t know why they didn’t share it,” said Rob Trotta, a county legislator who worked as a Suffolk County Police detective until 2013. But as new details emerge about how police finally caught the alleged killer, they’ve also raised questions about whether investigators adequately pursued a key lead - Schaller’s description of the stranger and his truck -that may have helped solve the case sooner. The arrest has brought a measure of relief to families of the victims at a moment when the trail appeared to have gone cold. Police have said the deaths may be the work of multiple killers. Heuermann has not been accused in any of those cases. Within months, the remains of six other bodies, including a toddler, were discovered elsewhere along the same beach highway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |